There is no doubt that thanks to the campaign to vaccinate millions of citizens, Israel can open things up – schools, culture, business, and the economy, like nearly no other country has been able to. Israel's public health, diplomatic, and human achievement has made it possible for all of us to carefully resume our routines while living with COVID. The data about the spread of the virus, morbidity, and mortality have dropped amazingly in the past few weeks, and continue to fall.
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The Israeli success in bringing in a massive quantity of vaccines quickly is more notable given the very bad, even catastrophic, figures about lethal COVID spikes in many countries, including Brazil (which is seeing some 4,000 COVID fatalities per day), India, and the Philippines. Many European nations are once again under restrictions and lockdowns, while in Israel it looks as if we've already forgotten they ever existed, and can hope they will never return.
According to Health Ministry data, as of Sunday evening nearly 5.31 million Israelis had received at least the first dose of the COVID vaccine, and 4.9 million have already received both doses. Israel's vaccination campaign, which is a global success, lets us see what the end of the pandemic that has already caused so much death, suffering, and historic blows to economies, school systems, employment, and society will look like.
Still, we are not invulnerable to COVID. Israel must maintain its superiority and leading position when it comes to vaccines and vaccinating its population. This means there is a critical need, a lifesaving need, to put off petty politics and secure contracts that will ensure that Israel has a supply of vaccines to expand the campaign to children and will be able to revaccinate all Israelis when there is a need to. Just like Israel needs to maintain military superiority, the main (if not the only) way to keep our position as leaders is to ensure that we have enough vaccines for all Israelis at all times.
But Defense Minister Benny Gantz's unrestrained and dangerous politics are part of the reason why the government is having difficulty making the urgent decision to allocate money and sign deals with Pfizer that would keep Israel's priority status for receiving vaccines. Just like it would never have occurred to Gantz to hold up an emergency, lifesaving shipment of military equipment during a war, it is inconceivable that he do so during a war of public health that has already claimed the lives of 6,288 people in Israel.
Meanwhile, it appears has if the Health Ministry and Israel's healthcare organizations have fallen asleep at the wheel, scandalously, and allowed the rate of vaccination to drop off. In the past few days, only a few thousand Israelis have been vaccinated. This is slow and worrying, when there are hundreds of thousands of Israelis over age 16 who haven't yet been vaccinated and tens of thousands of confirmed carriers who never bothered to get the single recommended vaccination.
A Military Intelligence report published Sunday warned that "Widespread vaccination of the Israeli population is the most effective way to reduce the problematic variants of the virus in Israel." This important statement should be accompanied by a new public service campaign that calls on all Israelis to get vaccinated, quickly, so Israel's success in battling the COVID pandemic won't go down the drain.
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