In an attempt to illustrate the serious, outrageous, inconceivable, and unforgivable failures of the Health Ministry's conduct in efforts to maintain Israel's major achievements on a global scale in the war on the coronavirus, let us begin with the Israel Railways.
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A senior physician from one of the largest hospitals in the Dan Region who takes the train from Modiin to Tel Aviv says she was shocked to see dozens of Israeli passengers who had just returned from all kinds of countries, including those contending with major outbreaks, boarding the train at Ben-Gurion Airport without any masks in accordance with the Health Ministry's victory statement just one week ago that the mask-wearing era in Israel was over. Those passengers continued to every single station, from Beersheba in the south to Nahariya in the north.
At hospitals and medical clinics, the Health Ministry dropped mask-wearing requirements, keeping them in place only for the unvaccinated or those who had not recovered from the virus, as if there was any legal or practical way of ascertaining whether those who should be donning a mask were in fact doing so.
The result, according to senior doctors at hospitals and clinics across the country, is that a large portion of visitors, patients, and medical staff also removed their masks, putting the lives of many patients, including cancer patients who remain highly vulnerable to infection and developing serious and even life-threatening illness regardless of whether or not they were inoculated, at risk.
Israel has made major achievements in the fight against the coronavirus, thanks largely to the vaccination campaign. Yet since the virus continues to run rampant across many countries around the world, the Health Ministry's decision not to recommend the sweeping vaccination of teens aged 12 to 15 and rescind the mask requirement, including in schools, and to cancel all restrictions on entry in Israel as well as the purple and green passes was rash, arrogant, and reckless. It led to a renewed outbreak that has seen over 5,000 people quarantined and nearly 150 new cases in one day. Thanks to the Health Ministry, the risk of a renewed outbreak is now very real and very dangerous.
Additional Health Ministry failures include a clumsy announcement that did not include a strong recommendation to vaccinate teens aged 12 to 15, something that should have been done before the renewed outbreak we are now seeing at schools across the country.
At the time of writing, 21,000 teenagers in this age group have been vaccinated, while 475,000 have not. Moreover, according to the ministry's own data, nearly 700,000 Israelis aged 16 and over have chosen not to get the jab, including some 200,000 Israelis aged 50 and over. This despite the fact that they have been eligible to do so for some time now.
Yet the Health Ministry is stumbling on this issue as well. It has barely made any effort in recent weeks to convince these people to get vaccinated and protect their family members, thereby expanding and deepening Israel's defenses against the pandemic.
The ministry's failure puts all of Israel's achievements in exiting the pandemic at risk, and we must hope Health Minister Nitzan Horowitz wises up quickly, shakes up Health Ministry management, which acted irresponsibly, and succeeds in overcoming the few voices in the government itself that sometimes sound like those of dangerous coronavirus deniers.
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