The decision of the Bennett-Lapid-Horowitz government to allow unvaccinated students to attend school, even if they have come into contact with a verified Covid patient, has deepened the existing chaos, not only in the education system but among the general public. Bennett’s reasoning is simple: Omicron is ‘almost’ behind us. While it is currently insanely contagious, mathematical models show that within a week it will start to wane, because there will be no one left to infect. On the contrary, because Omicron is known to be a mild disease, the more students catch it and infect each other and their parents, the faster we will reach the peak of the curve, which will then start going down. True, there are currently about 50 patients dying every day! Yet this number can be “accepted,” if we take seriously what Ayelet Shaked, the Interior Minister and Bennett’s partner, said in August 2021.

The Bennett government seems to have given up. The chaos stems from the fact that the immunization strategy has failed, Omicron has defeated the Green Pass, and the recommendation for a fourth jab was made half-heartedly and unconvincingly. This feeling was expressed by American journalist Bari Weiss. In an interview with comedian and TV presenter Bill Maher on January 22, she caused a stir by saying “I’m done with Covid.” She described how she meticulously followed instructions of the various health authorities, and believed the US administration’s claim that ‘You get the vaccine and you get back to normal.’ “We haven’t gotten back to normal. And it’s ridiculous at this point … You will realize you can show your vaccine passport at a restaurant and still be asymptomatic and be carrying Omicron. And you will realize most importantly that this is going to be remembered by the younger generation as a catastrophic moral crime.”

Her remarks provoked much anger in the American medical establishment. How dare she say “I’m done with Covid” when Omicron has not yet finished with us. More than 600,000 American citizens test positive each day for Covid, and more than 2,000 die daily. Yet the administration continues to cling to the claim that this is a “pandemic of the unvaccinated,” thus expressing its complete detachment from public feelings.  As in Israel, the public in the United States understands that the vaccine does not prevent infection, and the talk of it saving from death does not comfort anyone. People are infected and have no way to avoid it, because in Israel and the Western world, governments understand that closure is unpopular due to the economic damage it brings, and that schools cannot be closed as children and parents are “going crazy” at home. After two years of pandemic, all that remains is to pray that Omicron heralds the end, because we are frustrated and exhausted, and don’t possess the strength to think of the next variant.

It’s unfortunate that there are not enough voices saying what is so obvious to any beginning epidemiologist – to avoid the next variant one has to vaccinate the world, period. The great failure of the Biden administration and of all Western governments, including Israel, is their disregard for the world’s poor and the strategic adoption of “everyone for himself.” This concept is very suitable for Israel, which has volunteered to be a laboratory for testing vaccines. In fact, the vaccine has become a much more political than epidemiological card, proximity to Pfizer CEO Albert Bourla has become a political asset, and the Clalit Health Fund has become Pfizer’s subcontractor. Then came the South African Omicron, which is a wake-up call signaling that it’s impossible to continue like this. An immediate change must be made.

A large group of congress members and Democratic senators wrote a personal letter to President Biden, urging him to take immediate action to vaccinate the world. “The world is at a critical crossroads in the fight against the pandemic,” they write, demanding that Biden allocate another $17 billion for this purpose. “We cannot afford to waste another moment and risk the appearance of a more dangerous variant …. the time to end the pandemic is now.” These things are clear, it is not about living ‘with’, ‘near’ or ‘within’ Covid, but about life without it. The ‘non-dangerous’ Omicron teaches us that it is impossible to get used to a pandemic. As long as it exists, it changes its face and creates chaos, despair and helplessness. The absurdity is that humanity possesses the tools to end the global pandemic, and the demand of American senators and many in the scientific community is not unfounded at all. Failure is not in science but in politics! Vaccines have proven effective against the disease, but their unequal distribution has completely neutralized their effect.

The data do not lie. According to the World Health Organization, 10 billion vaccine doses were distributed worldwide, but were concentrated in rich countries. The number of vaccine doses given in high-income countries is 14 times higher per capita compared to low-income countries. About 84% of the population in the African Union have not yet received a single dose of vaccine, while 40% of Americans have received the booster. Where have the public health experts gone? For years they learned the fundamentals of the profession, they understand well that the global world is one epidemiological unit, they knew long ago that a “big thing” is on the way, they learned how to prepare for it, and in the moment of truth they failed. They were blown away by the illusions that Pfizer and Moderna sold us – ‘Forget the world, take care of yourself first, pay us good money for every vaccine and you will not be sorry.’ This is how Albert Bourla laughs all the way to the bank, while Omicron laughs at us all.

From the beginning I did not have much hope in Israel’s “government of change.” It has already given up and is preparing to recommend the fifth booster, while from booster to booster their effectiveness declines, and we hold a world record for the number of infected per million people. Salvation will not come from China either. The Chinese Communist Party is first and foremost interested in its survival, and the “zero Covid” policy it pursues violates the most basic civil rights. The closures, surveillance, house incarceration and concealment of information demonstrate the regime’s nature. The Russians are also collapsing under Covid, people do not believe the government and refuse to get vaccinated with Sputnik. Putin’s way of dealing with the pandemic is to mobilize tanks on the Ukrainian border and sell to the people the fantasy of returning to the glory days of the USSR. Germany and Britain do not want to take responsibility for vaccinating the world because they care about the profits of their drug companies. The United States may thus have remained the only hope. And to be precise, this is half of America, not its entirety. This is the sane democratic half facing the Republican half. The latter not only supports Trump and denies Covid, but we are also learning about its support for Putin, and its questioning of why the US should come out in defense of Ukraine.

Biden’s failure to deal with the pandemic is evident in him and his public status, as his standing in the polls is among the lowest relative to previous presidents in their first year. His attempts to pass his big social plans, the budgets to deal with climate change and the struggle for the right to vote for blacks, are deeply stuck due to his party’s internal conflict. The way to get rid of this blockage is to act immediately and vaccinate the world to bring an end to the pandemic.  

If the US administration does not wake up and pursue a policy of “world vaccination,” the result will be terrible. Not only will the Covid pandemic return to strike with all its might, but it will be followed by an equally dangerous pandemic: the return of Trumpism. It is possible that Bennett, Shaked, Lapid and also Bibi will welcome this, and will continue to shout ‘Iran, Iran Iran’ to silence the pains of Covid, but humanity will pay an unbearably heavy price. Wake up, Biden! For the sake of your citizens and all of us.

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The Bennett government has adopted the famous saying “If you can’t beat them, join them,” regarding the Omicron wave sweeping the world and striking Israel with all its might. “We were the first” has become the common currency of Israeli leaders: We were the first to close the skies and the first to vaccinate the population, Netanyahu boasted; we were the first to give the booster shots and the first to confirm a second booster, bragged Bennett. Yet this primacy has eroded in the blink of an eye. The first has become the last, so much so that the green pass, the same pass that was supposed to protect us, has lost all value.

We have become a nation like the nations, and what is good for Britain and the United States is also good for Israel. In other words, we have been left unprotected and helpless. The government, tail between its legs, has thrown up its hands and told us – dear citizens, do what you want. Thus, after two whole years of the nightmare pandemic, we have all become experts, epidemiologists, therapists, psychologists and policymakers. In such a situation, who even needs the government or the Ministry of Health?

“Omicron causes mild illness” is the new slogan, and since it cannot be stopped, we are told that it is not terrible if we become infected. The forecast is that one in four, something like two million citizens, will fall ill. The truth is that we will never know the true number of those infected, because the state has stopped doing mass testing, and those who have not reached the age of sixty will do a home test if they want to, or will not be tested if they do not want to. In any case, since the test is inaccurate, even the negatives (which may be positives) will go around as they please, freely infecting others. Long live individual freedom.

In the meantime, we are told that this wave will be powerful and high, but will break quickly, and within three weeks we will be able to breathe a sigh of relief. This is, of course, until the next variant, currently evolving somewhere in Africa, or somewhere in East Asia or South America. We do not yet know how contagious the next mysterious variant will be and what organ it will affect. The Delta variant impacted the lungs, Omicron the throat, and the next Greek name might affect our heart, liver, or perhaps the pancreas.

Here is the place to emphasize – the failure is not only of Bennett and his government, but of the entire Western world. It is enough to look at what is happening in the United States, the country possessing the greatest scientific potential, which developed the COVID-19 vaccine in record time, to understand the magnitude of this failure. It is in the U.S. that the number of dead and sick from COVID-19 is record-breaking. The huge gap between scientific achievement and the socioeconomic system could not be more pronounced. While its citizens are sick and dead, its schools are closing and 100,000 American children have already lost one of their parents, the stock market is flourishing and drug companies are making billions.

The narrow, nationalistic view of the world, a world that is essentially global, and the thought that any country can alone defeat COVID-19, is unbearable nonsense that claims millions of victims. “None of us is safe until we are all safe,” says US Secretary of State Anthony Blinken, yet his words and heart don’t match. Only 5% of those in the poor world are vaccinated, leaving the world vulnerable to the development of additional variants, while the pandemic continues to spread.

Ironically, vaccines have lost some of their effectiveness. Experts who were so enthusiastic about them are forced to acknowledge the fact that with the fourth booster, we have reached the limit of immune capacity. Professor Gili Regev, Head of the Infection Prevention and Control Units at Sheba Hospital, tells YNet: “Our initial results, which of course have not yet been published, show an increase in antibodies which is predictable but not very impressive. A fivefold increase is nice but insufficient – it does not give the same effect as the booster. If it brings us back to where we were four months ago – then every four months we’ll need a vaccine and that’s not the goal.” In other words – Ciao Pfizer, goodbye Moderna! You made your wad of cash and we remained as we were when it all started somewhere in late 2019, at Wuhan’s wet market.

The good news is, meanwhile, somewhere in a children’s hospital in faraway Texas, at the Baylor College of Medicine, two doctors, Peter Hotez and Maria Elena Bottazzi, have developed a universal vaccine against the corona virus. And why should they develop another vaccine when many effective vaccines already exist? The answer is simple. Existing vaccines are not accessible to the poor world, that is, to most of the world. They are very expensive, require special refrigerated storage, and are protected by patents that prevent manufacturers around the world from producing them en masse and at a price accessible to everyone.

So, in the last week of 2021, India’s regulatory agency gave the go-ahead for a local vaccine manufacturer, Biological E. Limited (BioE), to start distributing the Corbevax vaccine developed in Texas, without a patent or restrictive conditions. Companies in Indonesia, Bangladesh and Botswana in Africa were also permitted to do so. The technology is based on a vaccine against the hepatitis B virus, and no special conditions are required for its production or storage.

Unlike Pfizer and Moderna, the Baylor did not receive any funding from the U.S. government, its budget is meager, and it operates on the principles of the polio vaccine inventor, Jonas Salk, who refrained from patenting his creation in the early 1950s. Following this, Albert Sabin successfully developed another vaccine against polio. In a joint paper published on the Scientific American website, Hotez and Bottazzi ask themselves the question: “If we had received a fraction of the support that multinational biotech companies received, would the world already be vaccinated?  We might have been able to prevent the appearance of Omicron, Alpha and Delta, which probably developed among unvaccinated people.” This is, of course, a rhetorical question that is in fact a stinging indictment against the medical establishment and Western governments, which so far have refused to waive patent rights in order to vaccinate the world.

Omicron may be a ringing slap-in-the-face that will finally wake up world leaders, teach them a lesson in modesty and humanity, and most importantly, jolt them out of their national blindness. The costs of protecting the economic interests of Big Pharma are dear, not “only” for the impoverished world, but also the wealthy one. When states give up, leaving citizens to their own devices, they endanger the democratic regimes themselves. Politicians lose credibility when caught making false promises about defeating the disease without worldwide vaccination. The scientific establishment also loses credibility when it fails to tell the public the simple truth: there is no national solution – the solution is global. The vaccine is not a solution as long as the whole world is not vaccinated. We must follow in the footsteps of Jonas Salk and waive the patent. Science is the intellectual property of all humankind.

This pandemic will end eventually, whether by human actions and science, or by nature itself. Yet the deep scars on the body of humanity will not heal quickly. Humanity has once again demonstrated how selfishness, indifference to suffering, and greed can lead us to self-extinction. “Don’t Look Up” is the name of the most watched movie on Netflix today, which describes how a meteorite approaching Earth may destroy humanity because leaders are blind and private interests mix science with profits.

Israeli society is also accustomed to entrenching itself within the national paradigm, not looking eastward. It, too, remains indifferent to the suffering of the Palestinians living among us and refuses to offer a solution. This is the same blindness we witness today in the face of Omicron: the government throws up its hands, deluding itself that everything will somehow work out. The delusions are now exploding in our faces. The so-called “government of change” turns out to be helpless. It refuses to impose authority of any kind, let alone closure, and allows mass infections. So, in effect, it leaves Omicron to decide for us: it will put us in isolation, it will impose a closure on us, and it will decide when to leave us, without notice.

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We have not yet had time to enjoy the pleasures of the third jab, and are already informed that we must roll up our sleeves yet again for the fourth one. Our eyebrow can no longer be raised, it is stretched to the limit, as are our nerves. A fourth dose within one year? What kind of vaccine is this? Is this the amazing scientific invention that was supposed to save humanity from this terrible pandemic?

When the vaccine was first introduced, we were told that two doses would provide us with optimal protection against infection and disease. The Americans coined the term “fully vaccinated,” and President Biden clearly stated that if 70% of the population were vaccinated, we would reach herd immunity and thus eradicate the pandemic. In the US, Democrats were quick to get vaccinated while the Republicans, supporters of Donald Trump, did the opposite, and as a result the vaccination campaign there is faltering. Israel has declared that all those who have been vaccinated twice are actually unvaccinated, and demands a third dose as a condition for receiving a green pass.

The global expert, Dr. Fauci, who has already survived the COVID-19-denying Trump administration and continues to serve as chief medical adviser to the Biden administration, twisted and turned, explaining that the third dose is probably a “full dose”. Attention should be paid to the term “probably”, which corresponds to “allegedly” in the mouths of legal reporters. In short, nothing is certain, talk is supposedly scientific, but in the end everything remains a matter of speculation. The Americans are loyal to their determination that one who has received two doses is considered “fully vaccinated”, and they only recommend a “booster” without mandating it.

And while they are still explaining the effectiveness of the third dose, Israel comes out with bad news: the booster too is insufficient, and a fourth dose is required to cope with Omicron. This is hits below the belt. While the Americans are fighting Omicron with two doses, Israel has already run towards the fourth. The lights of science, the saints of medicine, stand naked, embarrassed, and without credibility in the face of the Omicron wave.

And what is happening in Israel? As noted, it rushes to the fourth dose after roundly failing with the third. From the country with the highest immunization rate after the first two doses, it has become one of the least vaccinated countries in the West. Why? Because from dose to dose the public loses faith in the vaccine and in the conflicted medical establishment, with a large proportion of doctors claiming the recommendation for a fourth vaccine is not scientifically based. This time, it seems, the medical establishment prefers the popular insight that “what does not kill you makes you stronger” over scientific insight, which is, it turns out, unclear.

In fact, the vaccine strategy is collapsing. As the West digs in and vaccinates itself, the variants become increasingly contagious and durable. To be precise, the problem is not with the vaccine itself, but with the egocentric way in which it is utilized. The basic principle in public health states that “the world is one epidemiological unit, and as long as the world is not vaccinated no one is immune.” Omicron is the convincing proof that the vaccination strategy has collapsed. Wealthy countries stocked up on vaccines and paid exorbitant prices to Pfizer, whose focus is not on humanity but on its shareholders. 80% of all vaccines were purchased by rich countries and only 5% reached poor ones, fertile ground for the development of new variants that penetrate all immune defenses.

Why does the medical establishment continue to market vaccines as a solution to a pandemic, and not demand that resources be directed in a balanced way to the poor and unvaccinated populations, who otherwise become a breeding ground for new and resistant variants? In the midst of the tsunami of text that pervades the Israeli and global media, why is this simple truth not stated? How can a clear and unequivocal voice not rise up to urge statesmen to vaccinate the world as the most effective – and perhaps the only – way to stop the virus that has resulted in millions of casualties in two years? The answer is painful and simple: the medical establishment is held captive by Big Pharma. Without them there are no studies, no international conferences, and most importantly, no salaries and countless benefits.

A few months ago, more than 50 Israeli doctors, including leading public health experts, signed a letter addressed to Prime Minister Bennett and Health Minister Horowitz. Doctors urged the government to work for a temporary waiver of intellectual property (patent) rights of COVID-19 vaccines. This is to enable those countries that can do so to mass-produce the vaccine, making it accessible to the whole world and blocking the development of new variants. The letter did not receive any attention from the recipients or the media.

It is very disappointing that the same doctors themselves, who signed the letter on the understanding that this is the correct and effective way to prevent the spread of variants, appear repeatedly in the media, praising the various boosters while being careful not to mention their true position on intellectual property. As time goes on, the efficiency of the boosters disappoints, and the variants continue to evolve. The medical establishment thus loses credibility.

The institution entrusted with intellectual property agreements is the World Trade Organization (WTO), in which fruitless discussions have been held for a year about the demand for Pfizer and Moderna to temporarily waive intellectual property relating to vaccines. Global pharmaceutical powers such as Germany, the United Kingdom, Switzerland, the United States and South Korea oppose India and South Africa’s initiative to allow the production and distribution of vaccines to any country possessing the capacity to do so. The economic interests of pharmaceutical companies outweigh the interest of the world in eradicating the pandemic.

The poor world continues to get sick and remains completely exposed to the virus, but the wealthy, satiated, selfish West will also pay the price in the end. From India came the Delta variant, from South Africa Omicron, and these are penetrating every border and spreading across London, Paris and New York, returning us to the pandemic’s early days. The billions of doses already given do not prevent the closures, the collapse of health systems and the death toll that has already crossed 800,000 in the US alone. The pandemic is costing not only lives, but also has a weighty political price: the chaos created by supply chain disruptions, millions of workers forced into unemployment, the rise in prices that accompanies the economic upheaval, spiking inflation – are leading to a loss of trust in heads of state like Boris Johnson and Joe Biden.

And what about Israel? The “government of change” is facing a test it did not expect. The airport closure is reminiscent of the Dutch boy using his finger to plug the hole in the dike that is about to erupt, while Omicron has long been spreading in Israel. Instead of being the first to adopt the fourth dose, the Israeli government must use all its scientific weight to persuade the world to agree on a temporary waiver of the vaccine patents, to protect the Israeli population and contribute to surviving the pandemic worldwide. It’s time to end the addiction to Pfizer and its chairman Albert Bourla, who continues to inflate his profits at the expense of Israeli society and with encouragement of Israel’s medical and political establishments. The medical community in Israel must look in the mirror and tell itself the truth: We have failed, we have not told the whole truth, we have ignored the weak of the world, and Omicron is their bitter revenge.

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