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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To help celebrate Israel’s 73rd Independence Day this past April, Pfizer CEO Albert Bourla was invited to light a torch on behalf of Diaspora Jewry. Although he was not present at the ceremony, he sent a recorded greeting saying, “We have shown that there is a path back to normal, and that definitely is something the entire world can celebrate.” In reality we did not return to normal. And while the whole world is watching in panic as the epidemic spreads, among the only ones who can celebrate is none other than Bourla himself, having sold his shares in Pfizer for $5.6 million. His salary also increased by a considerable percentage, amounting to $21 million last March. Netanyahu, for whom Bourla counts as a personal friend, poured all his love for him into vaccines as a strategy to get clear of COVID-19, transforming Bourla into Israel’s darling. In fact, relations with Bourla have become more important than relations with the White House, and the strategic alliance between Pfizer and the State of Israel has become the central axis in the struggle against the pandemic.

However, less than a month after Independence Day, it became clear that Pfizer’s vaccine did not provide a complete solution. Its effectiveness wanes within half a year, and a third dose is now required, whose date of waning is unknown.

Meanwhile, the health systems in Israel and the United States are in disarray. The debates between scientists are growing, and the rift between the political system and the scientific community is widening. This is because the vaccine strategy as a sole solution has collapsed, and the evidence is that Israel, the most vaccinated country in the world, was also the country where the number of verified cases in August and September was amongst the highest. In addition, neither Israel nor the United States have succeeded in convincing entire publics to get vaccinated. This reality does not deter Joe Biden and Naftali Bennett.

When the Biden administration announced provision of booster shots to all citizens of the US even before the US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) approved this, it commenced a direct confrontation with this agency. Interestingly, Dr. Fauci, Biden’s chief medical advisor, relied on the Israeli experience to try and persuade the FDA of the booster’s necessity. He gained, however, only half his wish. The FDA restricted the booster to people 65 and older and to those with compromised immune systems. Then, however, the agency responsible for public health, the Center for Disease Control and Protection (CDC), expanded booster eligibility to include most public servants. The debate between Biden and the FDA has damaged not only the credibility of the U.S. administration, but that of the entire health care system, whose reputation was already damaged because of its failure to treat the pandemic, as evidenced by the nearly 700,000 who have died.

In Israel, too, a crisis broke out between the health care and political systems, culminating in Prime Minister Naftali Bennett’s rather delusional attack on the Israeli health care system in his speech to the UN General Assembly. It was as if he had no other platform from which to blame the health care professionals for “not seeing the full picture.” Bennett attacked the experts who had warned that relying on vaccines without other means, such as the prevention of big gatherings, would not halt the pandemic. This crisis stems from the simple fact that the vaccination strategy does not work if restricted to the wealthy nations alone. Not only does the situation cast a heavy shadow on the integrity of politicians, it also raises doubts about the objectivity of the experts, scientists and doctors in charge of public health.

The crisis of trust was created due to the unreliability of those who initially claimed that two vaccine shots had finally saved us from COVID-19, and after being proven wrong they moved on to a new theory, that one should “live alongside the coronavirus” using the booster. In the next wave they will be inventing a new theory and a fourth booster, and so forth. The public is tired of living alongside the coronavirus, and it lives as if there is no virus at all. The results were evident in hospitals and intensive care units, where staff were pushed to the limit, although as of now (the beginning of October) numbers are receding.

What doctors and researchers do not say out loud is the simple epidemiological fact: There is no national solution for the coronavirus! Either the whole world will be vaccinated or the virus and all of its mutations will continue to plague us. The great failure of the experts is probably due to cowardice. “The coronavirus is here to stay” they say, but do not explain why, when the answer is simple and painful: only 1.5% of the citizens of poor countries have been vaccinated, while rich countries have accumulated 85% of all vaccines. This gap is the epidemiological omission that allows the virus to develop mutations and strains like Delta.

We talked about cowardice. So here’s the sad reality: the medical community around the world has in fact become a hostage of Big Pharma companies. These companies are responsible for everything that moves in the world of medicine, from research and drug development to scientific conferences. Big Pharma dictates what is permitted and forbidden in the field of science and medicine, and today humanity is paying the price. The situation is so extreme that 45% of the FDA budget is covered by Big Pharma companies themselves. The same regulatory body, the enlightened ones responsible for medicines and food, without whose approval no medicine goes on the market, depends on the application fees that those companies pay when they submit drugs for approval. Thus the FDA depends, to an unhealthy degree, on money from the companies it supervises. Furthermore, it is clear to all that Pfizer has no interest in selling its vaccines to poor countries, when it can continue to peddle its wares at the highest possible price.

In a rare historical situation of global pandemic that fatally harms world economies, causes political and social shocks, paralyzes the education system, deepens social rifts and causes the deaths of millions around the world, the solution is to vaccinate the world as quickly as possible to reach a 70% vaccination level. The “national” immunization strategy has failed, and there is no escape from switching to a “global” immunization strategy to put an end to the pandemic. The absurdity is that as the coronavirus continues to spread, Pfizer’s profits swell. Anyone with eyes in his head understands that the way to put an end to this absurdity is to temporarily expropriate from Pfizer the intellectual property rights over this vaccine, and allow drug factories around the world to produce it in bulk and cheaply.

The way to temporarily abolish intellectual property rights over the vaccine is through the World Trade Organization, which is responsible for ensuring compliance with the intellectual property rights agreement signed by its member states. Although President Biden agreed to support a temporary waiver of intellectual property rights in May this year and thus gave great hope to the world, his voice has since been silenced, he has adopted the booster strategy, and health anarchy is deepening. Both Biden and Dr. Fauci have embraced Dr. Sharon Elrai-Price, the head of public health services in Israel. She was honored to appear before the FDA to promote the booster shot, and along the way the interests of Pfizer.

Israel and its public health system have become a model for two opposites: on the one hand a model for the effectiveness of a public health system and for a booster shot that undoubtedly prevents serious illness, and on the other a model for contagion, mutation, and deaths despite high vaccine levels. Had Dr. Elrai-Price and her friends been faithful to the scientific truth and free from external considerations, they would have used the Israeli experience to tell the whole world: “Beware of relying on the vaccine alone, the booster is not the ultimate solution, you cannot live alongside the coronavirus, and the only way to eradicate the pandemic is by vaccinating the entire world.”

When it was proven that the experiment was successful but the patient died, instead of becoming a Pfizer laboratory the Israeli government and Israeli health system should take a bold step: Say thank you and good-bye to Albert Bourla, while using their prestige to embark on a global outreach campaign. They should act in all scientific forums and with Dr. Fauci and the Biden administration, to persuade them to work within the World Trade Organization for temporary waiver of intellectual property rights over coronavirus vaccines. This is for the health of the citizens of Israel, the citizens of the United States and citizens of the world. Israel, which has become the human laboratory that enriched Pfizer, can today use its vast experience to prove to the world that the national vaccine can be effective only if administered equally in all nations. The sanctity of private property and profit must not be allowed to prevail over the sanctity of human life.

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“Living alongside the coronavirus” is the new mantra of the Bennett-Lapid “Government of Change,” based on the tenets of top epidemiologists. The coronavirus, we are told, “is here to stay.” In contrast to Netanyahu’s populist stance, which saw vaccination as the means to eradicate the pandemic, under Bennett and Lapid the vaccine is supposed to enable the public to live with the virus. In their opinion, the way to do this is to endlessly vaccinate yourself, that is, to go for the booster shot as a means of preventing lockdowns and lowering the infection rate, even if it does not completely flatten it.

Therefore, as of October 1, anyone who received two doses more than five months ago will be considered unvaccinated if they refuse to take a booster third shot. The “green pass” will be taken from them; they will therefore be excluded from public events and be ostracized.   

The United States lags behind Israel by a month, yet even there the American administration is calling for a third dose to be administered as early as September, coining the slogan “this is the pandemic of the unvaccinated.” The percentage of those refusing to be vaccinated in the U.S. is very high and it overlaps with the political rift tearing American society apart: the Democrats are getting vaccinated, while the Republicans are refusing.

While there is much truth in the administration’s declaration that the pandemic is of the unvaccinated, it is not the whole truth. The Biden administration refers to those 100 million American citizens who refuse vaccination, but there are the billions of people in poor countries who want to be vaccinated but cannot. That is why 4.5 million people in the world have already died from COVID-19 and have not been able to ‘live alongside it’. All of them are victims of a criminal health policy that puts the profits of the so-called “big pharma” drug companies above the needs of humanity.

“The end will only come when the whole world becomes ill or vaccinated. It will take a long time,'” says Israel’s number one expert in virology, Prof. Gili Regev from the Sheba Tel Hashomer Hospital (Ynet 20/8/21).  Regev is expressing the cruel and absurd paradigm on which Israel’s epidemiological position is built, that is, “living alongside the coronavirus.” Regev is saying that until we reach herd immunity of 70% for all of humanity, which requires 11 billion vaccine doses, we will continue to live with the virus. We will fall ill, we will die, or recover, and we will continue to be vaccinated every few months.

The interesting question is, if epidemiological logic clearly indicates that the sole way to eradicate the coronavirus is to vaccinate the entire world, why does Professor Regev shy away from the question: what prevents the vaccine from reaching the whole world? Professor Regev knows the answer to this question, as does Dr. Fauci, the world’s number one expert in infectious diseases. They refrain from touching it because they too are captives of big pharma.

To vaccinate the whole world, one has to give up the patents registered in the names of Pfizer, Moderna and AstraZeneca, companies which earn billions from the pandemic. Prof. Regev, Dr. Fauci and in fact almost the entire medical establishment situated at the forefront of the fight against the coronavirus, will not touch the sacred cow of the modern capitalist regime: intellectual property. In fact, the pandemic revealed that the sanctity of intellectual property transcends the sanctity of life itself. Intellectual property, or in simple language the ‘patent’, the abolition of which is key to eradication of the coronavirus, remains in the hands of pharma company shareholders, whose whole purpose is to put fat dividends into their overflowing pockets.

Almost all scientific research is funded by the big drug companies. Thus, they gain a monopoly not only on drug production but also on scientific research, which turns intellectual property into an untouchable topic not to be discussed or criticized. The absurdity is that research is therefore legitimate as long as it generates profits. Entire branches of medical science are neglected because they are not considered profitable. Ever since government in Israel withdrew from the public arena and privatized entire sectors of health, education and social welfare, capital has become the primary player determining the fate of human beings. Not only has this created social disparities that endanger the democratic regime, capital is today leading humanity to an unnecessary health disaster.

To understand the extent of the absurdity, let us look at the position paper published by The People’s Vaccine, which unites world-renowned personalities and organizations. This paper discusses Covax, which was established in a partnership between Bill Gates and the World Health Organization with the aim of vaccinating the impoverished world. Covax’s policy has collapsed. Gates’ insistence on preventing the abolition of patents, resulting in exorbitant vaccine prices, has resulted in a vaccination rate of only 1% in poor countries.

The position paper states that the production cost of one vaccine dose is about $1.18, but that the published prices demonstrate that countries have paid 4 to 24 times more. Since the priority in vaccine distribution goes to the highest bidder, 90% of all production goes to rich countries. The paper holds that Pfizer and Moderna charged $41 billion more than the estimated cost of production.

The Israeli Ministry of Health published a censored version of its agreement with Pfizer, intending to reassure its citizens that the confidential medical details of the vaccinated will not reach Pfizer. Only one figure does not appear and will not appear in the published agreement, and that is the amount the government paid for the Pfizer vaccines. Well, not only is intellectual property sacred, but so is the so-called “trade secret”. In other words, the price of the vaccine should not be publicly known, so that Pfizer can charge any price it pleases regardless of the production cost.

Israel, for its part, is doing everything to promote Pfizer. From a serological study at the Sheba Tel Hashomer Hospital to comprehensive research on the vaccine’s effectiveness and side effects, conducted jointly by the Clalit HMO and Harvard University on about two million Israelis.  That is, in exchange for a continuous supply at a price of $30 per vaccine, compared to the $14-19 paid by the European Union, Israel does Pfizer’s public relations. We don’t need to be convinced that the vaccine is important and beneficial, we know that. At the same time, we understand that the third shot, which is unequally distributed between rich and poor, does not bring about the end of the pandemic. This unequal division is described by the Director General of the World Health Organization himself, Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, as “vaccine apartheid.”

The way in which Israel, the United States and the rest of the rich world are behaving is not only selfish and immoral, but epidemiologically inefficient. The abolition of intellectual property for this vaccine, for the sake of the rich and the poor, is the only way to end this pandemic. Furthermore, it can be done. By its total reliance on the third dose, without addressing the Covid 19 crisis in the poorer countries, the Israeli government is short-sighted. Those poor countries are the ones from which new mutations will come. The real breach is not Ben Gurion Airport, the gateway to new variants, it is the millions of unvaccinated people throughout the world who continue to get sick, enabling the virus to evolve. In failing to act on this elementary fact, the Bennett-Lapid government is driven by the same nationalist blindness that views the fate of Israelis as detached from the fate of humanity.

We say to our country and to every rich country: Instead of waiting for the enemy at home, go out to the world and eliminate the chances of further mutation. Most importantly, abolish the patents!

The post Abolish the patents on those vaccines! first appeared on Da'am Party: One state - Green Economy.