Prof. Yoram Les.
Continues to try and tear off the masks from the faces of policy managers during the Corona period (Photo: Rafi Delvia)
In the end, Prof. Les was right.
No matter how we look at it, the corona is probably just a flu with PR.
Look what is happening around you now.
People catch the virus, feel horrible for two days, lie in bed with hot tea, paracetamol and tissues, and get up on their feet two days later like new.
At this very moment, many cities across the country are red, but some of their residents are not at all aware of this statistic, they have no idea that there is still a traffic light that indicates the level of morbidity, and all the talk about "post-corona" has long been no longer about psychosomatic symptoms, but about the consequences for society and the labor market.
The "Chinese epidemic" as the US president was careful to call it when it broke out, cost the Israeli economy billions. According to the Bank of Israel, Israel's gross domestic product decreased by 2.2% during the years of the epidemic, the treasury transferred NIS 30 billion to health expenses, and the total of grants given to citizens is estimated to be close to - 40 billion shekels. The total amount of expenses is, according to estimates, about one hundred billion shekels, which might have been saved if the government's policy had tended to adopt the opinion of Prof. Les, who thought that there was no need to impose closures and that the economy must be left open.
On the other hand, We have to remember the terrible pictures from Italy and the USA, the collapsing hospitals, the lack of ventilators, the patients who died in the corridors, desperate for oxygen and the funerals that were held one after another.
I mean, it's easy to talk about "what if" when we're all smart after the fact.
In real time, uncertainty prevailed.
"Sweden stood in front of the great and hysterical world."
Claims Prof. Les.
There are, of course, experts who completely disagree with him (photo: Walla! system, Walla system)
The projector version
Last week I interviewed the projector of the Corona, Prof. Salman Zarka on Radio North 104.5.
We talked about the spreading disease and Zarka expressed concern that the outbreak of corona and flu together could lead to overloading the hospitals, sentences that gathered dust in the past year, and no longer scare anyone.
When I told him that Prof. Les seemed to be right, the projector half-heartedly agreed, "Maybe he was ahead of his time," and immediately added - "Corona can resemble the flu, but it's certainly not the flu, it's much more dangerous."
When I told Prof. Les what Zarka said, he seemed to get excited for a moment, wanted to hear the exact quote, asked me to send him the recording, which didn't stop him from reprimanding me in his loud voice, which brought me back to the sleep of closures and terror, and firmly asserted that he has no feelings, only facts.
The colorful provocateur, who shouted in the studios at doctors and presenters who were stricken with anxiety, "Get out of the panic", is considered a dangerous corona denier, and signed the unbelievable sentence, "For very few people, whose life expectancy is not great, they do not destroy a country".
And when asked, "So what, sacrifice them?", he answered without hesitation: "Yes", he is now on the banks of the Rhine with his wife Bracha and enjoying every moment.
As he then enjoyed the public attention that made him an "epidemic celebrity" and earned him cover articles and a radio show.
The response of the Corona projector managed to tear him from the pastoral German landscape and make him return to the period when he was "assigned because of trollol".
"It's not completely new," he says in a telephone conversation, "there was a general announcement by the Ministry of Health, not by Zarka, that it was the flu. Now the supervisor is also saying that."
It must be a feeling of victory after everything you've been through.
"I don't have feelings. I know it's hard to grasp, but that's the answer to people who ask me, 'What do you feel?' Understand what I understood at the time, that there is no place to get into hysteria. I somehow became an icon, but there were other people who didn't get into hysteria and thought that the epidemic should not be exploited politically.
"Do you remember how Bibi established a government?
How did he break up Blue and White and how did he add Gantz to it, when he announced a 'corona emergency government'?
In an unforgettable speech at Yad Vashem, he spoke about the Holocaust.
He said something like 'We didn't prepare for the Holocaust - we did for Corona'.
This man, guilty of mass hysteria that worked for him for political purposes, that's how he managed to form a government and sit in the chair for more than a year.
"So I don't feel. My personal problems don't interest me. What's interesting is the subject itself, the data, the correct rational approach and that's what your faithful servant did, with complete faith in the path. I wasn't alone, but we were a minority."
You blame Netanyahu for his use of hysteria, but the whole world was hysterical at the time.
No one knew the corona virus, did not know what its consequences were and there was mass mortality.
"There was no Israeli politics in the world. What happened in Israel also happened in the world, and Netanyahu poured a lot of oil on it. I cried out and said, look how the corona is handled in Sweden. Against the big and hysterical world, Sweden stood, and they, like me and some like me, stood against the crazy wave. The person who managed things there was the person in charge of the corona, Anders Tagnell, and throughout the madness of the virus, there was no lockdown, they did not close the education system, there was no coercion, trampling on civil rights, and people did not lose their jobs.
"Hundreds of billions of shekels were burned in little Israel, as if they took a match and burned bills. Sometimes you burn money and get a train or a road, here they burned to nothing. I saw that there is Yoram Les in the world, there is a country in the world that behaves like this. We were told that Sweden is being destroyed. I remember a panel on Channel 12 , with the great epidemiologist, Boaz Bismuth, who announced that Sweden was finished.
"But we were not alone.
Among the journalists, I mention to praise Arad Nir, who said that Sweden behaves rationally.
Now, three years later, the data is very clear and indisputable.
There is a perspective of time and I am informing you that of all the countries in Europe, Sweden has weathered the Corona crisis the best, and its economy has been the least affected."
Of course, in front of the Les version, there are those who believe otherwise: according to data published by Peter Goodman in the "New York Times", the Swedish theory actually failed in all parameters.
Not only was the death toll from the corona in Sweden several thousand higher than neighboring countries that imposed lockdowns, its economy was also damaged.
Jacob Kirkgart, a senior researcher at the Patterson Institute for International Economics in Washington, stated that not only did the Swedes hurt themselves, they gained nothing from the easing policy.
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Arguing with Nadav Eyal in the studio of News 13 (Photo: screenshot, Network 13)
facing business
Prof. Yoram Zacharia Les
, 77, the son of an allergy specialist and a dentist, did not earn a degree in economics, but specialized in pharmacology and physiology, but behind him are several business ventures, including a company called "New Filtration", which reuses the filters of dialysis machines, for filtering water which was sold to the "Naf" company.
Now he is working on a new and secret project for the time being.
He gained experience in managing budgets and building long-term plans, when he was appointed director general of the Ministry of Health in the late 1980s, when the polio epidemic broke out in Israel. Even then, he refused to be moved by unruly viruses and insisted that it was not an epidemic but an outbreak of the disease, he opposed giving vaccines, but later He himself led a comprehensive and rapid vaccination campaign.
"I am one hundred percent in favor of vaccines," said the professor, when the world started talking about the rapid production of vaccines against Corona.
"It's difficult to produce vaccines against this type of virus. So we go for methods that have never been tried, and the fear is that crazy people like Trump will come and say before the US elections, 'There is a vaccine.'
Vaccination is a matter that takes years, because AIDS, a 35-year-old virus, has no vaccine."
But the pharmaceutical companies managed to produce vaccines for Corona, the State of Israel was among the first to receive the vaccine, and Les, accompanied by his nurse, was photographed in Ichilov receiving a vaccine himself, not before declaring: "I want Back to the orchestra I like to hear.
Only a vaccine will calm this wave, only the vaccine will save," then he did not put on makeup and added, "even if it is a placebo vaccine."
Even before he arrived at the Ministry of Health, Channel 1 recognized his media potential and cast him, alongside Yael Dan, to host the program "Tazfit" which dealt with science and helped him rub shoulders in front of cameras.
Four years as a MK in the Labor Party gave him political mileage and further honed his performance skills in front of an audience.
When he finished his term he returned to the academy and since then he is an emeritus professor and a lecturer in the Department of Physiology and Pharmacology at the School of Medicine at Tel Aviv University.
Then the corona virus broke out.
In the studios, they looked for past CEOs of the Ministry of Health and reached him. In an interview with Ma'ariv, he testified himself, "I understand the media, better than many people in the industry.
Knows how to handle each interviewer in a way that suits him." Niv Raskin and Amnon Levy were the first to give him the stage and in no time he became the most sought-after interviewee in Israel, providing action and scandals, and sometimes it seemed that he lost his tongue brakes.
In the 12 news studio. The plague turned him into a media star (photo: screenshot, Keshet 12)
Between Bennett and Netanyahu
He decided that he stood alone against the world and the hostile media, because he claimed he knew the truth, that the real virus is on social networks and there is no epidemic.
When Bennett served as Minister of Defense he asked to meet him.
"He is an open politician, not a beast, so we gave him a kick. He invited me to the Ministry of Defense and I don't want to give details about what was there. He has a mathematical head and we spoke in the language of integrals.
"Corona is a serious problem, they said then, but the flu is also a problem serious
After the World War there was an outbreak of flu on the scale of the Corona, only then there were no social networks and no mass testing, which were one of the main reasons for the wave of hysteria that attacked the world.
And the whole thing about cutting the attachment chains, complete nonsense.
Some people became heavy millionaires and the benefit was zero.
The entire population of Israel was infected with the virus and I stand behind this sentence."
Do you think you were ahead of your time?
"I speak from life experience. So yes, I am sorry for the country and the whole world, that an unprecedented event happened since World War II, an event of self-destruction. If I were the prime minister, this would not have happened."
"I told you so", is what you are saying now.
"There is no one to say, because no one asked for forgiveness. Everyone was brainwashed by experts who did not understand what they were talking about and the doctors were giddy from the attention. I would do in Israel what Tengel did in Sweden, and then we would come out of the crisis better than anyone."
We got out of it better than most countries of the world, even though they went against your way.
"We could have done better."
Were you hurt when they looked at you like you were crazy?
"I whistle at the whole world, provided I know I'm right. And right with proof. You think being told I was right makes me happy? You're wrong. I have sorrow for two years of self-destruction without justification. Zarka's words are perhaps the first time I've heard From a person in an official position, a kind of weak apology. But the one who is really responsible for the destruction of the corona virus and did not apologize, is Netanyahu and his trumpets."
Of money
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Yoram Les
Corona
Benjamin Netanyahu
Clasp
Corona vaccine
Ministry of Health
