Looking for who to inject in Israel

"Go and get vaccinated," Benjamin Netanyahu preached Tuesday in the interest of saving lives.

“We are the nation of vaccines.

We have doses for everyone, ”emphasized the Israeli prime minister.

While almost everyone is impatient with the lack of vials against COVID-19, Israel is eagerly searching for someone to immunize.

After having injected up to 240,000 people (2.6% of the population) on January 12, the daily number of injections fell to 119,000 on Monday, of which less than half were recipients of the first dose.

85% of those over 60 have already been vaccinated, but citizens between the ages of 20 and 40 are reluctant, with rates still lower than 40%, to go to health centers.

In the age group over 60, the immunization rate of the two main minorities, Arab (2 in 10 Israelis) and ultra-Orthodox (1 in 10), is dangerously far away, 40% and 33%, respectively, from the average of the country.

"We are facing a national emergency situation," Netanyahu warned the press, quoted by Reuters.

"There is a striking fact: more than 97% of the 1,536 killed by the pandemic in Israel in the last month were not vaccinated."

The immunization campaign began on December 19 and remained at around 200,000 a day until the end of January.

Israel now offers Pzifer-BioNTech and Moderna vaccines to all those over 16 years of age registered in the public health system, managed by non-profit health mutuals.

Diplomats, international journalists and other foreign residents without local health insurance have been included in the campaign.

The Israeli government has also sent 5,000 doses from the Moderna laboratory to the West Bank to begin inoculating Palestinian medical personnel, whose government has already received another 10,000 doses of the Russian Sputnik V vaccine.

The coronavirus protection program continues to slow down as the Jewish state has just hit a record unmatched globally.

The first dose has been administered to more than a third (38%) of the 9.2 million inhabitants and the second and final dose has been injected to a fifth (21%) of the population.

Israel is looking for someone to vaccinate now.

The Tel Aviv City Council has begun immunizing refugees, asylum seekers and undocumented immigrants excluded from health insurance companies on Tuesday.

In coordination with a hospital in the coastal city, the

undocumented

receive the vaccine free of charge and without having to report their situation to the immigration authorities.

The degraded south of Tel Aviv is home to a large part of the approximately 50,000 refugees in Israel, from Sudan and Eritrea, as well as the majority of the 80,000 undocumented workers, among whom there are many Filipinos and nationals of countries of the former Union. Soviet.

The NGO Doctors for Human Rights had asked the Ministry of Health to also protect foreigners with irregular residence.

"The coronavirus does not distinguish between a neighbor and a migrant, between a citizen and a refugee, and the right thing to do is to include everyone who lives in Israel in the campaign," claimed the humanitarian organization.

Finally, it has been the Tel Aviv consistory (governed by a center-left coalition) that has assumed the inoculation of the 'undocumented' in the face of the government's silence.

Mass religious festivities

The concern of the Israeli authorities is growing after the slowdown suffered by the vaccination campaign.

They hoped to have immunized half the population in March, coinciding with the legislative elections, the fourth to be held in two years.

Now they see how successive massive religious festivities are inexorably approaching in the Holy Land.

Passover and Catholic Holy Week, which this year coincide between March 28 and April 3, closely followed by the month of Islamic Ramadan and Orthodox Holy Week.

The mayor of Jerusalem, Moshe Lion, has met with leaders of the Muslim community in the eastern part of the city, occupied by Israel since 1967, to alert them of the risk posed by the low immunization rate among the more than 300,000 Palestinians in the city. Holy city.

"If they don't get vaccinated they won't be able to access the mosques," he warned them, according to

The Times of Israel.

Conservative city councilor Lion did not mention the nearly 300,000 ultra-Orthodox Jews living in Jerusalem, whose parties support the municipal government, also averse to injections.

The Ministry of Health is preparing to encourage vaccinations by sending medical teams to large work centers, paying premiums to health personnel who carry out more immunizations and removing restrictions for holders of the "green passport" or vaccination record.

Israel and Greece signed an agreement in principle on Monday to facilitate tourist travel for immunized people, despite the fact that the European Union is divided when adopting a common position.

To encourage the youngest to receive the inoculation, a large-scale outreach campaign is planned in institutes and faculties.

The main objective is to convey scientifically-based information under the motto that messages on social networks, where deniers roam freely, are not always reliable.

Facebook has blocked disinformation pages in Israel for spreading hoaxes.

Police have tracked down online boycotter groups who made appointments to get vaccinated and then failed to show up to have their doses spoiled.

Among ultra-Orthodox Jews, who follow

rebbe

or spiritual leaders

with blind faith

, the word of their rabbi amplified in videos posted on Facebook amounts to revealed truth.

Some, like Yuval Hacohen Asherov, an acupuncturist who practices Kabbalistic alternative medicine, argue that COVID is a simple flu and that the vaccination campaign turns Israelis into guinea pigs in a genetic engineering experiment that leads to sterility.

- "I'm on dialysis.

My family and the hospital pressure me to get vaccinated.

What should I do? ”, An adept quoted by

Yedioth Ahronoth

asks him on the social network

.

- "The opinion of the rabbi is that you do not get vaccinated", replies an assistant of Asherov, also known as the "rabbi of the stars" for his influence on celebrities of the show business.

"But the final decision is yours."

In Israel, those who do not get vaccinated are because they do not want to.

Information about the coronavirus

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- Guide to action against the disease