Opinion | Reading Distress From The Backyard Israel today

The new corona variant, the Omicron, should worry us all.

It was first reported to the World Health Organization by South Africa, and is the most unpredictable there is.

A country where the vaccination rate is less than ten percent is not a local problem, and is a potential for the most dangerous mutations that have developed and will continue to develop in the global epidemic.

The new and disturbing variant is particularly ironic.

South Africa is one of the leading countries in calling for the release of the vaccine patent against corona strains and making it public domain.

The notion that such a patent should stand for the benefit of all mankind, and not for the benefit of the profits of billionaire companies and shareholders, was in the past self-evident.

The inventor of the polio vaccine, the Jewish-American virologist Jonah Salk, insisted on not registering the polio vaccine as his patent.

When asked to explain his decision, he answered the well-known question: "Is it possible to patent the sun?".

According to various calculations, such a patent could have brought the inventor and vaccine developers over the years about seven billion dollars.

Salk did not become a billionaire.

Mankind has managed to stop a severe epidemic.

The corona has brought into our lives the simple reality: there are no more backyards.

Not ones that can be launched and forgotten.

The end of every such yard to explode inside us.

This happened at the beginning of the plague, when Israelis living in poverty were at much higher rates than those among us.

The seven do not understand hunger.

Necessity to go out to work and earn a living (street cleaners, cashiers, drivers, etc.), crowded families and lack of access to medical services made all the difference.

For the worse.

The vaccines have shown us all, once again, the crucial truth.

Vaccine rates are poor in the poorest places, such as the Bedouin communities in the Negev.

Vaccination rates are also low in ultra-Orthodox localities and in development cities.

Even today, Savyon and Kochav Yair have more than 75 percent vaccinated with the third vaccine.

In Bir HaDaj and Ba-Side in the Negev - less than ten percent.

In Beit Shemesh and Emanuel about 20, in Kiryat Malachi about 30.

These gaps have led to a slow recovery from the delta wave, and they are still the cracks through which even the new variants will enter our lives.

There are no more backyards.

We are all living human tissue.

The irresponsibility taken by the Israeli government with regard to the savings of vaccinating Palestinians in Gaza and the West Bank has also cost us dearly.

The vaccination campaigns for workers in Israel, followed by the transfer of vaccines, under pressure from human rights organizations, improved the situation somewhat.

Better late than never.

In our global village, it can not end there.

The butterfly wing farm theory predicted the plague that started in the Chinese wildlife eating market.

The theory is valid even now, with a mutation in the world's unvaccinated region rolling in at our doorstep and in Western countries, threatening to wipe out the tourism revival project at best, leading to a dramatic fifth wave at worst.

An ancestral mask is precisely aimed at backyard disease.

It measures us in measurements.

"My narrator is mine and yours is a mediocre measure. And some say, it is a measure of sodomy" (Chapter 5, Mishnah 10).

Sodom is considered in the Midrash to be the most beautiful and sophisticated city in the ancient world.

Its people consecrated the beauty and private property, and the utter indifference to all around them.

Because why should I invest in the poor, the ultra-Orthodox and the Arabs?

Why should I be interested in the fate of the Palestinians?

What about me and Africa?

It turns out that all this comes with a heavy price tag.

Do not need angels and smoke transformations like in Sodom.

We do it for ourselves.

Most of the richest countries in the Western world, such as Germany and the USA, made a choice. They stood by the pharmaceutical companies, and not by the people of Africa, India and other peripheral countries. They made a bad choice, a real sodomy. The new variant proves it. To bring Israel to choose the right and good measure, both in relation to the weak within us and around us, and also in relation to the global truth. To depart from evil and do good as much as we can. This also has value.

Were we wrong?

Fixed!

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