Israel Has the Highest Case Rate in the World With Masks, Vaccine Passports and Boosters

The interventions and push for more boosters isn't stopping COVID

Israel is the world’s COVID vaccine laboratory.

Those aren’t my words, that’s what the chief scientific officer of Pfizer, Philip Dormitzer said back in September 2021.

His point wasn’t that they were experimenting on the Israeli population, but that the country’s data could be used to track the success of the vaccines in a population wide setting. Israel’s rapid rollout was considered the “gold standard” among countries, and even Pfizer executives said they viewed what happened in Israel as a sort of prediction for what could come in the United States.

Well if Israel’s COIVD situation is a preview of coming attractions for the rest of the globe, then we are in for an unending world of trouble.

Israel’s rates are exploding.

No, that’s underselling it. They are exploding within an explosion.

These are numbers that have never been measured before anywhere on earth. Case rates are absolutely annihilating previous records.

Israel did everything “right” — they have mask mandates, vaccine passports and have rolled out not just one but two boosters.

None of it is working.

It’s important to highlight the claims made by the experts and media members on what would happen in Israel, what their “gold standard” rollout and the boosting would accomplish.

And weigh those expectations up against the ensuing reality.

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“Real World Data”

The latest information published by Pfizer is very encouraging. In real world data, published by Israel’s ministry of health, after two weeks following the second dose, the vaccine effectiveness was 97% in preventing symptomatic disease, hospitalizations, severe and critical hospitalizations, and death. The vaccine was also effective at a rate of 94% in reducing asymptomatic infections—this is very important in halting spread of the virus. This study was done at a time when the more infectious U.K. variant was the dominant strain in the population.

94% effective in reducing asymptomatic infections, “very important in halting the spread of the virus.”

94% effective!

This article was posted in March 2021, back when Israel’s vaccine rollout was the envy of the world, and cases had declined dramatically (likely due to seasonal impacts).

Even earlier, back in January 2021, The Guardian breathlessly reported that Israel’s vaccine data showed an “extremely low rate of infection.” Only 0.04% of vaccinated people caught the virus a week after the second dose, they said.

Just look at these numbers!

It revealed that out of 163,000 Israelis given both shots, only 31 were infected

Hard to argue with that level of success, isn’t it?

It should come as no surprise then that the BBC claimed in April of last year that Israel could be “reaching herd immunity.”

Since the vaccines were so protective against infection, the BBC’s experts set out their expectations for the herd immunity threshold:

This happens when enough of a population has protection against an infection that it stops being able to spread - and even people who don't themselves have immunity are indirectly protected.

For Covid the estimated threshold for herd immunity is at least 65%-70%.

An Israeli professor who’s also the director of the country’s largest hospital, said herd immunity was “the only explanation” for the decline in cases:

Prof Eyal Leshem, a director at Israel's largest hospital, the Sheba Medical Center, said herd immunity was the "only explanation" for the fact that cases continued to fall even as more restrictions were lifted.

"There is a continuous decline despite returning to near normalcy," he said.

"This tells us that even if a person is infected, most people they meet walking around won't be infected by them."

His quote actually highlights several mistaken assumptions about COVID:

1. That lockdowns work, and so any decline in cases must be attributable to behavior or human intervention

2. That vaccines would prevent the transmission of COVID

So did one of the country’s leading experts correctly identify the drop in cases as “herd immunity?”