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Israel was a vaccination poster child. Now its COVID surge shows the world what’s coming next

Israel, once a front-runner in the global race to move on from COVID-19, is now one of the world’s biggest pandemic hot spots. The country that was once predicted to be the first to vaccinate its entire population had the highest per-capita caseload of anywhere in the week through Sept. 4, according to figures compiled by Johns Hopkins University. Its world-beating inoculation rate, meanwhile, has tumbled down the league table. The nation of 9 million became the test case for reopening society and the economy in April when much of Europe and the U.S. were still in some form of lockdown. Yet Israel now shows how the calculus is changing in places where progress was fastest. It’s no longer just about whether people get coronavirus, but also how badly they get it and ensuring that vaccines are still working as the highly infectious Delta variant threatens to undermine immunity. More recently, it has led the way when it comes to vaccinating children and rolling out a booster shot of the Pfizer-BioNTech vaccine after research suggested reduced efficacy over time. Around 100,000 Israelis are getting inoculated every day, the vast majority of them with a third shot. “If you are able to maintain life without lockdown, and to avoid very high numbers of hospitalizations and death, then this is what life with COVID looks like,” said Eyal Leshem, a professor specializing in infectious diseases at the Sheba Medical Center in Tel Ha-Shomer. Since April, Israel has fallen from first to 33rd in Bloomberg’s vaccine tracker of populations considered fully vaccinated. The program plateaued amid hesitancy from some in the Orthodox Jewish and Arab communities. About 61% of Israelis have been given two doses, lower than in European laggards earlier in the year such as France and Spain. Following the spread of the Delta variant over the summer, Israel has seen cases climb, reaching an all-time high of 11,316 daily cases on Sept. 2. The number of people falling seriously sick and being hospitalized, though, has risen less than it did during the last coronavirus wave, peaking at 751 in late August, compared with 1,183 in mid-January. The trend is now downward.

Infections jumped because of the prevalence of cases among the unvaccinated, especially children. There were also so-called breakthrough infections in those who have been vaccinated, and the drop in efficacy of vaccines.

That said, unvaccinated people account for more than 10 times as many serious cases as those who have received two doses, showing that even with immunity waning, shots are providing protection. For public health officials and politicians, the latest chapter of the pandemic is to concentrate on ensuring older people more at risk continue to be protected while cases are rising among children. The importance of that drive is heightened by the return of millions of children to schools last week, and the Jewish New Year this week. Epidemiologists say cases among the over 30s are already declining thanks to the boosters and restrictions on bars and restaurants to the fully vaccinated. The highest rate of new cases in recent weeks is among children under the age of 12, according to Ran Balicer, chair of the expert advisory panel to the government. There’s also a record level of testing. “Waning immunity is a real challenge that every country needs to prepare a contingency plan to tackle,” said Balicer, who is also chief innovation officer for Israeli health maintenance organization Clalit. The data coming from Israel in the coming weeks will allow the world to assess the efficacy of the booster shot program, he said. As of Sept. 6, at least 2.6 million people in Israel—around 28% of the population—have now had the booster shot of the Pfizer-BioNTech vaccine, according to the Israeli Health Ministry. That rises to at least 64% for people in age brackets over 60. Significantly, the booster shot is also available for anyone over 12 who was vaccinated at least five months ago.

The wildcard is the return of schools. That could change the transmission dynamics and expose all age groups to infection because of kids coming home with COVID-19, Balicer said.

The World Health Organization’s heat map puts Israel in the top five in the wider European region. The rolling data show areas with the highest seven-day infection rates are in Scotland, where 68% of the population are fully vaccinated. Cases surged after restrictions were lifted and then schools returned from their summer break in mid-August. “If we look back a year ago, we virtually had no protection other than a complete lockdown,” said Leshem. “Now, we have an open education system, fully open commerce, and despite over 50,000 cases a week, we are not seeing increases in the number of severe cases and hospitalization.”

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More U.S. first respondents are dying of COVID-19 infected in droves…vaccine rate under 30%

The resurgence of COVID-19 this summer and the national debate over vaccine requirements have created a fraught situation for the United States’ first responders, who are dying in larger numbers but pushing back against mandates. It’s a stark contrast from the beginning of the vaccine rollout when first responders were prioritized for shots. The mandates affect tens of thousands of police officers, firefighters and others on the front lines across the country, many of whom are spurning the vaccine. That is happening despite mandates’ consequences that range from weekly testing to suspension to termination — even though the virus is now the leading cause of U.S. law enforcement line-of-duty deaths. According to the Officer Down Memorial Page, 132 members of law enforcement agencies are known to have died of COVID-19 in 2021. In Florida alone last month, six people affiliated with law enforcement died over a 10-day period.

Despite the deaths, police officers and other first responders are among those most hesitant to get the vaccine and their cases continue to grow.

No national statistics show the vaccination rate for America’s entire population of first responders but individual police and fire departments across the country report figures far below the national rate of 74% of adults who have had at least one dose.

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There is a worst case… forced quarantines

When public health epidemics like coronavirus stoke panic, governments have a long track record of responding to a political problem rather than a health problem
Just after midnight in an old boarding house in San Francisco, Chick Gin finally stopped moaning.

Leading up to his death in March of 1900, the Chinese immigrant had complained for weeks of a headache and lower back pain. When morticians later sliced open his grey body, they found organs swollen with blood. A swab from his lymph nodes confirmed the doctor’s fears: the bubonic plague had arrived in the United States. By dawn, armed guards had circled Chinatown, trapping almost 35,000 people inside. Health officials wearing masks and rubber aprons stormed the city to burn personal property, close businesses and evict tenants as they disinfected every building. The police used batons to beat anyone they deemed disobedient. “With the unclean habits of their [slur redacted] and their filthy hovels…they are a constant menace to the public health,” said James Phelan, the then mayor of San Francisco. Quarantine lines were carefully gerrymandered around white-owned businesses— even those directly across from closed Chinese stores. While white Americans were allowed in and out of the city freely, Chinese-Americans were trapped for months. They hid in alleys and desperately tried to escape until a large wooden fence with barbed wire was built around the boundaries of the city. Retrospectively, some experts believe Gin’s symptoms were indicative of gonorrhea-induced sepsis, not the plague. It’s difficult to imagine that an abuse of human rights tantamount to what took place in San Francisco in 1900 could take place today, but as the spread of Coronavirus leads to Americans being quarantined everywhere from cruise ships to Southern California military bases, it’s worth noting that U.S. quarantine laws are still squishy. Each state enforces quarantines within their borders based on their own laws, some of which haven’t changed since the 1800s. These laws are intentionally broad to give officials the flexibility to act swiftly in a public health crisis—but that can also allow biases and panic to seep into these decisions. During World War I, female prostitutes (but not their male customers) were quarantined to prevent the spread of sexually transmitted diseases. In the 1980s, California lawmakers proposed legislation that would quarantine those living with AIDs. Although the bill didn’t pass, the U.S. did quarantine HIV-positive Haitian refugees at Guantanamo Bay.

Often times, quarantines are used by politicians to show they’re taking a problem seriously, regardless of whether research finds them effective, says Wendy Parmet, a Northeastern University law professor.

In reality, quarantines alone are rarely sufficient to quell an outbreak and can even spread an infectious disease further if fear of pleads people to hide or lie about their symptoms. The quarantines imposed in the wake of the Ebola outbreak in 2014, for example, had no public health justification, Parmet says. Asymptomatic people were contained to their homes for two weeks, even though they had tested negative for Ebola and the disease is only contagious when symptoms appear. One woman, quarantined to her apartment in New Haven, Connecticut, was left without access to food. When she tried to retrieve groceries her friend had left on her doorstep, a neighbor called the police. Another woman, a nurse who’d just returned from working with Ebola patients in Africa, spent three nights in a makeshift tent outside of University Hospital in Newark, New Jersey, with no access to a shower. A report from the American Civil Liberties Union later found that this quarantine was unconstitutional and the nurse sued New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie. “They were responding to a political problem, not a health problem,” Parmet says. “They were really just political grandstanding, I don’t think there’s a nicer way to put it.” As long as Parmet has been working in public health laws, she has seen examples posturing calls for quarantine, which makes her especially worried as panic around coronavirus spreads to the United States. “People look for scapegoats in times of disease,” she says. “There is a long history of conflating disease protection and harsh policies towards vulnerable populations.”

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Antivaxxers Big Brother can NOW force you to vaccinate

Nick Bit: They can force you to get a vaccination. And they will if these variants are not bought under control. Now that their are approved by the FDA vaccines the authority unquestionable exists to test you for vaccine antibodies and force you to get the jab:

In a 1905 case, Jacobson v. Massachusetts, the Supreme Court upheld compulsory vaccination during a smallpox outbreak. It explained that “the liberty secured by the Constitution of the United States to every person within its jurisdiction does not import an absolute right in each person to be, at all times and in all circumstances, wholly freed from restraint. There are manifold restraints to which every person is necessarily subject for the common good…. Upon the principle of self-defense, of paramount necessity, a community has the right to protect itself against an epidemic of disease which threatens the safety of its members.”

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NBC News U.S. hits 40 million Covid cases as delta variant spreads… kids forced to go to school to die!

The U.S. has logged 40 million Covid-19 cases since the start of the pandemic, as the fourth wave brought on by the delta variant continues to spread. The country has recorded 40,000,070 cases and 651,690 deaths, according to the latest NBC News tally. It recorded 35,355 news cases and 279 deaths Sunday. About 207 million people have received their first doses of a vaccine, and more than 175 million have been fully vaccinated. Vaccination rates have risen slowly since July, but still no state or territory has passed the 70 percent fully vaccinated threshold, and the country is nowhere close to its peak in April, when more than 3 million people were getting shots every day.

Health care workers attend a patient with Covid-19 at the Cardiovascular Intensive Care Unit at Providence Cedars-Sinai Tarzana Medical Center in Tarzana, Calif., on Sept. 2, 2021. (Apu Gomes / AFP - Getty Images)

The fourth wave, which many experts say could have been prevented with better vaccination rates, has overwhelmed hospitals. At Billings Clinic in Montana, the intensive care unit is nearing 150 percent capacity as the hospitals in the state have called on the National Guard for help. Hospitals are seeing an average of 100,000 Covid patients a day, higher than at other any point since last winter, when the vaccines weren’t available for most people. At the same time, hospitals face a nurse staffing crisis, as many nurses exhausted by the pandemic are quitting or retiring. August was Florida’s deadliest month for Covid cases since the pandemic began — it recorded more than 1,300 deaths as hospitalizations among children skyrocket. In central Texas, a school district closed until after Labor Day after two teachers died of Covid.

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UK records 41,192 new COVID cases on Monday

The UK has recorded more than seven million COVID cases since the start of the pandemic, according to government data. It comes after 41,192 new infections were reported in the latest 24-hour period, along with 45 more coronavirus-related deaths. The figures compare with 37,011 infections and 68 fatalities reported on Sunday, and 26,476 cases and 48 deaths announced this time last week. Since the pandemic began early last year, a total of 133,274 people have died in the UK within 28 days of a positive COVID test and there have been 7,018,927 lab-confirmed cases. According to the latest data, 988 COVID patients were admitted to hospital on 31 August, while there were 6,573 admissions in the last seven days, a 3.7% rise on the week before. Some 21,795 people had their first COVID-19 vaccine dose on Sunday, taking the total to 48,270,113 (88.8% of over-16s in the UK). And 73,193 had their second jab yesterday, meaning 43,455,083 are now fully inoculated (79.9% of over-16s). It comes as a senior doctor has suggested that some children as young as 12 should be allowed to overrule their parents on whether they have the COVID vaccine. Dr David Strain, a clinical lead for COVID services, told Sky News he believed there were 12-year-olds “mature enough” to decide to have the jab without the consent of their legal guardians. The vaccines minister, Nadhim Zahawi, has said parental consent will be required if the government decides all 12 to 15-year-olds should be offered the jab. However, Dr Strain said a school nurse or GP could assess whether a child is capable of consenting to having the vaccine – even if their parents opposed it “Some children at the age of 12 are mature enough to make that call,” he said. “It will be dependent on people with training – the school nurse, the GP – people who have sufficient training to identify that.

The Joint Committee on Vaccination and Immunisation (JCVI) has decided against recommending COVID vaccines for all 12 to 15-year-olds on health grounds alone, as the virus presents a low risk to them. {Nick Bit: Not true!}

The UK’s chief medical officers are currently considering the wider benefits of the move, such as reducing school absences. They are expected to present their findings within days.

Last month, experts warned it is “highly likely” there will be large levels of coronavirus infections in schools by the end of September.

Meanwhile, a leading business lobby group has warned the government that the crisis caused by the shortage of key workers could take up to two years to resolve, hampering economic recovery from the pandemic.

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EU regulator studying data on booster dose for Pfizer COVID-19 vaccine

Mon, September 6, 2021, (Reuters) – Europe’s medicines regulator said on Monday it was evaluating data on a booster dose for the COVID-19 vaccine developed by Pfizer/BioNTech, to be given six months after the second dose in people aged 16 years and older. The European Medicines Agency said it would carry out a speedy evaluation of the data, with an outcome expected “within the next few weeks”. It also added that it was also assessing data on the use of an additional dose of mRNA vaccines in people with weak immune systems.
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Israel’s coronavirus czar is calling for preparations for a 4th vaccine dose

Mon, September 6, 2021,
  • Israel’s coronavirus czar suggested that people may need a fourth shot of COVID-19 vaccine.
  • He said the country needs to “prepare” for that, but didn’t give a timeline.
  • Israel is currently giving most people third vaccine doses as a booster

Israel’s coronavirus czar has called for the country to prepare to roll out a fourth coronavirus vaccine dose. Salman Zarka told Israel’s Kan public radio on Saturday that “given that that the virus is here and will continue to be here, we also need to prepare for a fourth injection,” Zarka did not outline a timeline for when those vaccines could be given. Israel is already rolling out a vaccine booster shot to most people, which would be their third dose. The country’s health minister last week granted access to a third shot to everyone over the age of 12 who had received their second shot at least five months earlier.

Zarka said on Saturday that the booster could be modified to better target variants of the virus.He told The Times of Israel in August that people could need to get a shot “every few months – it could be once a year or five or six months.”

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Pfizer on track for U.S. vaccine boosters, Moderna lagging, Fauci says

WASHINGTON, Sept 5 (Reuters) – Top U.S. infectious disease expert Dr. Anthony Fauci said on Sunday that officials were likely to soon get the regulatory go-ahead to administer COVID-19 vaccine booster shots made by Pfizer (PFE.N), although Moderna (MRNA.O) booster could take a little longer. Asked on CBS’ “Face the Nation,” about President Joe Biden’s goal to give booster shots starting Sept. 20, Fauci said that “in some respects” that remained the plan. But he said that while Pfizer-BioNTech has submitted the necessary data on booster shots to the Food and Drug Administration (FDA), Moderna has yet to complete the process. Fauci said he hopes to give both vaccines when boosters doses roll out, but if Moderna does not complete the process before Sept. 20, then Moderna boosters will be given later. Moderna and the FDA did not immediately return emails seeking comment. In a statement released Wednesday, Moderna said it had “initiated its submission” of booster data to the FDA. How – or even whether – to administer boosters has emerged as a thorny issue as COVID-19 continues to kill unvaccinated people around the world. Last month the Biden administration announced it would start offering boosters to Americans by Sept. 20, usurping the process by which the FDA and the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention usually decide on such issues, current and former FDA scientists and CDC advisory panel members have told Reuters. Scientists are still debating how much additional immunity boosters provide and whether all Americans should get another shot, rather than just those at high risk of severe illness. Speaking Sunday, Fauci emphasized that both boosters were assumed to be safe, but that the FDA and other officials would study the data to make sure. “When you’re dealing with allowing the American public to receive an intervention, you want to make sure you’re absolutely certain,” he said.