In the past few weeks you may have seen Israel and Palestine in the headlines for an unexpected cause: anti-vaccination and anti-masking advocates have circulated misleading or outright false claims about inoculation and infection rates. The claims made it to the wide corners of the internet, including an account belonging to a notable retired physician, former Republican Representative from Texas, Ron Paul.
In an August 10 tweet Ron Paul wrote, “Jewish Israelis are heavily vaccinated, while Palestinians are not/Covid cases are increasing for Jewish Israelis, but not for Palestinians/What’s going on?”
Embedded in the post was a video from the Ron Paul Liberty Report, where co-host Daniel McAdams displayed merged graphs of Israeli and Palestinian infection rates, claiming “look at what the masks have done in Israel, translation nothing if you look at this chart.” He added, “this is a head-scratcher.”
What is going on
“Covid cases are increasing for Jewish Israelis”
Israel is known for one of the most aggressive vaccine campaigns in the world, with over 60% of the public vaccinated. Yet one million people out of a population of 9 million, or 20% of those who are eligible for vaccines, have not been vaccinated. And that non-vaccinated population is partly driving new infections, which right now hovers around 10,000 a day. This figure trails earlier peaks in August 2020 and January 2021, when vaccination rates were much lower, however, a lockdown was in place at that time.
In May, Israel reopened its economy and gone were heavy restrictions on mass gatherings and police roadblocks sealing in communities known as “hot spots.” So even though infection rates are high now, they would likely be much lower if closures were still in place across the country.
This is not to say that there is no legitimate worry around vaccine efficacy for the Delta variant. Early research from the CDC shows that frontline workers saw a drop in vaccine efficacy from 91% to 66% with the emergence of the Delta variant. But of those new cases, there are fewer patients sent to ICUs.
Eran Segal, a scientist at the Weizmann Institute, tweeted this week: “The rate of verified patients becoming seriously ill dropped from 2% to 1.4%.” Before vaccines were unrolled, that number was 4%, meaning when vaccines don’t prevent transmission, they seem to lessen the severity of symptoms.
Last Monday marked when unvaccinated patients with serious cases of COVID-19 started outpacing vaccinated cases. The trend has continued for the last week and a half.
On Wednesday public health physician and head of Israel’s Clalit health services tweeted: “As we expected – the trend continues 112 seriously ill (negative record in the current wave)/Of these, 64 (57%) are not vaccinated.”
What’s more, fatalities in Israel are about half of what they were during the January spike, when there was a comparable number of cases.
“Palestinian COVID-19 cases are not rising”
This is a simple falsehood to dispel. COVID-19 cases are rising among Palestinians—full stop. The official data of confirmed cases has been climbing since July, so before Ron Paul inaccurately stated infections were dropping.
If we want to add a little nuance to the discussion, laboratory testing in the West Bank and Gaza has always been low. In Gaza, unless Palestinians are at a hospital with severe COVID-19 symptoms, they do not get tested. To get an idea of what that looks like on the ground, check out our reporting from July from Ahmed al-Sammak. He interviewed a married couple who went to a Gaza hospital seeking COVID-19 tests and treatment and were told they could not get one. Only after calling a friend and pulling some strings, were they able to have labs run. Spoiler alert: they were both positive.
Let’s not forget, testing completely stopped last May during the escalation of hostilities between Israel and Hamas.
Throughout the pandemic the WHO and the UN have consistently warned of shortages for testing materials. Indeed, Palestinians had to stop testing altogether almost half a dozen times because they ran out of lab kits. As a result, health officials believe limited supplies to confirm new infections are probably masking a much broader outbreak.
