Israël : A Solution to the Vaccine Impasse. The Right to Choose

TRIBUNE : Israel has hit a brick wall. The government has ordered seven million doses of Pfizer vaccines but only about half the country is willing to be subjected to the needle.  The country is at war with the self-righteous vaccinated accusing the other half of endangering the health of the country.

Intolerance knows no boundaries against those who may not be anti-vaxers but either unable to be vaccinated or question the long term risk of a not yet licensed jab.

In the maelstrom of the virus and the storm that is raging around the vaccine, I have discovered that I am a conservative with liberal tendencies and my once fellow conservatives have become vaccine fascists. Let me explain.

Here in Israel the government and half the people are marching to the drumbeat of Vaccine Uber Alles. The orthodoxy demands that healthy people who do not wish to subject themselves to the dreaded needle must be demoted to lesser citizens. Punished, shamed, put beyond the pale, expelled from society.

It is strange indeed that we who question the inadequacies and potential dangers of an unproven vaccine are accused by those who ignore or deny this fact are accusing the rest of us of ignoring he science though many of us have spent more time inspecting the science than many of our accusers.

Those who consider themselves safe post-vaccination accuse others of risking their health by not complying to their orthodoxy. In their hysterical rage, they have displayed no tolerance to those who choose to take alternative routes to protect their health. They have even applied their rage and insults against those unable to be vaccinated.

The government has followed the global fascist precedent of banning conscientious and compassion physicians from practicing their ancient Hippocratic Oath, one of the most binding documents in history, the sacred duty of doctors to heal the sick to the best of their knowledge and ability and to preserve the privacy of their patients.

Part of that oath demands that the doctor must keep their patients safe from harm and injustice. This has been denied them.

To many of us, participating in an extension of Phase Three trials under the guise of an emergency is, in fact, mass participation in an experiment of a yet unproven, unlicensed, vaccine.

The contracted demand on my government to provide the vaccine manufacturer with medical records of those participating in that experiment is adequate proof that the manufacturer is uncertain of the full efficacy and safety of their product.

 Only time will tell, beyond claims of immediate efficacy, how long it will be before the vaccinated need to be re-vaccinated? A year? Six months? Ad infinitum?

But back to the physicians. Those with alternative knowledge. Those that know the science and successfully apply their skills on us, their patients. They have been banned from using their skills. Banned, after centuries from asserting their ancient code of honor, from healing us to the best of their ability by the imposed fascist orders that they must hand their personal patients over to the state. Because the state knows better how to heal us.

Those who object are silenced. Those who bravely choose to heal their patients are threatened with expulsion from the profession they have dedicated their lives for going against the authoritarian orthodoxy.

One brave doctor told me, “Better my patients are illegally alive than legally dead,” after losing half his sick corona patients by following the orders of the incompetent World Health Organization and his national public health officials. Instead, he successfully cured his patients with a known, but banned, drug combination.

This doctor saved half of his patients by practicing his knowledge, by following the science. No matter. He was forced to stop treating his patients under threat of being struck off. The result? More of his patients died.

This tragedy is known in too many local clinics. Doctors who protest have been silenced.  In too many cases, those that refuse to be muzzled lost their jobs.

We are losing a healthy world, country by country, to incompetent fascist dictates of which imposed mass vaccination is one. The right to choose has been denied us and to our caring outpatient doctors.

Instead of allowing us to use another route to maintain our health, the fascists are threatening to place us outside acceptable society, beyond the pale, looked on as lepers and criminals.

Is this what Israel has become? A nation divided between those who conform and those who think differently?

Those in power need to take off their blinkers because power has blinded them, deafened them from listening to experts who offer an additional path to health security by using the traditional route.

It is time to release our local physicians from the bondage they have been placed.

Now that the vaccine is here, an innovative Start-Up Nation should take a global initiative and run a national clinical trial by allowing our caring outpatient doctors and clinics to administer safe and effective early treatment and assess if this reduces the hospitalization of corona infected patients that is overloading on our hospital system. 

There can be no further ban because we now have multiple confirmations that an early stage drug combination has been proven to be as effective, statistically, as a vaccine in keeping us safe from the current disease.

If this is the expected outcome, as predicted by thousands of silenced doctors and specialists, it will offer all of us the freedom to choose which route we can take for our individual health security and better escape the ravages of an infection that is attacking us both as human beings and as a nation.

Barry Shaw,  Senior Associate at the Israel Institute for Strategic Studies.