MK Bennett Railed At Previous Government COVID-19 Policies, PM Bennett Is Doing Far Less To Combat Pandemic

JERUSALEM (VINnews) — As Israel suffers a worrying spike in infections, hospitalizations, serious cases and deaths from coronavirus, the government continues to dally and initiate ineffectual steps which have not succeeded in curbing the current breakout. Prime Minister Bennett, who prided himself on having a strategy on how to combat COVID-19 and even wrote a book on “How to Beat a Pandemic”, has yet to take aggressive action to curb the outbreak, which has now reached more than 5000 cases daily and 130 deaths in the past month after there were almost no cases and no deaths during the entire month of June.

There have been reports that the government intends to impose a lockdown during the festival period, prompting chareidi knesset members to declare that the public would not obey any such lockdown, especially since the current holiday period did not have any lockdowns despite the rise in infections. However it would seem that the government’s strategy is mainly to encourage a third booster shot against coronavirus, currently being given to those over 60 and with weak immune systems, and to adopt the previous methods of masks and social distancing although with less enforcement than before.

The fear of paralyzing the economy as occurred in previous lockdowns will likely deter the government from taking any extreme steps unless the pandemic goes out of control. It is hoped that a concerted vaccination campaign will prevent this- in the past week 650,000 people received booster shots and tens of thousands of young people received their first and second shots, but there are now 400 people in serious condition in hospitals and 61 intubated, which is a huge increase over the previous month. The only positive sign is that the rate of infection (R) is now tapering off and may go below 1 by the end of the month.

Interior Minister Ayelet Shaked raised a storm Tuesday when she said that “we need to know how to “contain” serious cases and deaths since this is a pandemic and in pandemics people die. It’s happening at this moment worldwide.” Shaked stressed that “there was no complacency or lack of comprehension at the beginning, we understood right away where we were going. We took a difficult but strategic decision to live with the virus knowing that we have vaccines against it.”

MK Shlomo Keri (Likud) attacked Shaked stating “you have failed. Go home, write a book. We cannot contain any longer your stupidity and lawlessness.”

Shaked later chose to rephrase her words, stating that :”every departed person is a world of their own and human life is a hallowed value. I meant to explain the price involved in continuously facing up to a global pandemic. I should have expressed it differently. Once again I request that people go and vaccinate, it saves lives.”