On exiting the second lockdown in Israel, Gabi Barabash and Michael Osterholm are in sync

    

 

Gabi Barabash

  

Michael Osterholm

Gabi Barabash is apparently the only one in Israel who knows what he is doing. 100 new infections per day is 1 per 100 000 per day and that is the same number that the US epidemiologist  Michael Osterholm has been giving since August.

Former Health Ministry director-general Gabi Barabash, a frequent media commentator during the pandemic, on Friday criticized the decision to begin emerging from the lockdown next week.

“They shouldn’t have set the threshold to exit the lockdown at 2,000 cases a day. They should have put it far lower at dozens or between 100 and 200 because it’s much easier to control,” Barabash told 103FM Radio.   

Michael Osterholm in his NYT Op-Ed

“Once the number of new cases in those areas was driven to less than one per 100,000 people per day as a result of their lockdowns, limiting the increase of new cases was possible with a combination of testing, contact tracing, case isolation and extensive monitoring of positive tests.”

Prof Amnon Shashua vs. the scientific consensus published in The Lancet

 

In his article Israel must shift strategy in its fight against coronavirus, prof Amnon Shashua writes (italics added):

“Increased contagion rates among those not at risk would enable the economy to function.

By adopting an infinite strategy, expecting the virus to be with us for an sustained period, we can shield the vulnerable members of society and the rest of the population would be more inclined to adhere to health mitigation directives, understanding the danger to the economy and to their incomes.”

The idea that we can shield the vulnerable members of society with increased contagion rates among those not at risk seems to be at odds with the opinion expressed by epidemiologists in The Lancet

 “The arrival of a second wave and the realisation of the challenges ahead has led to renewed interest in a so-called herd immunity approach, which suggests allowing a large uncontrolled outbreak in the low-risk population while protecting the vulnerable. Proponents suggest this would lead to the development of infection-acquired population immunity in the low-risk population, which will eventually protect the vulnerable. This is a dangerous fallacy unsupported by scientific evidence”

Epidemiologist Michael Osterholm in his latest weekly podcast apparently shares the same opinion: 

28:46 Into the video Question: Just a quick follow up, Mike, that idea, you let the young and healthy live their lives and protect the vulnerable, A) there is never a plan how to do that, but is that even possible?

Michael Osterholm: It’s not possible. Look at the college students right now and I talked about how it spills over to adults. We see this happen all the time. You know this infection has been cruel in terms of racial inequality and when you actually look at the social economic status and you look at housing issues and you look at job issues you have someone who is racially disadvantaged, black, brown and indigenous populations, they are living three family generations in one apartment building with two bedrooms and the single mother is going to work by public transit, and she is an essential worker making a little more than a minimum wage. Tell me how in the hell do you protect that family if you come home with the virus? How do you isolate, what do you do? There is a lot of things here that we can’t do that people say just let it go. You know if she comes home with that virus grandpa and grandma, her mom and dad are at great risk of the serious outcome. That is just wrong. That’s wrong. And so I think we have to protect these people, and it does not mean forever.

That is another thing I find very frustrating is, if we are asking this for the rest of all of time, then you can say OK, we’ve got a to learn how to live with this, and I ‘m still saying we have to live with this, but we are trying to get to a vaccine, give us six months, give us eight months. Give us these, OK. I mean, who are we?  I mean, I look back, and I mentioned this on a previous podcast when I watched the greatest generation locked up in their homes so that they don’t end up going out and catching this and dying from it. These are the same men and women who back in the 1940s gave two and three years of their life to protect this country and they didn’t ask for anything for anything at all. And today we are just asking people can you help us hold down the transmission of this virus and it’s an inconvenience.

So I think that in the follow up to your question – it’s not practical, we are not just going to be able to bubble off …. Tell me how are you going to bubble  health care workers from basically getting infected and bringing it home or taking it in, for example long term care. So I think this is a part of the reality we have to deal with. This virus is the enemy, it’s not us. We are not enemies of each other, it’s the virus. But if we don’t understand it we will make each other the enemy of each other, and that is when we will absolutely fail against this virus.

Dr. Osterholm's Take on the White House COVID-19 Outbreak

White House covid-19 protection plan - like secret service agents with squirt guns to protect the president against an assassin 

 

But let me do take a step backward and say, if you were on this podcast as early as July, you heard me say that I thought that the testing program put in place at the White House to protect the president and other senior leadership was not a plan at all, and in fact it reminded me of providing all the secret service agents with squirt guns and expect them to protect the president against an assassin.

 Let me just say a couple of comments about testing and what was done at the White House. This is one of those examples where there was a mindset you can test your way into safety, i.e. test your way out of the pandemic. Simply not possible to do! Testing is always going to be after the fact. It is going to be a situation that even if it is highly reliable it doesn’t protect you from being exposed, all it does is tell you that you were.   And now some people would say but if I know that I am infected then I can take steps to reduce my risk of transmitting to others, and that’s a great idea. But let just us be honest, first of all, what test we are talking about, these point of care tests are often coming up with more than 30 to 50 percent false negatives, meaning  you are missing people who are positive, and so if you are trying to xxx yourself  that is one thing.

 Second, I would acknowledge to those who promote this new testing approach or strategy for containment as they call it, this would help, but with one caveat. As we just saw what happened at the White House -  will people actually use this information to actually change their behavior so that they do not transmit. And we have seen a number of examples of people who were contacts of cases, who were cases, who did not abide by what we would hope would have been risk reduction behavior. So I am not suggesting that’s widespread in the population, but when you have almost a third of the public who does not believe this pandemic is real. You have a number of people experiencing pandemic fatigue, they think this is too much I do not want to deal with it, and you have a number of people who are bubbled in today because of their high risk of serious disease if they get infected, that does not leave a lot of people left in the middle necessarily who are going to be impacted by this kind of testing.

And so, the last piece is of this point in care testing, we are going to show very shortly that there is actually a very important number of false positives, and wait until people are taking these rapid tests and call false positives only to be confirmed by PCR that they were not positive at all, and see how long that is going to last, and watch that spread around as a challenge why not to take them, because the next thing you know you have to be worked up, you know you got everybody upset and concerned and it wasn’t even true positive.

 So, I just want to come back to this issue. I would support any kind of testing that might help actually reduce the number of cases. And I think the White House experience really is that. It shows you the challenges of using testing in regards to behavior change and what it means and what it does. So yes, it can have some impact, but it is not going to have this major containment strategy outcome. And I am sorry that the White House situation ever occurred, but I think it is illustrative of the point that we are making, and again false positives and false negatives point of care tests are occurring much, much more frequently than people realize and they will dramatically impact even among that limited number of people who are even willing to consider taking these on a routine basis that they ultimately would do.        

 Now what I have a hard time with is that no one addressed that situation at the White House, even though it was raised with them at numerus occasions that this was a terribly inadequate plan. Keeping in mind that, this is what I have been basically saying, as many of you know, it is emblematic of we do not have a national plan for responding to this pandemic, so why should we be surprised if we don’t have a White House protection plan? And so what this episode should tell us is that we desperately need for a national plan how to respond and how we bring the 50 states together, recognizing their diverse differences whether they be urban or rural, whether they be west, south, north, east, whatever. But we need a comprehensive plan. We don’t have that. People will say we do but I defy anyone to come forward and tell you what our plan is.                                                                                                

Coronavirus Suicide Bombers

 

I think I found a term for these people who in the middle of a near total lockdown protest in thousands in Tel Aviv and Jerusalem.  They are self-centered, self-righteous, ignorant, dumb, inadvertent suicide bombers. They expose themselves and everyone else to a deadly virus. The key of their behavior is absolute ignorance of the threat the virus represents.

Of course, you also have the haredi variation and the apolitical hedonistic variation.  On top of that add the greedy power hungry politicians and the result is a catastrophe. 

And yet the root cause of all this is ignorance of science and forgetting that preserving human lives takes precedence over everything else.      

Jerusalem protest disperses after estimated 16,000 rally against Netanyahu  

Letter in the Jerusalem Post on September 30

In “Religious leadership in a time of plague”” (September 29), Yitz Greenberg is spot on.

In 1848, Rabbi Israel Salanter instructed Jews not to fast on Yom Kippur because of the cholera epidemic. Today during the coronavirus pandemic all rabbis should have followed his example that pikuah nefesh is paramount.

What does 8,000 new infections per day in Israel mean? It means 80 infections per 100,000 population per day and that is 80 times, i.e. two orders of magnitude (!!) more than it is possible to control using a combination of testing, contact tracing, case isolation and extensive monitoring of positive tests. This is insanity!

But the religious are not the only ones. You have people who in the middle of a near total lockdown protest in thousands in Tel Aviv and Jerusalem. They expose themselves and everyone else to a deadly virus. The key of their behavior is either absolute ignorance of the threat the virus represents or the maxim that the end justifies the means.

Some on the Left view these demonstrators not as the problem but the cure, yet in a democracy, you topple elected leaders at the polls – or you end up with another French Revolution of 1789 and The Rein of Terror that followed it, or the October Revolution of 1917 and 100 million dead in Communist regimes since.

The root cause of all this is ignorance of science and forgetting that preserving human lives takes precedence over everything else.

MLADEN ANDRIJASEVIC
Beersheba

Bret Stephens column: A rare Middle East triumph

THE BALTIMORE SUN

By BRET STEPHENS

 THE NEW YORK TIMES

For years, the Trump administration’s peacemaking efforts in the Middle East have been the object of relentless derision in elite foreign-policy circles, some of it justified. Yet with Friday’s announcement that Bahrain would join the United Arab Emirates as the second Arab state in 30 days to normalize ties with Israel, the administration has done more for regional peace than most of its predecessors, including an Obama administration that tried hard and failed badly.

There are lessons in this, at least for anyone prepared to consider just how wrong a half-century’s worth of conventional wisdom has been.

At the heart of that conventional wisdom is the view, succinctly put by U.N. Secretary General António Guterres in February, that “resolving the Israeli-Palestinian conflict remains key to sustainable peace in the Middle East.” Untie that Gordian knot, so the thinking goes, and the region’s many problems become easier to solve, whether it’s other regional conflicts or the anti-Americanism that feeds international terrorism.

That thinking was always dubious — what, for instance, did the Iran-Iraq War, in which a million people or more died, have to do with Israelis and Palestinians? — though it had the convenience of giving Arab regimes a good way of deflecting blame for their own bad governance. But since the (misnamed) Arab Spring began nearly a decade ago, the view has become absurd.

    

The rise and fall of ISIS, civil war in Syria and anarchy in Libya, Turkey’s aggression against Kurds, proxy battles and hunger in Yemen, political turmoil and repression in Egypt and Iran, the bankruptcy of the Lebanese state, the plight of Middle Eastern refugees — if any of these catastrophes have something in common, it’s that they have next to nothing to do with the Jewish state or its policies. One may still hope for a Palestinian state, but it won’t save the region from itself.

What would? The best option is an alliance of moderates and modernizers — anyone in power (or seeking power) who wants to move his country in the direction of greater religious and social tolerance, broader (that is, beyond energy) economic development, less preoccupation with ancient disputes, more interest in future opportunities. Such an alliance is the only hope for a region being sucked into the maw of religious fanaticism, economic stagnation, environmental degradation and perpetual misrule.

Now this alliance may finally be coming into being. Unlike Israel’s peace with Egypt and Jordan — both based on strategic necessity and geographic proximity — the peace with the Emirates and Bahrain has no obvious rationale, even if a shared fear of Iran played a role.

The larger factor is shared aspiration. Israel is the most advanced country in the region because for seven decades it invested in human, not mineral, potential, and because it didn’t let its wounds (whether with respect to Germany in the 1950s or Egypt in the 1970s) get the better of its judgment.

The choice for the Arab world is stark. It can follow a similar path as Israel; be swallowed by Iran, China, Russia, Turkey or some other outsider; or otherwise continue as before until, Libya-like, it implodes.

As consequential as the peace deals themselves is the Arab League’s refusal to condemn them, eliciting a furious Palestinian reaction. That’s not surprising: It means the Palestinian grip over the league’s diplomatic agenda may finally be loosening.

Perhaps it also means that the grievance-driven politics that have dominated the Palestinian issue for decades are finally over, too. If so, it’s bad news for those Palestinian leaders and activists who think that, with unflagging obstinacy, they can somehow restore the status quo ante 1948, when Israel didn’t exist.

What’s bad news for some Palestinian leaders may be good news for ordinary Palestinians. Peace between Israelis and Arabs will not come from the inside out — that is, from a deal between Jerusalem and Ramallah that wins over the rest of the Arab world. Decades of diplomatic failure, culminating in John Kerry’s failed mediation efforts in 2014, should put an end to that fantasy.

Yet it isn’t crazy to think that peace might come from the outside in: from an Arab world that encircles Israel with recognition and partnership rather than enmity, and which thereby shores up Israel’s security while moderating Palestinian behavior. If that’s right — and if states like Oman, Morocco, Kuwait, Sudan and especially Saudi Arabia follow suit — then this summer’s peace deals might finally create the conditions of viable Palestinian statehood.

A final point about these deals: This wasn’t supposed to happen. Not under the leadership of Israel’s supposedly bellicose Benjamin Netanyahu; certainly not through the diplomatic offices of the usually crazy/amateurish/perverse Trump administration. Luck and timing played a part, as they always do.

But it behooves those of us who are so frequently hostile to Netanyahu and President Donald Trump to maintain the capacity to be pleasantly surprised — that is, to be honest. What’s happened between Israel and two former enemies is an honest triumph in a region, and a year, that’s known precious few.

Ayaan Hirsi Ali: What Islamists and ‘Wokeists’ Have in Common

The Wall Street Journal

Adherents of both pursue ideological purity, refuse to engage in debate and demand submission.

A leftist demonstrator protesting President Trump steps on a burning American flag outside the U.S. Embassy in Buenos Aires, January 20, 2017.

By Ayaan Hirsi Ali

There were many American heroes on 9/11, but the greatest were the passengers and crew of Flight 93. Not only did they avert what al Qaeda planned—a direct hit on the White House—but they also embodied Patrick Henry’s credo “Give me liberty, or give me death!”

Do those words still have a meaning in the America of 2020? For two decades, I have opposed the fanatical illiberalism of those strands of Islam that gave rise to al Qaeda. I broke with my Somali family and ultimately with their faith because I believed that it is human freedom that should be sacrosanct, not antiquated doctrines that demand submission by the individual.

So implacable are the proponents of Shariah that I have faced repeated death threats. Yet I have always consoled myself that, in the U.S., freedom of conscience and expression rank above any set of religious beliefs. It was partly for this reason that I moved here and became a citizen in 2013.

It never occurred to me that free speech would come under threat in my newly adopted country. Even when I first encountered what has come to be known as “cancel culture”—in 2014 I was invited to receive an honorary degree at Brandeis University and then ungraciously disinvited—I didn’t fret too much. I was inclined to dismiss the alliance of campus leftists and Islamists as a lunatic fringe.

But the power of the illiberal elements in the American left has grown, not just on campus but in the media and many corporations. They have inculcated in a generation of students an ideology that has much more in common with the intolerant doctrines of a religious cult than with the secular political thought I studied at Holland’s Leiden University.

In the debates after 9/11, many people sought materialist explanations for the attacks. American foreign policy in the Middle East was blamed, or lack of education and employment opportunities in the Arab world. I argued that none of these could explain the motivations of the plotters and hijackers, who in any case were far from underprivileged. Their goal was religious and political: to wage jihad against their kin if they didn’t accept a literal interpretation of Islam, to denounce Arab governments as corrupt and their Western allies as infidels, and ultimately to overthrow the established order in the Middle East and establish a caliphate.

American policy makers preferred the materialist explanations, as they implied actions to solve the problem: invasion, regime change, democratization. It was unpopular to suggest that the terrorists might have unshakable immaterial convictions.

Nineteen years on, we see a similar dynamic, only this time it is within our borders. Naive observers explain this summer’s protests in terms of African-Americans’ material disadvantages. These are real, as are the (worse) socio-economic problems of the Arab world. But they aren’t the main driver of the protests, which appear to be led mainly by well-off white people.

Their ideology goes by many names: cancel culture, social justice, critical race theory, intersectionality. For simplicity, I call it all Wokeism.

I am not about to equate Wokeism and Islamism. Islamism is a militant strain of an ancient faith. Its adherents have a coherent sense of what God wants them to achieve on earth to earn rewards in the afterlife. Wokeism is in many ways a Marxist creed; it offers no hereafter. Wokeism divides society into myriad identities, whereas Islamists’ segmentation is simpler: believers and unbelievers, men and women.

There are many other differences. But consider the resemblances. The adherents of each constantly pursue ideological purity, certain of their own rectitude. Neither Islamists nor the Woke will engage in debate; both prefer indoctrination of the submissive and damnation of those who resist.

The two ideologies have distinctive rituals: Islamists shout “Allahu Akbar” and “Death to America”; the Woke chant “Black lives matter” and “I can’t breathe.” Islamists pray to Mecca; the Woke take the knee. Both like burning the American flag.

Both believe that those who refuse conversion may be harassed, or worse. Both take offense at every opportunity and seek not just apologies but concessions. Islamism inveighs against “blasphemy”; Wokeism wants to outlaw “hate speech.” Islamists use the word “Islamophobia” to silence critics; the Woke do the same with “racism.”

Islamists despise Jews; the Woke say they just hate Israel, but the anti-Semitism is pervasive. The two share a fondness for iconoclasm: statues, beware.

Both ideologies aim to tear down the existing system and replace it with utopias that always turn out to be hellish anarchies: Islamic State in Raqqa, the Capitol Hill Autonomous Zone in Seattle. Both are collectivist: Group identity trumps the individual. Both tolerate—and often glorify—violence carried out by zealots.

This Sept. 11, then, let’s dismiss the fairy stories about the enemies of a free society. Their grievances aren’t merely economic and they won’t be satisfied with jobs or entitlements. Their motivations are ideological and they will be satisfied only with power.

I cling to the hope that most Americans are still willing as a nation to fight and, if necessary, to die to preserve our freedoms, our rights, our customs, our history. That was the spirit of Flight 93. It was the spirit that ultimately defeated al Qaeda and Islamic State. But it is not the spirit of today’s “woke” protesters. And it is time that we all woke up to that reality.

Ms. Hirsi Ali is a research fellow at the Hoover Institution and founder of the AHA Foundation. She served as a member of the Dutch Parliament from 2003-2006.

  

PM Netanyahu has lost it.

PM Netanyahu has lost it. His appeasement of the Haredim at the expense of the health of the citizens of Israel is a disgrace and is unacceptable. PM Netanyahu should have put his foot down and declared that the health of Israeli citizens takes precedence over dangerous and illogical demands of the ultra-religious, else he will have inexorably pushed this country into a split between the ultra-religious and the  secular.  

All of PM Netanyahu's achievements through the years, his warnings of the continuing existential Iranian nuclear threat, his standing up to the absurd Obama policies in support of the Muslim Brotherhood and Iran Deal, his freeing of the Israeli economy and his contribution to the prestige of Israel around the world and new ties with UAE - all will be forgotten – since we will remember that he has failed in protecting our lives.  

Update:  Published as a letter to the editor in the Jerusalem Post on Sept 9, 2020