Professor Yaakov Jerris, the director of the coronavirus ward of Ichilov Hospital in Tel Aviv, Israel said recently that the majority of patients who have severe COVID have had at least three shots of the vaccine. The professor added that the COVID vaccine has "no significance regarding severe illness."
"Right now, most of our severe cases are vaccinated. They had at least three injections," Jerris said on Channel 13 News, as reported by Israel 365 News. "Between 70 and 80% of the serious cases are vaccinated. So, the vaccine has no significance regarding severe illness, which is why just 20 to 25% of our patients are unvaccinated."
During a cabinet meeting on Sunday, Jerris told ministers that, "Defining a serious patient is problematic. For example, a patient with a chronic lung disease always had a low level of oxygen, but now he has a positive coronavirus test result which technically makes him a 'serious coronavirus patient," the Gateway Pundit reported.
"But that's not accurate. The patient is only in a difficult condition because he has a serious underlying illness," Jerris pointed out.
New Israel Health Ministry data showed that the number of patients with severe COVID that were hospitalized have continued to increase. On Sunday, it hit an all-time high of 1,263. Israel is one of the countries with the highest COVID vaccination rates, having double-vaccinated about 98.7% of the country's population.
Despite having high vaccination rates, however, Israel also has the highest number of COVID deaths per one million in the world. A prominent Israeli doctor recently suggested that COVID vaccine programs should end with three doses.
"We really have very little scientific data to suggest that the fourth dose will add a substantially enhanced protection against severe disease and hospitalization," Professor Eyal Leshem, an infectious disease specialist at Israel's Sheba Medical Center, told CNBC in January.
"So it was a recommendation based on expert opinion, rather than a recommendation based on robust data as we would ideally like to have in clinical medicine. We use expert opinion when we don't have evidence, and we do that all the time in clinical medicine."
According to the Times of Israel, 37,985 new COVID cases were reported on Saturday, resulting in a 28.79% test positivity rate, which is the highest since the beginning of the pandemic. The death toll is now at 9,139, with at least 41 new deaths recorded over the weekend. This past week alone, 299 died from COVID.
Despite the severity of COVID conditions in the country, however, the government has decided that Israelis will no longer have to present their Green Passes, or proof of vaccination, recovery, or recent negative COVID test to gain access to restaurants, movie theaters, gyms and hotels. The Green Pass meanwhile has been updated to be valid for people who have either recovered or received two doses of the vaccine in the past four months, or anybody who has received three or four doses of the COVID shot.
Coronavirus czar Salman Zarka told Kan public radio on Sunday morning, "Because Omicron also infects the vaccinated, the [Green] Pass has lost effectiveness in most places and we decided to reduce its use to only high-risk places. It is part of the trend of living with the virus."
