Israel’s vaccine passport QR-code system, Green Pass, will now expire six months after the second injection is received, making a third, and possibly fourth, booster shot effectively mandatory to continue participation in Israel’s mainstream society.
On Aug. 29, Israeli health officials announced at a press conference that effective Oct. 1, fully vaccinated Green Pass validation status would expire six months after the second dose is received, according to news website Arutz Sheva.
Nachman Ash, Director General of Israel’s Health Ministry, also announced the age limit to receive the third injection had been reduced to 12. When Israel’s booster distribution was announced on Aug. 1, the age minimum was 60 and halved to 30 during the week of Aug. 23.
Additionally, citizens returning from overseas travel who have accepted a third injection will be required to quarantine for only 24 hours after arrival. Those who only have two doses are no longer considered fully vaccinated and will be sequestered for 7 days.
On Aug. 24, Haaretz reported Health Minister Nitan Horowitz as saying in comments given on Channel 13 Television, “This is simply because, in terms of its effectiveness, the vaccine is valid only for a period of five or six months.”
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“After about half a year, you have to get a third dose. Otherwise, the vaccine loses its power.”
Horowitz continued, “The Green Pass testifies that a person is safe in a certain way…So the moment we know that the vaccine loses its effectiveness after a certain period, there’s no justification for giving a green pass to someone who hasn’t gotten another dose.”
The Minister was paraphrased as saying “the booster will become a requirement for a Green Pass only when the shot is available to everyone aged 12 and older.” At the time of his comments, the age limit was still 30.
According to Times of Israel, when Horowitz was questioned at the Aug. 29 press conference about whether a fourth dose would be required in the future to maintain vaccine passport status, he simply replied, “It is too early to speak about the end of the fourth wave.”
The Times also reported that Professor Eran Segal, a “top coronavirus advisor to the government” told Army Radio on Aug. 28 that the entire country needed to take the third injection, “From the moment that we understood the vaccine is fading, the right thing to do is to give a third dose to the entire population that got vaccinated five months or more ago.”
Yet in early August, Dr. Kobi Haviv, Medical Director of Herzog Hospital in Jerusalem, the Capital’s third largest hospital, self-described as “Israel’s foremost center for geriatric, respiratory, mental health and psychotrauma care, treatment and research,” told Channel 13 that 95 percent of severely ill Coronavirus Disease 2019 (COVID-19) patients were vaccinated individuals.
He also said 85 to 90 percent of those hospitalized were vaccine recipients, and that his hospital was forced to open additional COVID-19 wards.
In July, the Israeli Minister of Health had to concede the Pfizer-BioNTech injection’s efficacy had plummeted to a meager 39 percent when facing the Delta Variant.
A prophetic warning from a former Pfizer executive
In April, Michael Yeadon, former Vice President and Chief Science Officer of Pfizer spoke with the documentary series Planet Lockdown about SARS-CoV-2 variants, booster shots, and vaccine passports.
In the interview, Yeadon shared his grave opinion about booster injections, “You should be terrified at this point, as I am, because there’s absolutely no possible justification for their manufacture…The variants are not different enough to represent a threat to you. You do not need top up vaccines. Yet, they are being made, and the regulators have more or less waived them through.”
Yeadon said in his 57-minute interview that when he was an up-and-coming star in Pfizer’s executive track, one former supervisor said what really made him stand out was his ability to “spot patterns in sparse data earlier than [his] peers did.”
“So when there’s not enough data for most people to judge what was going on, I would often be able to see it. I could see a pattern forming when there wasn’t quite enough information.”
He said during his April interview that he was troubled by mentions in the media and by various experts encouraging incoming vaccine passports because historically, they have only existed under extremely narrow circumstances, “The only reason we’ve ever had passports for certain immunizations…are those when the disease is extremely lethal, something like yellow fever, and when you might otherwise bring back to a community, which has no immunity whatsoever, a really dangerous pathogen.”
He then cautioned about the slippery slope of civil liberties and human rights erosions ubiquitous digital vaccine passports can bring, “What they provide, though, is complete control over your movements to whoever controls the database that your vaccination status is connected to.”
“This is what’s going to take over your life in a way that George Orwell in 1984 didn’t even dream of.”
Yeadon gave an apt example, “Imagine you’ve been vaccinated and you’ve been awarded a vaccine passport on an app…Imagine if they say now you need your valid vaccine passport to enter any large shopping complex, then every large store. That’s going to provide coercive pressure on people who’ve chosen not to be vaccinated in order to get vaccinated.”
He warned, “You can’t control what those rules are…Don’t allow this system to come into force. It’s going to be used to coerce you.”
And continued in his prediction of things to come, “I believe if you allow vaccine passports to come into force, you’ll be pinged one day and it will advise you to go to the medical center to have your top up vaccine, and if you choose not to, your vaccine passport validity will expire, which means you won’t be able to enter a shop.”
Yeadon said what he was really worried about, however, was if the trend started to be taken to extremes, “You may not eventually be able to use your bank card. All somebody needs to do is set a rule that says as after a given date before any bank card can be used the vaccine passport has to be beeped onto the card reader.”
“It will give away to whoever controls that database and the rules complete control over everything you do.”
He also sounded the alarm that in the future, vaccine passport status may hinge on more than just the individual’s willingness to accept continual injections, “In addition to advising you that you need to come to the health center for your top up vaccine, perhaps your second one in a year,” he said, “It also advises you that you need to bring your small grandchild down because your daughter hasn’t brought the little lad in yet. And they say if you don’t bring that grandchild down, your vaccine passport will expire and that of your daughter as well.”
“Now try resisting that.”
