The Daily - Life After the Vaccine in Israel

Episode Date: March 15, 2021

Just a few months ago, Israel was in dire shape when it came to the coronavirus. It had among the highest daily infection and death rates in the world. Now, Israel has outpaced much of the world in vaccinating its population and hospitalizations have fallen dramatically. Today, how it is managing the return to normality and the moral and ethical questions that its decisions have raised. Guest: Isabel Kershner, a correspondent in Jerusalem for The New York Times. Sign up here to get The Daily in your inbox each morning. And for an exclusive look at how the biggest stories on our show come together, subscribe to our newsletter. Background reading: Israel’s “Green Pass” creates a two-tier system for the vaccinated and unvaccinated, raising legal, moral and ethical questions.The pandemic lockdowns brought tensions between Israel’s secular and ultra-Orthodox communities to the boiling point. The political consequences could be felt for years.For more information on today’s episode, visit nytimes.com/thedaily. Transcripts of each episode will be made available by the next workday.

So I'm inside the stadium now, and the way it's set up is the 500 people in the audience are just filling the rows in one small section of the arena. Last week in Tel Aviv, I had the chance to do something that I haven't done in well over a year. The singer is a wonderful songstress called Dikla. I went to a concert. Well, we're just a few minutes away now from the concert beginning, and you can really

see the excitement. People are taking selfies, groups of friends. It's really a feeling of release and a taste of life as we used to know it. There was only one reason why I could be there along with the other 500 people. And that was because we were all fully vaccinated. From the New York Times, I'm Michael Barbaro. This is The Daily. Today.

It's really happening. I'm at a concert. Israel has become a global leader in vaccinations, so far fully inoculating nearly half its population. In the process, it is quickly restoring a kind of normalcy that is defined in large part by who it excludes. I spoke with my colleague, Isabel Kirchner, in Jerusalem. It's Monday, March 15th. Isabel, you are now living in what seems like an entirely different pandemic planet than many of us. You attend concerts. You can go into restaurants. So how did Israel get to that point?

My sense is that just a few months ago, Israel was in pretty dire shape when it came to the coronavirus. Well, you are not wrong, Michael. It's been a real helter-skelter here, frankly. And, you know, just a few months ago, we had the worst infection rates in the world and the worst per capita death rate. And within a few months, we're now outpacing the rest of the world in vaccinations, huge decreases and dramatic drops in hospitalizations. Life is getting slowly back to normal. Netanyahu kicked off his week having coffee at a cafe and declaring that we were back to life, as he put it. I was at a concert that night for the first time in obviously a very long time. And it was so weird to be in one place with

hundreds of people. But yes, it's really been quite a wild ride, I have to say. wild ride, I have to say. So tell us how we got from the bad phase of this all for Israel, the recurring lockdowns, the sense that the virus was almost completely out of control, to this point where everything is looking, and I say this quite jealously, very positive in Israel with this vaccination program. So how did that happen? What do we need to understand? Well, I think to Netanyahu's credit, we have to say that he did recognize very early on that the vaccines could be the savior, not only for Israel in terms of COVID, but for him in terms of his political prospects of getting Israel back on track.

Well, what do you mean? Well, we're now heading into a fourth election in the space of two years. And this whole COVID crisis has played out alongside a massive political crisis here and impasse. And Netanyahu and the government have basically been on one long campaign ever since this thing began. And that's largely because he is on trial on corruption charges.

He's been charged with bribery. And he's hanging on, clinging on to power. And his best card, really, for staying out of jail, for sure, is just to remain in the prime minister's seat. Obviously, any leader of any country wants to deal with the health crisis and wants to deal with the economic crisis. But for him, it's also extremely personal. He has a lot at stake here, which might explain, you know, the personalization of everything as well.

I'm the one that can bring the vaccines. I'm the one that's bringing Israel back to life. I mean, this is not only the prime minister doing his job. This is the prime minister campaigning constantly. So for Netanyahu, solving the crisis of this pandemic is also solving his own political crisis and perhaps keeping him out of jail. Well, it certainly gives him the best chance of that, for sure. gives him the best chance of that, for sure. Really, his main card this time is the vaccines and getting Israel, as he calls it, back to life.

So, Isma, how does Netanyahu go about trying to get Israel back to life? Well, from what I was told from health ministry people, the health ministry bureaucrats did start entering into talks with the vaccine companies for a few months, but really nothing was sewn up until they say until Netanyahu got involved. And that apparently happened sometime in November. He starts calling the CEO of Pfizer, Albert Bourla, and he's sort of claiming kinship, saying that the Pfizer CEO has great sentiments for Israel.

He's the son of Holocaust survivors. And, you know, everything becomes personal. And a deal was made. We're seeing already the first vaccines arriving now to Israel. Again, a small dose today, 3,000 to 4,000. But this is clearly the first sign of many, many more vaccines. In fact, the first batch arrived at the airport on December the 9th. Our viewers are seeing the live images here on the tarmac as Prime Minister Netanyahu has arrived at the plane side here on the tarmac here emerging from his vehicle with a victorious fist pump here. Obviously, an air of celebration going on. Netanyahu went to the airport to greet the cargo.

The solution to the coronavirus pandemic is here, as you can see. The cargo going off the plane, the first vaccines. And 10 days later. vaccines. And 10 days later. And this just in, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu is getting his coronavirus vaccine on live television along with his health minister. December the 19th, Saturday night. It's a very big day for the state of Israel. He is on TV getting the first vaccine, getting the jab. You can see, you know, his right sleeve rolled up and ready to have that vaccine. And this was meant to kick off the campaign, to assure everybody it was safe. I was sitting with a few friends that night watching this on TV.

And literally, you know, soon after that, some of my older friends started getting SMSs from their HMOs saying, call and make an appointment to come and get a vaccine. Everybody was calling everybody else. Did you call? Did you call? Did you get an appointment? And it just went very, very quickly from there. there. And here, of course, we have the fact that Israel does have this really fantastic universal health care system, which is a leftover of the socialist founders of the state. And we have four HMOs. By law, every Israeli citizen has to be a member of one and has to get coverage from one. And of course, it's a relatively small country. We're talking a population of nine million people geographically, roughly the size of New Jersey.

So getting the vaccines around isn't so complicated either. These HMOs are also highly digitized. So not only were they good at the logistics, but they could also gather data. And this made Israel a major world test case, you know, sort of real world laboratory for how the vaccine was being administered and how effective the vaccine was. And Isabel, do you get the vaccine during this period that you're describing? Yeah, so I wasn't the first off the mark, but my husband, who's in the 60 plus age group that was eligible to get the first vaccine, he was able to phone and make an appointment. And they booked him in for,

I think, 10 days later. And then they said, is there anybody else that you want an appointment for? So I kind of grabbed the phone and said, look, I'm not in the right age group, but I live with him. And if you're offering and he said, yeah, please just come and let's just get you done. Wow. So I went along at the same time. And three weeks later, 24th of January, we went and got our second doses. And then a week after that, you're considered fully vaccinated. And that basically qualifies you for the next stage in life, which is getting your green passport or green pass. And what is the green pass? This is something that really just came into effect a couple of weeks ago. You can download an app from a health ministry site.

You apply for the green pass. And then once you're approved, you have this little, it's like a little moving picture of green people walking along looking happy, like a happy, fully vaccinated family, like a sort of meme thing on your phone. And it has your ID number and your name. And that's your green passport. And how is this green passport being used? Well, so the idea is that as the economy reopens in order to keep the environment safe,

certain places are only going to be open now to people that have the green pass. And this includes gyms, swimming pools, cultural events. So theaters that have begun to reopen, wedding halls and concerts, of course. So when you phone to book at a restaurant now, they ask you, do you have a green passport? Are you vaccinated? So this is really the entry ticket now to back to normal life. Right. Kind of a passport to normalcy.

That's right. That is the idea. That's right. That is the idea. The way the health minister put it, you know, in his kind of carrot and stick campaign for people to get vaccinated and get the Green Pass, he basically said, if you don't have it, you're just going to be left behind. As, you know, as we've been this test case all along, we're now becoming a test case for what life is like with the green passport. And in fact, we're beginning to see legal and other problems rising up that people really hadn't planned for. We'll be right back. So Isma, what are these complications and questions that have arisen with the use of the Green Pass in Israel? Well, you know, as if this society isn't already divided enough, we now have this new divide of the vaccinated and the unvaccinated.

So it's like this new two-tier class system. And this is raising a lot of legal and moral issues. If we take a look at some of the legal issues to begin with, getting vaccinated is voluntary. And there are some people who, for whatever reason, have decided at this stage not to get vaccinated. But then it raises all these questions. Can their employers say, well, you can't come into the office then? You get legal issues like the health ministry wanting to pass lists of unvaccinated people to the local authorities. They say just so that the authorities can then chase them up and try and persuade them or at least know, for example, which of their teaching

staff are not vaccinated when they start going back to in-person schooling, which is happening now. And that's already gone to the Supreme Court because citizens' rights groups are saying this is an invasion of privacy. So all these things are really just playing out now in this big real-world experiment that we're living in. So it sounds like the choice of whether or not you get vaccinated is something both the government and employers know, and they are beginning to apply pressure to those who are choosing not to be vaccinated. Well, for some people, it's actually a business concern, because if you're running a hotel, for example, and all your clientele have to show a green pass to come and stay at the hotel,

but you have employees who are not vaccinated, you don't want to be liable for infecting somebody. I mean, it's not 100% foolproof, the vaccine. So you don't want to be liable for somebody staying in your hotel, getting infected by one of your staff. So you have the employees' rights and you have employers' rights and a lot of things to balance here. Right. And what about the moral questions that you mentioned? What are those? So the moral questions are, you know, given that there are people who are ideologically opposed or who fear getting vaccinated at this stage, is it ethical to discriminate against them in terms of barring them from cultural events? And is it moral to have people who have done everything they can to protect themselves by getting vaccinated have to be in a space with people who chose not to.

Is that moral too? I mean, it works both ways, Michael. You can look at it both ways. Well, who is choosing not to get a vaccine at this point in Israel? What do you know about them? Well, at this point, it looks like the over 50s are very, very vaccinated. We're looking at something like 89% today of the over 50 age group who are either fully vaccinated or have recovered from COVID and have antibodies. But we see the numbers dropping the younger you get. And we did see a slower start, certainly in the Arab sector, in the Arab minority,

which is 20% of Israel, where there was more hesitation because they're coming from a background of decades of discrimination and mistrust of government. But the government put a huge effort into encouraging vaccination among the Arab minority. Netanyahu has been to many Arab towns and villages to vaccination centres. Everything has been done to try and encourage. And I think the numbers have gone up quite a lot there. Same in the ultra-Orthodox community, where at first there was a much slower start to the vaccination campaign. So we've seen the numbers generally across the

board climbing. I think it was largely a question of public campaigning. And once millions of people have already had the vaccine and seem to be fine, then, you know, it gave more confidence to communities that were naturally more fearful or suspicious. Mm-hmm. So we have been talking about Israel's success with vaccinations inside the country. success with vaccinations inside the country. How is Israel approaching the question of the Palestinian territories, which are close by and filled with people who I sense do not have access to the same amount of vaccine as those inside of Israel? Absolutely. I mean, this has been a huge issue that has accompanied this whole period. The fact that Israel has secured itself this steady, plentiful supply of vaccines just underscored the fact that the Palestinians didn't have any. At the beginning, the Palestinian Authority seemed to want to try and go it alone as a show of independence.

But, you know, it was very difficult for a weak, small society without many resources to make deals with the companies alone. And it's taken a very long time to get any vaccines through the COVAX, the international aid system. It became a big question and debate about responsibilities and obligations. On the one hand, Israeli officials were suggesting that this is the Palestinian Authority's problem. You know, they signed the Oslo Accords in the 90s and took responsibility for their own health system. But that's obviously only one answer to a very

complicated question, because as an occupying power under the Geneva Conventions, Israel is absolutely responsible for helping the occupied population during a pandemic. And so is Israel helping get vaccine to the Palestinian territories? So at the beginning, some token number of doses were actually transferred to the Palestinian Authority, just a few thousand. But there was a development this week where Israel actually did begin a campaign to vaccinate 120,000 Palestinians who work in Israel or work in the settlements. So any Palestinian that has a legal work permit is now eligible and getting vaccinated. Palestinians beyond that, ordinary Palestinians in the territories, they still do not have access to a vaccine yet,

for the most part. So it's kind of interesting. There are two tiers inside of Israel as it seeks to return to normalcy. And then there's, in a sense, another tier just over the border in these Palestinian territories controlled by Israel, where it's not a question of whether people want a vaccine or don't want a vaccine or get a green pass or don't get a green pass, but whether or not they have access to a vaccine at all. That's absolutely right. And I think what made it all the more painful for the Palestinians was that Israelis living in the West Bank, in Jewish communities there, were getting access to the vaccine through their Israeli HMOs. So you would have two tiers, again, another two tiers within those territories of the West Bank.

Isabel, I'm curious, as an Israeli who has now been vaccinated, has a Green Pass, As an Israeli who has now been vaccinated, has a green pass, can partake very fully in this new recovering world of Israeli society, how are you making sense of all this and how you're feeling about this new set of privileges you have and the moral and ethical and legal complexities of this moment? Well, it is complicated. I mean, I think on the one hand, personally, I certainly feel a sense of liberation and relief. And I mean, I even caught myself the other day in the supermarket without my mask on. It's mandatory to be out and about with a mask, but somehow I just suddenly feel so light and carefree that I just forgot. And I think that's a sign of, you know, after a year of just how subconsciously I feel in a different space. Right. And it really is a great feeling. But then on the other hand, you know, you're on the phone the next day or on a Zoom with a Palestinian friend who's not been so fortunate.

And there is a slight feeling of guilt and sorrow. And, you know, you feel fortunate for what you have, but you're very aware that it is a privilege and there are many, many people who don't have that now. You know, you kind of almost feel apologetic, but it's not anything that you can affect personally. You can only commiserate and say that you hope the same for your friend in the near future. Well, thank you, Isabel. We appreciate it. Thank you. We'll be right back.

Here's what else you need to know today. As U.S. vaccination rates surge, air travel is quickly rising. On Friday, nearly 1.4 million people passed through U.S. airports, the highest number on any day since March 2020. The flight data, while welcomed by airlines, is alarming public health officials. Non-essential flights violate the latest guidelines from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention,

which says that even fully vaccinated people should avoid travel unless necessary. And calls for the resignation of New York Governor Andrew Cuomo from fellow Democrats are growing. Following multiple allegations of sexual harassment, and in one case, groping, the state's two Democratic senators, Chuck Schumer and Kirsten Gillibrand, are demanding Cuomo step down, along with most of the state's congressional delegation and a majority of the state legislature. Cuomo has denied inappropriately touching anyone and said he will not resign. Today's episode was produced by Austin Mitchell, Aastha Chaturvedi, and Alexandra Lee Young. It was edited by M.J. Davis-Lynn and Lisa Chow, and engineered by Marian Lozano.

That's it for The Daily. I'm Michael Barbaro. See you tomorrow.