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Doctor’s claim 80% of serious COVID patients are fully-vaxed not supported by official health data

February 6, 2022 | | Print Article

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Update: Statistics from Israel’s Ministry of Health dispute the unsubstantiated statements from Yaakov Jerris. According to the available data, over 49% of severe COVID patients are fully-vaccinated, which contradicts the 80% statistic from Jerris. The number rises to 61% if you include patients who are “vaccinated without validity” meaning they have both doses of the vaccine, but not a booster shot, which is required in Israel to comply with the fully-vaccinated status. For more information on the current COVID situation in Israel, please refer to the Ministry of Health website.

An Israeli doctor has claimed that the majority of serious hospitalizations at the Tel Aviv hospital where he works have been vaccinated thrice.

“Right now, most of our severe cases are vaccinated. They had at least three injections,” Prof. Yaakov Jerris, the head of the COVID department at the Tel Aviv Sourasky Medical Center (commonly known as the Ichilov Hospital), said in an interview last week, as reported last week by Arutz Sheva.

“Between seventy and eighty percent of the serious cases are vaccinated. So, the vaccine has no significance regarding severe illness, which is why just twenty to twenty-five percent of our patients are unvaccinated.”

If his unsubstantiated claim is proven to be true, it would mean that the COVID vaccine “narrative has completely collapsed,” as noted below by conservative commentator Benny Johnson:

However, Jerris did throw out a notable caveat.

“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,’ but that’s not accurate. The patient is only in a difficult condition because he has a serious underlying illness,” he reportedly said at a cabinet meeting a week earlier.

He appeared to be suggesting that the Ichilov Hospital’s system for diagnosing “serious coronavirus” patients” may not be entirely accurate.

And indeed, what he said about the vaccinated representing the majority of serious patients being vaccinated does contrast sharply with the data coming from the rest of the world.

Over here in the U.S., for instance, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) say that the unvaccinated have a “9x higher” chance of being hospitalized than the vaccinated:

(Source: CDC)

That being said, this rate is lower than it was during the Delta outbreak, and the CDC admitted just last week that hospitalizations among the vaccinated have in fact increased amid the current Omicron outbreak. But the CDC did also stress that the chance of a “serious” hospitalization still remains low.

“The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) analysis of a single hospital in Los Angeles found there were more hospitalizations during omicron compared to delta, but that among omicron-period patients, vaccination — particularly vaccination plus a booster dose — was associated with lower likelihood of admission to an intensive care unit,” according to The Hill.

“Among adults at least 65 years old hospitalized during omicron, vaccination was also associated with a lower likelihood of death while hospitalized.”

Some suspect that natural immunity may explain why the hospitalization rate among the vaccinated is beginning to level out with the hospitalization rate among the unvaccinated.

The longer that the coronavirus spreads among the population, the more unvaccinated people who contract it and develop immunity.

The CDC for its part finally began recognizing the legitimacy of natural immunity last month, when it published a paper that found that natural immunity offered “greater” protection than the vaccine “after the highly transmissible Delta variant became predominant, coinciding with early declining of vaccine-induced immunity.”

Dovetailing back to Israel, what might explain the alleged phenomenon witnessed by Jerris? Some believe it could be the fact that an estimated 98.9 percent of the nation’s population has been vaccinated. And so in Israel, the vaccinated grossly outnumber the unvaccinated.

In the U.S., meanwhile, only 64.1 percent of the population was fully vaccinated as of Feb. 5th, according to the Mayo Clinic. Incidentally, as this rate has slowly ticked up over the past year, the hospitalization rate difference between the vaccinated and unvaccinated has declined. Coincidence or conspiracy?

(Source: Mayo Clinic)

Note also that Jerris’ remarks didn’t include any mention of deaths.

“Israelis over 60 who are either unvaccinated or only partially vaccinated against COVID-19 died in significantly higher numbers last month compared to people in their age cohort who are fully vaccinated, according to official figures published by the Israeli Health Ministry,” Haaretz reported Sunday.

“These numbers highlight once again the stark contrast between the vaccinated and unvaccinated as Israel grapples with the fifth wave of a pandemic that has killed more than 9,000 people since March 2020.”

Editor’s Note: The headline of this story has been updated to reflect additional information regarding COVID statistics in Israel.

Vivek Saxena
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