Fake news and Holocaust imagery: COVID anti-vaxxers around the world take aim at Israel – Haaretz

As Israel draws international attention as a COVID vaccine success story, and as the countrys ability to document inoculation with vaccine passports has allowed for something resembling a return to normal life, anti-vaccine activists have taken notice.

While they do battle in their own countries against COVID mitigation measures, inoculation campaigns and, most recently, the implementation of vaccine passports in their own countries, activists from both sides of the political spectrum have turned to the modern weapon of fake news to distort perceptions of Israels experience.

One new strategy is to pepper the internet with false information regarding the results of Israels vaccine campaign and the rollout of the Green Pass, as the vaccine passport program launched on February 21 is known. The green passport allows vaccinated Israelis to access indoor dining, cultural and sporting events, nightclubs, gyms and more.

Israel is also increasingly being incorporated into existing COVID conspiracy theories. Some implicate the country in a global vaccine conspiracy designed to exaggerate efficacy and cover up vaccine injury and death. While the attacks are mainly limited to online activity, some have made their way into mainstream media.

Prominent among skeptics is author Alex Berenson. A popular guest on prominent Fox News shows like The Tucker Carlson Show, the Unreported Truths on COVID-19 and Lockdowns writer has repeatedly asserted that vaccines are not as effective or as safe as Israel reports.

In the first few months of Israels vaccine rollout, Berenson took to Twitter to claim that that large-scale vaccination campaign did not seem to be having an effect on infection and serious illness. As coronavirus infection rates began to dramatically drop as the percentage of vaccinated Israelis grew, Berenson changed his focus from efficacy to safety. He implied, while providing no evidence, that illness and death resulting from COVID vaccination was being covered up by Israeli authorities. Berenson has taken these claims beyond Twitter, to the Fox News airwaves.

On Laura Ingrahams program The Ingraham Angle, Berenson asserted that vaccines are not 95 percent effective, thats pretty clear from the data coming out of Israel. On Carlsons show last month, Berenson said he believed the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention is very afraid that there will be cases of people getting vaccinated and sick or dying, as has happened in Israel. We know thats happened in Israel. Carlson agreed.

Prof. Eran Segal, a computational biologist at the Weizmann Institute of Science, Rehovot, has been closely tracking the pandemic and says Berensons claims are baseless. The evidence regarding effectiveness is overwhelming. There is zero possibility for any other explanation for what is happening in Israel besides vaccination, he says.

He recounts that skeptics like Berenson cast doubt on the findings after Israel began vaccinating citizens over age 60 in late December and COVID numbers began declining a few months later. They were saying, OK, numbers are dropping all over the world its not the vaccines that are responsible.

But in past weeks, much of Europe and the rest of the world has seen infections, hospitalizations and deaths rise again, while Israels figures have plunged after more than half its adult population has been vaccinated.

Even more convincing, says Segal, is the fact the drop in hospitalizations and death has hewn precisely according to the vaccination timeline. First there was a drop in over-60s, then the over-50s and then younger people, he says. Now were at the point where we have relatively few people in the country who have not been vaccinated, especially older people. We see that 80 to 90 percent of our remaining critically ill COVID patients come from that very small group.

Study after study backs up his assertions. Research by Maccabi Health Services and the Technion last month found that there have been 96 percent fewer cases, 90 percent fewer new daily critically ill patients and 85 percent fewer deaths since the rollout began.

As for charges swirling in online anti-vaccine circles that Israel is somehow concealing data to cover up vaccine injury, Segal says these accusations have no basis whatsoever. The data is there, its available and the evidence is overwhelming. If there are any delays, it is purely due to technical issues.

Berensons coverage of the pandemic was eviscerated in an article by Derek Thompson in the Atlantic last week, headlined Alex Berenson, the Pandemics Wrongest Man. The piece covered multiple misstatements and distortions by Berenson, but was particularly emphatic when it came to Israel.

Berenson is wrong about all sorts of little things when it comes to Israel, wrote Thompson. But I want to emphasize how straightforward and obvious the big picture is here. Israel is a world leader in vaccinations. Its COVID-19 cases have plunged, and its economy is roaring back to life.

Vaccine passports have become a political hot potato in many countries, as critics view them as invasive and discriminatory. To bolster this claim, they charge that Israel a pioneer in the use of vaccine passports to permit entry into large gatherings has become a two-tier society that has turned non-vaccinated people into second-class citizens deprived of rights and oppressed by the government.

A global study called the Virality Project, launched by a coalition of research institutions including Stanford and NYU, has set out to detect, analyze, and respond to incidents of COVID-19 vaccine disinformation across online ecosystems. In its most recent report, it observes that much of the propaganda regarding Israels vaccine passport program strikes an unmistakably antisemitic chord.

On far-right channels of the social media app Telegram, the report finds that articles and video content mentioning the Green Pass have been shared by users belonging to antisemitic Telegram channels as part of a narrative that claims that the COVID-19 vaccine is part of a Jewish plot against the goyim.

Holocaust imagery is rampant in such content. Across social media platforms, the report says, narratives being pushed by anti-vaccination and conspiratorial communities describing the present moment as a pre-Holocaust period wherein unvaccinated people will be second-class citizens and targets for persecution, similar to the Jewish people during the Holocaust and WWII. Essentially, groups can use the specter of vaccine passports to create a perception that rights and freedoms will be taken away, connecting these claims to historical examples of deprivation of rights like the Jewish people during World War II.

The app will know

Restrictions on non-vaccinated Israelis are being misrepresented and falsified towards this purpose. The English-language Twitter account Freedom Israel, which claims to be a grassroots organization that started due to the disproportionate measures the country has taken in response to the COVID-19 pandemic and has been retweeted and amplified internationally, has used doctored photographs to illustrate this alleged oppression.

The account tweeted a photo of chair-shaped signs on the Tel Aviv beaches in which the municipality encourages vaccination. The Hebrew ad reads Get vaccinated now in Tel Aviv! Beside it, an identical sign carries a Photoshopped mistranslation: Reserved for vaccinated people only. The post implied that these signs were actual chairs, and that only vaccinated people have access to them.

On the eve of Israels Holocaust Remembrance Day, the account posted a YouTube video portraying Israels vaccination campaign as like something by the Nazis, and claiming the country had created a hated underclass of the unvaccinated.

Among those retweeting Freedom Israel is once-respected Jewish feminist Dr. Naomi Wolf, who has become one of the most prominent challengers of masking, lockdowns and now vaccines. She has been fighting forcefully against proposals for vaccine passport legislation in the United States, characterizing them as a slippery slope to totalitarianism and oppression.

She has seized on the Israeli Green Pass as an example of the vaccine passports dangers. In four months, vaccine passports quote, unquotehave turned Israel into a closed society, destroyed civil society organizations, created an apartheid system, and activists and advocates and critics of the system in Israel are saying that they are surveilled 360 degrees, 24 hours a day and marginalized from society, Wolf warns in a YouTube video.

Predicting a dystopian Big Brother future if similar programs are adopted in the United States, she says the app will know who the vaccine dissenters are, and use that information to follow them and disrupt their ability to organize protests. Its already happening. Thats what weve seen in Israel. Its been used not just to identify whos been vaccinated and who isnt, but to track dissenters and silence dissent and critics.

Wolfs assertions are patently false. The official Health Ministry app is only one way to display the green passport; no one is required to download it. Each vaccinated Israeli also receives a vaccination certificate bearing a QR code and the holders national ID number, which can be printed out, carried in ones pocket and displayed. It can also be accessed via smartphone and computer.

Civil liberties organizations in Israel have, in fact, voiced concerns about potential abuse or overuse of vaccine passports. They are fighting legislation that would enable information on vaccinations to be shared with public agencies and employers without consent. Debates are taking place in and out of court as they are in the rest of the world as to whether proof of vaccination should be required for teachers to return to the classroom, and whether university students without Green Passes will be admitted to the classroom.

The executive director of the civil rights group Zulat Institute for Equality and Human Rights, Einat Ovadia, told Haaretz last week that we need to ensure that expanding the demand to present a Green Pass wont lead to other infringements of individual rights.

Zulat, together with Physicians for Human Rights, issued a report warning that expanded use of the green passport could lead to the erosion of individual rights, and pushed for increased PR efforts as an alternative strategy to get a higher percentage of the Israeli population vaccinated. Privacy groups worry about the Green Pass vulnerability to hackers.

Still, this reality hardly resembles the kind of existing totalitarian oppression that Wolf and other detractors describe. A spokesperson for Facebook said that the social network has tripled the number of people working to combat coronavirus disinformation, reviewing content 24 hours a day in over 50 languages, including Hebrew. A YouTube spokesperson said the platform removed over 850,000 videos from its platform for spreading dangerous or misleading COVID information. But this is not quite the silencing of vaccine opponents by government bodies; no one is being fined or thrown in prison.

Nor do non-vaccinated Israelis appear to be suffering from overly restrictive application of the rules in daily life. A recent New York Times piece describing life in Israel as a test case for a post-lockdown, post-vaccinated societyportrays the reality with which those in the country are familiar: That enforcement is far more apt to be overly lax than in danger turning the country into a police state.

A concert in Tel Aviv was the first time I was asked to show my Green Pass and the last, the Times Isabel Kershner wrote. She recounted staying at a Galilee bed and breakfast where food was served indoors to vaccinated and unvaccinated guests alike, and a crowded restaurant that allowed indoor seating to her unvaccinated young child. A Jerusalem restaurant inquired about green passports for reservations, but did not request to see them when they arrived to dine.

Green passports, says Segal, are first and foremost a safety issue, not a coercive tool. They have been a precautionary measure as we open up the economy, to make sure the virus is not spread in large gatherings.

He noted that those who are not vaccinated due to their age, for medical reasons or simply personal preference are not barred from any activity if they are able to provide a negative COVID test. The fact that they motivate people to get vaccinated is a side effect, Segal says.

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Fake news and Holocaust imagery: COVID anti-vaxxers around the world take aim at Israel - Haaretz