Political talk show host Kim Iversen, on a segment of the Kim Iversen Show Wednesday, called the latest COVID data coming out of Israel “alarming and shocking.”
Iversen reminded viewers that Israel was nearly fully vaccinated by February, after striking a deal with Pfizer to make its citizens “essentially … a giant study group.”
“They have very high vaccination rates in the country,” Iversen said. “Kids are still not vaccinated. There are some super ultra-Orthodox holdouts, but otherwise, everybody in Israel banded together and they took the Pfizer vaccine — two doses.”
But by summer, Iversen said, Israel health officials determined the vaccine had worn off. “They saw skyrocketing numbers of cases, even after they’d hit this so-called herd immunity threshold of 70%.”
At first, Iversen said, it looked as though the vaccines might at least be protecting against more severe symptoms, because, for the most part, only the unvaccinated were having to be hospitalized.
“But then as time went on … the hospitals started to fill up with fully vaccinated people,” Iversen said, “and they saw more and more cases among the fully vaccinated, and more and more of them becoming very severe to the point where the majority of their cases in the hospitals and in the ICU and those dying were fully vaccinated people.”
Iversen has been tracking data in multiple countries besides Israel, including Iceland, Chile, Seychelles, Uruguay, and others.
“I have a whole list of countries that I’ve been monitoring on this,” she said. “And it was really clear early on that the vaccine was not stopping the spread, but it did seem to keep people out of the hospital for a period of time.”
But then Israel found the vaccine was wearing off — so they told everybody they would need a third, booster shot, “in order to participate in society,” Iversen said.
That seemed to work for a while — but now cases are rising again.
“I don’t know what to make of that, “Iversen said. “And I’m not going to speculate. I’m just going to share the data and I’m going to keep watching that data. And we’re going to see what happens. I mean, at this point, that’s all we can do. All we can do is see what happens now.”
Watch the segment here:
