The Jewish state’s immunization drive reached another landmark on Monday, with 5,000,000 Israelis having received the first shot of the two-dose Pfizer-BioNTech vaccine against COVID-19. Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu predicted that the entire adult population would be inoculated by the end of April.
Health Minister Yuli Edelstein said the success of the campaign means that the government can now “open up almost everything, the economy, sport, leisure, tourism.”
Due to the progress, Israel is reportedly reviving a plan to supply friendly nations with surplus coronavirus inoculations. The development comes two weeks after the effort was halted by legal officials, who argued that Netanyahu could not authorize the move without cabinet approval.
According to local media, Jerusalem is currently negotiating with 20 countries – as well as with pharmaceutical company Moderna – to send up to 100,000 vaccine doses abroad, in accordance with criteria laid out by Israel’s attorney general. There is an element of urgency to this diplomatic endeavor, as the doses are due to expire by the end of May.
Israel on Monday also accelerated its drive to vaccinate some 120,000 Palestinians who have permits to work inside Israel and Jewish communities located inside the West Bank.
An Iranian tanker deliberately spilled oil into Israeli waters, a leading international shipping journal has claimed. Lloyd’s List’s findings correspond with much of Environmental Protection Minister Gila Gamliel’s description of the events leading up to last month’s environmental disaster.
Gamliel called the oil spill “eco-terrorism,” accusing Iran of intentionally polluting the Mediterranean Sea to harm Israel.
Lloyd’s List’s vessel-tracking data suggested that a tanker called Emerald was responsible for the incident, which occurred while it was carrying 90,000 tons of crude oil from Iran to Syria.
As the Environmental Protection Ministry had previously stated, Lloyd’s List said the tanker’s Automatic Identification System (AIS) was turned off when it sailed through the Gulf and the Red Sea, turned on while passing through the Suez Canal, and then turned off again as it neared Israel on February 1.
An Israeli investigation found that the ship dumped some of the crude oil near Israel’s shores, before heading to Syria.
In an unprecedented move, Egypt’s Ministry of Education has green lighted a parliamentary proposal to teach elements of Judaism in the country’s school system.
“The Ministry of Education’s approval of the subject of religious values shared between the divine [Abrahamic] religions expresses the state’s keenness to spread the values of tolerance and fraternity,” declared Kamal Amer, the lawmaker who heads Cairo’s parliamentary Defense and National Security Committee.
“President Abdel Fattah al-Sisi is keen to teach the youth the values of respect for others, and rejection of fanaticism and extremism,” he added.
Scientists at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem have created what is believed to be the first-ever cancer drug that does not require testing on animals. By using a chip that simulates the human body, the need for trials on animals was eliminated, the Israeli research team wrote in the latest edition of the peer-reviewed journal Science Translational Medicine.
The chip, which contains human tissue, monitors the response of the body’s organs – including the heart, liver and kidneys – to drug treatments.
“This is the first demonstration that we can use such technology to circumvent animal experiments, and this could lead to faster, safer and more effective drug development,” Prof. Yaakov Nahmias, who is spearheading the research, said. “Getting a drug to the point of clinical trials normally takes four to six years, hundreds of animals and costs millions of dollars,” he added.
Creating the novel cancer drug took eight months, without using a single animal and at a fraction of the normal cost. According to Prof. Nahmias, the Israeli findings could increase the efficiency of drug development worldwide.
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Recommended Reading
- Israel’s Multifaceted Power (Dr. Manfred Gerstenfeld, Begin-Sadat Center for Strategic Studies)
- Israel, Cyprus and Greece Agree to Link Power Grids via Subsea Cable (Reuters)
- Miracle Nation: 5-Year Report Reveals Robust Health of Israeli Tech Ecosystem (Brian Blum, Israel21C)
- Runners to Race From Jerusalem to Eilat to Raise Money for At-Risk Youth (Jerusalem Post)
