The Prime Minister of Israel, Naftali Bennett, announced on Thursday afternoon (17) the end of the health passport in the country. The prime minister justified the measure by saying that the wave of contagion related to the Omicron variant of the coronavirus is rapidly decreasing.
At the beginning of the month, the Israeli government ordered the suspension of the green passport – as the health passport is called in Israel – for entry into restaurants, bars, cafes, hotels and gyms, keeping it only for concert halls, cinemas and places subject to crowd.
“We are ending the use of the green passport as the wave of Ômicron is slowing down, with a sharp drop in the number of infected and critically ill people,” Bennett said in a statement following a meeting with public health officials. Israeli.
This week, thousands of Israelis from different parts of the country headed to Jerusalem to protest against the health measures linked to the pandemic, following the initiative that emerged in Canada and imitated by several countries. Trying to get to the Parliament (Knesset), the group caused huge traffic jams on Monday (14), with honking noises.
Currently, nearly half of its population in Israel has received three doses of the Pfizer vaccine, which health officials say has helped reduce the number of hospitalizations at the height of the wave caused by the Ômicron variant. The country was one of the first to carry out a mass vaccination campaign, since December 2020, thanks to an agreement with the American pharmaceutical company.
At the end of January, a fourth dose of the immunizer was released for people over 18 who are immunosuppressed or on the front lines of the fight against Covid-19. About 600,000 people out of a population of 9.4 million have taken the fourth dose.
In recent weeks, Prime Minister Bennett has reiterated that he wants to fight the coronavirus primarily through vaccination, without “blocking” the country’s economy, which shrank a lot in the first months of the pandemic.
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