Thanks to vaccines, Israel looked like the first country in the world to reach herd immunity from the coronavirus. But then Delta arrived. Daily cases shot up from less than 20 to around 750 in three weeks.
Most of the daily cases in Israel are now among vaccinated people. 56% of Israelis are vaccinated, and they make up roughly the same proportion of daily cases (though there are lots of demographic confounders in that data!)
On the other hand, only 1% of daily cases are people who previously tested positive for Covid, despite this group constituting 9% of the population. Again there are confounders here, but I think the effect is probably real.
Most of new severe hospitalised Covid patients are vaccinated, too. This isn't a surprise. ~90% of over 50s, the most vulnerable group, are vaccinated. In a population with high enough vaccination, most of the severely ill will be from the larger group of vaccinated people.
A key number is the ratio of new cases to new hospitalisations and deaths. It's too early in Israel's Delta spike to have a clear picture of that, but the UK's experience gives a good sense that there will be MANY fewer severe cases for the same level of infection.
1. 'third doses' and waning protection 2. How much Delta can a vaccinated country live with? 3. With the brief mirage of full vaccine-induced herd immunity gone, what do we do now?
One point I just want to stress: Delta in a vaccinated population might be a challenge. Delta in an unvaccinated, exposed population will be a horrific nightmare like India faced.
All of you antivaxxers retweeting this thread: I hope your followers can read, even if you can't. We need to be honest about the challenges Delta poses, but the vaccine is keeping people out of hospitals, saving lives and preventing millions of deaths. Everyone should get one.
Israel's current severe Covid cases by age and vaccine status, with each group normalised per million people. This really shows the impact that the vaccines are having,
With very high vaccination, the breakthrough cases become the majority. But the very small minority of over-40s who aren't vaccinated are disproportionately vulnerable to severe disease.
This means a Russian intel agent was part of the internal conversations with Lauren Chen and Liam Donovan about how much to pay Benny Johnson and Tim Pool
The Russians asked Chen to recruit Benny Johnson and Tim Pool to make some content and offered $2m a year each. Johnson said he wanted $5m. Pool demanded $100k per episode.
NB the indictment does not suggest that they knew the money was coming from Russia.
Tim Pool spoke to a Russian agent pretending to be a Hungarian businessman on a secure call.
OK, so let's talk about this. The term "Ashkenormativity" is used *internally* in Jewish communal discourse to refer to discrimination against non-Ashkenazi Jews — like north African and Yemenite Jews.
In the US, for example, most Jews are Ashkenazi: their ancestors come from eastern or central Europe, and they follow the traditions, liturgy and religious rulings of the Ashkenazi communities.
Jews from north Africa and the Middle East follow different traditions, which get sort of politically lumped together as Mizrachi, "Eastern" even though Moroccan and Algerian Jews lived WAY west of, say, Polish and Russians.
Why does the far Right hate Taylor Swift so much? Well, *partly* because they used to worship her as a secret White Nationalist 4channer and still feel betrayed that she wasn't actually any of those things.
4chan a decade ago was full of photoshopped pics of Swift in wehrmacht uniforms and excited posts about how her (then) political silence proved she was actually going to be the Aryan mother of the next generation of American Nazis. All total fantasy of course.
Here's an article from 2016 (ht: @SueSandersHere) that talks about the theory at the time.
At a certain point, op-eds in mainstream media started demanding she "speak out" to prove she wasn't a secret neo Nazi.
I am reconnecting after a day offline. This is the worst single day of casualties Israel has suffered in my lifetime. Civilians massacred, reports of many kidnapped into Gaza. More than 100 dead and that total is rising.
Hamas launched this mass surprise attack into Israel, an invasion covered by huge rocket fire, without any escalation or specific trigger. They did it because they can and because they wanted to.
Horror stories are emerging from the towns near to Gaza of massacres, with Hamas cells going house to house. Hamas claims it has kidnapped 53 Israelis, but we'll have to wait to see how true that is.
This is happening now. It's hosted by the Daily Wire and so far it's just Ben Shapiro interviewing Musk, asking hard-hitting conversations like "How do you stand up to the ADL and organizations that want to control speech?".
Also, when talking about Chaya Raichik, Musk pronounces Chaya as if it rhymes with 'China'. Right now he's saying that he's going to find ways to let advertisers choose to advertise next to risky content if they want to.
Ben Shapiro is now praising Musk for "getting rid of the bots", therefore dramatically reducing antisemitism. This is not the typical experience of many Jewish users of this platform.
This paid anti-Ukrain propaganda ad, in Hebrew, just popped up on my Facebook. The cartoon's message is hardly subtle, but let's see what we can find out.
First, the advertiser. It's a nothing Facebook page targeting people based in Israel who've interacted with content like graphic novels and consumer electronics.
The page is running another ad too. Both use the same text:
"Israel should focus all attention on fighting the economic crisis. Supporting the conflicts of others is an unjustified luxury. Every shekel counts"