The PA’s Obscene Vaccine Refusal
David Lange
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On Friday, I posted how Israel had agreed to give the Palestinian Authority 1 to 1.4 million doses of the Pfizer-BioNTech vaccine that would otherwise have expired and that the authority would return the favor in September or October.
Alas, the palestinian Arabs have changed their minds and refused the doses under the pretext of their expiry date being too close.
The Palestinian Authority (PA) cancelled a deal on Friday to receive soon-to-expire COVID-19 vaccines from Israel after an initial Israeli shipment showed an expiration date sooner than had been agreed, the PA health minister said.
Israel and the PA announced a vaccine swap deal earlier on Friday that would have seen Israel send up to 1.4 million Pfizer-BioNTech doses to the PA, in exchange for receiving a reciprocal number of doses from the PA later this year.
The doses were due to “expire soon”, Israeli Prime Minister Naftali Bennett’s office said in a statement announcing the deal. The PA said they had been “approved in order to speed up the vaccination process” in the occupied West Bank and Gaza.
“They told us the expiration date was in July or August, which would allow lots of time for use,” PA Health Minister Mai Alkaila told reporters later on Friday.
“But (the expiration) turned out to be in June. That’s not enough time to use them, so we rejected them,” she said.
The PA cancelled the deal over the date issue, a PA spokesman said, and sent the initial shipment of around 90,000 doses back to Israel.
Even if this was true, there are almost two weeks between now and the end of June. And that is just for some of the vaccines. The rest of them expire only at the end of July. That is a lot of lives that could potentially be saved.
I say if this was true, because it almost certainly isn’t.
Israel on Saturday insisted that COVID-19 vaccines delivered to the Palestinian Authority the previous day, only to be rejected, were “perfectly sound” and identical to vaccines being given to Israelis.
Ramallah said it was canceling the agreement that would see some 1 million Pfizer vaccine doses handed over to the PA, citing the close expiration date of the doses. It said it had rejected a first batch of some 100,000 doses transferred to it. The doses were set to expire at the end of June.
But the Health Ministry in Jerusalem expressed surprise at the move, saying in a statement Saturday that the doses of the Pfizer-BioNTech inoculation were “perfectly sound” and “identical in every way to the vaccines currently being given to citizens of Israel.”
Officials say it is standard practice to use vaccines whose expiration date is close, and so long as the date has not passed, manufacturers deem them perfectly safe.
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The rest of the vaccines set for delivery have an expiration date at the end of July, Israeli Health Ministry officials said Saturday afternoon.
The Health Ministry said Saturday the Palestinians knew in advance of the doses’ expiration date. Ramallah stated Friday afternoon that the delivery was in order, but four hours later said it was rejecting it. “We hope that the vaccination campaign in the Palestinian Authority will begin soon,” the Israeli ministry said.
According to several Hebrew media reports Saturday afternoon, Israel still hopes to reach understandings with the PA so that the vaccines are not wasted.
But officials told Channel 12 that the first batch of 100,000 doses was now likely to be thrown out. The West Bank-based government has not yet returned the delivery.
Yet another example of how they hate us more than they love their own children.
Meanwhile, this paragraph from the above report is another reminder just how messed up they are:
And the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine terrorist group called the deal “humiliating” and claimed it “could have harmed human life.”
Update: Back in 2010, the “humanitarian aid” on board the Gaza flotilla ships included expired medicines. Funny how the palestinians did not make a big song and dance about that fact.
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David Lange
