A series of Health Ministry failures have led to the recent outbreak of measles in Israel, which has reached numbers not seen in the country in decades, doctors and senior health care officials told Israel Hayom Tuesday, saying the current situation was nothing short of a "medical and administrative meltdown."
Some 1,400 Israelis have contracted the disease so far in 2018. Last week, an 18-month-old toddler died of measles in Jerusalem.
According to these experts, this series of failures are the reason Israel's main healthcare service providers and its chain of Tipat Halav baby wellness clinics are unable to meet the demand for vaccines.
Doctors and nurses leveled harsh criticism at the Health Ministry over what they called its hesitation with regard to real-time decision-making, which has led Israel to the brink of one of its most severe public health crises.
Several experts said that the most prominent issue at hand is the fact that, despite the growing number of measles cases, the Health Ministry has yet to decide on the budgeting and implementation of a national vaccination campaign that would target, first and foremost, the hundreds of thousands of Israelis born between 1957 and 1977, who were not fully immunized.
The experts were also very critical of the Health Ministry for doing nothing to counter anti-vaccine parents and doctors who dispense false and dangerous information about the dangers of vaccines.
The critics say that the new measures the Health Ministry seeks to employ to fight the measles outbreak, which include setting up mobile baby wellness clinics and adding nurses to clinics in major cities, fall grossly short of dealing with the situation.
"These are small, hesitant steps that only illustrate the lack of leadership in the Health Ministry," a senior health care administrator told Israel Hayom.
"The problem is that the Health Ministry continues to operate as if there is no medical emergency here that actually endangers public health, and it has not come up with any national plan to eliminate the measles."
Experts further leveled criticism at the Health Ministry for not temporarily limiting the number of medical tourists that arrived in Israel while the threat of measles rages on, as they may be carriers of the disease.
A statement by the Health Ministry said, "[Measles] immunization rates in Israel are among the highest in the world. The Health Ministry takes continuous action on the ground, either by means of public awareness campaigns in areas where vaccination rates are lower or by directly contacting parents who have not vaccinated their children."
