Health Ministry, Jerusalem
Health Ministry, JerusalemFlash 90

Health Communication Lecturer at IDC Herzliya International School Dr. Yaffa Shir Raz wrote in a Facebook post that she "stands behind" her article that was removed from the Ynet website about Health Ministry policy vis a vis COVID-19 as cause of death.

The article, entitled Has the coronavirus death toll in the country been inflated?, said: "After evidence in the U.S. and the UK indicates that not in everyone who was registered as having died of coronavirus was it indeed the cause of death, a Ynet investigation found that also in Israel the criteria for registering a person as 'deceased from coronavirus' does not take into account the time elapsed from illness to death."

Shir Raz wrote: "I stand behind every word in my article that was removed this morning from the Ynet website.

"This revelation has caused a scandal in the UK: after it was revealed that the death reports included people who had tested positive for the virus months before they died of any other cause at all. Health Secretary Matt Hancock ordered an urgent examination of the death count from the virus.

"An examination of Health Ministry documents shows that in Israel, too, there is no reference to the gaps between the positive test time and the date of death, and anyone who tests positive for the virus and dies later is classified as 'died of coronavirus', even if more than 100 days have passed.

"Worse, in the UK and U.S., where authorities have been severely criticized for their classification of deaths policy, at least guidelines from health ministries are publicly available. In Israel, the Health Ministry does not publish the guidelines, or data on the deceased that could shed light on the causes of death. My request to receive the information yesterday was completely ignored.

"In the words of Prof. Carl Heneghan, Director of the Center for Evidence-Based Medicine at the University of Oxford, only paraphrasing to fit Israel: 'According to the Health Ministry's method, no person with COVID-19 is ever permitted to recover from his illness'."