At least two of the Coronavirus Cabinet ministers are demanding that the government immediately stop the serological testing for children ages 3-12, Kan Reshet Bet reported Tuesday morning.
According to Environmental Protection Minister Tamar Zandberg (Meretz) and Interior Minister Ayelet Shaked (Yamina), the serological testing is expensive and completely unnecessary.
During the Cabinet's recent meeting, Zandberg said: "This is high-resource operation for which 6,000 soldiers were brought in, and it is simply completely unnecessary. In the best scenario, 15% will be found to be positive - that's the percentage the haredi sector had, and they had high infection rates."
"So let's say a student tests positive and the class goes into quarantine, are those 3-4 students going to learn alone in their classroom? It's completely extraneous. It would be better to take the soldiers who were called up and send them to vaccinate in homes or in the Bedouin sector."
At the same meeting, Shaked emphasized that the effort put into the serological testing is completely unnecessary, since it does not reduce infection rates in the long term. According to her, the government should transfer the investment and resources it poured into serological testing, and focus them only on vaccination efforts.
To prove her stance that the serological tests have no purpose and are unnecessary, and do not reduce infection rates, Shaked performed a serological test on herself during the Cabinet meeting.