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Prominent Israeli vaccine skeptic, who previously accused Jerusalem police of attempting to poison him, telling supporters “if anything happened to him” they should assume he was “murdered” , died of Covid-19.
Hai Shaulian, a well-followed social media anti-vaxxer and organizer of face mask and vaccination protests, died Monday morning at the age of 57 from complications from Covid-19, according to the Jerusalem Post and other local media.
In a video he posted to social media from his hospital bed days before his death, Shaulian claimed to have been mistreated by police after his arrest in early September. The activist was arrested during a demonstration against the Green Pass system – which limits access to places and events for unvaccinated Israelis – in Jerusalem and brought before a judge the next day. Soon after, he started to feel unwell and was taken to Edith Wolfson Medical Center in Holon where his tests came back positive for Covid-19. Shaulian was obviously not vaccinated against the virus.
In the clip, he said that after his arrest, an officer put his leg on his neck and went so far as to suggest that “The Jerusalem police tried to poison” him because of his campaign.
“I have never felt this in my life” he said to his supporters. “I fought all week like nothing had happened but today I couldn’t breathe and I went to my health care provider and from there I was taken to the hospital Wolfson. ”
If anything happens to me, you know it’s an attempt to assassinate me.
Shaulian’s condition continued to deteriorate over the following days. His last message on Saturday was just text because he already was “unable to speak and respond to people.
The activist held on to the end, writing that “The Green Pass will not be accepted in Israel. It has nothing to do with the coronavirus. It has nothing to do with vaccines. It has to do with coercion. However, he did not repeat his poisoning allegations in this post.
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The news of Shaulian’s death saddened and angered his supporters on social media, many of whom supported the assassination theory, accusing the police and even the Israeli Shin Bet secret service of “criminality.” Others have gone so far as to suggest that the activist died because he had not received proper care at the hospital because of his opinions.
Commentators on the other side have insisted that what happened to Shaulian was a warning to all coronavirus skeptics and showed the danger of rejecting the vaccine and the authorities’ health advice.
There has been no official reaction from the Jerusalem police to the poisoning charges.
Israel has carried out one of the largest vaccination campaigns in the world, fully immunizing more than 60% of its population with the Pfizer vaccine and already giving a third injection – as a booster – to some 2.8 million people. However, a large portion of the public, including many Arabs and Orthodox Jews, still refrain from getting vaccinated, with anti-vaccines staging regular protests and actively using social media to challenge government policies.
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Meanwhile, Covid-19 cases continue to rise in Israel since the emergence of the most contagious Delta variant. On Monday, the coronavirus reproduction rate, which indicates how many people a single sick person can infect, crossed the 1 mark for the first time in three weeks, according to the health ministry. Since the start of the pandemic, Israel has so far recorded nearly 1.2 million cases of Covid-19 and more than 7,400 virus-related deaths.
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