Taking the world to visit Israel despite corona
Itamar Ben David and the Israel Virtual Tourism Association offer out-of-work tour guides a chance to share their respective passions, and make some money, while exploring new markets
This Purim, tour guide Itamar Ben David took his family to Iran to visit the ancient city of Susa and marvel at the tomb of Esther and Mordechai at Hamadan. COVID-19 travel restrictions and the tense relations between Jerusalem and Tehran were not a problem. Why? The whole tour was done virtually using Google Earth images and digital tools provided by Zoom.
“Sometimes people hear the concept of Digital Tourism and they think it’s an online lecture,” Ben David told The Jerusalem Post. “What they don’t understand is that these amazing digital tools allow the traveler to experience the site in a way that is entirely different.
“True, it’s not at all like being in an ancient temple or palace in person and breathe it in and soak it through the skin – but it is a way to get a taste of it. Who knows? Maybe in the future, when you have the time or the money or borders reopen, you will reach out to the guide you met online and re-book, this time with flight tickets?”
With 14 years of experience under his belt, Ben David guided such noted people in the Holy Land as the actor Chris Noth (“Mr. Big” from Sex and the City) and Larry King.
“Like many tour guides I am a technophobe and see myself as a content creator,” he wrote in a 10-page document he shared with his peers when COVID-19 struck.
“However, if you think tourism will return to normal by summer – I believe this is a totally unrealistic expectation,” he told them in April.
As he sees it, the objection to virtual tourism is rooted in a misconception: that it comes at the expense of regular tourism.
“This is not the right way to look at it,” he explained. “First of all, there are millions of people around the world who would love to explore Israel but can’t afford to come here. Many of them reside in developing countries.
“These people are a vast, yet untapped market.” He offered the example of how, using large screens and a good audio system, an entire church could hire a virtual tour in the footsteps of Jesus for the entire congregation.
“We also send people souvenirs by mail,” he added, offering people that physical connection to the Holy Land.
“So far we sent people spices after they took our incense trade route virtual tour and wine bottles for those who explored Israeli wine-making online.”
In theory, church goers could get water from the Sea of Galilee or the Jordan River. This is one way to create new markets by using new technologies.
“Second of all, there are lots of people who are considering visiting Israel but have other options. So why should they come here? By offering people an easy online travel experience you can show them this
country is indeed worth seeing. Maybe they’ll like the guide, or see that it’s safe to come here, and pick us over other places.”
“What people need to understand is that what counts is the personal connection people feel with the guide they meet. If they meet him online and feel the experience was a good one, they will feel a lot safer booking a trip with her or him later on.”
In addition, he added, the technology enables people who are unable to travel for whatever reason – health concerns or work commitments – not just to see more of the world but also to enjoy a radically new sort of travel.
“Lets say we have a tour guide in Oman, a tour guide in Jordan, and a tour guide in the Negev,” he suggested. “With digital technology, we could offer people a unique experience to see what is the meaning of the Abraham Accords and how they relate to the Incense trade route.
“I happen to be from Yemenite-Moroccan heritage myself,” he shared, “and I would love to create a tour with one guide in Spain, another in Morocco, another in Jamaica and one here. This could be a fantastic way to explore the heritage of Sephardic Jews that would connect people to all these amazing places and stories in a brand new way.”
It would also be possible to offer people an augmented reality experience.
For example, a tourist sitting at home in Toronto could follow a tour guide in Jaffa on the footsteps of the prophet Jonah and “see” an animated whale appear as the guide shows him the modern beach of the port city.
If pre-COVID-19 tourists would visit a Skansen-type
museum, in which actors in period costumes would present how the Puritans would talk and dress. The post-COVID-19 tourist might open a laptop for a unique evening experience of Sephardic heritage and enjoy an introduction to Jewish pirate of the Caribbean Moses Cohen Henriques, followed by a performance of Ladino music by a current musician.
BEN DAVID currently offers roughly 80 unique virtual tours, including one about Israeli street art, and thinks almost any tour can be tweaked to serve the needs of the client.
“It’s hard to get face to face time with people who are famous because they usually work very hard,” he said. “However even very busy people can speak to someone over the phone for 20 minutes or so.”
If your son is having a bar mitzvah during COVID-19 travel restrictions and is a hardcore fan of Iron Chef, Ben David can offer a virtual tour of Israeli food and arrange for a famous chef to talk with your family and share his passion for culinary excellence. Who knows? If things click, the chef might eventually give your son a job if he proves committed to the craft.
Ben David also offers a tour about Israeli bats with a nod to the theory COVID-19 was introduced via that species and a wink toward Batman.
“Very few people are going to pack a bag and follow the life of Theodor Herzl and visit all the cities he lived in from Paris and Vienna to Jerusalem and Istanbul,” he said, providing an example.
“Herzl is one of my personal heroes, I would love to shape a tour with guides in each city who could “take” people to important locations where events took place and then have an academic expert give a short lecture.
This is the good thing about a guided tour, it’s not just us guides who point at things and explain, people can stop us and ask questions.”
With that in mind, he co-created the Israel Virtual Tourism Association (IVTA), which currently has 46 registered guides who can offer virtual tours in a staggering variety of languages: from English to Chinese, Indonesian to Danish.
“Me and Gadi Ben Dov offered the first training course to teach tour guides how to function in the virtual world in January and we had 70 students. It was funded via the Jerusalem Entrepreneurs Tourism Hub [JETH] and their partners,” he said.
Support was granted by the Jerusalem Affairs Ministry and Heritage and the Jerusalem Development Authority.
“Now we’re in the process of opening a third course. Roughly 90 people are taking the second course as we speak.”
Ben David is sure that digital tourism is something Israel cannot ignore and is looking ahead to June 16, the International Day of Virtual Tourism, as a key date for which he must gear up. This date is significant – as it marks the day IVTA was founded.
“We do have things we would love to solve! As I keep telling people, you must use your own photos for copyright reasons. Google Earth has an issue around copyrights and Amazon Explore has a limited range of formats to use. This is an issue we’d love to work out with these large companies, if we could only find someone there to talk with.
“The Foreign Ministry should consider speaking with us,” he concluded, “imagine all the Gulf states residents we could bring to Israel – online – right now.”
WASHINGTON (Reuters) – The Senate on Saturday passed US President Joe Biden’s $1.9 trillion COVID-19 relief plan in a party-line vote after an all-night session that saw Democrats battling among themselves over jobless aid and the Republican minority failing to push through some three dozen amendments.
The final bill includes $400 billion in one-time payments of $1,400 to most Americans, $300 a week in extended jobless benefits for the 9.5 million people thrown out of work in the crisis, and $350b. in aid to state and local governments that have seen the pandemic blow a hole in their budgets.
The Senate voted 50-49, with no Republicans supporting what would be one of the largest stimulus packages in US history.
Democrats broke out in applause amid passage of the bill and Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-VT) fist-bumped Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer (NY).
As the Senate was about to cast its vote, Schumer said the bill was the prescription for getting the upper hand against a pandemic that has killed more than 520,000 people across the country and upended most aspects of American life.
“I want the American people to know that we’re going to get through this and someday soon our businesses will reopen, our economy will reopen and life will reopen,” Schumer said.
Senate Republican Leader Mitch McConnell (KY), however, had harsh words about the measure.
“The Senate has never spent $2 trillion in a more haphazard way or through a less rigorous process,” he said.
Republicans had sought a new round of aid about one-third the size of Biden’s plan.
McConnell argued that even without this legislation, “2021 is already set to be our comeback year” because of relief bills enacted last year.
The fight is not over as the bill needs to return to the House of Representatives, which approved a slightly different version a week earlier. The House is expected to give its final approval this week, and Schumer said the House passage is expected in time for Biden to sign the bill before enhanced unemployment benefits expire on March 14.
The measure comes as an increasing number of states have been relaxing restrictions designed to curb the pandemic, with Texas earlier this week announcing it would allow most businesses to operate at full capacity and California saying it would soon allow Disneyland and other theme parks as well as sports stadiums to reopen at limited capacity. But even as more and more Americans get vaccinated against COVID-19, top infectious disease official Dr. Anthony Fauci has said that “now is not the time to pull back.”
The standoff within the Democratic Party over the jobless benefits and the all-night effort by Republicans to amend a bill that polls show is popular with voters illustrated the difficulty Biden will face in pushing other policies through
a Senate that Democrats control by the narrowest of majorities.
The chamber set a record in its longest single vote in the modern era – 11 hours and 50 minutes – as Democrats negotiated a compromise on unemployment benefits to
satisfy centrists like Sen. Joe Manchin, who often walks a delicate tightrope as a Democrat representing a state, West Virginia, that overwhelmingly supported Republican former president Donald Trump in the November election.
The extended unemployment payments, which are to be paid out on top of state jobless benefits, proved to be the most contentious part of the bill. The House bill had set the supplemental benefit at $400 a week, but Senate Democrats finally agreed to knock that down to $300.
The House bill also featured a measure to more than double the minimum wage to $15 per hour, which the Senate also rejected.
Moderate Democrats feared that the higher jobless benefits and minimum wage hike would overheat the economy and hurt businesses in rural states.
Senate Democrats used a process called reconciliation to pass the measure with a simple majority rather than the 60 of 100 votes normally required under the chamber’s rules.
It was unclear whether Democrats will try to use that maneuver on other policy goals such as legislation dealing with climate change and immigration.
One Republican, Dan Sullivan of Alaska, left Washington on Friday night for a family funeral, meaning that Democrats did not need Vice President Kamala Harris’ tie-breaking vote in the normally 50-50 chamber.
Republicans broadly supported previous stimulus packages to fight the virus and revive the economy. But with Democrats in charge of the White House and both chambers of Congress, they criticized this bill as too expensive.
The country has yet to replace 9.5 million jobs lost since last year and the White House says it could take years to do so.
Washington got unexpected good news on Friday after data showed that US employment surged in February, adding 379,000 jobs, significantly higher than many economists had expected.
LOS ANGELES (Los Angeles Times/ TNS) – A lot of us have engaged in some bold mixing-and-matching during the pandemic – office attire on top, pajama pants on bottom, for instance – and been none the worse for it.
Imagine doing the same with COVID-19 vaccines, perhaps pairing a first dose of the AstraZeneca product with a second dose supplied by Novavax. Would the consequences of such mixing be any graver?
It’s hardly an idle question. Either by accident or design, some mismatched dosing is inevitable, experts say.
Three vaccines are currently being rolled out across the United States, with two more likely to come over the next several months. All but one were designed to be delivered as two-dose regimens.
Another 69 vaccines are in clinical development across the globe, and nearly two-thirds of those were designed to generate immunity with two or more doses.
But making sure people get the right vaccine at the right time has turned out to be a greater logistical challenge than initially expected. What’s more, the unexpectedly swift emergence of menacing coronavirus variants has made it imperative to get shots into arms as quickly as possible.
Health officials in Great Britain proposed a radical solution to both problems: Delay second doses for up to 12 weeks so that more people could get at least some protection.
Later, the government acknowledged that in exceptional circumstances, mismatched doses may be given to people who arrive for their second dose and discover that the vaccine they originally had is not available.
It seemed preposterous, especially considering that neither of these protocols was evaluated in clinical trials. If they don’t work, the precious vaccine will have been wasted at a time when there’s none to spare.
“I wouldn’t make any changes unless you’ve got good data,” said Dr. Anthony Fauci, director of the US National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases. “I don’t think you mix and match without results showing it’s very effective and safe.”
Now British researchers are trying to do just that.
This month, a team of vaccinologists from Oxford University began recruiting 800 or so people age 50 or older for a complex study to see whether vaccine switching could actually work.
Using an eight-armed clinical trial, they’ll test vaccine regimens using various combinations and intervals of the two vaccines currently being dispensed in Britain: one made by Pfizer and BioNTech, and another developed by Oxford and AstraZeneca.
In announcing the mix-andmatch vaccine trial, Dr. Matthew Snape cited experiments in mice in which combinations of the Pfizer and AstraZeneca vaccines boosted immunity better than two doses of either one alone. Perhaps it would work in humans as well.
Both vaccines prime the immune system to target the coronavirus’s spike protein, which plays an instrumental role in the infection process. But they home in on different parts of the spike, and they deliver their payloads by two very different means.
THE ASTRAZENECA vaccine uses a modified cold virus to present the spike protein to the immune system, while the Pfizer one hands over genetic instructions for making the spike protein and relies on human cells to produce it.
Additional COVID-19 vaccines made by Novavax and Johnson & Johnson also focus on the spike proteins on the virus’s surface, and researchers expect to add them to the trial as it proceeds. (J&J’s vaccine candidate is designed to be administered as a single dose, but the company is testing whether a second dose, delivered 57 days after the first, would provide a higher level of immunity).
The British trial is expected to release its findings in June.
That mouse study cited by Snape has encouraged scientists’ belief that combining vaccines will kick the body’s immune system into a higher gear. By nudging it through different means and training it to recognize new and different pieces of the virus, these mismatched regimens could not only generate neutralizing antibodies but boost production of a specialized class of immune cells called CD8+ T-cells.
The neutralizing antibodies that are produced in response to most vaccines specialize in hunting down and killing free-floating viral particles as they circulate in the bloodstream. Fielding an army of CD8+ T-cells as well would empower the immune system to find and kill cells that have already been infected and turned into virus-copying factories. That would end an infection faster and more completely.
These T-cells also have long and specific memories of what the SARS-CoV-2 virus looks like. That means immunity might last longer when this army of immune cells is strongly recruited.
Though mixing and matching vaccines awakened these T-cells in mice, the same response has not yet been demonstrated conclusively in humans. Nor have studies borne out scientists’ hope that mismatched vaccines can be safely administered to millions of healthy people.
One potential benefit of mismatched vaccines is that if the two jabs target different sets of proteins on the virus’s surface, the immune system would be prepared to face a wider array of threats. That might preserve or improve vaccine-induced immunity as new variants of the virus arise.
The emergence of a new strain in South Africa has underscored the importance of having such a backup. After evidence surfaced that the variant was less susceptible to AstraZeneca’s vaccine, Moderna began work on a modified shot specifically tailored to protect against it. Doses of the booster vaccine were sent to the National Institutes of Health for testing this week, and a new clinical trial will explore whether it expands the immunity of people who’ve already been vaccinated against COVID-19.
But there is recent precedent for combining vaccines that use different vehicles to deliver their immunological payloads.
THE TWO doses of Russia’s Sputnik V COVID vaccine, for instance, use two kinds of viruses to transport the genetic instructions that tell the immune system which coronavirus surface proteins to look for. The first is a harmless cold virus. For the second shot that comes 21 days later, scientists engineered another innocuous cold virus to carry the cargo.
This way, there’s no chance the immune system will inadvertently attack the harmless cold virus when it’s time for the second dose. With a new ride, the vaccine’s genetic payload can slip by unchallenged.
Russia’s Gamaleya Research Institute, which designed Sputnik V, took a similar approach to formulating the first and second doses of its Ebola vaccine. Several experimental HIV vaccines are also testing this approach.
The COVID-19 vaccines made by Pfizer-BioNTech and Moderna use the same mRNA “platform” that prompts cells to construct harmless spike proteins that the immune system will learn to recognize. However, they encapsulate their instructions in very different packages (which may explain why the risk of a severe allergic reaction called anaphylaxis is more than four times higher for the Pfizer-BioNTech vaccine than the Moderna one, though both are extremely low).
In late January, the US Centers for Disease Control & Prevention told medical professionals they could offer a mismatched second dose of mRNA vaccine “in exceptional situations in which the first-dose vaccine product cannot be determined or is no longer available.”
But there’s a reason every multidose vaccine on the US market – from the hepatitis B shots that start just after birth to the shingles vaccine series for adults in their 50s – comes with a recommendation to get all doses from the same manufacturer: Their safety and efficacy have been tested as an established pairing; mix-and-match combos have not.
The problem with testing the safety and efficacy of mix-and-match combinations is compounded by the complexity of the immune system.
“What we know to measure is only half the story,” said Dr. Gregory Poland, a vaccine researcher at the Mayo Clinic in Rochester, Minnesota. The British mix-and-match trial will measure the amount of antibodies in the bloodstream, but actual immunity is more complicated than that. Immunity brought about by neutralizing antibodies and immunity brought about, say, by CD8+ cells complement each other in mysterious ways.
“If you alter one component of that, you no longer know if you have the same efficacy and safety,” said Poland.
But this level of caution may be a luxury we can’t afford in a public health emergency.
In the midst of a pandemic, a natural experiment in mixing and matching may be unavoidable. Snarls in vaccine production and distribution are bound to happen, imperiling guaranteed on-time access to a second dose that matches one’s first.
People in search of their second shot may not even remember what they got the first time around. And many may be willing to take whatever they can get.
“There’s the ideal and there’s the necessary borne of the practical,” Poland said. “Absent clinical trials, you do studies on the fly. But you’d like to have studies.”