The Israeli parliament passed a law on Wednesday that allows the government to share the identities of people who have not been vaccinated against the coronavirus with other authorities, raising privacy concerns for those who opt out of vaccination.
The measure, passed by 30 votes in favor and 13 against, gives local authorities, the Director General of the Ministry of Education and some of the Ministry of Welfare the right to receive the names, addresses and telephone numbers of unvaccinated citizens .
The purpose of the measure – valid for three months or until the Covid-19 pandemic is over – is “to enable these agencies to encourage people to vaccinate by addressing them personally,” according to a statement from it. parliament.
Israel, a country of nine million people, has administered the two recommended shots of the Pfizer / BioNTech vaccine against the coronavirus to about one-third of the population.
As shown by lockdown, the country is restricting certain services, including access to gyms and indoor dining, to only vaccinated individuals, by issuing a so-called green pass to fully vaccinated individuals.
This, too, has given rise to concern about unequal access for those exercising their right not to be vaccinated.
During the debate over the measure, Labor Party leader Merav Michaeli accused right-wing Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of “denying citizens their right to the privacy of their medical information.”
The parliament, or Knesset, statement said the personal information cannot be used for any purpose other than encouraging people to get vaccinated.
“The information will be deleted within 60 days of use,” the law said, and “a person contacted may require their data to be deleted and not contacted again.”
Haim Katz of Netanyahu’s Likud Party defended the law as a means of promoting vaccination.
“I’ve been asked about people’s privacy: is privacy more important than life itself?” Katz said in parliament, stressing that the information would contain nothing but whether or not the person had been vaccinated.
At a press conference, Netanyahu later called on Israeli citizens to get vaccinated in order to “return to normal life.”
The prime minister lamented misleading news about the vaccine, saying Israel wanted to fully vaccinate 6.2 million people by early April.
“More than a million adults have not yet been vaccinated,” he said, adding that “in the world people are waiting for vaccines, (but) here vaccines are waiting for people.”
Israel has officially recorded more than 760,000 coronavirus cases and more than 5,600 deaths since the pandemic began.
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