Amid Israel’s Covid-19 success, bid for ‘fruitful ties’ with Muslim nations continues, envoy says
- A quick vaccine roll-out and lessons from Singapore have helped Israel to recover from a ‘severe’ virus situation, said Sagi Karni, Israel’s ambassador to Singapore
- In a wide-ranging interview, Karni also spoke about Israel’s growing trade with its Arab Muslim neighbours, and its hope for relations with Indonesia and Malaysia
When the first vaccine shots were rolled out on December 19, Israel was just easing out of a second lockdown and had been bracing itself for a possible third one as a new wave of infections erupted. Feeling the sense of urgency, the authorities sped up the immunisation drive, said Israel’s ambassador to Singapore, Sagi Karni. It helped that Israelis had no hesitancy about receiving the shots, he added.
Karni’s first overseas posting when he joined the foreign service was to Beijing. From 2013, he also spent a four-year term as Consul General to Hong Kong and Macau.
The envoy said part of Israel’s lessons in handling Covid-19 came from Singapore, which it consulted early on in the outbreak, before the World Health Organization declared it as a pandemic in March. The city state diagnosed its first Covid-19 patient on January 23, while Israel’s first case was almost a month later on February 21.
“We consulted Singapore because we know and we trust the system, so it was important to pick [its] brain to get the right information and right assessment about how this pandemic was going,” Karni told This Week in Asia in a wide-ranging interview on April 1 that also covered Israel’s relationship with Asia and Muslim countries in the region.