Israel will vaccinate more than 10% of its population in two weeks

Israel began vaccinating their health care workers and those over 60 on December 20 after receiving early loads of the Pfizer Inc. vaccine. get. By Saturday, they had administered 12.59 doses for every 100 of its people, according to the research group Our World In Data, based at Oxford University. That inoculation rate is nearly four times faster than the second fastest growing country, the small state of Gulf Gulf in Bahrain.

“The health system is proving itself,” Health Minister Yuli Edelstein said in an interview Thursday with The Wall Street Journal. Israel has a technologically advanced health care system to which everyone in the country is registered by law.

The rollout will provide an insight into how authorities are trying to increase the coverage of the campaign for the most vulnerable while reducing dose waste, which needs to be maintained. extremely cold to keep them from getting bad.

After Israel threw out hundreds of doses as fewer people turned out than expected to be circulated, authorities cut back on the number of vials sent to vaccination centers and allowed anyone who was willing to jump the bullet the queue. These measures allowed Israel to quickly cut waste and reach out to more people, officials say.

Pfizer vaccine, manufactured by partner BioNTech SE,

must be administered within a window five days after leaving the main storage facility, and six hours out of frids, according to Israeli authorities, who say they follow Pfizer rules.

To address that short shelf life and help authorities reach smaller and more remote areas, Israel began distributing some 1,000-dose Pfizer packages into smaller loads of several hundred each. The system, in which workers repackage the filters in workplaces inside large freezers, was approved by Pfizer before it was implemented, Mr Edelstein said.

Israel has also introduced a policy that will allow vaccinated waste-burning vaccines to soon protect anyone who shows up. This has led to nationwide scenes of both young and middle-aged citizens queuing at vaccination centers, hoping to gain an early look.

But in doing so, there is a danger that Israel will run out of the current vaccine supply before the most vulnerable people are fully taken. Israel has bought 8 million doses from Pfizer, 6 million from Moderna and 10 million from AstraZeneca,

but it is not clear when the loads arrive. Vaccine manufacturers say it will take two doses to be fully effective.

Authorities by mid-January will also stop vaccinating new patients for two weeks. The current plan is for those who have already received the vaccine to start receiving the second dose during this break.

Israel’s health minister defended the current plan as balancing the needs of those most at risk with the rest of the country.

“I don’t think it would be the right decision… to give the vaccine to those who deserve it – for example, 1,000 vaccines a day with zero errors—[but] then vaccinate the country in a year, ”Mr Edelstein said. “In the meantime, we would have people who die simply because they did not receive the vaccine on time.”

Israel is currently among its third national closure to introduce a revival in Covid-19 cases – one that health officials say is not working because there are too many exceptions.

The decision to ban it came at the end of December when daily new disease rates in Israel reached more than 3,000. They now receive an average of more than 5,000 per day, with a total of 50,299 active cases.

In total, 3,391 Israelis have died from the virus, with a mortality rate of 0.8%. Deaths have been steadily rising since the beginning of December.