TEL AVIV – Israel has vaccinated nearly half of its most at-risk citizens and more than 10% of the population in two weeks as authorities speed up a vaccination program against Covid-19 after early hiccups resulted in wasted shots.
The small country – with about nine million people, about the same as New York City – now wants to immunize the majority of its people in the early spring. Israel’s vaccination campaign is relatively simple compared to the mass mobilization that countries with many more people and a wider geographic spread require.
Israel began vaccinating its health workers and people over 60 years old on Dec. 20 after early shipments of the vaccine from Pfizer Inc. According to the Our World In Data research group at Oxford University, it had administered 12.59 doses per 100 inhabitants on Saturday. That vaccination rate is almost four times faster than the second fastest country, the small Arabian Gulf state of Bahrain.
“The health system is proving itself,” said Health Secretary Yuli Edelstein in an interview with The Wall Street Journal on Thursday. Israel boasts a technologically advanced healthcare system for which everyone in the country is legally registered.
The rollout provides insight into how authorities are trying to maximize campaign coverage for the most vulnerable and minimize waste of doses, which must be kept extremely cold to prevent them from going bad.
After Israel was forced to dump hundreds of doses because fewer than expected people were being vaccinated, authorities reduced the number of vials sent to vaccination centers and left anyone who wanted to inject them in line. Those steps allowed Israel to quickly reduce waste and reach more people, officials say.
Pfizer’s vaccine, made with partner BioNTech SE,
According to Israeli authorities, who say they follow Pfizer’s rules, it should be administered within five days of leaving the main storage center, and six hours once out of the refrigerator.
To cope with that short shelf life and help authorities reach less populated and isolated areas, Israel began breaking down some of Pfizer’s 1,000-dose packages into smaller shipments of a few hundred each. The system, whereby workers repackage the bottles in workstations in huge freezers, was approved by Pfizer before it was implemented, Mr Edelstein said.
Israel also enacted a policy whereby vaccine centers dealing with a soon-to-be-wasted surplus vaccinate anyone who shows up. This has led to scenes across the country of citizens of both young and middle age queuing up at vaccine centers, hoping to get an early shot.
But by doing so, Israel also risks running out of its current supply of vaccines before the most vulnerable are fully vaccinated. Israel has purchased 8 million doses from Pfizer, 6 million from Moderna and 10 million from AstraZeneca,
but it is not clear when the shipments will arrive. Vaccine manufacturers say it takes two doses to be fully effective.
Authorities will also stop vaccinating new patients for two weeks in mid-January. The current plan is that those who have already been vaccinated will receive their second dose during this break.
Israel’s Health Minister defended the current plan as a balance between the needs of the most threatened countries and the rest of the country.
“I don’t think it would be the right decision … to give the vaccine only to those who are eligible – say 1000 vaccines a day without errors -)[but] then vaccinate the land in a year, ”said Mr Edelstein. “Meanwhile, we would have people who will die for not getting the vaccine on time.”
Israel is currently in the midst of its third national lockdown to stem a resurgence of Covid-19 cases – one that health officials say is not working because there are too many exceptions.
The decision to impose the lockdown in late December came when new daily infection rates in Israel hit more than 3,000. They now average over 5,000 a day, with a total of 50,299 active cases.
A total of 3,391 Israelis have died of the virus, with a death rate of 0.8%. The number of fatalities has steadily increased since the beginning of December.
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