The effectiveness of the national coronavirus vaccination campaign has impressed the world. About five million vaccines have been administered in the past month and a half, with about 3,236,259 individuals vaccinated on Wednesday morning, 1,855,071 of whom have both vaccines.
In the past few weeks, about 200,000 vaccines have been administered every day.
However, only about 100,000 injections were administered on Tuesday, 115,000 on Monday and 130,000 on Sunday.
Three out of four health funds explained to The Jerusalem Post who are seeing a slower response rate from the younger population, while the fourth highlighted that demand is still high, but has not received enough doses from the Ministry of Health.
“As the vaccination campaign was extended to young people, the rate of people coming to be vaccinated also started to decrease, for several reasons: young people think they will not get sick, women are concerned about fertility and so on” Moshe Mosko, a spokesman for the Leumit health fund, said.
“We have reached a point where we are inoculating half of the people we inoculated before. If until last week we had administered up to 15,000 injections per day, there were days this week when we did not reach 7,000. “
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Leumit has about 500,000 members over the age of 16; about 200,000 have already received the first dose, with 125,000 of them also having received the second.
“We call people, talk to them, send texts,” added Mosko, thanking the decision to make the vaccine available to the entire adult population. “We have to preserve the momentum of the campaign that we have been losing in the last few days.”
At Leumit, about 96% of those who received the first dose came for the second.
“However, on Tuesday,” said Mosko, “about 12% of those who scheduled their first injection did not show up. We were very disappointed. “
In Meuhedet, the number of vaccinations per day has dropped from around 30,000 to about 10,000. A spokeswoman said she hoped this would change as the campaign expanded. She also stressed that whoever makes an injection appears, in almost all cases, both for the first and for the second injection.
The health fund has about 1.2 million members, 54% of whom have already recovered from COVID or been vaccinated.
A different perspective was offered by a spokesman for Maccabi.
“We are limited by the supply from the Ministry of Health; the demand is still high, ”said the spokesman, expressing hope that, as the campaign extends to all ages, more doses will be provided to the health fund.
Although Maccabi has the capacity to vaccinate about 60,000 people a day – and its record number of inoculations in one day was 53,000 – in the past two days, they vaccinated only about 30,000 a day.
About 1.66 million of Maccabi’s 2.5 million members are eligible for a vaccine. About 900,000 have already received the first shot and about 500,000 the second.
On Tuesday night, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said Israel would aim to vaccinate 90% of citizens over 50 against the coronavirus in the next two weeks.
Currently, 77% of people over 50 have already been vaccinated, leaving more than 400,000 people in this age group still at risk of contracting the virus. Although the vaccination campaign now covers the entire adult population, the Ministry of Health has instructed health funds to focus on people over 50.
Maayan Jaffe-Hoffman contributed to this report.