The Ministry of Health gave health providers approval on Thursday to extract up to six vials of Pfizer’s COVID-19 vaccine, instead of the five currently allowed, according to Hebrew media reports.
The reported change could significantly increase the supply of the vaccine to Israel, allowing it to immunize more people. If all of the Pfizer bottles scheduled to arrive in Israel in the next few months have the extra dose, it could mean that another 800,000 people can be vaccinated.
Earlier this month, the U.S. Food and Drug Administration confirmed that some vials of Pfizer vaccine were too full and contained sufficient doses for seven people. He told health officials to use all possible doses “due to the public health emergency”.
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Each dose should contain 0.3 milliliters of the vaccine. Each bottle was supposed to contain five doses, but many were found to contain more.
Pfizer’s COVID-19 vaccine is photographed at Rady Children’s Hospital before being put back in the refrigerator in San Diego, California, on December 15, 2020. (Ariana Drehsler / AFP)
Chezy Levy, the director general of the Ministry of Health, said on Thursday that 180,000 Israelis had been vaccinated against the coronavirus in the past five days.
At a news conference before a national blockade scheduled to start on Sunday, Levy said 40,000 had already been vaccinated on Thursday and 65,000 had been vaccinated on Wednesday.
“The goal is to vaccinate at least four million people during the first quarter of 2021,” he said, according to the news site Ynet. “We have enough vaccines for that and I hope we can meet that goal.”
Levy also said that Israelis will not be prevented from being vaccinated during the blockade.
According to the Oxford University’s Our World in Data website, Israel is second in the world in number of people per capita to receive the vaccine, behind Bahrain.
Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu receives a coronavirus vaccine from his personal doctor, Dr. Tzvi Berkovitz, at the Sheba Medical Center in Ramat Gan on December 19, 2020 (Amir Cohen / Pool / AFP)
Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said on Thursday that he expects up to 100,000 Israelis to be vaccinated every day until next weekend, while Health Minister Yuli Edelstein instructed Levy to meet that goal by getting professionals administrators to administer vaccines 24 hours a day, seven days a week.
“I want to tell you that the combination of the wonderful vaccine campaign, on the one hand, and a quick and short block, on the other, will allow us to get out of the coronavirus [pandemic] and we will probably be the first country to leave [it] in a few weeks, ”said Netanyahu in a statement.
On Wednesday, the Ministry of Health said hospitals will begin administering vaccines to the public next week, joining the country’s health maintenance organizations that are leading the effort. A ministry statement said the move was intended to “significantly” increase the pace of the vaccination campaign. He did not say how the Israelis could make an appointment to be vaccinated in hospitals or provide more details about the move.
The national vaccination program started on Sunday, with medical professionals receiving the first injections. As of Monday, vaccination was open to people over 60, as well as at-risk groups.
The government has not yet specified when vaccines will be made available to the general public.