TEL AVIV – Israel inoculated nearly half of its most at-risk citizens and more than 10% of the population in two weeks, as officials stepped up a vaccination campaign for Covid-19 after initial hiccups led to vaccine wastage.
The small country – with about nine million inhabitants, almost the same as New York City – now plans to immunize the majority of its population by the beginning of spring. Israel’s vaccination campaign is relatively simple compared to the mass mobilizations needed for countries with many more people and a wider geographical coverage.
Israel began vaccinating its health care workers and those over 60 on December 20, after receiving early shipments of the vaccine from Pfizer Inc. On Saturday, it administered 12.59 doses per 100 inhabitants, according to the research group Our World In Data, Oxford University. This inoculation rate is almost four times faster than the second fastest nation, the tiny state of the Arabian Gulf of Bahrain.
“The health care system is proving itself,” Health Minister Yuli Edelstein said in an interview on Thursday with The Wall Street Journal. Israel prides itself on having a technologically advanced healthcare system, in which everyone in the country is registered by law.
The launch offers insights into how authorities are trying to maximize campaign coverage for the most vulnerable, while minimizing wasted doses, which must be kept extraordinarily cold to prevent spoilage.
After Israel was forced to dump hundreds of doses while fewer people than expected appeared to be inoculated, the authorities reduced the number of vials that were sent to vaccination centers and allowed anyone willing to take the injection to skip the line. These measures have allowed Israel to rapidly reduce waste and reach more people, officials say.
Pfizer vaccine, made with the partner BioNTech SE,
it must be administered within a window of five days after leaving the main storage center and six hours after leaving the refrigerator, according to Israeli officials, who say they are following Pfizer rules.
To deal with the short lifespan and help authorities reach less populated and isolated areas, Israel has started to split some of Pfizer’s 1,000-dose packages into smaller shipments of a few hundred each. The system, in which workers repackage bottles at workstations inside huge freezers, was approved by Pfizer before being implemented, Edelstein said.
Israel has also enacted a policy that allows vaccine centers that face the surplus that will soon be wasted to inoculate anyone who appears. This led to scenes across the country of young and middle-aged citizens lining up at vaccination centers, hoping to get an injection sooner.
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But in doing so, Israel also runs the risk of running out of its current supply of vaccines before the most vulnerable are fully inoculated. Israel bought 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.
Until mid-January, authorities will also stop vaccinating new patients for a period of two weeks. The current plan is for those already vaccinated to start receiving the second dose in this interval.
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 only to those who qualify – for example, 1,000 vaccines a day with no mistakes -[but] then vaccinate the country in one year, ”said Edelstein. “In the meantime, we would have people who would die just because they didn’t get the vaccine in time.”
Israel is currently in its third national blockade to contain a resurgence of cases from Covid-19 – which health officials say is not working because there are many exceptions.
The decision to impose the blockade in late December came when the new daily infection rates reported in Israel reached more than 3,000. They are now averaging more than 5,000 a day, with 50,299 active cases in total.
In total, 3,391 Israelis died from the virus, with a mortality rate of 0.8%. Fatalities have steadily increased since the beginning of December.
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