Israel vaccinates more than 10% of its population in two weeks

Israel began by vaccinating its health workers and those over the age of 60 on December 20 after receiving the first shipments of the vaccine from Pfizer Inc. On Saturday, it had administered 12.59 doses per 100 residents, according to research group Our World In Data, based at the University of Oxford. This inoculation rate is nearly four times faster than the second fastest country, the small Arab state in the Gulf of Bahrain.

“The healthcare system is proving its worth,” Health Minister Yuli Edelstein said in an interview with the Wall Street Journal Thursday. Israel boasts of a technologically advanced health care system that everyone in the country is enrolled in by law.

The deployment offers insight into how authorities are trying to maximize campaign coverage for the most vulnerable while minimizing wasted doses, which must be extremely cold to prevent them from deteriorating.

After Israel was forced to dump hundreds of doses when fewer people than expected showed up for vaccination, authorities reduced the number of vials sent to vaccination centers and allowed anyone wishing to be vaccinated to skip the queue. These measures allowed Israel to quickly reduce waste and reach more people, officials said.

The Pfizer vaccine, manufactured with the partner BioNTech SE,

should be administered within five days of being taken out of the main storage facility and six hours out of the refrigerator, according to Israeli officials, who say they follow Pfizer’s rules.

To cope with this short shelf life and help authorities reach less populated and isolated areas, Israel has started dividing some of the 1,000-dose packages of Pfizer into smaller consignments of a few hundred each. The system, in which workers repackage vials at workstations in massive freezers, was approved by Pfizer before being implemented, Edelstein said.

Israel has also adopted a policy that allows vaccination centers facing a soon-to-be-wasted surplus to vaccinate anyone who comes along. This has led to scenes across the country of young and middle-aged citizens lining up at vaccination centers, hoping to get a first photo.

But in doing so, Israel also risks running out of its current vaccine supply before its 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 makers say it takes two doses to be fully effective.

In mid-January, authorities will also stop vaccinating new patients for a period of two weeks. The current plan is that people already vaccinated will start receiving their 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 only to eligible people – for example, 1,000 vaccines per day without error -[but] then vaccinate the country in a year, ”Edelstein said. “During that time, we would have people dying just because they didn’t get the vaccine on time.”

Israel is currently in the midst of its third nationwide lockdown to contain a resurgence of Covid-19 cases – a case that health officials say is not working because there are too many exceptions.

The decision to impose the lockdown at the end of December came as new daily infection rates reported in Israel reached over 3,000. They are now averaging over 5,000 a day, with 50,299 total active cases.

A total of 3,391 Israelis have died from the virus, with a fatality rate of 0.8%. Deaths have steadily increased since the beginning of December.