Israel starts hitting TEEANGERS with Covid

Israel began administering Covid-19 vaccines to adolescents on Saturday as it continued its vaccination campaign, with 30% of the population now having received the first dose, health officials said.

Since the rollout of vaccinations a month ago, more than 2.5 million of Israel’s 9 million people have already been vaccinated, the health ministry said on Friday.

The widening of the campaign to include teenagers came days after Israel extended its third national coronavirus lockdown on Tuesday until the end of the month due to an increase in coronavirus infections.

The health ministry said Thursday that it was allowing inoculation of high school students aged 16 to 18, subject to parental approval.

The country’s largest health fund, Clalit, was already giving vaccines to adolescents on Saturday morning, its website said, while the three smaller funds were due to launch their campaign later.

Israel began administering vaccines on December 20, starting with medical professionals and moving quickly to the elderly, sick and at-risk groups, continuously lowering the minimum age for those entitled to the vaccine.

From Saturday, people aged 40 and over are also allowed to be vaccinated.

Nearly 2.5 million people had received the first of two doses, of which 900,000 were also receiving the second, according to the Health Ministry on Friday.

Israel has given at least one dose of the vaccine to 38.8 per 100 inhabitants of the country, well ahead of other countries, with some people already receiving the second.

In comparison, the UK gave 8.9 first doses per 100 people, the US gave 5.8, France only gave 1.4.

The country has secured a huge stockpile of Pfizer-BioNTech vaccine and pledged to quickly share impact data with the US-German manufacturer.

On Thursday, Israel’s estimated COVID-19 breeding number fell below 1 for the first time since the country launched its vaccination campaign, the government said.

An “R” number greater than 1 indicates that infections will grow at an exponential rate, while less than 1 indicates they will eventually stop.

Israel’s “R” number reached 1.3 on December 11. He started vaccinating citizens the following week. With growing contagion, on December 27, he imposed a third national lockdown – which is still in effect.

“Do we see the light? We see a loophole in the blinds, ”Deputy Health Minister Yoav Kisch told Channel 13 television after Israel registered an“ R ”number of 0.99. “We made a stop, but we managed to stop at high levels of morbidity.

He credited the lockdown and the vaccines – now given to more than a quarter of Israel’s 9 million people – but added that the vaccines had “mainly reduced severe morbidity, not necessarily the number of carriers.”

The reduction would have been more significant without the presence of the particularly contagious British variant of the coronavirus, Kisch said.

Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said on Tuesday that the rapid vaccination campaign “ will give us the opportunity to defeat the coronavirus, get out of it, open the economy and get life back to normal. ”

But while Israel currently leads the global vaccination campaign, infection and death rates, as well as the number of people hospitalized, have shown little sign of declining.

On Wednesday, the country recorded its highest number of Covid-19 cases and deaths in a single day, with 10,213 cases and 101 deaths – the first time Israel has recorded more than 10,000 cases and 100 deaths since the start of the pandemic.

Thursday, out of 82,930 active cases, 1,918 were hospitalized. Last week, the hospitalization figure was just over 1,000.

UK Chief Scientific Adviser Sir Patrick Vallance said on Friday it was too early to draw any conclusions from Israel’s vaccination campaign after being alarmed that hospitalizations had failed still lowered.

Addressing the apparent failure of the jab diet in reducing infection rates, Israel’s leading coronavirus doctor said Wednesday that Pfizer’s vaccine was less effective than expected.

Real-world data from Israel’s global deployment showed that the first dose resulted in a 33% reduction in coronavirus cases between 14 and 21 days later in people who received the vaccine.

The figure is lower than the estimate of the British regulator, which said it could prevent 89% of recipients from contracting symptoms of Covid-19.

But Sir Patrick, the UK’s chief scientific adviser, told the Downing Street press conference on Friday that the Israeli data was “very preliminary”.

He said: “ Regarding the Israeli data, I think it was information from one of the organizations that organize health care in Israel, I think there are four, and it is data. preliminary that have been released on the numbers.

“ I think the Israeli Ministry of Health has said that they are not entirely sure this is the final data and that they expect the effects to increase so I think that it is very preliminary.

“ This is preliminary information from a subset of people, they haven’t followed people for long enough.

“We had a discussion with the Israeli advisers yesterday and they expect to get more information in the coming weeks.

“And I think we’re going to have to watch this very closely, we will have to continue to look at the data and understand how vaccines perform in the real world.

Dr Nachman Ash, one of the medics leading the Covid-19 response in Israel, told local media on military radio earlier this week: “Many people were infected between the first and second injections of the vaccine.

Immunity can take 10 days or more.