Benjamin Netanyahu says Israel aims for full reopening in April: “We are at the end of the pandemic”

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said on Wednesday that he hoped health officials vaccinate all adults before March 16 and be able to make a Full reopening of the company in April.

Netanyahu called for “not to repeat” the events of the previous Purim, a Jewish holiday whose celebration last year was followed by a rapid rise in infections.

“We can be happy, dressed, but we have to follow the rules. This is very important because we are at the end of the pandemic“Said the Prime Minister, according to The time of Israel.

If the prime minister’s estimates are met, Israeli adults would be vaccinated ahead of the March 23 election where Netanyahu is running again as a candidate despite his corruption trial.

From the Ministry of Health, they assured that they did not know the Prime Minister’s intention to reveal the dates of the reopening and that he was not aware of the plan, according to the local newspaper mentioned. Minister of Health Yuli Edelstein recalled that children are still not vaccinated and demanded respect for the rules.

Currently, almost half of Israeli adults have received at least the first dose of the coronavirus vaccine and more than 3.1 million are fully vaccinated. Israel has so far recorded 42,045 active cases and 5,648 deaths in the pandemic.

Israel, the great Pfizer trial

The vaccination campaign, which is carried out only with the BioNTech / Pfizer formula, was a large trial of dose effectiveness, with a centralized health data system.

Until now, the effectiveness of the Pfizer vaccine had been proven through clinical trials: its validity was confirmed by analyzing data from about 1.2 million people in Israel, a country at the forefront of the vaccination and where the British variant circulates widely.

The authors of a study published Wednesday in the prestigious New England Journal of Medicine note that the vaccination reduced symptomatic cases of Covid-19 by 94%, severe cases of the disease by 92% and hospitalizations by 87%.

These figures apply to the protection obtained at least seven days after the second injection.

“This is the first peer-reviewed evidence of a vaccine’s effectiveness in real conditions,” he told the AFP Ben Reis, one of the co-authors of the study. The vaccine worked relatively evenly across all age groups, he said.

It has also been shown to be effective against the very possibility of getting infected (and not just the development of symptoms). This is crucial information, as it could indicate that people who have already been vaccinated can no longer transmit the virus, but it needs to be confirmed.

(With information from Europa Press and AFP)

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