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Tel Aviv: More than 10% of Israel’s people have received its first dose of the coronavirus vaccine, a rate that has overtaken the rest of the world and at a critical juncture has tarnished the domestic image of the country’s leader Benjamin Netanyahu.
According to data compiled by our government mostly from local government sources, the Israeli campaign, which began on December 20, distributed vaccines up to three times as much of its population as the second fastest nation, the small Persian Gulf empire of Bahrain, according to data compiled by our government.
In contrast, less than 1% of the United States population and only small portions of the people in many European countries received vaccine supplements in China, the United States, and the UK by 2020, according to our world data. Each delivered higher doses overall.
“This is a surprising story,” said Professor Ran Bowler, chair of the National Advisory Team of Experts who are counselling the Israeli government on its response to COVID-19.
According to other Israeli experts, Israel’s heavily digitized, community-based health system – all citizens must, by law, be registered with one of the country’s four HMOs – and its centralized government proved adept at national immunization campaigns Have done.
With a total population of 9 million, Israel’s relatively small size has played a role, said Baliser, who is also the chief innovation officer for CLAT, the biggest of the nation’s four HMOs.
An aggressive procurement effort assisted set the stage.
The Minister of Health, Yuli Edelstein, said in an interview on Friday that Israel had negotiated with vaccine makers as an “early bird”, and that the HMO’s reputation for efficiency and collecting reliable data led to companies supplying Israel Was interested in
“We are leaders of the world race due to our initial preparations,” he said.
Israel broke down in October primarily due to internal political conflicts, confusing instructions and a lack of public confidence in the government. The country struggled to cope with an increase in cases of coronavirus and deaths relative to population size.
While sanctions imposed in the fall reduced the number of new coronavirus cases, in recent weeks, Israel has seen an increase of more than 5,000 to send the country back to third if they were partially locked-down. Over 420,000 Israelis have been infected, and 3,325 have been killed.
Israeli officials have not made public the exact number of vaccine doses it has received so far, or how much it has paid for them, saying the agreements are confidential. But if it turns out that Israel is overpaid compared to other countries, Edelstein noted, the cost would still be worth it compared to reopening Israel’s economy a week earlier than it might otherwise have done.
Professor Jonathan Helieve, president of the Shaare Zedek Medical Center in Jerusalem, said that was initially the “right strategy”.
Israel preferred health workers and citizens 60 and older, with Edelstein saying the majority of its high-risk residents should receive the second of two doses of the Pfizer-BioNotech vaccine by the end of January. About 150,000 Israelis are being vaccinated every single day.
Netanyahu – who is on trial under the charges of bribery, fraud and breach of trust – created the vaccination campaign as a personal mission, taking credit for signing agreements and acquiring millions of doses from Pfizer with modern and other companies.
Israel is headed for another election in March, the country’s fourth in two years. Netanyahu makes his fight for political survival increasingly likely to emerge from the epidemic-causing health and economic crisis. They excluded the possibility of Israel becoming the first country in the world to be fully vaccinated.
After being blamed for misrepresenting the crisis last year, the Prime Minister also received praise from some critics for his efforts.
“We will not blame PM Netanyahu for all of Israel’s ills – correctly, most of the time – and later ignore his contribution when something works”, Gideon Levy, a columnist for this week’s left-handed Hertz newspaper Has written.
Netanyahu became the first Israeli to vaccinate against COVID-19 on December 19, saying he required to set an example. On Tuesday, he dropped at a Jerusalem facility to congratulate the 500,000th Israeli for receiving a vaccine.
To encourage high turnout among the country’s Arab minorities, he visited a vaccination centre in the city of Tira in central Israel on Thursday. Arab citizens, who make up one-fifth of the population, hesitate more than others to get vaccinated.
“We brought millions of vaccines here compared to any other country in the world relative to our population,” Netanyahu said, “We brought them for everyone: Jews and Arabs, religious and secular.”
“Come and get vaccinated,” he urged
Arab representatives say they are battling a flood of germs about the vaccine in Arabic news and social media. Mayor of Umm al-Fahm Drs. Sameer Subhi, where Netanyahu and Edelstein visited on Friday, told Israeli television that they had sent a voice message to over 25,000 phones in the sector urging people to vaccinate and describe the fight against the virus. Sacred to all. ”
Israel’s ultra-Orthodox Jewish community, mightily struggling with the epidemic, was also seen as a population that may oppose vaccination. But those initial fears seem to be spreading.
Rabbi Yitzchok Zilberstein, a prominent ultra-Orthodox authority in Jewish law, issued a public ruling after consulting with Baliser that any threats posed by the vaccine were negligible compared to the dangers of the virus. Many important figures from the community were photographed to obtain the vaccine.
So far, the government’s vaccination campaign has not extended to Palestinians in the occupied West Bank and Gaza Strip, who do not yet have access to any vaccination. The Palestinian Authority does not publicly request them. Law experts and human rights activists said that Israel was obliged to provide vaccines to Palestinians.
The United Nations humanitarian agency for the occupied regions said the recent week that the Palestinian Authority had applied for financial assistance from the global vaccine-sharing system Kovacs and worked with international organizations on logistics.
Edelstein stated the government’s first obligation was to its own citizens, but it was in Israel’s interest to help suppress Palestinians’ transition. “If God wills, there will be a situation where we can say that we are in a situation to help others,” he said, “no doubt.”
At an HMO headquarters in Jerusalem recent week, the situation was calm and orderly. A constant stream of the public was seated in small booths and got injected within a minute or two of their arrival – much less than when it took them to get on the phone to make an appointment. Was.
In Tel Aviv, City Hall and Sorsky Medical Center said that to meet the demand, they were opening a large vaccination centre in the city’s iconic Rabin Square in the first week of January.
Facilities are being accommodated on behalf of young Israelis, who have shown up with older relatives and sometimes called on the general public not to store the remaining trays of weary vaccines instead of throwing them away until the next day Huh.
“We use every drop,” Sharon Alory-Preuss, a senior Health Ministry official, said on television on Thursday.