Israeli Health Minister Yuli Edelstein reported the country has delivered 380,000 inoculations against coronavirus in eight days, prizing Israel with the title of the fastest rate of vaccination rate per capita in the world.
A total of 169,000 doses of the Pfizer/BioNTech vaccine were given over the weekend of 26-27 December.
Israel is set to enter its third national lockdown to quell positive cases of Covid-19, which have gone over 5,000 daily infections in the last reported 2 days.
Prime Minister - and first Israeli to receive the vaccine - Benjamin Netanyahu announced on 26 December that if the country maintains its current pace of vaccinations, then 25% of the country’s 9.1 million residents will be inoculated by the end of January.
Prof. Jonathan Halevy, president of Shaare Zedek Medical Center in Jerusalem, said he believes the government. “They have delivered the goods. I don’t see any reason we will not reach this number,” he said.
“It is a game-changer. I don’t know if we will reach 150,000 per day, but 100,000 we will readily reach. I can see 2 million people inoculated in January,” he said.
“If we vaccinate 2 million people in a month and there are already some 1 million Israelis – though statistics say about 400,000 – who have or had coronavirus, we are in good shape to reach herd immunity for the population, which I would say is somewhere in the 60% -70% range,” Halevy said.
In November, it was announced that Isreal had struck a deal to receive 1 million doses of the Oxford/Astrazeneca vaccine, which was approved for use early on 30 December.
