Israel began injecting a third dose of the coronavirus vaccine into people 50 and older on Friday, after deciding overnight to lower the minimum age in hopes of tackling a new wave of contamination related to the Delta variant.
The Hebrew state had launched a campaign two weeks ago to allow people 60 and over to inject a third dose of vaccine, mainly from Pfizer / BioNTech laboratories, although the United States Drug Administration (FDA), which the Israeli authorities generally follow the recommendations, it has not ruled on this practice.
On the night of Thursday through Friday, Prime Minister Naftali Bennett announced that the minimum age for receiving this booster dose had been lowered to 50 years. “The vaccination campaign for the population aged 60 and over is a great success (…). This is an important step in the fight against the Delta variant and I ask everyone over 50 to line up tomorrow (Friday) to get vaccinated, ”he said in a press release, stating that this decision had been validated by a committee of experts.
More than 775,000 Israelis have received a third dose, according to the latest data from the Health Ministry. Among them, the 56-year-old Health Minister Nitzan Horowitz, who received him this Friday. “We are the first in the world to do this,” he said, adding that Israel faces a “wide spread of the infection.”
Nitzan Horowitz said he hoped to avoid a return to the drastic limitations imposed three times by the government during the pandemic. “Containment is the last resort, it is not an effective solution,” he said.
Israel’s main health organization Clalit vaccinated about 5,000 people between the ages of 50 and 60 on Friday morning, according to Ran Balicer, the organization’s director of innovations, also head of the national committee of experts on Covid-19.
Israel was one of the first countries to launch a mass vaccination campaign in mid-December under an agreement with Pfizer that quickly delivered millions of paid doses in exchange for data on the effect and effectiveness of the vaccine in its population.
This campaign had drastically reduced the number of cases, but in recent weeks contamination has risen again with the spread of the Delta variant in unvaccinated adults but also in people vaccinated more than six months ago.
Hence the challenge of local health authorities to inject booster doses in the hope of strengthening the protection conferred by vaccines in the elderly, who are at higher risk.
