Israel vaccinated its two millionth citizen, Etty Shemesh, on Tuesday at a small ceremony in Ashdod. Shemesh is a school principal and an educator for 28 years. She was inoculated at a Leumit vaccination complex, in the presence of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and Health Minister Yuli Edelstein.Israel will fully release its economy in March, Netanyahu said at the event, and will gradually release it “long before that.”He said that he heard that in Europe there is talk of locking down until April.”Not with us,” Netanyahu said, “but only if we vaccinate and keep” the rules.On Tuesday, one day after the country expanded its coronavirus vaccination campaign to people over the age of 55, the Health Ministry announced that beginning Wednesday, Israelis 50-54 will also be able to get the jab, too.To make an appointment, people should contact their health funds, the ministry said.
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The expansion of the circle of people who can be vaccinated was made possible due to the delivery of some 700,000 new vaccine doses that arrived in Israel on Monday. More are scheduled to come next week, and according to Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, hundreds of thousands should arrive each week until around 5 million Israelis are inoculated by the end of March.In addition, the health funds have committed to increasing the number of people who can be vaccinated to as many as 200,000 a day.”On Sunday, we witnessed another wave, this time not of disease, but the second wave of vaccines arriving every week,” Edelstein said. “There is no shortage of vaccines in Israel.”The vaccination of educational staff also began on Tuesday, but not without frustrations.Senior officials in the Health Ministry said that “after dragging their feet and a prolonged and unnecessary delay on the part of the education minister, the Health Ministry received the list of teaching staff that could be vaccinated.The list was then transferred to the appropriate health funds so that appointments could be made.
“While the health minister is busy bringing in vaccines, along with the prime minister, and running the best vaccination campaign in the world, the education minister has taken care to put his feet up in endless bureaucracy, just to try to show control,” the officials said. The Education Ministry had reported Monday night that more than 17,000 teachers registered to be vaccinated in the first 24 hours of the campaign. In Ashdod, Edelstein celebrated Shemesh’s vaccination as part of the campaign to get all educational staff immune to coronavirus.
“As we saw here, Etty Shemesh, a veteran educator, head of a division in Ashdod, received the vaccine as part of the teaching staff,” Edelstein said. “We are very happy that today they [teachers] are starting to get vaccinated. This is important both in protecting the educational staff and in preventing quarantines that have burdened the education system.”
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