Prime Minister Naftali Bennett, Health Minister Nitzan Horowitz and several senior health officials are going to meet on Wednesday to discuss the campaign to inoculate children ages 5-11 against the coronavirus, the day after a US expert panel voted overwhelmingly to recommend the Food and Drug Administration authorized the Pfizer vaccine for the cohort, saying the benefits of the shot outweigh the risks.
Israel has a population of 9.3 million, about 7.3 million of whom are over the age of 12 and therefore eligible for the inoculation – at least age-wise.
As of Wednesday, 6.2 million Israelis had received at least one dose of vaccine, 5.7 million at least two and 3.9 million have already been administered the booster.
The possibility to inoculate the cohort 5-11 – about 1.27 million children – is set to give a significant contribution in reaching a very high coverage and potentially herd immunity, preventing the virus from further circulating (at least as long as the efficacy of the vaccine lasts or a new vaccine-resistant variant emerges).
In an interview on channel 12, Head of Public Health Services Dr. Sharon Alroy-Price said that the process to start inoculation will likely take a few weeks and it is going to be carried out with complete transparency to reassure the parents.
Medical staff receive their third COVID-19 vaccine shot at Meir Medical Center in Kefar Sava, August 13, 2021. (credit: AVSHALOM SASSONI/FLASH90)
In the meantime, morbidity in Israel continued to decrease.
Some 727 new cases were identified on Tuesday, with 0.85% of the 91,000 tested resulting positive. A week earlier they were 1,147 and two weeks before 1,817.
The number of serious patients also continued to decrease and dropped to 237. A month earlier it stood at 662.
As of Wednesday, the country had less than 11,000 active cases. At the peak of the fourth wave in September, they were over 80,000.
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