Israel has rolled out the fastest Covid-19 vaccination campaign in the world, inoculating more than 42% of its population since late December. The small country -- with roughly nine million people, about the same as New York City -- now aims to inoculate the majority of its population by March.
While Israel's vaccination campaign is relatively simple compared with the mass mobilizations needed by countries such as the U.S. that have many more people spread over a greater sweep of geography, the effort offers some clear lessons.
Dispatch Smaller Vaccine Shipments
The Pfizer Inc.-BioNTech SE vaccine must be administered within five days after it leaves the main storage center and within six hours after a diluent is added before five to six doses are extracted from a vial.
To cope with that short shelf life and to reach less-populated and isolated areas, Israel -- with Pfizer's approval -- devised a system to split the company's 1,000-dose packages into smaller batches of a few hundred each. Workers repackage the vials in workstations equipped with massive freezers.
Israel, like most other countries, began by giving priority to medical professionals, people over 60 and those with high-risk conditions. In early February. it expanded the campaign to everyone over 16, while more actively encouraging older citizens to get inoculated.
Use Dedicated Vaccination Sites
Many of the vaccine sites are at large venues such as sports arenas or are being set up in tents inside cities, away from clinics and hospitals, allowing more people immediate access. These dedicated vaccination centers are staffed by doctors and nurses from public healthcare providers, making staffing easier. Israel's four health maintenance organizations are also operating mobile vaccine stations and a drive-through site to increase access. Israel's military is also pitching in, sending 700 medics in the reserves to assist at 104 of nearly 300 vaccination sites.
Refine Administrative Acts
Israel's healthcare providers are reaching out early and often to those eligible to receive vaccines, via applications, text messages and websites.
Israel, which is providing the vaccine free of charge to everyone, is also developing a passport system that would allow those who have been vaccinated to show a certificate on their cellphone to avoid quarantining after travel and to access places such as event halls, arenas and restaurants.
Reach Out to Minority Groups
Ahead of the vaccine rollout, public-health officials lobbied the country's minority groups that would be less disposed to take the vaccine: the ultra-Orthodox and Israel's Arab population, which together make up about 33% of the population.
Public-health officials met with ultra-Orthodox rabbis and leaders in Arab communities to get them to back the vaccination campaign. Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu made a special effort to visit Arab towns as part of his public-relations campaign.
Public-health officials traveled to ultra-Orthodox towns to meet with rabbis and dispatched Arabic speakers to Arab towns to meet with health professionals. They outlined all of the available information to indicate that the vaccine is safe and effective. They secured the signoff of the ultra-Orthodox leadership, which issued a statement urging anyone who could to get the vaccine.
Early Data Suggests Significant Drop in Infections After Second Dose
A study by Clalit, Israel's largest healthcare provider, showed a 94% drop in symptomatic Covid-19 infections among 600,000 people who received two doses of Pfizer's vaccine.
The vaccinated group was also 92% less likely to develop severe illness from the disease, according to the study. It compared 600,000 people who got the vaccine with a group of the same size and similar medical histories that didn't.
Clalit said the study, which was carried out with a team from Harvard University, included 430,000 people who were between 16 and 59 years of age, and 170,000 who were over 60. It was the first of its kind to show such a high level of efficacy for Pfizer's vaccine for those aged 70 and higher due to the limited scope of the clinical trials.
The study shows that Pfizer's vaccine is very effective in real life one week after the second dose, said Prof. Ran Balicer, Clalit's chief innovation officer and one of the study's authors, in a statement published with the study on Feb. 14 . The vaccine is even more effective two weeks after the second shot, he said.
Pfizer says its vaccine only reaches full effectiveness after two doses.
Separately, researchers at the central-Israel based Weizmann Institute found that in relation to previous lockdowns, hospitalizations and serious illness among those first vaccinated -- meaning those 60 and older -- dropped 48%, while deaths decreased 50% among that group. For those aged 55-60, the next most-vaccinated group, researchers found a 36% decrease in hospitalizations and 30% decrease in serious illness.
"Gradually the groups that are further away from their vaccination start date become less and less hospitalized," said Eran Segal, a computational biologist at the Weizmann Institute of Science.
After imposing a third lockdown in December to contain a resurgence in infections, Israel has begun to loosen restrictions in recent days.
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