COVID sickness dropped 95.8% after both Pfizer shots - Israeli Health Ministry
JERUSALEM, (Reuters) - The risk of illness from COVID-19 dropped 95.8% among people who received both shots of Pfizer's vaccine, Israel's Health Ministry said yesterday.
The vaccine was also 98% effective in preventing fever or breathing problems and 98.9% effective in preventing hospitalizations and death, the ministry said.
The findings were based on data collected nationally through Feb. 13 from Israelis who had received their second shot at least two weeks previously. According to the Health Ministry's website, about 1.7 million people had been administered a second shot by Jan. 30, making them eligible to be included. Israel's ambitious vaccination drive has made it the largest real-world study of Pfizer’s vaccine and Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said on Saturday he expects 95% of Israelis age 50 and over to be vaccinated in the next two weeks.
Previous reports from individual health care providers also showed positive results, spurring Israel to remove restrictions on the economy after weeks of lockdown. On Sunday, schools and many stores will be allowed to reopen.
The Thursday before last President Irfaan Ali went before Parliament and told his party MPs, “The key word of my Government is ‘oneness.’” Whatever that means. An either puzzled or more likely disinterested citizenry learnt that the government intended to establish a One Guyana Commission so they would no longer, it was maintained, be held ransom to partisan politics and partisan ambition. “It is time to set those two impostors aside,” said the head of state, “and to embrace in their place the virtuous cause of patriotic duty.”
Guyanese are no strangers to nebulous notions promoted by their politicians, and many of them no doubt cast a cynical eye on this latest contribution to the public discourse. Most citizens, if not all of them, would be offended by any suggestion they are not patriotic; they have no doubts about where they stand in relation to foreign states, and within the ambit of the nation they would consider their goals for the country patriotic in so far as they want the best for it. It is just that a substantial number of them, including President Ali’s own supporters, consider that the way to achieve this is through what he would call partisan means. In other words, patriotism and partisanship are not opposite ends of the same pole; they each have their own distinct matrices.
The Commission which will be established by an Act of Parliament will be led by Prime Minister Mark Phillips, and its purpose, said the head of state, would be to identify practical steps to fuse our ‘one’ society, encompassing and respecting the diversity from which our “oneness” originates. The least that can be said about this is that it sounds like a contradiction in terms. Diversity in and of itself will not generate ‘oneness’. That kind of ‘unity’ normally presupposes a common foundation for the society and greater homogeneity than is evident here.
The practical steps the President identified included the institutional strengthening of the Ethnic Relations Commission to make it more effective, although he did not specify the nature of the measures he had in mind to achieve this. While the ERC clearly needs reform, particularly in terms of its membership, it might be remarked that it has possibly always been expected to perform in a way it was never structured to do. Suffice it to say that kind of body is best suited to address cases of individual or group discrimination and instances of hate speech. It is not designed – and should not be – to manage large-scale issues of ethnic antagonism or manage ‘national conversations’ on racial issues, although it can contribute to them. As has been reported, it has recently brought cases under the Racial Hostility Act, a law which has been sleeping undisturbed on our statute books for years. At least that is a move in the right direction.