VACCINATION start-up seen as near in Israel.

Millions of Palestinians will have to wait

RAMALLAH, West Bank — Israel will begin rolling out a major coronavirus vaccination campaign next week after the prime minister reached out personally to the head of a major drug company. Millions of Palestinians living under Israeli control will have to wait much longer.

Worldwide, rich nations are snatching up scarce supplies of new vaccines as poor countries largely rely on a World Health Organization program that has yet to get off the ground. There are few places where the competition is playing out in closer proximity than in Israel and the territories it has occupied for more than half a century.

Next year could bring a sharp divergence in the trajectory of the pandemic, which until now has blithely ignored the national boundaries and political enmities of the Middle East. Israelis could soon return to normal life and an economic revival, even as the virus continues to menace Palestinian towns and villages just a few miles away.

Israel reached an agreement with the Pfizer pharmaceutical company to supply 8 million doses of its newly approved vaccine.

Israel has mobile vaccination units with refrigerators that can keep the Pfizer shots at the required minus 94 degrees Fahrenheit. It plans to begin vaccinations as soon as next week, with a capacity of more than 60,000 shots a day. Israel reached a separate agreement with Moderna earlier this month to purchase 6 million doses of its vaccine — enough for another 3 million Israelis.

Palestinians will have to wait for the cash-strapped Palestinian Authority, which administers parts of the occupied West Bank in accordance with interim peace agreements reached in the 1990s. Israel captured the West Bank, the Gaza Strip and east Jerusalem, territories the Palestinian seek for their future state, in the 1967 Mideast war.

The Palestinian Authority hopes to get vaccines through a WHO- led partnership with humanitarian organizations known as COVAX, which aims to provide free vaccines for up to 20% of the population of poor countries, many of which have been hit especially hard by the pandemic.

Meanwhile, the WHO said Thursday that countries in the Asia-Pacific region are not guaranteed to have early access to covid-19 shots and urged them to adopt a long-term approach to the pandemic.

“The development of safe and effective vaccines is one thing. Producing them in adequate quantities and reaching everyone who needs them is another,” WHO Regional Director Dr. Takeshi Kasai told reporters in the Indonesian capital, Jakarta.

While some countries that have independent vaccine purchase agreements might start vaccination campaigns in the coming months, others could see vaccination begin in the middle or late 2021, said Dr. Socorro Escalante, WHO’s coordinator for essential medicines and health technologies.

“It’s important to emphasize that most, if not all, the countries in the Western Pacific region are a part of the COVAX Facility,” said Escalante. “Within the COVAX Facility we are expecting that the vaccines will be coming in on the second quarter of 2021.”

WHO representatives also urged that high- risk groups should be prioritized for vaccination as vaccines will only be available in limited quantities.

Separately, Sweden’s King Carl XVI Gustaf said Thursday that he believes his country has failed to protect the elderly in care homes from the effects of the pandemic.

“I think we have failed. We have a large number who have died and that is terrible. It is something we all suffer with,” the monarch said.

His comments followed the conclusions presented Tuesday by an independent commission that looked into Sweden’s handling of the pandemic. It said that elderly care in Sweden has major structural shortcomings and authorities have proved unprepared and ill-equipped to meet the pandemic.

Sweden has stood out among European and other nations for the way it has handled the pandemic, long not mandating lockdowns like other nations but relying on citizens’ sense of civic duty. The Scandinavian country has seen more than 7,800 virus-related deaths.

In September, Sweden lifted a national ban on visiting elderly people in care homes, saying the need had decreased. The ban came after the bulk of Sweden’s deaths earlier this year were recorded among people above the age of 70, and many in nursing homes.

“You think of all the family members who have not been able to say goodbye to their deceased family members,” the king said in an excerpt of a pre- recorded Christmas interview to be broadcast Dec. 21 on Swedish broadcaster SVT. “I think it is a heavy and traumatic experience not to be able to say a warm goodbye.”

Mats Melin, head of the commission that penned the report, said the blame for structural shortcomings in Sweden’s health care system could be placed on several authorities and organizations.

“One should be able to trust that society works and it also exists when you get older. Anything else is not worthy of a welfare state like ours,” Swedish Prime Minister Stefan Lofven told a news conference.