50% Israelis get first dose of vaccine, says ministry

JERUSALEM: Just over half of Israel’s population has had at least a first dose of the Pfizer-biontech coronavirus vaccine, the health ministry said on Friday in its latest update.

It said that 4.65 million of the country’s 9.29 million population had received a first shot, with 3.27 million of them geting the recommended second dose too.

Takeup of the second jab topped 85 per cent among people aged 70 and over, the ministry said.

Israel launched its massive inoculation operation on Dec.19, backed by a deal with Pfizer which mounted an airlit of its vaccine in exchange for biomedical data on its effects.

A first dose of the vaccine is 85 per cent effective two to four weeks ater its injection, Israel’s Sheba Hospital said last week in a study published in scientific journal The Lancet.

Pfizer’s product is 94 per cent effective against symptomatic cases of COVID-19, according to a study of 1.2 million people in Israel published in the New England Journal of Medicine on Wednesday, confirming data already made public in the Jewish state.

“This is the first peer-reviewed large scale evidence for the effectiveness of a vaccine in real world conditions,” said Ben Reis, a researcher at Harvard Medical School and one of the paper’s authors.

Despite the promising results, Israel has imposed a weekend night curfew over the carnival-like Jewish holiday of Purim, to dampen festive gatherings it fears could cause a spike in infection.

Since Thursday, people have been forbidden to stray more than 1,000 metres from home between 8:30pm and 5:00am daily and parties are banned. Gatherings are limited to a maximum of 10 people in closed spaces and 20 people in the open.

Purim typically includes costumes and boisterous public celebrations marking a story dating from fourth-century Persia that saw Jews defeat a murderous plot against them.

For many it also involves services in synagogues and shared meals.