The rest of the world does not want to vaccinate young children yet, but in Israel they will just start. A panel of health experts this week gave the green light for the jabing of the 5 to 11-year-olds. No country in the world has gone this far.
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Precursor
Israel has been at the forefront from the very first moment, says Middle East correspondent Olaf Koens. “They were the first country to start early with a large-scale vaccination campaign. And last summer they were the first to start distributing booster vaccinations. It started only for healthcare workers and the elderly, later for everyone,” said Koens.
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He continues: “When we made a story about this for RTL Nieuws in August, the rest of the world was still skeptical about the booster vaccines. But in Israel they already noticed that the protection of vaccines simply weakens over time, and there are so they have to be updated. You could say that they are a few months ahead of the rest.”
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The rest of the world follows reluctantly. It also plays a role that if you start vaccinating late, you also have to give that third shot later. From 6 December, the Netherlands now wants to give a booster shot to all people over 60, to people over 18 who live in a care institution. Hospital staff can get that third shot from next week.
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Israeli Redding
“The third vaccine, the booster, has saved Israel. There is no doubt about it,” Gabriel Barbash, one of the country’s leading health experts, told German wave.
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The graph below shows that the number of infections as a result of that booster shot is now falling very fast again. After a strong revival that started this summer. The third peak was caused by the emergence of the contagious delta variant of the coronavirus. But the trend has reversed again.
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More than four million Israelis have already had that third shot, out of a population of nine million. There is, however, a downside; in the Palestinian territories occupied by Israel, the population had for a long time had no access to vaccines. That’s starting to come now. Although according to the World Health Organization WHO, only 50 percent of the people to be vaccinated there have had at least one shot.
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Epidemiologist Barbash acknowledges that the booster will eventually lose its effectiveness. “We will have to be vigilant. But I think life is going back to normal, to a new normal. Because we are not going to give up the mouth caps yet. They remain mandatory in closed spaces.”
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Stricter rules
This brings us to the next pillar under Israeli corona policy. The rules are stricter than with us, says Koens.
“A lockdown is really a strict lockdown there. When I was there last summer, the mouth caps had just been abolished, but they were quickly reintroduced when things went wrong again. To enter the country I even had to do a blood test. You can even do two PCR tests as a vaccinated person before you are allowed in,” says Koens.
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QR-code
Of course, the so-called green pass applies in Israel, or the QR code in combination with an identification document, which must be displayed in many places. The government’s approach has received approval from the majority of Israelis, although there is also a group that does not want to know anything about vaccinations.
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So things are going in the right direction in Israel and health expert Barbash tells Deutsche Welle: “Because of the speed of vaccination, we are a kind of laboratory for the whole world. We experience what the world is experiencing, but earlier than countries in Europe, or the US.”
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The Israeli scientists will now investigate how long the booster provides effective protection. Perhaps as sensible as OMTs and governments of other countries watch closely.
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