Israel leads the world in vaccination drive with 7% getting a dose
Israel leads the global vaccine race with 24/7, 150,000-dose-a-day drive that has already inoculated 7% of its population – but the UK is third and has delivered more jabs in total
- Israel has already given a dose of the vaccine to 644,000 of its 8.7million people
- Bahrain is second in the per-capita table, followed by the UK, US and Canada
- UK today became the first in the world to approve the Oxford/AstraZeneca shot
Israel is leading the global vaccination race with more than seven per cent of its population already given the jab in the space of nine days.
Some 644,000 people have received a dose of the Pfizer/BioNTech jab in the country of 8.7million, the highest per-capita rate in the world.
The rapid rollout in a country that prides itself on self-reliance comes after Israel’s health minister ordered a 24/7 vaccination drive, hundreds of military medics were drafted in to help with the effort and the country ordered shots from all three of Pfizer, Moderna and AstraZeneca in advance.
Israel is expected to launch a so-called ‘green passport’ scheme in January which means people immunised against Covid-19 will avoid having to quarantine if they travel from abroad or come into contact with a virus patient.
Bahrain is second in the global vaccine table, while Britain is third after handing out 800,000 doses in barely two weeks by Christmas Eve – with the UK set to ramp up its vaccine drive after today’s approval of the Oxford/AstraZeneca jab.
The US has given out the most vaccines outright after injecting more than 2.1million people, but president-elect Joe Biden has criticised delays in the rollout.
Europe started its own programme at the weekend after an EU regulator finally approved the Pfizer jab, with Portugal and Denmark making the fastest progress on the continent so far.
Israel is leading the global vaccine race after handing out vaccines to more than seven per cent of its population in nine days, with Bahrain second in the per-capita league table
The US has delivered more doses than any other country, but president-elect Joe Biden has criticised delays in the rollout. The UK has handed out the most in Europe so far
An Israeli military medic prepares to administer the Pfizer/BioNTech vaccine at a medical centre in Rishion LeZion on Monday
Israel’s health minister said on Wednesday that nearly 152,000 people had been vaccinated in a day, bringing the total well above half a million.
The 643,600 people vaccinated are already more numerous than the 412,398 people who have tested positive for coronavirus in Israel.
After two national lockdowns and more than 3,000 deaths, Israel began its mass vaccination programme on December 20 after PM Benjamin Netanyahu became the first citizen to get the jab.
Netanyahu, who has self-isolated three times after being exposed to Covid carriers, has called for more than two million people to be vaccinated within a month.
‘This is the critical stage, the first stage, because here is the population at risk, all the medical teams, all of the people over 60,’ he said.
‘As soon as we are done with this stage, within 30 days we can emerge from the coronavirus, open the economy and do things that no country can do.’
While only the Pfizer jab has been used so far, Israel also has shipments of the Moderna and AstraZeneca vaccines on order.
Israel’s justice ministry also announced it had asked Facebook to take down false anti-vaccine content as the government tries to drum up support for the programme.
Four Hebrew-language groups were removed for publishing texts, photographs and videos with ‘deliberately mendacious content designed to mislead about coronavirus vaccines’.
The fake news included spurious claims that vaccines would be used to plant government tracking chips in recipients’ bodies, poison them or subject them to medical experimentation.
Israel is followed in the global league table by Bahrain, where 56,041 people had been vaccinated out of a population of 1.7million by Tuesday evening.
Bahrain is using the Sinopharm vaccine developed by the Chinese pharmaceutical giant of the same name, which says the jab is 79 per cent effective.
China has struggled to gain trust for its vaccine candidates, hindered by a lack of transparency on test results, but it has been approved in Bahrain and the UAE.
It has also been slow to complete Phase 3 trials, which had to be conducted abroad due to China’s success at curbing the spread of Covid-19 within its own borders.
However, more than one million people have already been given vaccine doses in China under its emergency use programme.
They include frontline health workers, state-owned enterprise employees and workers planning to travel abroad.
Prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu became the first Israeli to get the vaccine on December 19, rolling up his sleeves at a medical centre in Ramat Gan
China plans to vaccinate millions more this winter in the run-up to Lunar New Year, and officials have vowed to ramp up capacity to more than one billion doses.
Beijing has pledged to share its vaccines at a relatively low cost – a potential boost for poorer Asian countries who are otherwise reliant on limited distribution offered by a global scheme.
Third in the global vaccine race is Britain, which approved the Pfizer jab before its EU neighbours or the United States.
Today the UK became the first to approve the Oxford/AstraZeneca jab, which unlike the Pfizer jab can be stored at normal fridge temperatures.
This means the Oxford vaccine is easier to roll out to places such as care homes and GP surgeries, paving the way for an even larger vaccination programme.
AstraZeneca chief executive Pascal Soriot told BBC Radio 4’s Today programme deliveries will be ramped up ‘very rapidly’ in the first and second week of January.
He added: ‘We will start delivering this week – maybe today or tomorrow we will be shipping our first doses.
‘The vaccination will start next week and we will get to one million a week and beyond that very rapidly.
‘We can go to two million. In January we will already possibly be vaccinating several million people and by the end of the first quarter we are going to be in the tens of millions already.’
Bahrain, where a woman is pictured receiving a vaccine in Manama last week, has approved both the Pfizer jab and another shot developed by Chinese firm Sinopharm
Asked whether two million vaccinations per week is possible, health secretary Matt Hancock told Times Radio: ‘That’s absolutely deliverable by the NHS.’
In the US, the two million people vaccinated so far are well short of a Trump administration target to immunise 20milloin people before the end of 2020.
President-elect Joe Biden criticised Trump’s vaccine rollout on Tuesday, warning it would take years at the current rate to deliver the necessary shots.
‘As I long feared and warned, the effort to distribute and administer the vaccine is not progressing as it should,’ Biden said.
Biden’s goal of ensuring that 100 million shots are administered by the end of his 100th day in office would mean ‘ramping up five to six times the current pace to one million shots a day,’ he added.
Earlier in the day, Biden’s vice president-elect Kamala Harris received her Moderna vaccine live on television in a bid to boost confidence.
Biden, 78, received his first dose of the vaccine last week and has vowed to make the pandemic his top priority when he takes office on January 20.
But Dr Atul Gawande, a member of Biden’s Covid-19 advisory board, told CBS News the transition team still did not have all the information it needed to understand the bottlenecks hampering vaccine distribution.
‘The realistic picture is to expect it could be fall before … enough people are being vaccinated that we’re getting back to normal and that it might be summer before the general public is really accessing the vaccine,’ he said.
