By the time vaccines were made and started to be distributed, not many countries were really successful. But above all else, the country with the most successful vaccination programs in the Covid-19 pandemic is not the US or European countries, but Israel.
When the majority of countries vaccinated less than 1% of the population, Israel exceeded 20%. And recently, according to studies done in this country, the Covid-19 vaccination program has actually worked, as noted through the dramatically reduced rate of infection and hospitalization. However, the results also indicate that some vaccines – at least the Pfizer / BioNtech type – require two injections to be effective.
Pfizer realizes this advantage of Israel, and thus has provided great support for the immunization program in this country. The fact that earlier infection rates in Israel were also above average is also a factor in the faster implementation of the program. As a result, Israel received enough vaccines to vaccinate its entire population, while the world struggled to get what it needed.
Keeping its promise to deliver early results, the Israeli Ministry of Health and Maccabi Health Services have released a post-vaccination infection report. Accordingly, only 31: 163,000 vaccinated people were infected within 7-16 days before receiving the second shot. Meanwhile, the other group had up to 6,500 cases in the same period.
The comparison here is not perfect – since those who are injected tend to be concerned about and implement better measures of prevention. However, that was not something that could be used to explain the 200-fold difference. The Times of Israel reported that the vaccine was 92% effective, slightly lower than the 95% in clinical trials. The figures are really impressive, as the Maccabi study subjects had a higher average age than what Pfizer used to do.
The Israeli Ministry of Health’s target group is larger, and the results are similar. Within 1 week of the second injection, only 317 people out of a total of 715,425 were positive for Covid-19 – 0.04%.
Not only were the results similar to the clinical trial, but what happened in Israel also matched with Los Angeles county (USA). It is also a place where the number of infections has decreased significantly after vaccination.
In fact, the spread in Israel has decreased since January 14. However, at that time, the data could not be released, because it was not known whether it was the vaccine’s effectiveness or the other preventive measures. Because, many countries also achieve this achievement just by wearing a mask and restricting out.