Israel’s ahead-of-the-world vaccine rollout offers hope for countries lagging behind - The Washington Post

Israel’s scientific results have allowed health officials to open the inoculation program to pregnant women and nursing mothers, while the findings also showed that it was safe for those with food allergies and autoimmune diseases.

Israel’s small population of about 9 million, and its universal national health system, makes it a natural vaccine lab for the world.

The program has inoculated more than 4.6 million people with at least the first injection, the fastest per capita pace of any country.

This data has allowed scientists from universities, the health ministry and Pfizer to track the vaccine’s impact with unprecedented speed.

“Sometimes when you go from clinical trials to the real world, you get different results,” said Hagai Levine, an epidemiologist at Hebrew University and chairman of the Israel Association of Public Health Physicians.

Still, the run of upbeat reports has reassured health officials who watched anxiously as the new vaccines were deployed within months, instead of the years that vaccine development has usually taken.

Some scholars cautioned that the good news had yet to be peer reviewed, but officials and pandemic-weary people worldwide, desperate for information, have devoured the findings.

Another major study, conducted jointly by Israel’s Ministry of Health and Pfizer and reported by the Israeli news site Ynet last week, showed a 93 percent plunge in serious covid disease and death among the vaccinated.

Analysts can create virtual control groups so it’s possible to compare hundreds of thousands of vaccinated people with unvaccinated people who share the same profiles.

They found two shots of the vaccine to be 94 percent effective in preventing symptomatic illness, a potentially pandemic-ending success rate if enough people are inoculated.

A study of 9,000 staffers at Sheeba Medical Center in Tel Aviv, for example, showed the Pfizer vaccine to reduce symptomatic cases by 85 percent after only one dose.

Israel’s rapid vaccine deployment is being closely watched around the world, as other nations grapple with their own uneven rollouts amid growing public frustration over health restrictions.

That said, there are major differences between Israel and other countries, and the quantity of vaccine doses is one.

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