Expert Believes Israel Risks Dropping Ball with 1.75 Million Unvaxxed

According to a top expert, there is a great danger of Israel repeating its past mistakes and not be able to protect itself from the next coronavirus wave, as the current number of infections wane. Professor Eran Segal warned that even though it seemed that the country had managed to beat the Delta variant due to the vaccines, it shouldn’t conclude that the nation would remain protected in the future because the current rate of inoculation is high enough. Hailing from the Weizmann Institute of Science, Segal is a computational biologist and a coronavirus statistician. 

He said that he was extremely pleased that Israel had beaten the fourth wave of COVID-19 without having to impose lockdowns, but he was concerned that there were still too many people who either hadn’t gotten vaccinated or hadn’t received the booster shot. He went on to say that doing so had been a mistake when the third wave had ended and doing the same would be wrong at the end of this wave as well. Professor Salman Zarka, the coronavirus czar, had said back in August that when the delta wave of the coronavirus hit, it was because the country had dropped the ball on COVID vaccination. 

Of the total 9.3 million people in Israel, there are 7 million citizens who are eligible for getting vaccinated. This is due to the fact that there is a significant number of people under the age of 12 who cannot currently receive the COVID vaccines, although this might change soon enough for kids over the age of 5. There are 650,000 people in the country who are eligible for the vaccines, but have not received a single shot, which has become a major point of concern for the entire medical community. It is also a fact that while Israel is the first to have introduced a campaign of delivering booster shots to the general population.

Yet, for every four people in Israel who get the third shot of the Pfizer vaccine, there is one person who refuses to do so. The booster shot has been administered to just under 4 million people in Israel, but there are still 1.1 million people who have not gotten the vaccine. This means that there is no vaccine protection for about 1.75 million Israeli citizens, or they lack what is regarded as optimum vaccine protection by the government. There is a broad agreement amongst top COVID analysts that during the thick of the Delta crisis, the vaccination rates had surged.

After all, the number of unvaccinated individuals had fallen to 650,000 from 1.4 million. When Israel had introduced the booster shot campaign in the country in August, they had also received an overall positive response from the population. Around 4 million people had gotten the shot, but 1.1 million had refused. However, now Israel is coming out of the danger zone and Segal is concerned that it might not consolidate its success. He said that the 1.1 million are not anti-vaxxers because they have already gotten two shots, so they can be convinced for the booster.