COVID-19 vaccination in Israel

COVID-19 vaccination in Israel
Date19 December 2020 (2020-12-19) – present
LocationIsrael
CauseCOVID-19 pandemic in Israel
TargetFull immunisation of people in Israel against COVID-19
The President of Israel, Reuven Rivlin, with the first vaccinator in Phase B of the vaccine, at the Israel Institute for Biological Research, BriLife at the Barzilai Medical Center.

Israel's COVID-19 vaccination programme, officially named "Give a Shoulder" (Hebrew: לתת כתף),[1] began on 19 December 2020, and has been praised for its speed, having given twenty percent of the Israeli population the first dose of the vaccines' two dose regimen in the span of three weeks.[2][3][4]

As of June 26, 2021, about 64% of eligible Israelis have received at least one dose.[needs update] Coordinated vaccination drives by the country's health authorities, utilizing databases of personal information for Israeli patients, contributed to Israel's success in vaccinating a high proportion of its population in a short period of time, relative to the rest of the world.

According to a September 2021 study published in The Lancet, COVID-19 vaccination in Israel prevented an additional 158,665 infections, 24,597 hospitalisations, 17,432 severe or critical hospitalisations, and 5,532 deaths from December 20, 2020, to April 10, 2021.[5]

  1. ^ "280,000 Vaccinated in the First Week of the 'Give a Shoulder' Campaign". GOV.IL. Archived from the original on 2021-04-15. Retrieved 2021-04-14.
  2. ^ Ellyatt, Holly (8 January 2021). "Israel's Covid vaccine rollout is the fastest in the world — here are some lessons for the rest of us". CNBC. Archived from the original on 2021-08-15. Retrieved 2021-01-13.
  3. ^ Schwartz, Felicia (11 January 2021). "Israel's Covid-19 Vaccinations Hold Lessons for U.S." Wall Street Journal. ISSN 0099-9660. Archived from the original on 2021-07-12. Retrieved 2021-01-13.
  4. ^ Cite error: The named reference :3 was invoked but never defined (see the help page).
  5. ^ Haas, Eric J; McLaughlin, John M; Khan, Farid; Angulo, Frederick J; Anis, Emilia; Lipsitch, Marc; Singer, Shepherd R; Mircus, Gabriel; Brooks, Nati; Smaja, Meir; Pan, Kaijie (2021-09-22). "Infections, hospitalisations, and deaths averted via a nationwide vaccination campaign using the Pfizer–BioNTech BNT162b2 mRNA COVID-19 vaccine in Israel: a retrospective surveillance study". The Lancet Infectious Diseases. 22 (3): 357–366. doi:10.1016/s1473-3099(21)00566-1. ISSN 1473-3099. PMC 8457761. PMID 34562375.