A new measure to try to counter the Delta variant in Israel.
The Hebrew state announces this Tuesday to lower to 30 the minimum age to receive a third dose of vaccine against Covid-19.
"The injection of a third dose of vaccine is authorized for people 30 years and over from today," said the Ministry of Health in a statement.
Three weeks earlier, Israel launched a campaign to allow people aged 60 and over to be injected primarily with a third dose of the vaccine.
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from pharmaceutical giant Pfizer / BioNTech.
The country has since gradually lowered the minimum age, despite the call from the World Health Organization (WHO) for a moratorium on these booster doses, in order to leave more vaccines to poor countries, where the rate vaccination rate remains low.
Israeli Prime Minister Naftali Bennett replied that the administration of these doses in Israel, a country of nine million inhabitants, would not affect global stocks and would allow the effectiveness of a third dose to be tested.
A step ahead
More than 5.4 million people received two doses of the vaccine in Israel, 58% of the population, and more than 1.5 million a third.
The Hebrew state had been one of the first countries to launch, in mid-December, a vast vaccination campaign thanks to an agreement with Pfizer which had quickly delivered millions of paid doses in exchange for data on the effectiveness of the vaccine on its population.
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This campaign has drastically reduced infections, but in recent weeks contaminations have increased again with the spread of the Delta variant in unvaccinated adults but also in people vaccinated more than six months ago.
Monday, 9,831 new patients were detected by the Ministry of Health, the highest figure since January. That same day, the country exceeded the mark of one million people infected since the start of the pandemic. In total, more than 6,800 people have died from the coronavirus in Israel.
