Israel announced Sunday lowering to 12 years the minimum age to receive a 3rd dose of vaccine against the coronavirus in order to fight against an increase in contamination, linked to the Delta variant.
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"
Today, we are extending the possibility of receiving the booster, the 3rd dose of the vaccine, to the entire population, provided that 5 months have elapsed since the injection of the second dose
", declared the director general of the ministry of Health, Nachman Ash, at a news conference broadcast on television. "
The third vaccine is immediately open to all people over 12 years old,
" Health Minister Nitzan Horowitz said on Twitter. Emphasizing "
the effectiveness of the booster
" according to "
the latest studies
", he called on all citizens to be vaccinated.
The Hebrew state launched a campaign at the end of July to allow people aged 60 and over to be injected a third dose of vaccine, mainly from the pharmaceutical giant Pfizer / BioNTech.
Read alsoThird dose of vaccine against Covid-19: should serological tests be required to check the level of antibodies?
It has since gradually lowered the minimum age of access, despite the call from the World Health Organization (WHO) for a moratorium on these third booster doses, in order to leave more vaccines to poor countries. , where the 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.
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More than 5.4 million people received two doses of the vaccine in Israel, 58% of the population, and more than 1.9 million a third.
The Hebrew state was 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.
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.
The country surpassed the mark of one million people infected on August 24 since the start of the pandemic.
In total, more than 6,950 people have died from the coronavirus in Israel.
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