Jerusalem (AFP)
Two million people will have received the double injection of the vaccine against the new coronavirus by the end of January in Israel, the country's authorities said on Sunday, where a third lockdown is in force.
The national vaccination campaign was launched on December 19 at a forced pace by Benjamin Netanyahu.
The Prime Minister, currently in the election campaign, had received his first injection of the vaccine from the American-German duo Pfizer-BioNtech live on television.
And, on Sunday, the director general of the Ministry of Health, Hezi Levi, claimed that about a fifth of Israel's nine million inhabitants - starting with healthcare workers and those over 60 - would have received their double injection "by the end of January".
"We should thus have inoculated two million residents," he said on Kan public radio.
This goal, however, appears less ambitious than that mentioned on December 26 by Mr. Netanyahu, according to whom a quarter of the population (2.25 million) should be immunized in a month thanks to the vaccination campaign.
The Hebrew state will reduce the pace of this campaign to manage vaccine stocks and ensure the injection at three week intervals of the two separate doses to the affected population, said Mr. Levi on Sunday.
As of Friday, one million people had received their first injection, according to the prime minister's office.
According to the program initially outlined, the Israeli government hoped for an end to the crisis in early March, just before the legislative news on March 23.
In the meantime, faced with a resumption in the number of infections, he decreed on December 27 a new almost generalized confinement of at least two weeks.
More than 435,800 people have been infected with the virus in Israel, according to the latest report released by the Minister of Health on Sunday, and 3,400 have died.
On Friday, the ministry also said it had recorded 18 cases of the British variant of the virus.
© 2021 AFP