Israel on Friday began injecting a third dose of the coronavirus vaccine into people aged 50 and over, after deciding overnight to lower the minimum age in hopes of tackling a new wave of contamination linked to the Delta variant. .

The Hebrew state had launched a campaign two weeks ago to allow people aged 60 and over to be injected a third dose of vaccine, mainly from Pfizer / BioNTech laboratories, although the United States Medicines Agency (FDA), which the Israeli authorities generally follow the recommendations, has not ruled on this practice.

A third dose already received by 775,000 Israelis

On the night of Thursday to Friday, Prime Minister Naftali Bennett announced that the minimum age for receiving this booster dose had been lowered to 50 years. “The campaign to vaccinate the population aged 60 and over is a great success (...). This is an important step in the fight against the Delta variant and I call on everyone over the age of 50 to line up tomorrow (Friday) morning to get vaccinated, ”he said in a press release, stating that this decision had been validated by a committee of experts.

More than 775,000 Israelis have received a third dose, according to the latest data from the Ministry of Health.

Among them, the Minister of Health Nitzan Horowitz, 56, who received it this Friday.

“We are the first in the world to do this,” he said, adding that Israel was facing a “wide spread of the infection”.

Nitzan Horowitz said he hoped to avoid a return to the drastic limitations imposed three times by the government during the pandemic.

"Containment is the last resort, it is not an effective solution," he said.

Contamination on the rise in recent weeks

Israel's main health organization, Clalit, vaccinated some 5,000 people between the ages of 50 and 60 on Friday morning, according to Ran Balicer, the organization's director of innovations, also head of the national expert committee on Covid-19.

Israel was one of the first countries to launch a massive vaccination campaign in mid-December under an agreement with Pfizer that quickly delivered millions of paid doses in exchange for data on the effect. and the effectiveness of the vaccine on its population.

This campaign had made it possible to drastically drop the number of cases, but in recent weeks contamination has started to rise again with the spread of the Delta variant in unvaccinated adults but also in people vaccinated more than six months ago.

Hence the challenge of local health authorities to inject booster doses in the hope of strengthening the protection conferred by vaccines in the elderly, who are at greater risk.

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