The fourth corona wave hit Israel in the summer.

Now the country has apparently survived - according to the Israeli health authorities, mainly due to the widely administered third vaccination against the virus.

The number of Covid-19 patients in critical condition was 385 on Friday, the number of new infections every day was given by the Ministry of Health at 1700 - that was just under 1.5 percent of those tested.

This is a decrease of around 80 percent compared to the peak of the fourth wave at the beginning of September, when more than 10,000 new corona infections were recorded every day.

Since then, the numbers have fallen continuously.

Christian Meier

Editor in politics.

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Naftali Bennett, Israel's new prime minister, commended himself and his government in parliament this week for achieving this without imposing new lockdowns.

Bennett had been repeatedly criticized by his predecessor Benjamin Netanyahu after he took office in June.

Already after about four weeks, the current opposition leader Netanyahu poisoned in the Knesset with a view to the corona policy, how the new government actually managed to "destroy so much in such a short time".

The highly contagious Delta variant of the virus had just reached the country and pushed up the low number of infections.

Now Bennett's persistence has paid off

In fact, Bennett's approach differs from that of the previous government. Before the parliamentary election in March, the right-wing politician had advertised that there would be a better corona policy under him than under Netanyahu. A lockdown, he said, was not a political strategy, "it was a failure". In a book entitled “How to Beat a Pandemic”, he explained how the Israelis could “live with the virus”: using a sophisticated testing strategy and intelligent political decision-making processes - the opposite of what he believed to be bungling policies by Netanyahu.

Even under the impression of the increasing number of infections in the summer and increasing public criticism, Bennett continued to polemic against the three lockdowns imposed under his predecessor. Their costs would have been the equivalent of $ 62 billion, he claimed on Facebook in August. This is "our money, yours, that of our children and great-grandchildren". A new lockdown would ruin Israel economically, the prime minister warned.

At the same time, he called on the population to be vaccinated a third time.

His government adopted this strategy at an early stage: Booster vaccinations with the active ingredient from Pfizer / BioNTech were available from the end of July for people over the age of 60, provided that the second vaccination had been at least five months ago.

The “booster” was later also released for Israelis aged twelve and over.

In view of the information available at the time, it was quite risky.

Because even if studies had shown that the effect of the vaccine drops sharply after a few months, there was still no precise knowledge about the benefit of the third vaccination.

Ministers themselves admitted that the government, with its no lockdown strategy, accepted that people would die.

Now Bennett's persistence has paid off.

Representatives of the Israeli Ministry of Health presented their findings on the effect of third-party vaccinations in Israel to the American Food and Drug Administration (FDA) on Thursday: According to them, the number of infections fell rapidly in people over 60 years of age just two weeks after the booster vaccination in other population groups increased.

Above all, a severe course of the disease is prevented: In Israel, unvaccinated, often younger people now make up three quarters of seriously ill Covid patients in hospitals - around two months ago, half of the seriously ill were from the group of more than 60 years old who were vaccinated came.

An FDA panel of experts on Thursday also recommended booster shots of the Moderna vaccine for Americans over the age of 65, as well as for certain risk groups.

Corresponding booster vaccinations with Pfizer / BioNTech have already been approved in the USA.

In Israel, however, it was not only the third vaccination that depressed the number of infections: In addition, there was a mask requirement in public spaces and access restrictions in accordance with the 3G rule in public facilities.

Only now are the rules slowly being relaxed.