Israel kicked off its Corona COVID-19 inoculation campaign with a bang in the last week of December 2020, ratcheting it up to an incredible 150,000 inoculations per day. This dizzy pace has carried on unabated for the last three weeks, with almost two million members of the public already with their first dose of RNA supplied by Pfizer.
The Government’s target is to have every citizen over the age of 16 inoculated twice by the end of March 2021, allowing the country to return to normalcy. This means administering some 14 million individual Covid shots in around 12 weeks flat.
Already by the end of the first week in January, 100 per cent of the residents of retirement homes have been vaccinated, along with 80 per cent of those over the age of sixty. At this early stage, police, first responders and the medical staff of hospitals and clinics who want to be, have been inoculated and next in line are teachers in the education system from Kindy to high school.
Because of its greased lightning approach to the solution of this crisis, both Pfizer and Moderna have acceded to Israel’s request and jumped them to the top of the world queue giving Israel early delivery of massive supplies and, by doing so, giving themselves a real time opportunity to evaluate the efficacy of their own new RNA inoculations. A Win Win.
Israel is uniquely placed to succeed with this quest. It has a taxpayer-funded public health system that is designed to be competitive and efficient. Public health providers compete with each other in the market place to grow their membership. They do this by being more efficient and providing better and more far-reaching health services to their members. The more members they can attract, the bigger the slice of the health pie they receive from the treasury.
The health providers through their medical records are able to target their membership by age and vulnerability and send them an SMS inviting them to be inoculated at a certain time and place close to their own homes. This is coupled with the IDF which is providing hundreds of army medics to the health system to both help inoculate and to assist in running the pop-up clinics.
Further, Israel has drafted the Global Generic drug maker TEVA into this campaign. TEVA has made available its minus 70 Celsius freezers needed to safely store the inoculations at its state of the art distribution centre at Ben Gurion’s Airport City. TEVA is also assisting in the distribution of the inoculations to the clinics and hospitals throughout the country.
In addition, much to NZ list MP Golriz Ghahraman’s dismay, Israel this week already sent initial emergency supplies to the Palestinian Territories in Judea and Samaria even though none were requested by the Palestinian Authority and even though under the Oslo agreements Israel has no responsibility to do so. So much for the shrill accusations of “Vaccination Apartheid” made by her ilk and published by various anti-Israel NZ media outlets.
I wonder how well the NZ Health System will shape up to this enormous challenge? With a population half that of Israel’s, will New Zealand be able to vaccinate the NZ population in six weeks flat?
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