Israel’s Health Minister Nitzan Horowitz has announced that Israelis may soon have to receive a fourth dose of COVID-19 vaccine. The country’s top coronavirus official Salman Zarka warned that Israel may already see the start of a fifth wave of infections.
“It’s not unreasonable to think that we need a fourth dose of vaccine,” Horowitz said in an interview with Channel 12 on Wednesday after Health Department data showed that nine percent of the new infections detected on Tuesday occurred in people who have already been infected three times have been vaccinated. Israel has vaccinated its population almost entirely with Pfizer Biontech.
Coronavirus officer Salman Zarka, who heads pandemic management, said he believes Israel is already experiencing the next wave: “We are not between the waves, we are at the beginning of a new wave,” Zarka said publicly on Wednesday -legal sender channel Such an increase was not expected with a possible fifth wave. Rather, it was thought that a new variant imported from abroad could cause problems or that it would spread from Europe, said Zarka. “The ascent is too early and too fast now. I don’t want to call it the fifth wave or a new wave at all. “
Israel started vaccinating children as young as five this week. The Times of Israel reports that the increase in the number of infections is due to children. According to this, some commentators have described the current rise in infections as a “wave of children”. Ilana Gans, chief of staff for the public health services department at the Ministry of Health, said Wednesday that around 30,000 young children in Israel have vaccination appointments. About a million children are entitled to the vaccination.
According to the Times of Israel polls, however, there are strong reservations among the Israeli population about vaccinating children. Health Minister Horowitz is convinced, however, that the first registrations for child vaccinations are an encouraging sign that vaccination of children will be possible on a larger scale.