i24 News – Israel will offer the updated Covid booster shots from Pfizer/BioNTech, designed to combat the omicron BA.4/5 subvariants, by the end of September, a senior health official said Wednesday.
Salman Zarka, Israel’s Covid task force chief, urged those at risk to take the booster along with a flu shot, though anyone above the age of 12 and at least three months from a previous shot or Covid illness would be eligible.
“We have been preparing for a while for winter and looking at the possibility of two illness waves in the country – flu and the coronavirus, two waves we have seen elsewhere in the world,” Zarka told reporters.
Around half of Israel’s 9.4 million population already has three vaccine doses and around 850,000 people have four, according to Health Ministry data.
More than 4.5 million Covid cases have been confirmed in Israel since the start of the pandemic, with 11,667 recorded deaths.
Pfizer/BioNTech’s so-called bivalent vaccine targets the currently circulating BA.4/5 as well as the original strain of the virus.
While the existing Covid vaccines used until now provided good protection against hospitalization and death, their effectiveness was reduced as the virus evolved.
Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, head of the World Health Organization (WHO), said the world was never in a better position to end the pandemic.
“We are not there yet. But the end is in sight,” said Ghebreyesus, who was in Israel this week for a WHO conference of European health ministers and officials.
For whom? The Dummies already took it as can be seen in hospitals or in the Chevra Kadisha list.