An Israeli doctor says that the majority of COVID-19 patients hospitalized at his hospital are fully vaccinated and those with severe illness have also been vaccinated.
Talking with Channel 13 TV News on August 5, Dr. Kobi Haviv, medical director of Herzog Hospital in Jerusalem said that “85 to 90 percent of the hospitalizations are in fully vaccinated people,” and “95 percent of the severe patients are vaccinated.” Herzog Hospital specializes in nursing care for the elderly.
Haviv said the rising cases of vaccinated people getting COVID-19 is because “the effectiveness of the vaccine is waning.”
Data from the Israeli Minister of Health in July suggested that the effectiveness of the Pfizer vaccine in preventing infection and symptomatic illness had dropped from 90 percent to only 39 percent and 41 percent, respectively. However, the levels of protection against severe illness (88 percent) and hospitalization (91.4 percent) remained high.
The Pfizer vaccine has been the only COVID-19 vaccine available for Israelis since it was authorized for use in December 2020. However, the government announced last month that the Moderna vaccine would be offered in August to certain people while the Pfizer vaccine would be reserved for those under 18 years.
Pfizer did not respond to a request for comment by press time.
As of Friday, 5,392,509 million of the more than 9 million people have received a second dose of a messenger RNA vaccine, and 349,707 people have gotten their third booster shot, according to figures from the Health Ministry. The country recorded more than 3,000 positive COVID-19 cases, 261 with severe illness, and six deaths as of August 4.
People are considered fully vaccinated two weeks after their second messenger RNA vaccine.
Israel was one of the first countries to roll out a mass vaccination program in December 2020, and within three months, at least 50 percent of its population had been inoculated with a messenger RNA vaccine, making the country a world leader in vaccinating against the CCP virus.
But in the past six weeks, the country has seen a continuous rise in the number of COVID-19 cases and hospitalizations due to the delta variant that was first identified in India.
The delta variant has become the dominant variant spreading across Israel, accounting for over 90 percent of the COVID-19 cases that have been sequenced. Scientists say it is more transmissible and may become more infectious, but whether it causes more severe disease, hospitalization, and deaths is still unknown.
This is an excerpt from The Epoch Times.
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