On Friday, Israel signed an agreement with US pharmaceutical giant Pfizer to provide the country with 8 million doses of its vaccine against COVID-19. The deal followed the company's announcment that preliminary results in its clinical trials indicated that the vaccine it developed is 90% effective.
Professor Eran Segal, a computational biologist at the Weizmann Institute of Science, tweeted that the first vaccines to arrive in Israel will significantly reduce the number of coronavirus deaths – probably by 60% to 70%.
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However, it is unknown at this time when the vaccine will receive its final approval from the Food and Drug Administration, when mass-production will begin, and where Israel is slated on the list of countries negotiating with Pfizer – something that will affect the question of when the vaccine becomes available to the Israeli public.
Israel has recorded 323,503 coronavirus cases since the pandemic erupted in mid-March, including 2,732 deaths. Some 312,823 Israelis have so far recovered from the disease.
"Let's suppose, we will vaccinate the medical staff first (about 100,000 vaccines). Afterward, we will start vaccinating the at-risk population, i.e., by age. In Israel, there are about 420,000 people above the age of 75, and they make up about 70% of those who die from COVID-19. Therefore, 420,000 vaccines with 100% efficacy will reduce the mortality rate by 70%," Segal wrote.
"If the vaccine is 90% effective, the mortality rate will decrease by 62%, and even if the vaccine is only 70% effective, the mortality rate will reduce by 48%.
"At some point, the mortality rate will drop to such a low level that the government will begin to make decisions to return to a regular routine, long before the general public is vaccinated. However, it must be done with much caution. We don't know yet how effective the vaccine be with older people because it has not been tested yet in trials. A vaccine's efficacy can decrease due to a weaker immune system."
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Segal stressed that "even with hundreds of thousands of vaccines, we will be able to reduce the coronavirus's damage significantly."
On Friday, the Head of Public Health Services at the Health Ministry Dr. Sharon Elrai Price, said that about 500,000 Pfizer vaccines are expected to arrive in Israel in January, with the rest of the vaccines hopefully arriving soon afterward.
i24NEWS contributed to this report.
