Israeli health officials will decide behind closed doors whether to allow child COVID-19 vaccinations.
Citing concerns that decision-makers would otherwise not speak freely due to aggressive anti-vax rhetoric by portions of the public, the decision was made Tuesday not to broadcast Wednesday's discussion live.
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It was further decided that the public would only be informed of the distribution of votes and would not be able to learn how each member of the committee voted.
Israel has been a world leader in vaccinations and more than 40% of the population has received a third shot.
Following the green light given by the US Food and Drug Administration for using the Pfizer/BioNTech coronavirus vaccine on children aged 5-11, the Health Ministry will convene the decisive discussion on the matter with experts on whether to follow suit.
A discussion last week was broadcast live.
"All the considerations for and against this decision were discussed, including the ability to hold a free and open discourse on such a sensitive and crucial issue against the backdrop of a prevailing violent discourse, which may affect the course of the discussion," the ministry said.
There have been an increasing number of threats against Health Ministry officials, police say, while Health Ministry Director-General Nachman Ash, and the head of Public Health Services at the Health Ministry, Dr. Sharon Alroy-Preis, have been assigned personal security details due to threats against them and their families.
On Wednesday morning, meanwhile, the Health Ministry reported that 564 new cases of the virus had been confirmed since Tuesday (for a 0.66% positive test rate out of 86,479 administered tests), bringing the total number of active cases in Israel to 6,198.
Among the active cases, 161 people were considered to be in serious condition with 107 of those patients attached to ventilators.
Nearly 4 million Israelis have received a third vaccination dose (3,996,567), while 5,746,166 have received two doses and 6,250,208 have received one dose. Since the beginning of the outbreak, 8,124 people have died in Israel of COVID-related causes, 17 of them in the past seven days.
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