Israel has signed a deal to purchase 5 million doses of a COVID vaccine produced by the American drug manufacturer Novavax Inc.
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Novavax's two-dose, protein-based vaccine can provide an alternative to those Israelis hesitate to be vaccinated with an mRNA vaccine or cannot do so for medical reasons.
The Health Ministry said this would provide an element of "technological diversity" to the country's coronavirus strategy.
The vaccine will be given in two doses and will be subject to regulatory approval in Israel.
Based on early research data, Novavax's vaccine is effective in generating an immune response against the Omicron variant.
"We are encouraged that boosted responses against all variants were comparable to those associated with high vaccine efficacy in our Phase 3 clinical trials," said Gregory M. Glenn, Novavax's president of research and development.
The Novavax purchase comes as a subvariant of the Omicron strain has the world worried.
On Friday, Britain's Health Security Agency said that BA.2 subtype of the Omicron coronavirus variant appeared to have a substantial growth advantage over the currently predominant BA.1 type.
UKHSA said that there was an increased growth rate of BA.2 compared with BA.1 in all regions of England where there were enough cases to compare them, and that "the apparent growth advantage is currently substantial."
"We now know that BA.2 has an increased growth rate which can be seen in all regions in England," said Dr. Susan Hopkins, Chief Medical Advisor for the UKHSA.
The agency said there was no data on the severity of BA.2 compared to BA.1, but reiterated that a preliminary assessment did not find a difference in vaccine effectiveness against symptomatic disease between the two Omicron subtypes.
A US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention statement issued Friday confirmed that nearly half of US states had confirmed cases of the BA.2 subvariant but that the strain was still at "low levels" in the US.
The CDC warned that the BA.2 strain was 1.5 times as contagious as the original Omicron strain.
Meanwhile, the Omicron wave in Israel showed signs of receding on Sunday, with the reproduction rate at 0.95 for the first time since the eruption of the fifth wave, according to Health Ministry data.
At Sunday's cabinet meeting, Prime Minister Naftali Bennett said, "We are seeing the Omicron wave start to stabilize. I am choosing my words carefully to avoid a sense that everything is over and inappropriate end-of-Omicron celebrations. At the moment, we are dealing with overcrowded hospitals and a very large number of new cases."
The Health Ministry reported that tests processed Saturday confirmed 45,258 new COVID cases. The percentage of tests that came back positive for the same 24-hours period stood at 27%.
As of Sunday morning, 1,069 COVID patients were hospitalized in serious condition nationwide, 241 of whom were on ventilators.
Nearly half a million (461,929) Israelis were defined as active or symptomatic cases, and there were 138,016 people in quarantine at home. Over the weekend, 9,900 people were vaccinated, including 2,300 children and 5,400 people who received a second booster shot.
Israel Hayom has learned that the Israel Teachers Union plans to ask that schools that still haven't received shipments of rapid antigen tests be exempted from the government's new quarantine guidelines. ITU chairwoman Yaffa Ben-David was scheduled to meet with Education Minister Yifat Shasha-Biton and senior Health Ministry officials at 1 p.m. Sunday.
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In other COVID news, the news site Politico reported Friday that the administration of former US President Donald Trump created a secret list while planning for COVID vaccine distribution, prioritizing certain countries over others.
According to the report, the list favored Israel and other allies such as Taiwan over low-and moderate-income countries.
The list was split into several sections, including US strategic allies, countries that helped develop the vaccine, countries with relationships with Gavi – the global vaccine alliance – and all other countries.
Officials told Politico that the documents were passed on to the Biden administration, saying that it "does not use the previous administration's policy or the cited list to make vaccine sharing decisions."
The list was an annex to a longer document laying out the Trump administration's international approach to facing COVID, planning the distribution of the vaccines based on political preference.
"We thought that the categories themselves made sense at the time," said Paul Mango, the former deputy chief of staff for policy at the Department of Health and Human Services, according to Politico.
"The underserved countries were third on the list."
The list included an assessment of the country's ability to "absorb and distribute doses and to what degree they were experiencing outbreaks."
"We identified categories and we put weights to them, and then subject matter experts from each [agency] came in and informed those categories," one former Trump official said. "From there, we had a panel of experts score each country based on the evidence provided."
Erez Linn and i24NEWS contributed to this report
