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Revealed: How Israel runs world’s fastest Covid vaccine rollout

Abu Dhabi - Over the past months, Israel has managed to bring down the number of positive cases.

Ashwani Kumar

Published: Tue 30 Mar 2021, 1:34 PM

Last updated: Tue 30 Mar 2021, 1:42 PM

Israel leads the world in Covid-19 vaccination rollout and the secret is in its time-tested centralised system for inoculation drives, a top official revealed on Monday.

Professor Nachman Ash, Covid-19 national coordinator for Israel, said more than five million of the country’s citizens have been vaccinated in a massive project over the past three months.

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“We are out of our third wave. We had quite a big wave of disease in January but since February and March, we are going down with the cases,” he said during the Hope Consortium’s World Immunisation and Logistics Summit held virtually from Abu Dhabi.

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This was achieved through a “central command” for storing and distribution of vaccines. “They were planning and rolling it out every day.”

Israel, he noted, has based the project through its four health maintenance organisations (HMOs) that have long been offering the annual influenza vaccine to the general public.

“So, it was easy for us to base it on them. Every citizen in Israel should belong to one of the HMOs. Hence, they could access every patient in Israel.”

A daily plan is charted out on the number of jabs to be offered and to whom, and then the doses are distributed across the villages and cities to reach all the eligible people. Over the past months, the number of positive cases has gone down, and the economy is slowly recovering. “We have managed to open our market and schools last month. Things look bright for Israel in the future,” Ash added.

ashwani@khaleejtimes.com