Israel will begin giving older people a THIRD DOSE of the Pfizer coronavirus vaccine, following the recommendation of a government advisory panel. PM Naftali Bennett will make the final decision today.
Israel is currently seeing a sharp spike in infections of the Delta variant, and preliminary figures seemed like older people's vaccine-induced protection *might* be waning.
Pfizer and the Health Ministry have been mooting a third dose for months, backed by former PM Netanyahu who's been an advocate of a booster dose since before the Delta wave arrived.
Israel, of course, was one of the first countries to vaccinate its elderly population with 2 doses of Pfizer (on a 3-week dosing schedule), so if there WAS waning immunity, it's possible places with later vaccination or a longer dosing schedule won't show it.
On the other hand, there's some evidence that immunity might not be waning all that much, and that the initial analysis was flawed. Lots of noise in the data.
We do know that a longer interval between the first two doses seems to produce better antibody levels and immune memory than a 3-week interval. So there's good reason to think a third dose will help here too.
Others say that the priority should be vaccinating 12-19-year-olds, an age group where uptake has been low, or to trying to convince the unvaccinated holdouts among the over-50s (vaccination coverage chart below)
Final: Israel will administer booster doses of the Pfizer vaccine to all residents over the age of 60. Most of this age group was vaccinated at the beginning of the year.
• • •
Missing some Tweet in this thread? You can try to
force a refresh
In honour of @wesstreeting's return to politics, I think it's time to tell the story of how he (unknowingly) became a source of tension in my marriage. Thread/
@wesstreeting My wife @shaynale68 is originally a New Yorker. Wes was visiting Jerusalem on a delegation and had a little free time, so we took him out to Gatsby, a speakeasy-theme cocktail bar with a hidden entrance behind a bookcase.
@wesstreeting@shaynale68 I remember we grimly predicted that Trump would win the 2016 election and that Brexit would narrowly pass. Also we drank cocktails and politely argued about Israel/Palestine.
This could be the reason that the Pfizer vaccine effectiveness numbers against delta appear to be so different in Israel and the UK. The UK mostly stuck to an 8-12 week dosing interval, while Israel used 3 weeks.
It's also an argument in favour of Israel giving a third dose at, say, 6-9 months to the over-50s — a dose which might be unnecessary in the UK until 1-2 years.
In April I speculated that the real test of the UK's dosing interval would come in 9 months. I was wrong; it was sooner.
Wow, Tom Barrack, a Trump advisor and friend who ran the Trump 2017 inaugural committee, charged with acting
as an agent of the UAE. justice.gov/opa/pr/former-…
Barrack charged with "influencing the foreign policy positions of the campaign of a candidate in the 2016 U.S. presidential election and, subsequently, the foreign policy positions of the U.S. government in the incoming administration" on behalf of the UAE.
Barrack allegedly had a secret mobile phone with an encrypted app to communicate with UAE officials. He told the FBI he'd never done anything for the UAE, under questioning.
Thanks to vaccines, Israel looked like the first country in the world to reach herd immunity from the coronavirus. But then Delta arrived. Daily cases shot up from less than 20 to around 750 in three weeks.
Most of the daily cases in Israel are now among vaccinated people. 56% of Israelis are vaccinated, and they make up roughly the same proportion of daily cases (though there are lots of demographic confounders in that data!)
On the other hand, only 1% of daily cases are people who previously tested positive for Covid, despite this group constituting 9% of the population. Again there are confounders here, but I think the effect is probably real.
The letter from @OversightDems to Cyber Ninjas asks them to produce details of who's funding the audit, any security issues, their interim findings and the wild conspiracies about bamboo and UV light. oversight.house.gov/sites/democrat…
Also asks for any communications between Cyber Ninjas and Trump, the Trump campaign, the 'audit' funders, Rudi, Sidney Powell, Lin Wood, Flynn, Byrne or Lindell.