What the world can learn about immunity from Israel’s vaccine rollout

More than 1.3 million Israelis have already received both doses of the Covid-19 vaccine from Pfizer-BioNTech. The extraordinarily fast and organized vaccination campaign in Israel is unmatched per capita anywhere in the world. By design, this fast rollout is providing Pfizer – and the rest of us – with the first critical real-world data on brand-new mRNA vaccines.

This type of vaccine instructs cells to make a “spike” protein that triggers the immune system to produce antibodies against the matching spike protein on the surface of the SARS-CoV-2 coronavirus, which causes Covid-19. “Pfizer knows the data they will get from Israel is good and accurate. They see our rate of vaccination is very efficient so they can report post-marketing data to the FDA quickly,” says microbiology expert Dr. Natan Keller, vice-chairman of Sheba Medical Center’s Institutional Review Board Committee and past president of the Israeli Society of Infectious Diseases. FDA emergency use approval for the Pfizer vaccine was based on a study of 24,000 vaccine recipients and 24,000 placebo recipients, says Keller. Israel now has data from more than 2.7 million who got at least one dose and the number increases by about 100,000 per day. ISRAEL21c gathered information from local experts and national health-maintenance organizations (HMOs) on what Israel has learned about the vaccine and its efficient distribution. We will continue to keep you updated as new data emerges, and as the Moderna mRNA vaccine comes into use in Israel. -- More...