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Israel will provide the latest COVID-19 booster shots from Pfizer designed to combat the Omicron BA.4/5 variant by the end of September, a senior health official said Wednesday.
Salman Zarqa, chief of Israel’s coronavirus task force, has urged people in risk groups to take boosters along with their flu shots, but those aged 12 and older and those with previous vaccinations or COVID-19 Anyone is eligible after at least 3 months from 19 illness.
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“We’ve been gearing up for winter for some time now and have been looking at the possibility of two waves of illness in this country, the flu and the coronavirus, and two waves we’ve seen elsewhere in the world.
About half of Israel’s 9.4 million population has already received three doses of the vaccine, and about 850,000 have received four doses, according to Ministry of Health data. Since the pandemic began, Israel has had more than 4.5 million confirmed coronavirus cases and 11,667 deaths.
Pfizer/BioNtech’s so-called bivalent vaccine targets the current circulating BA.4/5 and the strain that first emerged in China in December 2019.
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Existing coronavirus vaccines in use to date have provided good protection against hospitalization and death, but their efficacy, especially against infection, has declined as the virus has evolved.