Covid-19: Demands Go Up As Israel Plans To Buy 8m Pfizer Vaccines For 4m Citizens

Prime Minister of Israel, Benjamin Netanyahu, on Friday, announced that government has agreed with Pfizer Incorporated for the purchase of 8 million doses of its vaccine for about 4 million Israelis.

Netanyahu made this known at the Defense Ministry in Tel Aviv, as quoted in a statement published on the government’s website.

According to latest Worldometer figures, Israel’s covid-19 status stands at; 322,159 cases, 2,706 deaths and 310,605 recoveries.

The prime minister lauded the Pfizer management for the cooperation.

“This is a great day for the State of Israel and a great day on the way to our victory over the coronavirus. At these moments, we are signing the agreement with Pfizer to receive eight million doses of vaccine for four million Israeli citizens.

“The Pfizer vaccine requires two doses per person. The hope is that the supply of Pfizer vaccines will start in January and will increase in the following months. All of this depends, of course, on the approval of the health authorities both in the US and Israel. We have more agreements with additional promising companies on the way to receiving additional millions of vaccines for the citizens of Israel.

“I would like to thank Pfizer Chairman and CEO Albert Bourla for the telephone conversations between us. He was attentive at all hours of the day, even at 02:00. I am thankful that the conversations between us led to the removal of the last obstacles and to the closing of the deal, including the addition of millions of vaccine doses for the citizens of Israel,” he said.

THE WHISTLER earlier reported that Pfizer Inc. in partnership with BioNTech had on Tuesday announced that its “vaccine candidate was found to be more than 90% effective in preventing COVID-19 in participants without evidence of prior SARS-CoV-2 infection in the first interim efficacy analysis.”

Since then, massive orders have been pouring in from different parts of the world.

Lately, the European Union(EU) signed a deal for 300 million doses of the Pfizer vaccine.

In Nigeria, the Minister of State for Health, Adeleke Olorunnimbe Mamora, said that federal government was yet to go for the vaccine because it is considering different options.

“Regarding the vaccine, as at the moment we have so many vaccine candidates and like I did say here before, it’s like a kind of race and the latest we have right now is the Pfizer one which we are told or already established to have minimum of 90% success.

“But having said that, we are still looking at what will happen eventually; we do know that this is a vaccine that has to be kept at minor 70 degrees centigrade…that is a huge thing to achieve and we don’t know at the end of the day, which of the vaccine will be suitable for our own situation because even the technology to get the vaccine below that kind of temperature is an issue.

“We will look at the one that suits our purpose at the end of the day and decide on what to do in our own circumstance,” he said at the Covid-19 presidential Taskforce briefing on Thursday.