JERUSALEM, Jan 18 (Reuters) – Israel will continue to offer a fourth COVID-19 vaccine shot despite preliminary findings that it is not enough to prevent Omicron infections, the Health Ministry said on Tuesday, predicting contagions stoked by the variant will wane in a week.
With his government scaling back Omicron counter-measures to ease the strain on the economy, Prime Minister Naftali Bennett sought to cast Israel’s still-high case numbers primarily as a result of an en-masse testing drive rather than infection rates.
A preliminary study published by an Israeli hospital on Monday found that the fourth shot increases antibodies to even higher levels than the third but “probably” not enough to fend off the highly transmissible Omicron.
Health Ministry director-general Nachman Ash described those findings as “unsurprising, to a degree” as Omicron infections had been logged in some fourth-dose recipients.
As elsewhere, Israel has seen COVID-19 cases spiral due to Omicron. But it has logged no deaths from the variant, and Ash said there had been no increase in COVID-19 patients on ECMO machines – a gauge of the most critical cases.
Briefing the World Economic Forum in Davos, Bennett said Israel was testing as many as 5% of its 9.4 million population for COVID-19 each day, “and that’s why the case numbers are so high, not because necessarily so many people are infected”.
“By doing these tests we can isolate folks and slow down the pace of infection,” he said.
Israel on Monday cut the mandatory quarantine period for COVID-19 carriers to five days. read more To conserve PCRs and reduce queuing at public testing sites, it has encouraged more use of home antigen kits. On Tuesday, the government said 25 million to 30 million kits would be issued to Israelis for free.