Rising coronavirus cases in Israel, where most residents are inoculated with the Pfizer-BioNTech vaccine, offer “a preliminary signal” the vaccine may be less effective at preventing mild illness from the Delta variant, a top expert said Monday.
But Ran Balicer,, chairman of Israel’s national expert panel on COVID-19, stressed that it was “too early to precisely assess vaccine effectiveness against the variant” first identified in India in April that is surging across the globe.
That is partly due to the overall low number of cases among fully vaccinated Israelis and because those cases are not evenly distributed across the population, further complicating efforts to reach conclusions about the data.
Balicer, also the chief innovation officer at Clalit, Israel’s largest health maintenance organization (HMO), told AFP that the Delta variant’s emergence as the “dominant strain” in the country has led to a “massive shift in the transmission dynamic.”
Israel’s vaccine rollout that began in December was one of the world’s fastest, making the country a closely watched case study on whether mass inoculation offers a path out of the pandemic.
Vaccinations had brought transmission down to about five local new cases per day, but that figure has risen to around 300 in recent days, with the Delta variant raging.
