Israel Extends Vaccination Campaign to People Over 40

Israeli healthcare providers announced Tuesday that they are extending their coronavirus vaccination campaign and will now being to vaccine people over the age of 40.

Health Minister Director General Chezy Levy ordered all HMOs to start vaccinating people over 40 after Israel received another shipment of vaccines and the Health Ministry is gearing up to vaccinate over 100,000 people a day.

Health Minister Yuli Edelstein said Israel now aims to inoculate 250,000 people a day.

The Clalit health maintenance organization has so far set up some 150 vaccination centers across the country. As of Tuesday morning, 1,200,000 Clalit members have been vaccinated.

The Maccabi HMO has thus far inoculated 600,000 people against the virus at its more than 80 vaccine centers. Hundreds of thousands of additional appointments have already been lined up for the coming weeks.

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In the beginning of the week, all HMOs were vaccinating members over 45. So far, 2,190,000 Israelis have received the first dose of the vaccine and 423,000,000 have received the second dose.

Israelis aged 60 and older are at this point the vast majority of those “veteran” vaccine recipients, who have gotten the shot two or more weeks ago.

To date, 86 percent of those aged 70 to 79 have been vaccinated, along with 80 percent of those 80 or older and 68 percent of those aged 60 to 69.