“We bet on Israel, and we’re glad we did, because what you’ve done here exceeds anything we could have imagined,” said CEO of Pfizer Albert Bourla in a March 11 interview with Israel’s N12 news agency. He was explaining why Pfizer chose Israel to serve as the pilot for his company’s international vaccine distribution project. It has a relatively small population and a health-care system that collects data efficiently. In fact, the successful nationwide campaign turned a small country in the Middle East into a global leader, when it comes to the percentage of the population that has already been vaccinated against the coronavirus.
But there is a problem. At the start of the month, the nationwide infection rate was 1, while the infection rate in the Arab public reached 1.17. Thus, most of the towns still marked “red” by the traffic light model now being used come from the Arab sector.