Socioeconomic Disparities and COVID-19 Vaccination Acceptance: Experience from Israel

Caspi, Gil; Dayan, Avshalom; Eshal, Yael; Liverant-Taub, Sigal; Twig, Gilad; Shalit, Uri; Lewis, Yair E.; Shina, Avi; Caspi, Oren

doi:10.1101/2021.01.28.21250716

Cited by 19 publications

(17 citation statements)

References 12 publications

(10 reference statements)

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“…The vaccination sites should be large and ventilated to decrease the probability of transmission on site. Finally, there is a clear pattern where areas in Israel with higher infection rates and a lower socioeconomic status have lower vaccination rates, despite widespread vaccine availability 21 .This trend might also diminish or delay the overall effect of the campaign as those who are at a higher risk of being infected are less vaccinated. Further efforts should, therefore, be made to encourage these populations to vaccinate and make the vaccines even more easily accessible to them.…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

COVID-19 dynamics after a national immunization program in Israel

Rossman

Shilo

Meir

et al. 2021

Nat Med

Self Cite

196

155

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A n effective and safe vaccination campaign is urgently needed to halt the rapid spread of severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 (SARS-CoV-2) infections and the resulting disease, COVID-19. The BNT162b2 vaccine, developed by BioNTech in cooperation with Pfizer, is a lipid nucleoside-modified RNA encoding the SARS-CoV-2 full-length spike protein 1 . Results from a phase 3 randomized placebo-controlled trial demonstrated that a two-dose regimen in a 21-d interval conferred 95% protection against laboratory-confirmed COVID-19 infection in individuals 16 years of age or older 2 . On 11 December 2020, the Food and Drug Administration issued an Emergency Use Authorization for emergency use of the vaccine for the prevention of COVID-19 (ref. 3 ), and, after that, an emergency use of the vaccine was also issued by the Israeli Ministry of Health (MOH).On 20 December 2020, Israel launched a national COVID-19 vaccination campaign 4 , in which BNT162b2 vaccines were administered. The Israeli health system comprises four health maintenance organizations (HMOs), and vaccinations were widely available, according to a prioritization schedule determined by the Israeli MOH. During the early phases of the distribution process, individuals considered as being at high risk for COVID-19 were prioritized for vaccination, including individuals older than 60 years, nursing home residents, healthcare workers and individuals with severe comorbidities. The vaccination campaign was further expanded for individuals aged 55 years and older 5 and 40 years 6 and older on 12 January 2021 and 19 January 2021, respectively. On 21 January, individuals aged 16-18 years were also prioritized for vaccination. On 28 January, the vaccination campaign expanded to those aged 35 and older 7 . On 4 February, all individuals aged 16 years and older were eligible to receive the vaccine. However, the HMOs were still instructed to focus their efforts on those aged 50 years and older 8 .

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Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

COVID-19 dynamics after a national immunization program in Israel

Rossman

Shilo

Meir

et al. 2021

Nat Med

Self Cite

196

155

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

show abstract

“…Israel has seen significant discrepancies between socio-economic and demographics groups in vaccination uptake. 2 This discrepancy entangles with socio-economic disparities in infection rates. While in randomized clinical trials, the disease dynamics and socio-economic differences are less of an issue because of the blinded randomization, in real-world, teasing out those confounding factors is impossible without individual-level clinical and demographic data.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Estimating real-world COVID-19 vaccine effectiveness in Israel using aggregated counts

Aran

2021

Preprint

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The vaccination rollout of the COVID-19 in Israel has been highly successful compared to all other countries. By the end of January, a third of the population has already been administered at least one dose of the BNT162b2 vaccine. Efforts to estimate the true real-world effectiveness of the vaccine have been hampered by disease dynamics and social-economic discrepancies. Here, using counts of positive and hospitalized cases of vaccinated individuals, we provide sensitive estimations of the vaccine effectiveness by correcting to daily case incidence. We find high effectiveness of 66-85% in reducing SARS-CoV-2 positive cases and over 90% in reducing severe hospitalizations. As more granular data will be available more it will be possible to extract more exact estimates; however, there is little doubt that the vaccine is highly effective in reducing cases, hospitalizations and deaths.

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“…The vaccination sites should be large and ventilated in order to decrease the probability of transmission on site. Finally, there is a clear trend where areas in Israel with higher infection rates and a lower socioeconomic status have lower vaccination rates, despite wide vaccine availability 24 . This trend may also diminish or delay the overall effect of the campaign as those who are at a higher risk of being infected are less vaccinated.…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Patterns of COVID-19 pandemic dynamics following deployment of a broad national immunization program

Rossman

Shilo

Meir

et al. 2021

Preprint

Self Cite

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Studies on the real-life impact of the BNT162b2 vaccine, recently authorized for the prevention of coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19), are urgently needed. Here, we analysed the temporal dynamics of the number of new COVID-19 cases and hospitalization in Israel following a vaccination campaign initiated on December 20th, 2020. We conducted a retrospective analysis of data originating from the Israeli Ministry of Health (MOH) from March 2020 to February 2021. In order to distill the possible effect of the vaccinations from other factors, including a third lockdown imposed in Israel on January 2021, we compared the time-dependent changes in number of COVID-19 cases and hospitalizations between (1) individuals aged 60 years and older, eligible to receive the vaccine earlier and younger individuals (0-59 years old); (2) early-vaccinated cities compared to late-vaccinated cities; (3) early-vaccinated geographical statistical areas (GSAs) compared to late-vaccinated GSAs; and (4) the current lockdown versus the previous lockdown, imposed on September 2020. By February 6th 2021, 45.3% and 29.7% of the entire Israeli population (89.9% and 80% of individuals older than 60 years old) received the first dose or both doses of the vaccine, respectively, or recovered from COVID-19. In mid-January, the number of COVID-19 cases and hospitalization started to decline, with a larger and earlier decrease among older individuals. This trend was more evident in early-vaccinated compared to late-vaccinated cities. Such a pattern was not observed in the previous lockdown. Our analysis demonstrates evidence for the real-life effectiveness of a national vaccination campaign in Israel on the pandemic dynamics. This report reflects a snapshot of a fast-changing situation. However, we believe our findings have major public health implications in the struggle against the COVID-19 pandemic, including the publics perception of the need for and benefit of nationwide vaccination campaigns. More studies aimed at assessing the effectiveness of vaccination both on the individual and on the population level, with larger followup are needed.

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Socioeconomic Disparities and COVID-19 Vaccination Acceptance: Experience from Israel

Cited by 19 publications

References 12 publications

COVID-19 dynamics after a national immunization program in Israel

COVID-19 dynamics after a national immunization program in Israel

Estimating real-world COVID-19 vaccine effectiveness in Israel using aggregated counts

Patterns of COVID-19 pandemic dynamics following deployment of a broad national immunization program

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