The validity of Israel’s green passports has been extended until the end of 2021, the Health Ministry announced on Wednesday, adding that Israelis won’t need a third shot against the coronavirus before that time.
“In light of the decline in morbidity and of the fact that the vaccine appears to protect us at least until the end of the year, we have decided, under the direction of the health minister, to extend the validity of the green pass for those vaccinated and recovered until December 2021,” said the Health Ministry’s director-general Chezy Levy, who signed the directive.
“I am glad that the vaccine protects us and has allowed us to return to our normal life. However, we must be careful and still maintain precautions, such as masks in enclosed spaces and keeping distance, as there is not yet complete information about the efficacy of the vaccine against some of the different variants,” Levy added. “I want to hope that we can go on with our routine and we will be able to persist in our daily life.”
Green passports in Israel are granted to all those who are fully vaccinated; are recovered from the virus; or, in the case of children under 16, who are not eligible to be jabbed, have a negative test performed in the previous 72 hours.
For the past several months, health officials and experts have been looking into the issue of how long the protection granted by the vaccine would last.
In March, Prof. Cyrille Cohen, director of the Immunotherapy Lab at Bar-Ilan University, told The Jerusalem Post that a reason to be optimistic about the duration of the protection was that no one who participated in the Pfizer clinical trial last summer appeared to have been reinfected.
“So far we have not heard about it. Even though we do not have the data yet, it seems that they are still protected,” said Cohen.
Israel currently has about 1,200 coronavirus active cases. At the peak of the pandemic, they were over 75,000. For over a week, it has registered less than 100 new cases per day, compared to several thousand in January and February.
Also, the number of serious patients continues to drop. As of Wednesday, it stood at 90, the lowest since July.