The National Immunization Technical Advisory Group in Israel

Invasive Disease Due to Neisseria meningitidis: Surveillance and Trends in Israel Prior to and during the COVID-19 Pandemic

Invasive meningococcal disease (IMD) is a devastating disease with significant mortality and long-term morbidity. The COVID-19 pandemic and containment measures have affected the epidemiology of infectious pathogens. This study's aim was to assess IMD trends in Israel prior to and during the COVID-19 pandemic. The Neisseria meningitidis invasive infection is a notifiable disease in Israel. Laboratory analysis includes serogrouping and molecular characterization. The overall national IMD incidence rate (1998-2022) was 0.8/100,000 population. The IMD incidence rates declined during the pandemic years (0.3/100,000 in 2020-2022 vs. 0.9/100,000 in 1998-2019). The number of notified IMD cases declined by 65% in 2020-2022. The case fatality rate among laboratory-confirmed IMD cases was 9% (47/521, 2007-2022). Mortality risk markers included cases' age (older) and socio-economic status (lower). Overall, most Neisseria meningitidis isolates were of serogroup B (62.6%), and the most prevalent clonal complex (CC) was CC32 (24.2%). Serogroup B prevailed in cases aged 0-9 years (74.5%) and less in cases aged 10 years and above (39%). Neisseria meningitidis serogroups and CC distribution altered recently with a decline in serogroup B fraction, an increase in serogroup Y, and a decline in CC32. Ongoing IMD surveillance is necessary to assess trends in circulating strains and support decision-making on meningococcal vaccination programs.

The health and economic impact of switching vaccines in universal varicella vaccination programs using a dynamic transmission model: An Israel case study

Currently available health economic models for varicella infection are designed to inform the cost-effectiveness of universal varicella vaccination (UVV) compared with no vaccination. However, in countries with an existing UVV program, these models cannot be used to evaluate whether to continue with the current varicella vaccine or to switch to an alternative vaccine. We developed a dynamic transmission model that incorporates the historical vaccination program to project the health and economic impact of changing vaccination strategies. We applied the model to Israel, which initiated UVV in 2008 with a quadrivalent vaccine, MMRV-GSK, and switched to MMRV-MSD in 2016. The model was calibrated to pre-vaccination incidence data before projecting the impact of the historical and future alternative vaccination strategies on the clinical burden of varicella. Total costs and QALYs lost due to varicella infections were projected to compare continuing with MMRV-MSD versus switching to MMRV-GSK in 2022. Over a 50-year time horizon, continuing with MMRV-MSD reduced varicella incidence further by 64%, reaching 35 cases per 100,000 population by 2072, versus a 136% increase in incidence with MMRV-GSK. Continuing with MMRV-MSD reduced cumulative hospitalization and outpatient cases by 48% and 58% (vs. increase of 137% and 91% with MMRV-GSK), respectively. Continuing with MMRV-MSD resulted in 139 fewer QALYs lost with total cost savings of 3% compared with switching to MMRV-GSK, from the societal perspective. In Israel, maintaining the UVV strategy with MMRV-MSD versus switching to MMRV-GSK is projected to further reduce the burden of varicella and cost less from the societal perspective.

Israel's rapid rollout of vaccinations for COVID-19

As of the end of 2020, the State of Israel, with a population of 9.3 million, had administered more COVID-19 vaccine doses than all countries aside from China, the US, and the UK. Moreover, Israel had administered almost 11.0 doses per 100 population, while the next highest rates were 3.5 (in Bahrain) and 1.4 (in the United Kingdom). All other countries had administered less than 1 dose per 100 population.While Israel's rollout of COVID-19 vaccinations was not problem-free, its initial phase had clearly been rapid and effective. A large number of factors contributed to this early success, and they can be divided into three major groups.The first group of factors consists of long-standing characteristics of Israel which are extrinsic to health care. They include: Israel's small size (in terms of both area and population), a relatively young population, relatively warm weather in December 2020, a centralized national system of government, and well-developed infrastructure for implementing prompt responses to large-scale national emergencies.The second group of factors are also long-standing, but they are health-system specific. They include: the organizational, IT and logistical capacities of Israel's community-based health care providers, the availability of a cadre of well-trained, salaried, community-based nurses who are directly employed by those providers, a tradition of effective cooperation between government, health plans, hospitals, and emergency care providers - particularly during national emergencies; and support tools and decisionmaking frameworks to support vaccination campaigns.The third group consists of factors that are more recent and are specific to the COVID-19 vaccination effort. They include: the mobilization of special government funding for vaccine purchase and distribution, timely contracting for a large amount of vaccines relative to Israel's population, the use of simple, clear and easily implementable criteria for determining who had priority for receiving vaccines in the early phases of the distribution process, a creative technical response that addressed the demanding cold storage requirements of the Pfizer-BioNTech COVID-19 vaccine, and well-tailored outreach efforts to encourage Israelis to sign up for vaccinations and then show up to get vaccinated.While many of these facilitating factors are not unique to Israel, part of what made the Israeli rollout successful was its combination of facilitating factors (as opposed to each factor being unique separately) and the synergies it created among them. Moreover, some high-income countries (including the US, the UK, and Canada) are lacking several of these facilitating factors, apparently contributing to the slower pace of the rollout in those countries.