One of the most vaccinated societies, Israel now has one of the highest infection rates in the world, raising questions about the vaccine’s efficacy… (paywalled.)

JERUSALEM — Last spring, Israel’s remarkably swift vaccination campaign was seen as a global model. Coronavirus infections plummeted, an electronic pass allowed the vaccinated to attend indoor concerts and sporting events, and distancing rules and mask mandates were eventually scrapped.

Israel offered the world a hopeful glimpse of the way out of the pandemic.

No longer.

A fourth wave of infections is rapidly approaching the levels of Israel’s worst days of the pandemic last winter. The daily rate of confirmed new virus cases has more than doubled in the last two weeks, making Israel a rising hot spot on the international charts.

Restrictions on gatherings and commercial and entertainment venues were reinstated this week, and the government is considering a new lockdown.

“I believe we are at war,” Israel’s coronavirus commissioner, Prof. Salman Zarka, told a parliamentary committee on Wednesday.

Scientists are still assessing how Israel’s pandemic response plunged from shining example to cautionary tale, and the stunning reversal has provided a crucial test for Israel’s new prime minister, Naftali Bennett, who staked a claim for leadership partly on the strength of his manifesto, “How to Beat a Pandemic.”

But some experts fear that Israel’s high rate of infections among early vaccine recipients may indicate a waning of the vaccine’s protections over time, a finding that contributed to a U.S. decision Wednesday to begin offering booster shots to Americans starting next month.

The vaccine may be less effective at preventing infection with the highly contagious Delta variant, now the primary version of the virus in Israel. And the first cohort to be vaccinated was an older group whose immune systems may have been weaker to begin with.

By June, Israelis, convinced the worst was over, had abandoned social distancing and other precautions.

“Everyone went about the business of trying to put the memory of a very difficult year and a half behind them,” said Prof. Ran Balicer, chairman of an expert panel that advises the Israeli government on Covid response.

“At that point in time,” he said, “the paradigm for many was that Israel is the most vaccinated country in the world, that vaccinated people rarely become infected, that even more rarely do they become severely ill and that basically, with very few precautions in place, the population was very close to herd immunity, all things considered. That was not a mistake.”

The problem, he said, was that what was true for the original virus “did not necessarily hold true for future variants coupled with waning immunity.”

The vast majority of Israel’s older population had received two doses of the Pfizer-BioNTech vaccine by the end of February, and by now about 78 percent of the population 12 and older are fully vaccinated.

The vaccine is still believed to help prevent severe illness in those who do become infected, though some Israeli data suggests the possibility of an increased risk of severe disease among those who received early vaccinations. The number of deaths in Israel has climbed in the past month as the infection rate increased.

[…]

Data published by Israel’s Ministry of Health in late July suggested that the Pfizer shot was just 39 percent effective against preventing infection in the country in late June and early July, compared with 95 percent from January to early April. In both periods, however, the shot was more than 90 percent effective in preventing severe disease.

Experts warn that these early assessments have not been scientifically proven: The small numbers of cases involved, Israel’s testing policies and a host of other biases could have skewed the results.

Still, as summer approached, infections began to spiral. School was out, families crowded local hotels and up to 40,000 people a day were flying abroad, even as the Delta variant was rampaging across the globe. After many days of zero Covid deaths in June, at least 230 Israelis have died so far this month.

Unlike previous epicenters of infection in Israel’s crowded, less-vaccinated ultra-Orthodox communities, this scourge primarily took hold in well-vaccinated, middle-class suburbs.

But of course they knew. Evidence of the declining vaccine efficacy has only been bubbling through social media platforms for weeks, but to report it might undermine the Democrats best wedge issue against Republicans — mandatory vaccinations and vaccine passports.

Still, why do they even bother suppressing information in an era in which we can pull it up on our own?

Speaking of “last to know” — Those Anti-Covid Plastic Barriers Probably Don’t Help and May Make Things Worse