Just a few months ago, we almost sang a song of triumph in the fight against the pandemic. The infection numbers drastically decreased in countries with high vaccination rates. The Tokyo Olympic Games ended without a big outbreak. Many sports leagues resumed their activities, like Major League Baseball and the English Premier League. We dreamed of a world that was back to normal.

And then the COVID-19 delta variant emerged and changed everything. Although there is still some debate around booster shots, distributing a booster shot and tackling vaccine hesitancy seem to be needed to end the pandemic. A recent Israeli study shows that the booster shot is 86 percent effective in preventing infection among the older population. The U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention has also reported that while vaccines show declining effectiveness against infection in general, they still show strong protection against hospitalization despite the variant. Once the model for defeating COVID-19, Israel is now facing a new stage of the pandemic—the infection count hit 8,000 as of August 17 (a month prior there were only 27 new cases) due to the delta variant. The booster shot of the COVID-19 vaccine is more necessary than ever. The problem is encouraging people to get it.

In March and August 2021, the Social Policy Institute (SPI) at Washington University in St. Louis and the Interdisciplinary Center (IDC) in Herzliya launched two nationally representative surveys to understand vaccination trends in Israel.

Read the full article about Israel's COVID-19 vaccinations by Oren Heller, Yaniv Shlomo, Yung Chun, Mary Acri, and Michal Grinstein-Weiss at Brookings.