Israel's world-beating vaccination programme

 Israel has inoculated virtually 12% of her population against the SARS/CoV-2 virus, well ahead of Bahrain at 3.5% and the UK, who started first, on 1.5%. Questions have been raised about the low priority given to Palestinians, but it is still an outstanding achievement. The Irish Times explains how Israel managed to obtain sufficient supplies of the Pfizer/BioNtech vaccine in order to accomplish her programme. 

There was another factor brought out by an Israeli spokesperson on Radio 4's PM programme on Monday: universal healthcare. According to wikipedia, "Healthcare in Israel is universal and participation in a medical insurance plan is compulsory. All Israeli residents are entitled to basic health care as a fundamental right. [...] In a survey of 48 countries in 2013, Israel's health system was ranked fourth in the world in terms of efficiency"

On PM, Evan Davies protested that the UK also has universal healthcare. Well, up to a point. Although Israel's services are delivered by independent providers in the same way as France's or Germany's, they do seem to be less fragmented and uncoordinated than the UK's. Most importantly, they are well-staffed. Stumbling and Mumbling on the same issue says:

There is much talk of how Covid is putting pressure on the NHS. Such talk, however, often misses an important fact – that although NHS capacity is more or less fixed in the short-term, it is certainly not in the long-run. And past political choices have limited this capacity. For example, the UK has 2.8 doctors for every 1000 people compared to an average of three in OECD countries generally

The figure of Israel is 3.6. I have little doubt that the ratio for other health-care workers, nurses, laboratory staff and other ancillaries, shows a similar superiority over ours.