Prime Minister Naftali Bennett said during a briefing that Israel will receive its first shipment of Pfizer's anti-COVID pill as soon as Wednesday.
The pharma giant and the Health Ministry signed off on the purchase of some 100,000 doses following talks between the premier and Pfizer CEO Albert Bourla over the weekend.
The antiviral pill will be available free of charge to Israelis in high-risk groups.
"We must be more calculated in our efforts against coronavirus," Bennett said during the briefing.
"Omicron is a highly infectious strain, we still don't know how lethal it is despite the optimistic data we have. Even if the number of seriously ill is low relative to the number of infected, if the number of infections over time rises ten or 20-fold, at the end we will see a rise in severe cases."
Following a decision to revise the quarantine mandate earlier on Tuesday, the prime minister said that if the current isolation policy would have not changed, Israel would have found itself under "a de facto lockdown" due to the rapid spread of the Omicron variant. Under the current policy, anyone who comes into contact with a COVID carrier must enter a seven-day isolation, regardless of the person's vaccination status.
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Prime Minister Naftali Bennett addressing the Knesset plenum from a dedicated quarantine rastra
(Photo: Alex Kolomoisky)
"We would have reached a situation where 1-2 million people are in quarantine, and the moment they leave it, they would need to go back in," Bennett said.
"Our ultimate goal is to maintain an open economy, all the while ensuring that hospitals are not inundated with patients. If we wanted a lockdown, we would have implemented one. Because of the quarantine mandate, we are seeing thousands of flights getting canceled across the world and shuttered economies in Europe and the U.S., which are disrupting the movement of supplies and goods. We don't want this"
The U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) earlier this month granted emergency authorization to the medication that was shown in clinical trials to be nearly 90 percent effective in preventing hospitalizations and deaths in patients at risk of developing severe illness.
Recent lab data suggests the drug — marketed under the brand name Paxlovid — retains effectiveness against the Omicron variant.
Officials in the government said that they believe that the treatment will be a "game-changer" as the country grapples with the highly infectious Omicron variant.
"Our goal is the keep the number of seriously ill as low as possible," an official said. "We will not punish people for being unvaccinated, but the parameters will be stringent. It is a purely professional decision — what will be the likelihood of a person to become seriously, or even critically ill."