How Israel Won the Vaccine Race

This is part of a series on "Startup Nation", technology in the State of Israel. I produced dozens these posts before the current Israel-Iran war that I post every weekday. I see no reason to stop posting them.

In early 2021, as most countries struggled to roll out their first COVID-19 doses, Israel was already leading the world by a staggering margin.

Within weeks, Israel had vaccinated more than 20% of its population, while the next closest country had barely hit 1%. By the time other developed nations were just getting started, Israel already finished.

How did they do it?

A 30-year head start.

Israel’s healthcare system is fully digitized for a long time.

Every resident belongs to one of four HMOs, and all medical records appointments, diagnoses, prescriptions and vaccinations are centrally stored and searchable.

That meant when the vaccines arrived, Israel already had:

• Up-to-date records on every citizen

• Accurate prioritization by age and risk group

• Instant scheduling via apps and SMS

Israel set up mobile vaccination centers, recruited army medics to help, and ran clinics 24/7.

Israel's healthcare system was already the third most efficient in the world.

Logistics were handled like a military operation... because many of the people running it had military logistics training.

Early on, Israel had the best coronavirus data on the planet, with individual timestamped case breakdowns by:

• Age group

• Location

• Preexisting conditions

• Symptoms

In fact, all the data I used when I worked at IQT (In-Q-Tel) to analyze the infection dynamics and other properties of the coronavirus very early in the pandemic came from Israel. This analysis was made public on GitHub, and contributed to public research on the infection dynamics of the virus.

No other country on Earth had similar data available.

While the world scrambled, the #StartupNation built a blueprint.