Dozens of asylum seekers and foreign workers in Tel Aviv lined up to receive their first dose of the COVID-19 vaccine on Tuesday as part of an initiative to inoculate the city's foreign nationals.
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Tel Aviv City Hall and the Sourasky Medical Center started administering vaccines free of charge to the city's foreign nationals, many of whom are undocumented asylum seekers.
Israel reported 700,479 cases and 5,192 deaths since the outbreak of the pandemic last year. Some 625,167 have recovered from COVID. More than a third of the population, 3,540,942 Israelis, have received the first dose of the vaccination, and 2,157,100 have been fully immunized.
On its first day of operation, the vaccination center in southern Tel Aviv, home to a large migrant community, dispensed doses to dozens of foreign nationals who lined up outside the building. Posters provided information in English, Tigrinya, Russian and Arabic. Recipients included foreign workers from the Philippines, Moldova, and Nigeria, as well as Sudanese and Eritrean asylum seekers.
Garipelly Srinivas Goud, an Indian national who has worked in Israel for eight years, said that some foreign workers in Israel don't have money or insurance to afford paying privately for the vaccine, and said the vaccine drive was a "very good decision. I am very happy."
Eytan Schwartz, a Tel Aviv municipality spokesman, said it was the government's responsibility "to vaccinate everybody within the nation's borders" and that it would take the next step and start "to vaccinate the illegal or undocumented asylum seekers as well."
Israel has pushed to inoculate most of its population since late December. Last week it made vaccines available to all citizens over the age of 16.
On Sunday, Israel started easing some of its lockdown restrictions that had been in place for over a month in an effort to clamp down on the spread of the coronavirus.
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