SOURCE: AS­SO­CI­AT­ED PRESS

JERUSALEM (AP) — Is­rael has be­gun tri­als of a fourth dose of coro­n­avirus vac­cine in what is be­lieved to be the first study of its kind.

The tri­al be­gan at She­ba Med­ical Cen­ter, out­side Tel Aviv, with 150 med­ical per­son­nel who re­ceived a boost­er dose in Au­gust re­ceiv­ing a fourth shot of the Pfiz­er/BioN­Tech vac­cine. The staff re­ceiv­ing the ad­di­tion­al dose were test­ed and found to have low an­ti­body lev­els.

The tri­al came as Is­raeli of­fi­cials have con­sid­ered rolling out a sec­ond tranche of boost­er shots to its pop­u­la­tion as the coun­try grap­ples with ris­ing in­fec­tions with the new omi­cron vari­ant.

Prof. Ja­cob Lavee, for­mer di­rec­tor of the heart trans­plant unit at She­ba, said “hope­ful­ly, we’ll be able to show here… that this fourth boost­er re­al­ly pro­vides pro­tec­tion against the omi­cron, which is high­ly need­ed.”

Is­rael rolled out a world-lead­ing vac­ci­na­tion cam­paign ear­ly this year. Just over 4.2 mil­lion of Is­rael’s 9.3 mil­lion peo­ple have re­ceived a third dose of the Pfiz­er/BioN­Tech vac­cine.

Is­rael has record­ed at least 8,242 deaths from coro­n­avirus since the start of the pan­dem­ic.