Though lagging behind, Israel’s COVID-19 jab hopes to ‘find its place in market’

Nearly two years after the emergence of the COVID-19 pandemic, Israel may soon finally see its own homegrown vaccine become commercially available. The jab will be a very late newcomer — lagging behind the first wave of COVID vaccines by almost a year — but its backers believe that it will find its rightful place in the global vaccine market, and may even prove in the long run to be more effective than existing jabs against coronavirus variants. These beliefs were offered this month by Dr. Jonathan Javitt, chairman of NRx Pharmaceuticals, the American-Israeli clinical-stage pharmaceutical company tapped two months ago by the Israeli Defense Ministry to manufacture and market the country’s vaccine developed by the government-run Israel Institute for Biological Research (IIBR) in Ness Ziona.