Will Israel Show Us the Way Out of the Pandemic? If vaccinations are key to ending the pandemic, Israel may get there first as it has the highest rate by far of any nation. Paradoxically, it also has the world's second-highest rate of daily new COVID-19 cases. February 14, 2021, 5am PST | Irvin Dawid Share "Israel, which has seen several waves of the virus, had raced ahead of other nations and given the first doses of Pfizer’s two-dose vaccine to more than a third of its population [of 9 million] by the end of January," according to the description accompanying The Washington Post's global coronavirus tracker on Feb. 12 (found just below the seventh chart titled, "