Empirics prove – requiring military leaders to vaccinate encouraged higher vaccination rates in the Israel Defence forces

Several reports have described interventions to increase COVID-19 vaccine uptake among military personnel. Segal and colleagues described a series of initiatives in the Israeli Defense Forces (IDF) to foster vaccine uptake, including early vaccination of commanding officers and elite military units to set an example, sharing reliable information on the vaccine via social media, holding group counseling sessions led by medical officers, personally meeting with personnel who refused vaccination, requiring that personnel refusing vaccination accompany other service members to the vaccination sites, and requiring a unit-wide vaccination rate of 85% to ease restrictions on social activities and spaces.4 Talmy and colleagues also reported that individual consultation with a primary care physician increased vaccine uptake rates beyond unit-wide interventions in a single IDF unit.20 Many of these approaches were used by the command from which our data was drawn and may validate this approach as vaccine uptake was rapid.