All Israelis over the age of 55 will be able to administer the first COVID-19 shot through their health providers starting Tuesday as Israel’s vaccine drive continues to expand, the Health Ministry announced Monday.

Sunday saw 49,897 Israelis receive their first inoculation, bringing the total to 1,870,652 by far the highest vaccination rate in the world, according to the Our World In Data website. The daily rate for Sunday was similarly the highest in the world.

On Sunday, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu promised that Israel would ramp up its vaccine drive even more, reaching a target of administering 170,000 shots a day, as a new batch of hundreds of thousands of doses of Pfizer's vaccine touched down at Ben Gurion Airport.

The announcement comes at a time when the country is reporting over 6,000 daily COVID-19 cases. According to figures released on Monday morning by the ministry, 6,780 new coronavirus cases were recorded Sunday, bringing the total number of infections confirmed in Israel since the pandemic began to 495,063.

The Israeli government had started the vaccination process with some 4 million doses of the vaccine from Pfizer-BioNTech. Moderna has recently informed the Israeli shipping firm that it can expect a shipment of up to 480,000 doses of its own COVID-19 vaccine on Wednesday or Thursday, Channel 12 News reported. A first Moderna shipment of more than 100,000 doses arrived last week.

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