A pavement of good intentions ...

Israel's secretive deal with Pfizer

A contract with the Devil, courtesy of Wikimedia

The Netanyahu administration bet the farm on a secretive deal for Pfizer’s vaccines, and the citizens of Israel have borne the risks of that decision. I hope that the Israeli voters will consider whether this was a reasonable gamble when they next vote.

From Guy Shinar at the Brownstone Institute[1]:

Netanyahu decided to bet on Pfizer’s vaccine as the strategy that could potentially allow him to solve the COVID problem, with the added benefit of substantial political gain…In this way, in exchange for the privilege to be the first country in the world to roll out the vaccine among its population, Israel entered into two agreements with Pfizer

Only one of the agreements is partially public, and in it:

None of the outcome measures that were explicitly agreed upon in advance were safety outcomes, such as overall mortality, hospitalizations from any cause or the known side effects of vaccines, whatever they may be.

As part of the agreement, Israel’s Ministry of Health game up its scientific independence:

Pfizer has the power under the agreement to omit any reference to its contribution to the research, so its involvement in setting research goals, methods or even in writing the research results is not mentioned at all ... a study may be portrayed as independent of Pfizer, although it is not necessarily so.

Finally, the potential political angle (although it is speculative):

Why did Ministry of Health officials enter into this agreement? Why didn’t they maintain their role as regulators, and why did they volunteer to serve as Pfizer’s marketing, distribution, research and publication branch? It appears highly likely that pressure from Netanyahu and his bureau contributed to the matter.

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[1] G. Shinar, How the Israeli Ministry of Health Became an Agent for Pfizer, The Brownstone Institute: https://brownstone.org/articles/how-the-israeli-ministry-of-health-became-an-agent-for-pfizer/