Indeed, in Jan. 2021, Israel beat out larger countries on COVID-19 inoculations by entering the agreement with Pfizer, which secured the country a steady stream of the pharma giant’s clinical trial-phase mRNA COVID-19 product vials and allowed them to jab a larger share of its citizens than other nations. Israel shared a redacted copy of the agreement after repeated calls for transparency and issues over data security and privacy, with some expressing concerns that the details of the agreement may not be shared for thirty years. As pointed out by NPR, “Israel paid a premium, locked in an early supply of Pfizer-BioNTech vaccines, and struck a unique deal: vaccines for data.”
According to the agreement, the nation of nearly 9 million promised Pfizer a speedy vaccine rollout, along with data from Israel’s centralized trove of medical statistics to examine “whether herd immunity is achieved after reaching a certain percentage of vaccination coverage in Israel.” Israel’s health minister Yuli Edelstein noted at the time, “We said to Pfizer … that the moment they give us the vaccine, we’ll be able to vaccinate at the speed they’ve never heard of.”
The Israel Democracy Institute’s Tehilla Shwartz Altshuler, a data privacy advocate and a leading voice questioning the Pfizer data deal, voiced his concerns last January, asserting:
“We need to understand that [Israel’s agreement with Pfizer] is going to be one of the, I would say, widest medical experiments on humans at the 21st century.”