New details have emerged about how Israel persuaded pharmaceutical giant Pfizer to supply it with the original shipments of its COVID-19 vaccine.
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Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu held some 30 phone conversations with Pfizer CEO Albert Bourla, in which former Israeli Ambassador to the US Ron Dermer also took part.
Dermer held separate talks with Bourla to convince the Pfizer CEO to pick Israel as a test case.
Netanyahu and Dermer pointed out that Israel had a computerized database of its population's medical histories that goes back 30 years, and stressed the comprehensive locations of community clinics that could administer the vaccines quickly and effectively. An additional point in Israel's favor was its small, but not too small, size.
Pfizer representatives countered with the claim that Estonia also met these criteria, but then Netanyahu and Dermer played two winning cards: Israel's experience with emergency situations, which would allow it to handle any situation that might arise as a result of the vaccination campaign; and Israel's demographic diversity, which eventually tipped the scales.
Netanyahu told Bourla, "You have here a population from 100 different countries. In the case of a negative reaction to the vaccine, there will be extensive and precise medical information about the links, if there are any, between a person's ethnicity and the effects of the vaccine."
Sources involved in the negotiations told Israel Hayom that the population diversity argument was what prompted Bourla to recommend to Pfizer's board of directors that Israel be picked as the first country to be vaccinated on a nationwide scale.
Meanwhile, Bourla has already spoken about how impressed he was by how intensely Netanyahu promoted the purchase of vaccines, even insisting that lawyers representing Pfizer and Israel join the phone conversation to prevent possible legal delays.
Israeli officials emphasized that the government's deal with Pfizer did not entail handing personal medical information about citizens who received the vaccination over to the company, and that Pfizer would receive only general data about recipients' background and other pertinent information.
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