Jerusalem (AFP)

Vaccines for data?

Israel has obtained a stock of anticoronavirus vaccines from pharmaceutical giant Pfizer in exchange for the rapid sharing of data on the effects of this immunization on its population, according to an agreement consulted on Monday by AFP.

The Hebrew state launched an "unprecedented" vaccination campaign against the Covid-19 almost a month ago.

It has already made it possible to administer the first of two necessary doses of the Pfizer-BioNtech vaccine to more than two of the nine million inhabitants, at a time when many Western states are struggling to obtain enough doses.

The Israeli government has ordered a total of fourteen million doses - capable of immunizing seven million people - from the Pfizer-BioNTech and Moderna laboratories.

And, above all, he has already received the delivery of several million of these precious bottles.

According to several local media outlets, Israel has paid more than market price to ensure a sufficient and rapid supply of vaccines.

Information that the authorities refused to comment on.

But the "startup nation", the name Israel gives itself to highlight its innovation sector, dangled Pfizer with access to rapid and large-scale data on the effects of its vaccine in order to secure the 'access to a large stock of doses, according to the agreement made public by the Ministry of Health and consulted on Monday by AFP.

This "collaboration" between Israel and Pfizer is presented as an effort to "measure and analyze the epidemiological data related to the deployment of the product", that is to say, the injection of the vaccine into the Israeli population.

The document states that the Israeli Ministry of Health depends on a certain rate of "delivery" of doses by Pfizer "in order to achieve collective immunity and to obtain sufficient data as soon as possible."

"Both sides recognize that the viability and success of the project depends on the rate and extent of vaccination in Israel," the document continued, released by authorities after protests from local organizations over data sharing private.

- Data lab -

In Israel, citizens are affiliated with one of the country's four major health insurance funds which personally contact policyholders to offer them a vaccination schedule.

However, these non-profit insurance funds have large digital databases on their policyholders, which in theory allows them to judge the effectiveness or potential side effects of the vaccine, depending for example on age or medical history. vaccinated.

Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu recently acknowledged that the Hebrew state agrees to "share with Pfizer and the rest of the world all statistical data that can help develop strategies to defeat the coronavirus".

The agreement with Pfizer aims to allow Israel to become "the first country in the world to emerge (from the pandemic) of coronavirus", repeated a few days ago the head of government, who aspires to restart the economy of the country by the legislative elections of March 23.

According to Tehilla Shwartz Altshuler, a private data protection specialist at the Israel Democratic Institute, a center for political analysis in Jerusalem, the large-scale digitization of health data in Israel is "a unique asset."

"In a month or six weeks, Israel can offer Pfizer data on millions of people," she told AFP, stressing that this sharing of data should have been the subject of public debate. as much as some fear that their data will not be anonymized.

Israel, which these days prides itself on being the "VaccineNation", has it turned its population into guinea pigs?

One thing is certain, according to the analyst: the vaccination campaign is so far "the greatest experiment on humans of the 21st century".

© 2021 AFP