The video was taken down, but watch out…
It’s not every day that a head of government goes to the airport to greet a cargo shipment, but the pandemic has changed many things. On Jan. 10, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu motorcaded to Ben Gurion International Airport, southeast of Tel Aviv, to watch a shipment of 700,000 vaccine doses from Pfizer Inc. emerge from a blue-and-white El Al Boeing 787-9.
“This is a great day for the state of Israel, with a huge shipment that has arrived,” Netanyahu said, exuding a confidence few world leaders have mustered since the crisis began. “I agreed with my friend, Pfizer Chairman and CEO Albert Bourla, that we would bring shipment after shipment and complete the vaccination of the over-16 population in Israel during the month of March.”
Bourla had thrown Netanyahu a political lifeline. Faced with surging Covid-19 cases and an election in March, the prime minister latched on to Pfizer’s vaccine as his best hope to stay in office. Standing on the tarmac, he bragged that 72% of Israelis over the age of 60 had already been vaccinated, thanks to shipments that began in early December, and that more doses would come soon. That was because he’d struck a deal with Bourla to use his country as a test case for Pfizer’s vaccine.
Vaccine distribution still has the feel of a zero-sum game. Five days after Netanyahu’s victory lap, Pfizer told other non-U.S. customers that it would cut near-term supplies while it briefly closed its vaccine manufacturing facility in Belgium for an upgrade.
Panic and anger rippled through world capitals, nowhere more so than in Rome. Italy, which has suffered one of the highest Covid death rates and which had successfully set up a mass vaccination program and inoculated more people than any other European Union country, was waiting for new doses when Pfizer announced the cuts. The country’s virus emergency czar at the time, Domenico Arcuri, lashed out, complaining that Pfizer had cut its shipments by almost 30% just as Italy was about to start vaccinating people older than 80 en masse. He warned that Italy could take unspecified action against the company.
