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Israel has pledged to provide Pfizer with a large amount of data on its coronavirus vaccination campaign, but no information that identifies individual recipients of Pfizer’s vaccine, according to the contract the government signed with the government. pharmaceutical company and the Ministry of Health made public on Sunday.
By disclosing the agreement, the ministry withheld parts of the contract relating to business information such as amounts payable to Pfizer. The move to publicize the contract is intended to increase transparency and allay any concerns that Pfizer is obtaining personal medical information from vaccinated Israelis.
Israel has vaccinated a greater proportion of its population than any other country, and most of the vaccines used come from Pfizer.
According to the agreement, the information provided to Pfizer is in accordance with what senior Health Department officials have said and includes general and non-personal information. Israel has agreed to provide weekly information on the number of infected and hospitalized patients, the number of severe cases, the number of ventilators and the number of deaths, as well as information on the vaccination campaign. The pharmaceutical company also receives data on vaccine recipients by age, sex and demographic origin.
In the event that information is accidentally provided that makes a patient’s identity identifiable, Pfizer is under contract to treat it as confidential and return it. The contract also prohibits the US pharmaceutical company from attempting to obtain information about the identities of patients from the data it receives.
Two weeks ago, following Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s statement that Israel would serve as a “model country” for Pfizer, the health ministry made it clear that “data is shared with the public on a daily basis, and that the same information will be transferred to Pfizer. The ministry’s director of public health, Dr Sharon Alroy-Pries, also gave assurances later that the public should not be concerned about privacy breaches and that the ministry was determined to make all data he provided to Pfizer.
In November, at a cabinet meeting, Health Minister Yuli Edelstein said releasing details of the Pfizer contract would be “criminal.” Prime Minister Netanyahu then added that “there are sections that cannot be disclosed” and that the vaccine supply must not be endangered.
For Pfizer, statistical information on members of the public receiving the vaccine in Israel, which has a very diverse population, can provide important data on the impact of the vaccine on subgroups that could not have been obtained in the past. tests carried out by the company itself. .
Officials of Israeli health-maintenance organizations have given their own assurances that neither Pfizer nor any outside party has access to the HMO databases. Prior to the signing of the deal with Pfizer, Israeli immunization data was entered into a separate national database containing information beyond what HMOs possessed.
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