Israel tested unapproved Pfizer booster on hospital staff, boasts former PM

Israel used hospital staff as guinea pigs for Pfizer’s first COVID-19 booster which at the time had no FDA approval, says former Prime Minister Naftali Bennett.

Israel has been called “Pfizer’s lab” for being the first country to experiment with the Pfizer vaccines on its citizens. Israeli officials then reported the vaccination data back to Pfizer and other countries, who followed suit and rolled out the vaccines to their own populations.

In 2020, then-Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu brokered a deal with Pfizer to get the vaccines first by promising rapid data collection using the country’s digitized health records.

“I said we’ll use that to tell you whether these vaccines, what do they do to people,” said Netanyahu in an interview last year. “So Israel became, if you will, the lab for Pfizer. And that’s how we did it, we gave the information to the world,” he added.

Pfizer CEO Albert Bourla also referred to Israel as a “lab”.

“I believe Israel has become the world’s lab right now because they are using only our vaccine at this stage and they have vaccinated a very big part of their population, so we can study both economy and health indices,” Bourla said in an interview with NBC News in February 2021.

In a recent five-hour interview with author and comedian Hanoch Daum, former Prime Minister Bennett boasted that he introduced the third Pfizer shot in Israel without FDA approval.

“I made the difficult decision to be the first country to get the third vaccine without FDA approval,” said Bennett. “The first round was FDA approved. It was a cautious process but a vital move and it saved the country.”

“Then everyone did it,” Baum added.

Bennett then revealed that he gave a batch of boosters to Sheba Medical Center Infectious Disease Unit Head Professor Galia Rahav to experiment on 2,000 members of the hospital’s medical staff. The former prime minister’s comments suggest that the experiment was conducted by a private individual instead of Israel’s Health Ministry.

“She tried it first, on their doctors, on the hospital staff, 2,000 people,” said Bennett. “She sampled the decrease in antibodies and mortality.

“So [Galia] was the first in the world. So every day I would call and ask, ‘What's going on, Galia?’ and she would update me.”

Galia Rahav is Israel’s “Lockdown Lady,” a government advisor and media COVID darling who was instrumental in the heavy-handed lockdowns imposed on Israeli citizens. Rahav was still asking for more lockdowns last year. 

The hospital head also heavily pushed child vaccines and masks. She holds no love for the unvaccinated, whom she refers to as “parasites”. 

But likely most important to Rahav is that she is the Israeli media’s token “medical expert” whom they trot out occasionally to stoke the embers of mass panic when it begins to wane. 

In the year before the pandemic, Rahav had little to no media coverage; in fact, a search for “Galia Rahav” in the news between January 1, 2019 and January 1, 2020 generates no results.

But in 2020, the year of the pandemic, Rahav was mentioned at least twenty times in the mainstream media. 

In 2021, the year of vaccinations, Rahav’s fawning media coverage increased, especially when she was threatened by parents over her influential push to vaccinate children. The threats earned Rahav NIS 42,000 ($11,900) in damages and her own page on the Israel government’s website in her defense.