Prime Minister Naftali Bennett will ask the government to approve the forming of a team to consider the establishment of a coronavirus vaccine plant in Israel, the Prime Minister’s Office announced on Friday.
“We are working around the clock, in various ways, to protect the health of the citizens of Israel,” Bennett said. “The independent ability to produce vaccines in Israel is likely to be dramatic, especially looking toward the future and future pandemics. Professional teams will examine this and make a decision soon.”
The announcement was made in collaboration with Finance Minister Avigdor Liberman and Health Minister Nitzan Horowitz.
The team would be headed by the accountant-general of the Finance Ministry and would conduct an orderly procedure and consult with relevant professionals in order to formulate the best way to establish the plant, the announcement said.
If established, the plant would be required to produce variant medications, while prioritizing vaccines, with an eye toward regular commercial activities.
At the same time, it would have the ability to adapt its activities to produce vaccines during emergencies, ideally using a variety of technologies.
The announcement added that Israel was open to establishing partnerships with other countries to bring any plan to fruition.
Back in March, former prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu, Austrian Chancellor Sebastian Kurz and Danish Prime Minister Mette Frederiksen announced during a visit to Israel an agreement among their countries to establish a research and development fund and manufacturing plants for coronavirus vaccines in Israel and Europe, but the plan has not been publicly discussed since.
“We will be, together, ‘Vaccination Nations,’” Netanyahu said of the deal at the time.
Netanyahu has long discussed establishing a vaccine production plant in Israel, potentially with Pfizer or Moderna, or an independent facility that would produce the Institute for Biological Research (IIBR) COVID-19 vaccine – a vaccine that is still stalled on its Phase II trial.
In May, Pfizer confirmed for The Jerusalem Post that the company had no plans to open such a plant or an R&D facility that Netanyahu described in Israel.
“I’ve checked internally and confirmed that we do not have plans for this,” a senior manager for corporate communications said. “It sounds like the talk around it has been coming from local politicians.”
However, Yeruham Mayor Tal Ohana said that even before coronavirus, there was hope to establish a vaccine plant in her town like the one described by Bennett. Then, in August 2020, when IIBR launched the Phase I trial for its coronavirus vaccine, Netanyahu asked the institute to start setting up a production plant at the same time. To date, there has been little or no progress on such a plant. Although, according to Ohana, the Defense Ministry and other commercial partners potentially involved visited the city multiple times.
“Today, Israel is completely dependent on external intellectual property and external manufacturing capacity,” BiondVax CEO Amir Reichman told the Post in a previous interview.
BiondVax, traded on Nasdaq, is a “biopharmaceutical company focused on developing, manufacturing and ultimately commercializing products for the prevention and treatment of infectious diseases and related illnesses,” its website described.
“With this pandemic, we were lucky because early in the pandemic we contracted and secured vaccine deliveries,” Reichman said, though he noted that in a future pandemic, Israel might not be so lucky. “It is important for Israel to have both the IP and the capacity to manufacture” vaccines.