Tamar Levi

The Miracle Had a Price Tag.

By Tamar Levi · Israel correspondent · Tel Aviv, September 29, 2026

In January 2020, no coronavirus vaccine had ever been licensed anywhere on earth. By December, two of them were in human arms. Eleven months. That is the part they engrave on the trophy. This column is about the rest of the story — the part with the money.

Start with the anomaly, because the anomaly is the whole story. SARS appeared in 2003. Roughly twenty vaccine candidates entered development; most never reached a clinic, because the outbreak was contained and the money walked away. MERS appeared in 2012; its candidates did little better — a Phase 1 here, a stalled trial there. Researchers were admirably blunt about why: with so few cases, an efficacy trial would have needed a hundred thousand participants, which was, in their word, not feasible. To this day, no vaccine has ever been licensed for SARS or for MERS. The industry’s position was never that a coronavirus vaccine was impossible. It was that nobody would pay for one.

Then came the paying customer. Operation Warp Speed, launched May 15, 2020, was a roughly $10 billion public-private program with a stated target of 300 million doses by January 2021. Read its contracts the way an investor would. Moderna received about $955 million for development and a $1.5 billion advance order for 100 million doses — and its vaccine, mRNA-1273, was co-developed with scientists at the NIH’s own Vaccine Research Center, who had been working on a MERS spike-protein vaccine that gave the whole effort its head start. Pfizer took no federal research money — give credit where it is due — but it took a $1.95 billion advance purchase agreement for 100 million doses, while its partner BioNTech took a €365 million grant from the German government and a €100 million development loan from the European Investment Bank. Governments did not merely fund the research. They bought the product before it existed.

Now the liability — or rather, the absence of it. Effective February 4, 2020, the U.S. Health Secretary issued a PREP Act declaration covering COVID-19 countermeasures: manufacturers, distributors, and administrators were immunized from legal liability for claims arising from the design, development, testing, manufacture, labeling, marketing, sale, and use of the products. The only remedy left standing was a federal compensation program. Consider what that means as a business proposition. The research was subsidized. The purchase was guaranteed in advance. And the lawsuits were, by declaration, illegal.

The numbers that followed belong in the commercial record books. Pfizer reported $36.781 billion in Comirnaty revenue in 2021 — the largest single-year sales figure for any pharmaceutical product in history, nearly double the previous record-holder, Humira, at $20.7 billion. In 2022 it did $37.806 billion. Across 2021–2024, Pfizer’s own filings show roughly $91.2 billion in recognized Comirnaty revenue — with, by the company’s guidance, an income-before-tax margin in the high twenties, after a fifty-percent gross profit split with BioNTech. Moderna’s arc is steeper: $803 million in total revenue in 2020, $18.5 billion in 2021, net income of $12.2 billion — a company that had never sold a product in its history, transformed in twelve months into one of the most profitable enterprises on earth.

And then the price went up. With government stockpiles exhausted, Pfizer floated a commercial price of $110 to $130 per dose for 2023. Two American legislators wrote, in fury, of “yet another massive corporate payday from the ongoing pandemic,” noting the price bump would land on top of tens of billions already banked. The fury changed nothing. The price held.

Europe’s chapter deserves its own telling, because it is still under criminal investigation. In 2021, the president of the European Commission negotiated the EU’s largest vaccine contract — up to 1.8 billion doses, worth up to €35 billion — in part through text messages with Pfizer’s chief executive. When journalists asked to see the messages, the Commission first said they had not kept them, then said they were too ephemeral to count as documents. The European Ombudsman found maladministration. In May 2025, the EU’s General Court ruled the Commission had been wrong to refuse access. The European Public Prosecutor’s Office has taken over a Belgian criminal probe into the procurement. No charges have been filed — say that plainly — but consider the sentence you just read: a €35 billion public contract, negotiated by SMS, and the messages are gone.

None of this erases the science, and a serious column says so. The mRNA platform was decades in the making; the spike-protein work on SARS and MERS, though never commercialized, handed the COVID effort its running start; running trials in parallel and manufacturing at risk were genuine logistical feats. The eleven months from published sequence to Phase 3 readout were earned — and they were also bought, shielded, and pre-sold. Both things are true. That is precisely the point.

Every founder dreams of product-market fit. This was something rarer: the market was mandatory, the customer was everyone, the research was publicly funded, the purchase was guaranteed before approval, liability was abolished by declaration, and the biggest contract in European history was negotiated by text message. You can admire the science with your whole heart and still ask, with a straight face, what business the business was in.

It was never just a vaccine. It was the greatest product launch in the history of capitalism — and like all great launches, the product was only half of it.

The Job Is Dead. Long Live the Ledger.

By Tamar Levi · Israel correspondent · Tel Aviv, September 27, 2026

AI is not taking jobs — it is unbundling them. The successor unit of economic identity is not the gig; it is the verified ledger of what you can do.

We Built the Tech. Now Watch the Giants Fight Over It.

By Tamar Levi · Israel correspondent · Tel Aviv, September 27, 2026

In Tel Aviv, a startup founder will pitch you an idea, take your money, and have a working prototype before your flight home. This is not a metaphor. I have watched it happen between a landing and a takeoff.

The innovation economy here runs on a simple fuel: a small country with no natural resources except the people, and a military that trains nineteen-year-olds to run operations most armies entrust to generals. The pipeline is famous — unit to startup, startup to exit — and the results are everywhere: the chips in your phone, the security in your cloud, the pricing in your insurance. We are the laboratory the world pretends it could take or leave — while quietly building its future inside it.

The numbers embarrass the metaphors, so: six percent of GDP into research and development — the highest share in the OECD — in a country with no oil, no minerals, and half its land desert. Nine thousand startups, more per capita than anywhere on earth. The pipeline is not a metaphor; it is a personnel file: Unit 8200 discharges teenagers who ran operations most armies entrust to generals, and within five years they are founding companies. Mobileye sold to Intel for fifteen billion. Wiz — cloud security, four friends from the same unit — became the largest acquisition in Google’s history. The chips in your phone, the firewall in your bank, the algorithm pricing your insurance: check the labels sometime.

Which brings us to the giants. Washington wants the tech, and offers aid with strings long enough to reach the Knesset. Brussels wants the tech, and offers lectures about everything else. The Gulf — the new friend — wants the tech, and offers actual money with admirable directness. And the East wants the tech too, quietly, through every channel that does not require a press release. Each of these giants arrives believing it is doing us the favor — the market access, the legitimacy, the partnership. Read it the other way around: four bidders, one laboratory, and the laboratory is not the one worried about being ghosted.

The bidders, in order of volume. Washington: nearly four billion a year in military aid, geopolitics’ most generous allowance — every dollar with a review process, a technology-transfer committee, and guidance on which markets we may sell to. Brussels: Horizon research money, partnership frameworks, and running commentary on everything else, delivered with the confidence of a continent that has not won a technology race in thirty years. The Gulf, the new friend: actual money, admirable directness, normalization deals opening markets from Dubai to Riyadh — no lectures, just term sheets. And the East: quiet delegations, unsigned memoranda, interest through channels that need no press releases. Four bidders, one laboratory. We take all four meetings, sell what we can to each, and keep the crown jewels — the source code, the algorithms, the next generation — at home. Not cynicism. Inventory management.

The gas fields taught what the startups taught. Fifteen years ago we imported nearly every drop of energy; then Tamar, then Leviathan — billions of cubic meters beneath the Mediterranean — and suddenly the country that invented drip irrigation was exporting molecules to Egypt and Jordan, with a regional gas forum headquartered in Cairo of all places. Energy independence, drilled and engineered by our own stubbornness. Europe, short of Russian gas, found our phone number. What you develop yourself, nobody can take away — the startups taught it first, and the sea confirmed it.

And defense — the original startup. Iron Dome, David’s Sling, Arrow: systems with combat records no brochure can fake, intercepting rockets by the thousand on live television. Nothing sells like that. Arms exports break records year after year; every air force with a budget wants equipment that has worked, under fire, last Tuesday. The engineers who miniaturized the interceptors miniaturize the medical devices; the algorithms that track a rocket track a tumor. War made us good at technology. Technology may, eventually, make war less necessary. Eventually.

So we do what small, clever countries do: we sell to everyone we can, partner where we must, and keep the crown jewels at home. The gas fields off our coast taught us the same lesson the startups did: what you develop yourself, nobody can take away. The giants will keep circling, each convinced the laboratory exists for their benefit. It does not. It exists for its own — built in a desert, under pressure, while the experts called it impossible. They can lecture, condition, and flatter all they like. The dependency runs one way, and everyone in the room knows which. The chutzpah is not the marketing. It is the business model.

Small, clever countries have one advantage over large ones: they cannot afford illusions. No resources, no hinterland, no margin for error — only people, and the pressure that turns people into engineers. The giants will keep circling, each convinced the laboratory exists for their benefit, offering strings, lectures, cash, or silence. We will keep taking the meetings, signing the deals, and building the next thing in a desert the experts called impossible. The chutzpah is not the marketing. It never was. It is the business model — and business, thankfully, is excellent.