In this podcast we interview Professor Shmuel Shapira who was the Director General of the Israel Institute for Biological Research (IIBR) between 2013 and 2021. He is the founder and head of the Department of Military Medicine of the Hebrew University Faculty of Medicine and IDF Medical Corps, and Senior Research Fellow at the International Institute for Counter-Terrorism (ICT) at Reichman University in Israel.
Under his leadership, the IIBR was given the task to quickly develop a Covid vaccine commencing on January 1 2020. The IIBR commenced this task using an engineered virus on Merck's previously demonstrated to be safe platform used for Ebola.
Unfortunately, the task did not go to plan. There was a sudden and unexplained pivot by Israeli leadership towards making an undisclosed deal with Pfizer so that Israel would become the lab of the world and be the first to recevie the experimental gene based mRNA vaccine.
Contrary to assumptions the vaccine was NOT being tracked for any safety signals or adverse events for the first 12 months. This was the critical time to identify concerning safety signals that could have been shared with the rest of the world. Instead the opposite happened. Doctors were encouraged to ignore the tracking and reporting of adverse events of vaccine induced harm. Harm to Israeli citizens was censored in the Israeli media, the doctors and health professionals misinformed and harmed citizens gaslit or denied voice.
The tragedy of this story is that many countries were looking towards Israel for the critical whole country Pfizer safety data. It was expected Israel research science could be trusted.
From this interview Prof Shapira makes it clear that there was no collected data to share. There was no one to report to. There was no follow up system in place. In contrast, if Plan A had gone ahead, the highly respected IIBR would have completed the critical task of creating a safe and effective vaccine for Israel. They would have ensured the data was transparent, adverse events tracked and that the vaccine was one which was truly safety and effective so benefits outweighed the harms for anyone receiving it. The consequences of these major gaps (informed consent, adverse event data, lack of transparency around evidence of harms, etc) is yet to be measured. The impact of adverse events on otherwise healthy younger citizens will take years or decades to know.