Israeleak: The silent tragedy of a discontinued vaccine adverse-effects study
Is accepting injustice a part of growing up?
On January 8, the Israeli Public Emergency Council for the COVID-19 Crisis (PECC), an independent organization of leading experts who have been challenging the response to COVID-19, revealed in full a leaked video from the Israeli Ministry of Health.
The following link includes (1) the full video, (2) the video of the January 8 meeting in which the video was revealed and analysis by Yaffa Shir-Raz and Ratsef Levi was provided, as well as (3) highlights from the long video.
The video shows that initially, there was openness, supportiveness and genuine efforts within the Ministry to study COVID vaccine adverse effects. Researchers commissioned by the Ministry to study vaccine adverse effects presented meaningful findings about vaccine adverse effects. The video shows that these researchers were emphatically praised for their work and encouraged to continue. But then the study was discontinued. As a result, Israel was unable to provide the world with information that could have possibly contributed to a growing body of evidence that indiscriminate mass vaccination was misguided. Instead, the opposite happened: Israel became the first to give the third and fourth boosters
At the January 8 event, Yaffa Shir-Raz and Ratsef Levi provided insightful commentary and questions about the possible reasons for the discontinuation of the study—including Pfizer connections within the highest ranks of the Ministry of Health, as well as the human difficulty of admitting errors in one’s own narrative.
I was reminded of a quote by Tolstoy that my father quotes in his website Periodic Physics: an independent approach to the cosmological and subatomic riddles
“Most people, including those at ease with problems of the greatest complexity, can seldom accept even the simplest and most obvious truth, if it be such as would oblige them to admit the falsity of conclusions which they have delighted in explaining to colleagues, which they have proudly taught to others, and which they have woven, thread by thread, into the fabric of their lives.” (Leo Tolstoy)
Since I am not a scientist or a healthcare professional, I cannot respond to the revelations in the video from a scientific perspective beyond the common-sense observation that the adverse vaccine side-effects study should have been encouraged to continue. The remaining observations are my subjective sentimental reflections on the experience of watching the video.
The fact that the video, with the exception of the commentary by Yaffa Shir-Raz and Retsef Levi, is in Hebrew (with English subtitles) can add a level of difficulty to the viewing experience, However, this is a barrier well worth overcoming due to the significance of the content. For me, however, Hebrew is the language that I spoke when I lived in Israel from birth until the age of 20 (minus some time in Canada between the ages of 16-18). I am 47 now, having lived in Canada since the age of 20, so Hebrew is the language of my youth, while English is the language of my adulthood. The earnestness of the researchers, speaking with a sense of purpose and determination about the research and the importance of continuing it, reminded me, in a general sense, of something in Israeli culture that I remember from my childhood.
Many of our expectations about how the world should be are formed during our childhood. And in advanced economies, these expectations, at least when I grew up in the 70’s and 80’s, were generally conditioned to be positive ones. Western civilization has fed us with optimism and the expectation of a fair chance at self-fulfillment. We implicitly expected to look forward to a life where we would have fair opportunities to make a contribution and where we would be rewarded and for hard work. We expect people to treat us kindly if we treat them kindly and if we do good work—as the researchers in the video are treated kindly and warmly. It was thus a moving and sentimental experience for me to hear the researchers in the leaked tapes praised and encouraged to continue.
Because I grew up in Israel but lived the vast majority of my adult life in Canada, there is a part of my psyche that has subjectively (no doubt unfairly) come to associate qualities such as warmth and the encouragement of individual effort and potential with Israel and with the Hebrew language. Even though I know that these associations are in part immature, simplistic and romanticized—in my heart I will always associate Israel in its best manifestations with the earnest love of learning, initiative and truth-seeking. This is one of the reasons that I found the initially warm encouragement of the researchers to be moving: it reminded me of something true and essential that seems to have been lost to cynicism.
It is natural and even desirable that the transition from youth to adulthood would involve an eye-opening realization that the world is not as good, just and rewarding as we had assumed. However, when the gap between expectations and reality is too large, when too many doors are slammed in the face of the earnest desire to make a contribution, we might feel that the problem is not only our own immaturity but that something may be rotten in the state of Denmark.
Therefore, the discontinuation of the study is symbolic of a loss of innocence and trust in the social value of truth seeking. The feeling of warmth, earnestness and encouragement toward the researchers that the video exudes reminds me intuitively of the encouragement of hard work and independent thinking that I sentimentally remember from the culture of my childhood—but the ending is sobering.
In Greek tragedy dramatic irony is generated because the audience knows more than the characters. So, for example, while Oedipus is earnestly seeking to identify the root cause of the plague in Thebes, the ancient audience, who came to the theatre with knowledge of the myth of Oedipus’s life story, knew what Oedipus himself was ignorant of—that Oedpius had unknowingly married his own mother and that his tenure as admired king would soon end tragically.
The classical understanding of tragedy involves the fall of a great man from the heights of success due to a tragic flaw, as well as divine fate. Modern tragedy, in contrast, often focuses more closely on the interaction between the character of a person and the social conditions surrounding that person, rather than on fate determined by the gods. The tragic hero is faced with harsh social realities to which they must decide, in accordance with their character, how to respond.
In Bertolt Brecht’s The Life of Galileo (1938), Galileo in the beginning of the play is naively enthusiastic and optimistic about his social prospects. He believes that the truth is “seductive” and that the evidence that he discovered that the earth is not at the centre of the solar system is a social asset—his society would praise and reward him for these valuable discoveries. However, he quickly realizes, as my father sometimes wryly observes, that the truth is important only as long as it does not conflict with more important things—in this case the more important things being the attachment of the establishment to the social and religious stability offered by the idea that the earth is at the centre of the Universe (as Biblical metaphorical descriptions, if taken literally, seem to imply). Galileo embraces pragmatism and refuses to martyr himself for the truth. He renounces the heliocentric truth, observing, “I cannot afford to be smoked on a wood fire like a ham. . . . I cherish the consolations of the flesh. I have no patience with cowards who call them weaknesses. I say there is a certain achievement in enjoying things.” Thus Galileo asserts the early-modern version of choosing Uber Eats over martyrdom.
In Henrik Ibsen’s An Enemy of the People (1882), Dr. Stockmann thinks he is choosing noble humility after he makes an important discovery that the water of the medicinal springs in his Norwegian town are contaminated:
Billing: Upon my soul, Doctor, you are going to be the foremost man in the town!
DR. STOCKMANN (walking about happily). Nonsense! As a matter of fact I have done nothing more than my duty. I have only made a lucky find—that's all. Still, all the same...
However, Dr. Stockmann is soon demonized as an enemy of the people. He has forgotten to take into account a crucial factor: the (contaminated) spring water has been a source of prosperity for the town: “Think how extraordinarily the place has developed within the last year or two! Money has been flowing in, and there is some life and some business doing in the town. Houses and landed property are rising in value every day.”
In the beginning of the play, The Messenger, the town paper, is viewed as a principled leader in critical thinking and truth-seeking. However, the paper quickly succumbs to the pressure of not publishing anything that would harm the town’s (poisioned) source of income.
Similarly, venerable Israeli media that pride themselves on high-quality journalism, such as Haaretz, have shown little interest in the IsraelLeak video. The same is true of media and academic and government institutions in almost any other country.
The stage is screaming for a Pfizer adaptation of Life of Galileo and An Enemy of the People.
But how does one conceptualize and dramatize, in today’s world, the tragedy of a study not being allowed to continue? Of results that could have shed light on the benefits and harms of the COVID vaccine not being disseminated?
The IsrealLeak video gives us a glimpse that we rarely get to see behind the curtains of academic and government institutions. This is the kind of quietly cruel drama that occurs in many organizations where decisions about giving funding or positions are taken. One can easily imagine a CanadaLeak that we will never get to see—where are the studies of side-effects that should have been done in Canada? [or fill in any country of your choice].
The sad and ironic story that we see unfolding is no Greek or Elizabethan tragedy with divine punishments or sword fights on the stage. In the terms in which we are currently being indoctrinated, the suppressed researchers are “privileged individuals.” They will not be arrested, burnt at the stake or thrown stones at like the characters of tragedies past.
But we must not confuse the relative convenience and physical liberty of our lives with the idea that our minds are more free than those of the people living during the time of Galileo or in the Norwegian town of the fictional Dr. Stockmann. In fact, in today’s universe of information and convenience, we might be more apathetic to the truth than ever before.
The tragedy of the twenty-first century is the tragedy of indifference: we can make things wither and crumble, so those who seek power hope, by ignoring them rather than by attacking them with direct violence. Gruesome violence is not needed when exclusion, stonewalling and indifference are sufficient to silence, depress and defund true thinkers—or at the very least freeze them out of spheres of influence.
Because the conditions of our lives have improved dramatically since World War 2, and because free speech is still largely legal, punishment will take on subtle yet pernicious forms that gradually eat away at our earnest desire to make a contribution to society by seeking the truth. Human beings have the need to belong and to be acknowledged for their earnest efforts—not to mention the greater need to make a living. But those who care about power over truth trust that any genuine attempt to reveal the truth will soon drown in the sea of information—and will remain less important to the public than my favorite Netflix show or what I want to eat tonight or the fact that Prince Harry has just published a memoir and there are many videos to watch about him. At any time, true ideas that require concentration and discipline to keep in mind can be overwhelmed with entertainment and distraction.
As long as we consider the truth to be important only to the extent that it does not conflict with “more important” things, many genuine attempts to discover and disseminate knowledge will die a tragic death in silence.
Israeleak: The silent tragedy of a discontinued vaccine adverse-effects study
What an excellent piece, with valuable insights. Thank you!
Canada recently sent $1B worth of Covid vaccines to the landfill (or however pharmaceuticals are disposed of) partly because our Prime Minister had agreed to buy 9 doses for every Canadian. At the time, administering such a number of doses would have been the work of fantasy... I want to believe the decision to purchase these drugs was made in earnest. At some point, though, the PM must have realized the error in judgment (which, again, is forgivable in the fog of pandemic). But I don't believe he is capable of acknowledging any real errors he made. The psychological stakes of admitting error are simply too great for some of us. And so the error propagates and propagates until such time as we've learned nothing that helps us prepare for the next pandemic.
In retrospect we were incredible lucky that Covid infected fatality rate fell as quickly as it did. That gave us so much time to study and learn. (Like Bart Simpson's prayer for a snow day that delayed his test.:) ) And yet we squandered it. Because, it seems, the truth must submit to ideology and ego (and profit).
Thanks for the insightful description of the human difficulty to admit our errors. Being mortal, our time to learn from errors in each life cycle is ultimately limited--so hopefully we will learn to do so more efficiently and with more humility.