UPDATE, Feb. 10, 2023: The science education organization Health Feedback said Feb. 9 that Levi’s study had “inadequate support” and he had engaged in “cherry-picking” to reach his conclusions. Information from its report has been added to this article.
Retsef Levi, an expert in risk management relating to the health field, is calling for the immediate suspension of all COVID-19 messenger RNA vaccines.
After performing a risk analysis of the vaccines, Levi — a professor in the Massachusetts Institute of Technology’s Sloan School of Management — revealed his recommendation and supporting evidence in a video posted to Twitter on Sunday.
As of Monday afternoon, the video had more than 1.1 million views.
Unsurprisingly, his assertions also were challenged by other health experts.
“I’m filming this video to share my strong conviction that at this point in time, all COVID mRNA vaccination program[s] should stop immediately,” Levi said in the video.
He said he believes the vaccines have “completely failed” to live up to the promises of efficacy given by health officials and vaccine manufacturers.
Furthermore, Levi asserted there was “mounting and indisputable” evidence that the vaccines cause an “unprecedented level of harm,” including the deaths of young people.
The evidence is mounting and indisputable that MRNA vaccines cause serious harm including death, especially among young people. We have to stop giving them immediately! pic.twitter.com/chFLvqlDqu
— Retsef Levi (@RetsefL) January 30, 2023
Various studies have shown the vaccines to carry a greater risk of complications than initially expected, albeit not to the degree Levi indicated.
For example, shortly after the vaccines were introduced to the public, the Johnson & Johnson and AstraZeneca shots were found to cause vaccine-induced immune thrombotic thrombocytopenia, a blood-clotting condition, in roughly 1 in 26,000 to 1 in 127,000 people, most of whom were young women.
Most public concern over the vaccines, however, comes from another rare yet serious side effect found in the Moderna and Pfizer mRNA vaccines: myocarditis. These side effects are found most often in young adult and adolescent males, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
Some experts believe the severity of these side effects has been downplayed by health authorities.
“We think the vaccines are an important tool for preventing severe illness and death among vulnerable people … But we have been concerned that our federal officials recklessly continue to push for multiple Covid shots for everyone five years old and up, despite the growing evidence that these vaccines may not be appropriate for all,” Drs. Vinay Prasad and John Mandrola wrote in a Wednesday article for The Free Press, an outlet founded by journalist Bari Weiss.
“We are also concerned about the way side effects of the vaccine, particularly among young men, have been downplayed,” they wrote.
In a report released on Nov. 7, the American College of Cardiology estimated the myocarditis complication rate to be 35.6 cases per million doses for the Moderna vaccine and 12.6 per million for the Pfizer vaccine. In 2018, before the vaccines, there were about 2 cases of myocarditis per million people under age 40 and 2.2 per million over 40, the report said.
According to Levi, vaccine side effects are likely more common than studies currently show. In his view, this is because cases of myocarditis are severely underreported and undetected.
“Since myocarditis is known to be hard to diagnose … I was very concerned that it will not be detected by the existing vaccine safety surveillance systems,” he explained in the video.
After performing an analysis of data from Israel’s emergency medical services, Levi found some “very concerning signals,” he said.
Comparing data from 2019 to the first half of 2021, Levi and his fellow researchers found a 25 percent increase in cases of cardiac arrest in people ages 16 to 39.
He also said he found a correlation between this increase and the same population receiving Pfizer vaccine doses.
Over the same time period, Levi’s research found no correlation between the increase in cardiac events and COVID-19 infections.
“While this is not proof of [a] casual relationship, it left us very concerned, especially given the known suspect clinical mechanism,” Levi said in the video.
Despite calling for an investigation into the “causal mechanisms” of the increase in deaths, he said that, “to the best of my knowledge,” no such investigation has been conducted.
“I think there is no other ethical or scientific choice but to pull out of the market these medical products and stop all the mRNA vaccination programs,” Levi said.
“This is clearly the most failing medical product in the history of medical products, both in terms of efficacy and safety,” he concluded.
The science education organization Health Feedback said Thursday that Levi’s study had “inadequate support.”
“In the study co-authored by Levi, the authors didn’t have information about the vaccination status of the people who’d developed heart problems,” Health Feedback said. “It’s impossible to reliably associate these heart problems with vaccination when it’s unknown whether these people were vaccinated in the first place.”
It said his tweet “ignored multiple other published studies showing that COVID-19 vaccination isn’t associated with a higher mortality rate, heart attacks or abnormal heart rhythm, while uncritically citing studies with methodological issues that appear to support his claim.”
This is the “key takeaway” provided in the Health Feedback report:
“While COVID-19 vaccines are associated with a higher risk of myocarditis, this risk is higher in people who get COVID-19. Moreover, COVID-19 is associated with a host of health problems, of which heart problems are just one.
“By reducing the risk of infection and severe disease in people, COVID-19 vaccines offer many benefits that go beyond just preventing COVID-associated heart problems. As such, the vaccines’ benefit outweighs their risk.”
This article appeared originally on The Western Journal.
