RIO DE JANEIRO, BRAZIL – Peter Doshi, editor-in-chief of the British Medical Journal (BMJ), and Retsef Levi, a professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, told an expert panel that data from the COVID vaccine trial do not support the claim that the vaccines are “safe and effective.”
U.S. Sen. Ron Johnson (R-Wis.) held a roundtable discussion Tuesday on federal COVID vaccination regulations with a group of people who have been harmed by COVID vaccines and scientists from some of the world’s most respected research institutions, including BMJ and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT).
Peter Doshi, senior editor of BMJ and associate professor of pharmaceutical health research at the University of Maryland School of Pharmacy, and Retsef Levi, professor of health systems and analytics at MIT, expressed their doubts about the efficacy of the COVID vaccine and the failures of the scientific community.
“It saddens me that we as a society are oversaturated with the attitude of ‘everybody knows,’ which limits intellectual curiosity and leads to self-censorship,” Doshi said.
Doshi said we are not in a “pandemic of the unvaccinated,” as the media claims. If hospitalizations and deaths occur almost exclusively in unvaccinated people, “why would booster shots be necessary?” asked Doshi. “And why would the statistics be so different in the United Kingdom, where most hospitalizations and deaths from COVID occur among the fully vaccinated?”
“There’s a correlation there that you should be curious about,” Doshi said. “Something’s not right.”
Doshi argued that the public was lied to in early 2021 when health officials, including Dr. Anthony Fauci, claimed that the COVID vaccination trial data showed the vaccine was saving lives.
After presenting trial data for vaccines approved in the U.S., Doshi noted that “the numbers were similar in the vaccine and placebo groups.” He argued that those who claimed that the trial showed that the vaccine was very effective in saving lives were “mistaken” and that the trials “did not show that.
Doshi talked about “anti-vaccination” and criticized the official definition of that term. He presented the panel with Merriam-Webster’s official definition of “anti-vaccination” as “a person who opposes the use of vaccines or regulations mandating vaccination.”
“The second part [of the definition] surprised me,” Doshi said.
“There are whole countries, from the United Kingdom to Japan, that don’t mandate childhood vaccinations,” he said. “There are no regulations, and I would bet that maybe the majority of the world’s population meets that definition of vaccination opponents.
Doshi told the panel that “vaccine” is another definition “worth reconsidering.”
“I contend that these products, which everyone calls mRNA vaccines, are qualitatively different from standard vaccines,” Doshi said. “So I found it fascinating to learn that Merriam Webster changed the definition of vaccine earlier this year.”
“The mRNA products did not meet the definition of a vaccine that has been in place for more than 15 years, but the definition was expanded, so that mRNA products are now vaccines,” Doshi said.
“Just because we call COVID injection a ‘vaccine’ doesn’t mean these new products are like all other mandated pediatric vaccines,” he continued.
“Every product is a different product, and if people are OK with prescribing something just because it’s a vaccine, then it’s time to bring critical thinking into the discussion.”
He also criticized the fact that society is vaccinating a large portion of the population and mandating the vaccine even though the raw data on the vaccine’s safety and efficacy are not yet available.
“Even though we are told to follow the science, what we are doing is not a scientific process based on open data, it is a process where the data is secret, and there is something very unscientific about that, in my opinion.
Levi told the panel that “scientists in the most prestigious journals claim the vaccine is safe and did not report serious side effects, such as deaths.”
He explained that emergency calls in Israel for cardiac arrest in young people under 40 increased dramatically by more than 25% in parallel with the COVD vaccination campaign.
“We wrote a scientific paper expressing our concern about these statistics and asking the authorities to check them … Of course, they never got back to us.”
Levi claimed the government tried to censor the research by questioning its credibility. “They called the research a hoax,” Levi said.