Long ago, in February 2020, before the world changed, China’s doctors, citizen journalists and netizens were forced to share vital information about a novel coronavirus spreading in Wuhan by writing about it on social media in bites peppered with typos and emojis, written backwards, or translated into Morse code or the fictional language of Klingon.

It seemed like black comedy. An artifact of communism with Chinese characteristics. Yet last month Professor Shmuel Shapira – head of Israel’s Institute for Biological Research 2013-2021, responsible for the development of Israel’s own Covid vaccine, physician, scientist, founder of the department of Military Medicine at Hebrew University, author of more than a hundred of peer-reviewed papers – was reduced to the same sad subterfuge to avoid an anonymous censor at Twitter.

‘T warned me to remove the T about connecting M to C,’ he tweeted. Dr Eli David (an expert in artificial intelligence as it happens) translated the tweet into emoji;

‘T = bird 🐦 MP = monkey 🐒 C = coronavirus 🦠’

This may seem only slightly less cryptic but for those versed in the language of pandemic censorship, it meant (T)witter had warned Shapira to remove his (t)weet connecting (m)onkeypox to (C)ovid which had pointed out that it was well established that mRNA vaccines impair the immune system and a monkeypox outbreak following a mass vaccination campaign was not a coincidence. ‘Each phenomenon may not be related to “you know what”,’ he tweeted, ‘but the clustering and timing suggest differently.’

How did it come to this?

Israel has played a key role in the pandemic. Early on it did a deal with Pfizer to get accelerated access to its vaccine in exchange for medical data on its effects on the Israeli population. Pfizer’s CEO Albert Bourla said Israel had become the ‘world’s lab’ earning the moniker Pfizrael. ‘To the best of my knowledge, this is the first case in history where experimental guinea pigs paid an exorbitant rate for their participation,’ in a trial, Shapira tweeted in April.

What is astonishing – or perhaps convenient – is that for the first year of the vaccine rollout, Israel had no system to collect data on vaccine injuries and deaths; just an anonymous form that could be submitted but not be tracked. Shapira had a significant injury following his booster. He says no one checked up on it.

Finally, at the end of 2021, the Israeli Ministry of Health created a system and commissioned a six-month study led by Professor Mati Berkowitz, an expert in pharmacology and toxicology. He reported in June 2022 via a Zoom meeting that was recorded and leaked to Israeli journalist Yaffa Shir-Raz who analysed the findings with the help of Professor Retsef Levi, an expert in risk management and health systems at Massachusetts Institute of Technology and a member of Israel’s Public Emergency Council.

Levi garnered international attention when, in mid-2021, he reported that data from Israeli emergency medical services showed a 25 per cent increase in heart problems for 16–39-year-olds years following the administration of the Covid vaccine compared with previous years. It gave the lie to the claim that any heart damage caused by the vaccine was not as bad as damage done by the virus.

The report by Shir-Raz and Levi on the Zoom call was equally damning. It showed that 90 per cent of reports of adverse events were not resolved in a few days, as claimed, but lasted up to three months, and 60 per cent lasted longer with some still ongoing. It proved causality in many instances because of dose-dependent reactions demonstrated when people were re-exposed to the jab. Finally, Berkowitz warned that the government could be exposed to medico legal claims for urging people to get vaccinated despite the known risks.

The response of the ministry was to sit on the report for two months while the decision was made to vaccinate children as young as six months. When they finally released it, they diluted the findings by calculating the frequency of adverse events not against doses administered to the 15 per cent of population surveyed during six months, but against the entire population of Israel for the entire campaign. They even included doses administered to males and females of all ages when calculating the frequency of menstrual problems.

As shocking as this was, it was matched by the utter indifference of the media which failed – with the honourable exception of Neil Oliver at GB News – to report the revelations. It has fallen to citizen journalists – doctors, statisticians, assorted others – many who have been banned on social media, to spread the word, mostly via Substack.com

Shapira was incensed that the Israeli Genesis Award was given to Bourla for ‘a mediocre, short-acting vaccine that yielded Pfizer a profit of billions’. ‘What grade would you give to a vaccine that people are vaccinated with three times and get sick twice (as of today)? Not to mention significant side effects’ he tweeted. ‘And don’t say that it prevents a serious illness,’ he added, ‘no one has proven it.’

The word ‘Israel’ means one who struggles with G-d, as Jacob wrestled with an angel. The Torah teaches that Jews are not expected to accept faith blindly but to engage intellectually with their doubts. How does a nation with such a tradition sink into censorship and self-censorship? Of course, it is not just Israel. It is Australia, the UK, the US, the West. Countries where we are bound – even the atheists – by our laws and traditions to the Ten Commandments, children of The Book.

In this sense Udi Qimron, professor of microbiology in the department of medicine at the University of Tel Aviv spoke for all of us when he tweeted: ‘Now, when everything is open and the wave is fading, and it is clear to everyone that the danger is increasing and that the measures were unnecessary, it is still not clear how: How did we neglect our children’s education? How did we burn our resources? How did we give up our freedom? How did we exclude, conceal and disintegrate the fabric of society? How was our mind so easily controlled? how?!?!’ There are no easy answers.

Rebecca Weisser is an independent journalist. Like what you read?  Consider supporting her work at PayPal.