Israeli Health Ministry ‘lost’ 82% of reports on COVID vaccine side effects

Israel’s Health Ministry failed to review 82% of reports on side effects from Pfizer’s COVID-19 vaccine, according to a recent official report.

Comptroller: Ministry recorded only 18% of reports

State Comptroller Matanyahu Englman revealed last month that the Israeli Health Ministry received 345,200 reports of adverse events following administration of the Pfizer injection. Only 18% of those reports were recorded in the ministry’s database. The other 82% were “lost” due to “technical errors,” Times of Israel reported.

“The Health Ministry also failed to process an additional 33,000 reports filed by the public regarding side effects due to limited ability to analyze reports filed anonymously,” continued the report. “Adding to that, a lack of manpower in the ministry’s Department of Epidemiology meant that reports that contained identifying details were also unable to be reviewed and investigated.”

Ministry failed to investigate serious side effects in timely manner

The 18% of reports that were reviewed by the Health Ministry mostly consisted of mild side effects such as pain at the injection site or low fever. 

There were also reports about more serious side effects that made it to the review stage and were checked by ministry officials. These included approximately 200 reports about changes in vaccinated women’s menstrual cycles following the shots. However, Comptroller Englman found that the ministry did not investigate these reports in a timely manner.

The ministry also reviewed only about 275 reports about myocarditis and pericarditis following the injections. Most of the patients in those cases ended up being hospitalized.

Rather than criticizing public health officials for failing to investigate the great majority of vaccine injuries, however, Comptroller Englman’s report chastised the Health Ministry for not doing enough to ensure public trust in the mRNA injections. He specifically reprimanded government officials for not acting sufficiently to combat “anti-vaccination propaganda” and for not having a strategy in place to fight “false information” about the vaccine.

Israel: A ‘lab for Pfizer’

During the pandemic, Israeli officials repeatedly told the public that the vaccine’s side effects were mild and that serious adverse events were “rare.” These claims were used to justify forced vaccinations, where Israelis who refused the shots were barred from schools, restaurants, pools, events, driving tests, and public areas. 

Officials proudly declared Israel as a “lab for Pfizer,” being the first country to experiment with the COVID-19 vaccines. Israel’s rollout provided the data for other countries to then roll out their own vaccination campaigns.

Israel was also among the first to implement harsh vaccine mandates for nearly all age groups, adding to a mask mandate which police violently enforced. These were accompanied by harsh rhetoric from officials, who blamed deaths and lockdowns on the unvaccinated. Then-Prime Minister Naftali Bennett proposed increasing health insurance premiums for those who refused the shots, and tried to implement a bracelet system to publicly identify the unvaccinated.

Forced vaccinations for young and healthy Israelis despite no COVID deaths

All this was justified by daily reports from the Health Ministry showing thousands of COVID-related deaths among all adult age groups.

But in response to a Freedom of Information (FOI) request from attorney Oren Shabi, Israel’s Health Ministry admitted last year it had no record of deaths among those 18-49 with no comorbidities.

“Among COVID-19 deaths on which epidemiological research was conducted and comorbidities were disclosed, there are 0 recorded deaths among ages 18-49 with no comorbidities,” said the ministry.

Many Israelis within that population were nevertheless forced to take the injections, which were then tied to a sudden increase in cardiac events.

A 25% increase in cardiac events among young and healthy Israelis

A Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) study in 2022 of young, healthy Israelis found that with the advent of the COVID-19 vaccine those Israelis saw a 25% increase in cardiovascular events. 

MIT researchers studied emergency calls in Israel over a two-and-a-half-year period spanning 2019-2021. Specifically, they looked at emergency calls reporting either cardiac arrests [CA] or acute coronary syndrome [ACS] in the 16-39 age group. 

The study also aimed to determine whether the uptick in cardiovascular events was associated with COVID-19 or the COVID-19 vaccine. The findings showed that for the period of January–May 2021 there was a 25% increase in emergency cardiovascular events compared with the same period in 2019 and 2020, and was entirely associated with the COVID-19 shot.

Israel’s Health Ministry vehemently denied there was any increase in cardiac arrests, though. In the same letter to Shabi, however, the ministry revealed that it stopped recording cardiac arrest data in 2021.