Profiles in courage: Dr Shmuel Shapira

February 19, 2023

As part of a series, Frontline News is profiling those medical scientists and doctors who previously supported COVID vaccination, then after reexamining the evidence, had the courage to change their minds. This series examines who they are and what evidence persuaded them.

Professor Shmuel Shapira headed the Israeli effort to produce a COVID vaccine. He began his career in the military, earning a medical degree in anesthesiology and medical management. Professor Shapira has had a long career in terror and disaster management, on which he lectures worldwide. He is a career government insider. He has served as an advisor to the government in several capacities and has published many scientific papers and several books, the latest being The Pandemic Circus (published in Hebrew) in which he narrates the development of a COVID vaccine at the Israel Institute for Biological Research (IIBR), but also strongly criticizes the Israeli government’s response to the COVID pandemic.

On February 2, 2020, the same day as the first reported death from COVID-19 outside of mainland China and a day before passengers on the cruise ship Diamond Princess were informed that they were being quarantined due to COVID-19, then-IIBR head Prof. Shapira received orders from then-Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu to begin developing monoclonal antibodies and a vaccine to deal with the new disease.

Shapira explains in The Pandemic Circus that IIBR is mandated to deal with biological dangers facing Israel, among them pandemics. The IIBR had been preparing for a pandemic and working toward the ability to produce vaccines since 2014. What came to be known as COVID-19 was already under their observation since November 2019, when first reports began to emerge from China.

On August 18, 2020, Professor Shapira reported to the Knesset (Israeli parliament) Science and Technology Committee, taking a very cautious approach. Here is some of what he had to say (translated from the committee transcripts):

I don’t think our goal is to be the first. . . . We will deliver a good and safe vaccine in a time frame that is reasonable and relevant for [dealing with] corona.

No other body, worldwide, has performed the number and volume of animal experiments that we have done and so we feel confident. We did not take any shortcuts.

The first two volunteers received the Israeli-made vaccine on November 1, 2020. A November 30, 2020, Ha’aretz article records Dr. Shapira’s estimation that the vaccine would be ready for public use in the summer of 2021 and that 3 million doses were already produced, the expectation being that Israel could manufacture a total of 15 million doses. He also complained, however, of delays caused by regulation, regulation from which large manufacturers like Pfizer and Moderna were excused. The Israeli vaccine was not based on the experimental mRNA technology touted by Moderna and Pfizer, so he felt confident that the Israeli vaccine was a safer bet. As he told Ynet News in 2021,

We opted for an approach that is on the one hand innovative and on the other, less bold that the other vaccine makers chose. Our model has been in existence for three or four years and has shown adequate results. How many years has the method used in the other vaccines been around? Six of seven months.

In a subsequent interview in 2022, Professor Shapira specified that the Israeli vaccine was based on a technology that had already proved successful in fighting ebola in 2016.

Shapira goes along with Israel’s riskier approach

The Israeli government was not relying only on the efforts of the IIBR and, throughout 2020, signed vaccine purchase contracts with several vaccine manufacturers. After the FDA granted emergency use approval to the Pfizer vaccine on December 10, 2020, Israel began vaccinating citizens almost immediately. Shapira himself, in the Knesset committee meeting in November 2020, said that “if there will be another vaccine and ours unfortunately fails, health comes first” and he received two doses of the Pfizer vaccine.

Shapira left the IIBR at the end of March 2021 and published The Pandemic Circus in August 2021. In an interview shortly before the book's publication he criticized the COVID vaccines in use in Israel pointing to the loss of effectiveness over time and the side-effects. Israel was contemplating a third dose at the time and Professor Shapira’s opinion was,

The decision is problematic. The first two shots hit their mark, sort of. I don't think it was an excellent vaccine. It was effective for four to five months and failed very quickly when mutations began to appear and it is still unclear if it prevents serious illness. It appears to hardly prevent contagion. I think the booster should have been a different vaccine altogether. That makes more sense medically and scientifically.

He had not yet received the third dose and stated that he wanted to wait and see.

He also criticized much about the vaccine rollout in Israel, focusing mostly on bureaucratic failures. He also felt that no proper follow-up was done to determine what adverse effects might occur.

I know from my close circle and from conversations I've had with physicians, that there are significant side-effects that could be associated with the vaccine. I don't think that they were covered up on purpose, but I think digging deeper into the possibility of side-effects was less convenient. . . . Arrhythmia, unusual muscle pain. No one picked up the phone to call me or any of my family or friends to ask if we had any irregular reactions to the shots. I believe that was intentional. It was easier to ignore the subject.

Forceful objection to the mRNA shots

Shapira did get the third dose, despite his reservations.. He tweeted on May 14, 2022, that he suffered a serious adverse reaction, although he did not give details. From that point, his criticism seemed to take on a harsher tone.

In January 2023 he tweeted that he regretted taking any of the vaccines, all three shots.

A couple of months previously, in October 2022 Prof. Shapira appeared on The Third Opinion Uncensored podcast, where he reported that he fell ill with COVID-19 even after getting a third dose of the vaccine. He is now jaded enough that he didn’t get the flu vaccine this year for the first time in 15 years. He is very critical of the pandemic response and the Pfizer vaccine. He denounces the Green Pass vaccine passport initiative in Israel as unsupported epidemiologically. The extended loss of school attendance was a disastrous mistake, especially as children were barely affected by the disease. There have been many apparently serious adverse events in Israel and although this has not been adequately studied he feels there are “big red lights flashing”. He mentions that excess mortality has been greatest in the most highly vaccinated countries Israel included.

Back in August 2021 when asked how he felt about Israel being the world’s guinea pigs, his response was, “Israel is an excellent laboratory and I mean that in a good way.” He is no longer proud to be the world's guinea pigs and feels that ethical boundaries were crossed. Looking back on the COVID response and considering what should be done as we go forward he states:

You should give the patients the data. . . . [P]hysicians certainly should have [the] autonomy to use their knowledge and to give advice to the patient, to give cautious advice, balanced advice. . . . [M]edicine is not black and white.

For more profiles in courage of medical scientists and doctors who previously supported COVID vaccination, then after reexamining the evidence had the courage to change their minds, see: