Avital Livny: The Testimonies Project

Avital Livny introduces the new affiliate organization to the World Council for Health, The Testimonies Project.

The Testimonies Project was created to provide a platform those who were affected after getting a Covid-19 vaccine. The Project amplifies the voices of people that are being ignored by Israeli media.

This is an edited segment from the weekly live General Assembly on November 15, 2021.

[00:00:00] [00:00:30] Avital Livny: So good evening to everyone. Um, I’m a mother of two, from Israel and um, in the last month, since the vaccination started in Israel, we already started to hear about injuries that people reported around us, right after getting the shots and it got to, you got more and more reports about that, but at the same time on the Israeli media, there was nothing nobody’s talking about it. [00:00:58] Everything is great. They give a lot of time to show the damages of the COVID-19. If somebody is getting ill, but the nothing about side effects. And you have to understand that in Israel, there is no efficient system to report side effects unlike the American VAERS and even if you try to get the report, there’s no transparency. [00:01:21] You don’t know if anybody got it. You can’t see other reports. So you can’t try to compare if other people have the same side effect like you have. And then they moved on and started vaccinating the teenagers and going onto the children. So I decided that I have to take as we say, the mission on my shoulders. [00:01:44] And I started then filming. And I went over on the web, on Facebook, you have thousands and thousands of reports and testimonies about injuries. So I contacted myself, hundreds of them, spoke to them. Most of them didn’t want to expose themselves. And you have to understand that the atmosphere is very difficult. [00:02:07] And there’s a lot of incitement against the unvaccinated. Our prime minister said out loud that the unvaccinated people are like a person going in the streets with a machine gun spraying, Delta viruses all over. And when they started to vaccinate the teenagers, he said, I want the parents of the vaccinated to fight with the parents of the unvaccinated. [00:02:32] So the atmosphere is very violent. I would say a lot of hate and fear. And and so most of the people that I contacted didn’t want to expose himself in front of the camera, but eventually I got 40 testimonies, very strong testimonies. And with this 40 testimonies, I created the Testimony Project. [00:02:55] And it was very interesting because while I was going on the testimonies, I could see clear patterns. I could divide them into seven different categories of side effects of heart problems, neurological problems, skin problems, clots, and vaginal bleedings and miscarriages and the burst of like auto-immune diseases. [00:03:21] And only with those 40 testimonies very strong and heartbreaking. At the beginning I wanted to make I was very naive. I thought they would make like a viral, a short video that will go viral, but I realized that it’s impossible with these 40 testimonies to summon up everything to a few minutes. [00:03:41] And it became a documentary of more than an hour and seven minutes. And it reached over 1 million viewers that already watched the documentary all around the world, more than 200 countries. And we’re translating it as we speak to more and more languages. We have it on English. [00:04:03] We have English translation. We have Italian, Romanian, Russian, and coming on, of course, German today, we published the German and we will have at least four more translations by the end of this week. And in order to reach as many people as we can. I’m giving interviews, as you can see, to all the international organizations that reach out to me, but I’m not giving interviews to the Israeli media because they’re so biased and I know that they will not give a real opportunity to say anything, and just try to make the project look, I don’t know, in a bed light. [00:04:43] And that’s it. The Israeli Ministry of Health, two weeks after publishing the project they posted on Facebook, saying, let’s talk about the side effects from the booster. They were trying to say how minor it is, as a reaction. I always said, it’s my dream, is that the project [00:05:03] will start like a me-too of the people got hurt from the vaccination that people would have the courage to come out with their stories. So the people around will see the numbers because they are not aware if you’re not in the groups of the injured people. You’re not aware. And two weeks after the project came out, the Israeli ministry of health posted this post and as a reaction, they got less than 24 hours, more than 25,000 comments of people saying, “really?” “Minor?” [00:05:38] “I don’t think so. I got hurt. I got this and that.” And people even uploaded their medical documents. And I don’t know somebody got panicked because somehow overnight thousands of comments were deleted. Luckily people already took screenshots of all of the comments to prove that the comments that were deleted were not with bad language or false things or fake or anything. [00:06:06] So not only you don’t have a real way to report the injuries in Israel, but you have a feeling that everybody’s trying to shush people up in order not to see, what’s really going on in Israel. Every day, you hear about 40, 50 year old people that they die from a cardiac arrest. And now I get a second, [00:06:31] let’s say, wave of dangerous from the young people that reach out to me. I have two mothers of 15 year old that got myocarditis a few days after the injection. So I started another line of shooting testimonies of the young, younger people I have already eight only from the last two weeks, eight testimonies, people of the age of 20, 20 something. [00:06:57] Most of them, myocarditis. A lot of heart problems. The last one that I videotape, it was amazing because he got, most of the people that live in Israel, got the vaccine because of the green passport. Not because of medical reasons. They said it themselves. This guy that’s got myocarditis got the vaccine because he was afraid that they will not let him go inside his own wedding because of the green passport. [00:07:26] So he got the vaccine and two weeks before his wedding, he got the myocarditis. He spent his whole weddings sitting down. This is the situation in Israel. Would you like me to go now to questions and answers? [00:07:40] Shabnam Palesa Mohamed: Thanks very much Avital. You shared what I can see is obviously a very painful process for you to go through being somebody who is collecting this kind of data, but it’s so important and it’s such a service to humanity. [00:07:52] So thank you very much for doing that. In South Africa, we have an independent alternative to government reporting system called SA VEARS. And as the person sitting behind collecting all of those, that those reports and doing the interviews, I can so resonate, what you’re experiencing. And I’d love to interview you when you have some space to talk about the experiences in Israel. [00:08:13] Tess, do we have any questions for Avital? [00:08:16] Dr. Tess Lawrie: Yes, I actually, I just wanted to say I think what’s especially difficult for people who are have experienced side effects and are experiencing serious adverse reactions. Is that just the failure of the authorities to recognize and acknowledge and to hear them. [00:08:34] And also it’s my understanding that many people face if, when they do speak about it they face real difficulties within their families and their communities and so on, because it seems like many people still struggle to accept that it can be a connection between the two. Is that something that your group is very aware of and how do you deal with those issues? [00:09:00] Avital Livny: First of all, new injured people that contact me? Most of them, they’re afraid to lose their jobs if they speak out. They’re afraid of getting criticism for, because it’s like they’re saying to people don’t go vaccinate. It’s not what they’re doing, but just want to say, “Hey, listen, you have to see the whole picture. [00:09:21] Okay. It’s not as the government, or everybody’s trying to show you.” I have to say they are very frustrated that they feel very abandoned and you have to remember, most of the people they serve in the army for two or three years people are really connected to the country and it’s a really heartbreaking feeling. [00:09:44] All the doctors are telling them it has nothing to do. We have a joke running in Israel. There’s a new pandemic. It has nothing to do with the vaccine. “What, oh, you have a heart attack. Oh, it’s because not no connection to the vaccine.” There’s no way that the doctors even will agree to [00:10:04] that they had the vaccination a few days earlier to what happened to them, not even to put it on the chart. One of the ladies that was in the documentary she asked a doctor, she had heart problems. “Are you going to report this?” He said, “it’s not my job to report. If you want, you can go ahead and report it.” [00:10:24] And people, they don’t know where to report. They don’t know how to do it. And one more interesting and very disturbing details. Many of the people in the project told me that the moment they came to the hospital with a side effect, the first thing that the doctors tried to do is to push them into the COVID 19 section. [00:10:45] Even though they had no COVID 19. There was an 85 year old. He was in the hallway for five hours because he wouldn’t go to the COVID-19 section. He said, “I don’t have the COVID-19.” And they told him, “Until you don’t go there, we don’t give you any tests, any exams, nothing.” Five hours, 85 year old man in a hallway. [00:11:05] And you have to ask yourself why. And also the way that they treat them, and they say it has nothing to do with the vaccination, but nowadays everyone who has heart problem that goes into the ER, they say that the first question that they are being asked, the minute they go inside the hospital is “when [00:11:24] did you get the vaccine?” So it has no connection, but that’s the first question they asked them. But if you go, as we say off camera and you speak to people behind, anonymously, they will say the truth. One of the mothers her 15 year old boy got the myocarditis. [00:11:41] She didn’t even imagine it would be like that. She sat the boy with his father. The boy wanted to go to the hospital. He felt something was really wrong. And she sent him with the father because she didn’t believe it’s anything serious. And after half an hour, the father called her very scared. And he told her the minute that inside the ER, the nurse came out, started shouting at me. [00:12:05] “Are you crazy? How dare you vaccinate a 15 year old boy?” And I’m asking myself, where was this nurse before they got vaccinated? Why isn’t she going out with this information? Why isn’t she shouting this information out loud in the media? I don’t know wherever. How are they supposed to know? It’s not okay to vaccinate a 15 year old boy, according to her. [00:12:29] There’s no way of saying something different than the narrative you have doctor. Any doctor, that’s trying to say something different. He’s conspirative. They try to show him as a crazy guy. And they showed us an SMS message. There was a very famous guy, he’s an activist and he got arrested. [00:12:52] And after he got arrested he got sick and he got inside of the hospital with a supposedly COVID 19 and he died and he was consulting with one of the famous doctors. And he asked him what to do. And he told him, “listen, do whatever the doctors tell you, they know what to do. And also I recommend to lay on your stomach. [00:13:11] It’s helps too with breathing problems.” In the media, they cut out, but he said, trust the doctors do what they say, they know what they’re doing. And they left only the recommendation of lying on your stomach to show him like a weirdo or something. He’s very well known doctor. [00:13:31] Dr. Tess Lawrie: Avital, there’s a couple of other questions? [00:13:33] Dr. Brian is wondering, what does the general situation in Israel with regard to lockdowns cases and mandates? [00:13:39] Avital Livny: There’s no lockdown, but there’s a green passport and somebody who is unvaccinated cannot go. Any, almost to any restaurant theater music show. Sometimes it’s even to the local authorities, if you have to, I don’t know, to do something with your license, everything is with green passport. [00:13:59] You can’t take the children sometimes even in a open space events, you need the greens passports. Weddings. Everything. If people who are not vaccinated required to take the PCR test. And and now there’s a new decision that they can only take it in a certain place where it costs them. It’s around, let’s say a 15, $15. [00:14:30] Let’s say every time they take the exam and they need to take two times a week the exam. So the try to pressure them economically also, even if somebody deciding to take the test instead of the vaccination, he’s losing money all the time. And so there’s a lot of intimidation. You have to wear a mask inside a closed areas. [00:14:55] The children are suffocating for hours in schools. While you see photos of our government and cabinets. Sitting around, hugging, no mask, the the virus doesn’t like, the government they’re protected from it. So this is how it goes. It’s really difficult. And the schools in Israel now they start to look like military zones. [00:15:19] The education, the ministry of education is not in charge anymore in the schools. The ministry of health is in charge. If they go inside, they can do whatever they want. And parents are not allowed inside the schools. That’s the new laws they’re not allowed inside. And so many Israelis took their children out of the the system because they have no trust. [00:15:43] They don’t know what is going to happen. Three weeks ago in a school in the center of Israel accidentally by mistake a whole class of six years old got a vaccinated. not with a Corona vaccination, but the regular vaccination that children have at this age, but they didn’t check to see the, that the approval of the parents, the whole class was vaccinated. [00:16:11] One of the children got vaccinated twice because they didn’t ask him. He didn’t know he already got these vaccination before. And also you had a few weeks ago, two women went in to get a flu vaccination and by mistake, they got another booster. Mistakes. Misunderstandings. One a guy was on, he was on the Israeli news. [00:16:36] One guy went to take the booster and by mistake they gave him three doses. So he has in total, like five doses of the vaccination or six, I think. [00:16:49] Dr. Tess Lawrie: If anyone wants to contact you what is the best way? [00:16:53] Avital Livny: I think through the testimony project website. It’s a vaxtestimonies.org. [00:17:02] Dr. Tess Lawrie: Are you still taking the testimonies and is there any kind of help you can offer them apart from taking testimonies that people who do contact. [00:17:11] Avital Livny: Help with the injuries or- I can say what I see on the web. I’m not a doctor, but I know that many people, first of all, consult and they ask, I have this and that, do you have with your experience, any idea of what it can be today. [00:17:28] I got to message. “My father-in-law has numbing in the fingers and the parts when go numb.” And I tell them what my, the people that was in the project told me that you have to take a test for clots for I don’t think it’s called D dimer. De..dimer… or something. It’s a test that checks for micro clots in your blood. [00:17:55] And if you have it, it could be the reason why your fingers go numb and then you have to take special pills to make the blood run. I don’t have the medical language and in the medical areas is not sufficient enough. [00:18:11] Dr. Tess Lawrie: So interesting. And you’re doing such wonderful work. [00:18:14] We’re very proud to have you as an affiliate. [00:18:16] Avital Livny: Thank you for having me. Thank you. [00:18:18] Shabnam Palesa Mohamed: Thank you. Thanks. Very much Tess and again, thanks very much Avital Livny. [00:18:23]