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County Health Officer Makes Questionable Claims About Natural Immunity, Shot Side Effects

Dr. Robert Levin, the face of public health in Ventura County, spent 2022 making numerous false or questionable statements about COVID shots, natural immunity and the seriousness of side effects from COVID shots.

In January 2022, Levin told the Guardian that “infection [by COVID] alone does not stack up against being fully vaccinated and pales in comparison even further if the person is boosted” — a demonstrably false statement that the CDC had already discredited.

The CDC published a study in January 2022 reporting, “By early October [2021], persons who survived a previous infection had lower case rates than persons who were vaccinated alone.”

“… university COVID-19 vaccine mandates are likely to cause net expected harms to young healthy adults … that is not outweighed by a proportionate public health benefit.”

— British Medical Journal’s Journal of Medical Ethics

UCLA Health’s Sandy Cohen echoed on January 20, 2022, that the CDC’s study “found that previous infection with COVID-19 provided better protection against the delta variant than vaccination in a large sample.”

In June 2022, a massive study of more than 5.7 million people in Israel, published in the New England Journal of Medicine, concluded that for “persons who had been previously infected with SARS-CoV-2 (regardless of whether they had received any dose of vaccine or whether they had received one dose before or after infection) … protection was higher than that conferred after the same time had elapsed since receipt of a second dose of vaccine among previously uninfected persons.”

As NBC News put it (in a story titled, “Natural immunity offers greater COVID protection than vaccines, study finds”), “The study said it found that COVID protection decreases over time, but the overall protection was higher in those who had COVID than those who received a second vaccine dose.”

Come again, Dr. Levin?

And while serious side effects from COVID shots are now widely recognized by leading medical journals and government health agencies worldwide, Levin weighed in, early in 2022, telling the Guardian, “As of now, we have received no such credible reports [of adverse reactions to COVID shots] … We have tracked reactions to vaccines very closely at county vaccination sites, and these have overwhelmingly been minor – feeling faint, flushing, pain at the injection site. … We have had no credible, substantiated deaths from COVID vaccination in our county.”

“A European Medicines Agency (EMA) committee recommended adding heavy menstrual bleeding to the list of side effects of mRNA COVID-19 vaccines made by Moderna, as well as Pfizer and its partner BioNTech.”

— Reuters

Levin and the County continued to push COVID shots on babies down to 6 months old, even as governments worldwide backed off. For example, the Danish Health Authority quit recommending boosters for anyone under 50, stating on its website: “Why are people aged under 50 not to be re-vaccinated? … People aged under 50 are generally not at particularly higher risk of becoming severely ill from covid-19. In addition, younger people aged under 50 are well protected against becoming severely ill from covid-19, as a very large number of them have already been vaccinated and have previously been infected with covid-19, and there is consequently good immunity among this part of the population.”

Sweden, too, joined the UK in not recommending COVID shot boosters for healthy children and adolescents under 18.

Just last week, the Journal of Medical Ethics, which functions under the aegis of the British Medical Journal, published “a risk benefit assessment and ethical analysis of mandate policies at universities,” which concluded that “university COVID-19 vaccine mandates are likely to cause net expected harms to young healthy adults … that is not outweighed by a proportionate public health benefit. Serious COVID-19 vaccine-associated harms are not adequately compensated for by current US vaccine injury systems. As such, these severe infringements of individual liberty and human rights are ethically unjustifiable.”

“… more cases of post‐vaccine myocarditis/myopericarditis are anticipated as more adolescents and younger children become vaccinated.”

— American Heart Association

It continued: “Mandates are also associated with wider social harms. The fact that such policies were implemented despite controversy among experts and without updating the sole publicly available risk-benefit analysis to the current Omicron variants nor submitting the methods to public scrutiny suggests a profound lack of transparency in scientific and regulatory policy making.”

The Journal recommended reforms that are “needed to begin what will be a long process of rebuilding trust in public health.”

But to date, Ventura County health leaders have yet to acknowledge or address any serious side effects from COVID shots. Take, for example, the problem of menstrual bleeding.

In 2021, The British Medical Journal published a study titled, “Link between menstrual changes after covid-19 vaccination is plausible and should be investigated.” In it, Dr. Victoria Male, a reproductive specialist at Imperial College London, said that “Changes to periods and unexpected vaginal bleeding are not listed [as common side effects of COVID-19 vaccination], but primary care clinicians and those working in reproductive health are increasingly approached by people who have experienced these events shortly after vaccination. … Yet more than 30,000 such reports had been made to the UK Medicines and Healthcare Products Regulatory Agency (MHRA) surveillance scheme for adverse drug reactions by 2 September.”

That was more than a year ago. The Conejo Guardian asked Levin about growing global concern over menstrual bleeding as a side effect. Levin responded in July by demeaning the source quoted by NBC News. “First of all, Science Advances is not a journal that physicians commonly look to to get their information,” he wrote, then continued: “Before physicians accept an observation as ‘truth,’ they need to see it repeatedly in various journals. … The CDC and ACIP has said repeatedly that the decision to use a vaccine is based on a risk benefit analysis.”

Just three months later, in October, Reuters reported, “EU regulator recommends adding heavy periods to side effects of mRNA COVID shots.” The report said, “A European Medicines Agency (EMA) committee on Friday recommended adding heavy menstrual bleeding to the list of side effects of mRNA COVID-19 vaccines made by Moderna, as well as Pfizer and its partner BioNTech. Reports of heavy periods — bleeding characterized by increased volume and/or duration that interferes with the quality of life — have been observed during clinical trials, from cases in the real world and in medical literature, the EMA said.”

Levin did not respond to follow-up requests for comment about menstrual bleeding and other side effects, and a County staffer referred the Guardian to its public data.

Regarding another side effect, myocarditis, which is now widely viewed as a statistically significant COVID shot side effect, especially among young men, Levin was well behind the curve, calling the “amount of myocarditis cases associated with the vaccine … important but minuscule.”

Yet the American Heart Association recently published a paper titled “Myocarditis After COVID‐19 Vaccination in Pediatrics: A Proposed Pathway for Triage and Treatment.” The authors wrote: “As vaccination numbers accelerated in these age groups (down to 5 years old), pediatric vaccine recipients began presenting with features meeting the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) definition of myocarditis,including chest pain, laboratory evidence of myocardial inflammation, and, in some cases, characteristic findings suggestive of myocardial edema and fibrosis on cardiac magnetic resonance imaging (MRI). The CDC and Food and Drug Administration have determined a causal link is likely between the mRNA vaccines (ie, Pfizer‐BioNTech, Moderna) and myocarditis … more cases of post‐vaccine myocarditis/myopericarditis are anticipated as more adolescents and younger children become vaccinated.”

While Levin continues to push COVID shots — with rapidly declining success — on the local population, even the CDC has drastically shifted its posture. The agency released revised guidelines in August stating: “CDC’s COVID-19 prevention recommendations no longer differentiate based on a person’s vaccination status because breakthrough infections occur, though they are generally mild, and persons who have had COVID-19 but are not vaccinated have some degree of protection against severe illness from their previous infection.”

This momentous change came only after mandates destroyed countless careers, the US Military lost tens of thousands of service members, and medical professionals lost their licenses for going against the CDC’s previous “guidelines.”

To add insult to injury, the new CDC statement acknowledges the power of natural immunity and the reality that COVID shots do not stop infection or transmission — facts which, until recently, were banned by social media platforms, giants such as YouTube, Google and others, and labeled “misinformation.”

The CDC also admitted that it had falsely claimed to have monitored vaccine safety data when, in fact, it hadn’t. According to The Epoch Times:

“Dr. Rochelle Walensky, the agency’s director, said in a letter made public on Sept. 12 that the CDC did not analyze certain types of adverse event reports at all in 2021, despite the agency previously saying it started in February 2021.

“CDC performed PRR [Proportional Reporting Ratio] analysis between March 25, 2022, through July 31, 2022,” Walensky said. “CDC also recently addressed a previous statement made to the Epoch Times to clarify PRR [adverse event analyses] were not run between February 26, 2021, to September 30, 2021.”

Before Walensky’s admission, Levin told the Guardian that the CDC “have done a forthright job of reporting negative data” — which turned out to be baseless and untrue since the CDC had not even monitored adverse events.

Walensky said in a statement, “For 75 years, CDC and public health have been preparing for COVID-19, and in our big moment, our performance did not reliably meet expectations. As a long-time admirer of this agency and a champion for public health, I want us all to do better, and it starts with CDC leading the way.”

Even CNN favorite Leana Wen, a major cheerleader for punitive mask-and-COVID-shot requirements, has reversed course. Wen, a Washington Post columnist, professor at George Washington University’s Milken Institute School of Public Health and formerly the City of Baltimore’s health commissioner, penned an article recently titled, “I’m a doctor. Here’s why my kids won’t wear masks this school year.”

Wen admitted that “masking has harmed our son’s language development.” This from a public health professional who called for stricter mask requirements in February 2022, mass school closures for an extended period of time, and who said in June 2021, “But at some point … I think it will be important to say ‘Hey, you can opt-out [of COVID shots], but if you want to opt-out, you have to sign these forms, you have to get twice-weekly testing.’”

Meanwhile, Levin, County supervisors and County health leaders have yet to acknowledge any failure of policy which shut down schools, businesses and public life in the County, gutted the local economy and set back tens of thousands of students in their learning and social skills.

Levin finally claimed, again falsely, that “There is no country in which natural infection and natural immunity has brought the pandemic under control. Countries with high levels of natural infection have not prevented recurrent waves of infection.”

He should subscribe to the New York Times, which reported on March 23 about West and Central Africa which have a very low rate of COVID shot acceptance, and very small numbers of COVID deaths — pointing toward the superiority of natural immunity.

“Sierra Leone, a nation of eight million on the coast of Western Africa, feels like a land inexplicably spared as a plague passed overhead,” reads the Times article. “What has happened — or hasn’t happened — here and in much of sub-Saharan Africa is a great mystery of the pandemic.

“The low rate of coronavirus infections, hospitalizations and deaths in West and Central Africa is the focus of a debate that has divided scientists on the continent and beyond.”

The article goes on to say, “About two-thirds of the population in most sub-Saharan countries do indeed have those [SARS-CoV-2] antibodies. Since only 14 percent of the population has received any kind of Covid vaccination, the antibodies are overwhelmingly from infection.”

“We have not seen massive burials in Africa. If that had happened, we’d have seen it,” said Dr. Thierno Baldé, who runs the WHO’s COVID emergency response in Africa.

Dr. Demby, the Sierra Leone health minister and an epidemiologist by training, agreed. “We haven’t had overflowing hospitals. We haven’t,” he said. “There is no evidence that excess deaths are occurring.”

So Ventura County’s public health experiment continues, seemingly out of step with multiple realities.

In response to follow-up questions posed by the Guardian, Levin — who is a longtime contractor with the County, became a multi-millionaire on his taxpayer-funded $300,000-plus annual paycheck and owns a winery in Ojai — pleaded with the newspaper:

“I’m choosing not answering based on the fact that other news people I deal with, radio and print, have not asked me for response after response. I feel that I have been respectful and communicative with you, and it’s ‘asked and answered’ when I said decisions about whether a vaccine is safe is based on a risk-benefit analysis. Every vaccine has side effects, but the vaccine is a lot safer, incredibly safer, than the disease. I hope you’ll print that. Have you considered that being ambivalent about vaccination, a proven modality that saves hospitalizations and prevents death, leads to more hospitalizations and deaths? Please don’t contribute to those who refuse to give credence to science and undermine actions that will save lives and misery.”

Joel Kilpatrick
Joel Kilpatrick
Joel Kilpatrick is a writer and journalist.

1 COMMENT

  1. Dr LeVauci (Oops Levine) and all like him are a danger to our society and the County of Ventura. I find it ironic that his salary increased almost 13% in Dec. of 2020. Also was retro activated back to July of 2020. So, then this so-called doctor of our county’s public health was making almost 300k plus. All for the sake of making sure this false narrative took place. His mission? To get as many as he could brainwash and threaten through media, and broken law to get a so-called vaccine which now is finally coming out with brave whistle blowers, mostly doctors, to be useless and more importantly extremely dangerous. Yes, people are dying, permanently injured, unable to work, suicidal or have already committed suicide etc. Now we are seeing numerous amounts of “Sudden Deaths” in our young people from myocarditis, and a high increase in myocarditis and other vax related injuries in all ages in healthy people. This will be the most heinous act on humankind this world has seen, and this man whom I refuse to call a doctor is a part of it. Making sure to instill fear so most but not all, masked, got inoculated and lost their jobs because they refused to be jabbed. Our county leaders closed everything down along with the country ordered by this government. Most disturbing was our places of worship. Which we needed desperately in that time of hopelessness. While liquor stores, casinos, main grocery stores were wide open. Now to this day I see people who still are walking in the bondage of fear created by people like this man and our government. Doctors are holding fast to this lie to insure their grants, pensions, and paychecks. All paid by We The People through taxes, insurance, and government. Still, some are masking, getting boosted every chance they can. Why? Fear. Let us all be in prayer for our nation and those who are suffering loss and who are now in fear because they got the shot(s). Pray for those who were forced to get the shot in our military, frontliners, medical staff, pilots, and all industries who were mandated. May God bless you all. If you are reading this and did or did not receive the shot, may you have a long and healthy life. It is not in judgement I comment but in humility and love. Lastly a huge shout out to the truth tellers at the expense of their careers and standing for justice for the innocent.

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