UPDATED
‘A common theme [in Kirsch’s talk] was the precipitous rise in death rate over time since vaccination’
Tech entrepreneur Steve Kirsch spoke on the overlooked dangers of COVID-19 vaccinations to a packed auditorium at Massachusetts Institute of Technology Thursday night at the invitation of a new student group dedicated to intellectual diversity.
Kirsch is a 1980 alumnus of MIT, inventor of the optical mouse, and founder in 1994 of Infoseek, an internet search engine, according to MIT News.
According to a 2021 article in MIT Technology Review, “Kirsch has spent tens of millions of dollars fighting humanity’s biggest threats” after “making a fortune as the founder of Infoseek, an early search engine that was the Google of its day.”
“He prefers iconoclastic approaches, whether by directly funding asteroid detection or advocating for nuclear power to combat global warming,” according to the article.
MIT Students for Open Inquiry, which brought Kirsch to campus and opened the event to the broader community, “exist[s] to restore intellectual diversity and open inquiry to MIT, a university nominally home to boundary-breakers and free thinkers,” its website states.
MIT SOI Captain Adam Deng told The College Fix in an email that he and his organization, launched in October, “received much praise for hosting Steve Kirsch, and having the bravery to stand up.”
“The reception was overwhelmingly positive, with 100 people staying after the lecture to talk to Kirsch, me, and Spencer,” he said of the event, which was livestreamed on Rumble and is available to watch in full.
“This is a very unsafe vaccine,” Kirsch said in his talk. “No one wants to look at the Medicare data, and the CDC hides it from sight.”
Kirsch “red-pilled a packed audience,” according to a news release from the MIT SOI. “Drawing on sources from New Zealand, Israel, and the Maldives, and examining US nursing home data, Kirsch painted a devastating picture never displayed before by mainstream outlets.”
“A common theme [in Kirsch’s talk] was the precipitous rise in death rate over time since vaccination,” according to the SOI. “Had vaccines worked, the line would’ve been flat, or have a slightly negative slope. In the 20 most vaccinated countries, excess mortality soared post-vaccine. … And with every conceivable confounding variable accounted for, there is no other culprit for the staggering number of unexpected deaths post-vaccination beside the vaccines themselves.”
Kirsch had challenged several pro-vaccination authorities to debate him at MIT Thursday evening, but none accepted, he said in his talk.
Kirsch reached out to Robert Langer, Moderna co-founder and professor of nutritional biochemistry at MIT, among others. Langer did not return his emails, Kirsch said.
Asked by The Fix whether any students or others protested or otherwise opposed the event, Deng responded, “Not really.”
“No protests, though some students walked out in the middle and [Kirsch] called them out, joking that they were ‘always busy,'” Deng said.
“Several undergraduates were really happy to FINALLY be platformed and have their views considered instead of ignored or smeared as ‘misinformation,'” Deng said.
Kirsch spoke in the Kirsch Auditorium, which the school named for him in 1998 following a $2.5M donation. In early 2022, he “wanted to give a talk at MIT about what the science is telling us about the COVID vaccines and mask wearing and how science is being censored,” he wrote on his personal blog.
“MIT requires a faculty sponsor for all talks and they said they couldn’t find one willing to sponsor my talk,” Kirsch wrote. “Therefore, students will not have the opportunity to consider that there may be an alternate hypothesis that better fits the evidence on the table.”
“I had always believed that MIT was above politics, but it is clear I was mistaken in that belief,” he wrote.
MIT SOI is a “platoon of MIT students who value and defend academic freedom and open inquiry, no matter what narratives it might shatter,” according to its website. “We believe that MIT, the math and tech capital of the world, must embrace intellectual curiosity and heterodox ideas because that’s how MIT ascended to the top.”
MORE: Nearly 100 colleges still mandate COVID vaccine as of Sept. 2023
Editor’s note: This article has been updated with additional quotes from Steve Kirsch’s speech at MIT.
IMAGES: Vaccine Safety Research Foundation/Rumble; Adam Deng
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