Did international researchers and doctors gather at a Bucharest, Romania, summit on November 18 and November 19, 2023, to reveal the magnitude of an alleged COVID-19 genocide through mass vaccination with an experimental serum? No, that's not true: The International Crisis Summit (ICS) IV included known conspiracy theorists from the U.S., Canada and other parts of the world, and was organized by Romania's leading far-right party AUR.
The claim was published in a video (archived here) on TikTok by @michelle1502a on November 19, 2023, with the following description (translated from Romanian to English by Lead Stories staff):
ICS4 International Crisis Summit: 'thank you for not getting vaccinated' Incredible reveals
This is what the post looked like on TikTok at the time of writing:
(Source: TikTok screenshot taken on Fri Nov 24 11:35:40 2023 UTC)
The summit, which took place between November 18 and November 19, 2023, is not a serious medical conference. Rather, it's an annual summit organized by the far-right AUR party, which has been one of the main sources of misinformation on the pandemic in Romania.
The list of speakers and participants included, besides party members, well-known conspiracy theorists like Dr. Robert Malone (whose claims have been debunked by Lead Stories), Denis Rancourt (a Canadian doctor who claimed COVID vaccines killed 17 million people), and Meryl Nass (a U.S. doctor whose license was suspended for spreading COVID misinformation).
According to the TikTok user and the conference video recordings, speakers said the vaccines are dangerous and contain harmful substances that were included intentionally to kill people. They also said there are no such things as COVID variants and that the vaccines are still in an experimental phase, which is why world leaders won't be prosecuted for genocide -- because the pandemic was essentially a testing ground for a new serum.
However, leading experts from the World Health Organization and the European Medicines Agency have explained the vaccines are safe and effective, and do not contain harmful substances.
In addition, public health officials validate and continue to monitor and identify COVID strains. The WHO website provides a list of these variants.
As for claims that the vaccine is experimental, Lead Stories has reported that this is false and that they are fully authorized. AUR leaders and speakers at the event frequently mentioned "the Wuhan experiment" during the summit, highlighting a known conspiracy theory involving the planning of the pandemic and the vaccine rollout. None of this is supported by facts.
