Surgeon who helped MrBeast 'cure blindness' said he nearly hung up on him when he called
The surgeon who helped MrBeast restore the eyesight of 1,000 people has admitted he nearly hung up on the YouTuber when he first contacted him.
To be fair, if I received a call out of the blue and heard someone claiming they were one of the biggest YouTubers in the world, and they wanted to offer up millions of dollars, I'd be dubious too.
It just sounds like a scam waiting to happen, but in the case of Dr Jeff Levenson it was all true.
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The surgeon received a call from MrBeast, whose real name is Jimmy Donaldson, after the YouTuber came across Levenson's TedTalk which focused on ending preventable blindness with cataract surgery.
Cataracts appears in the form of cloudy patches over the lens of your eye, which can cause vision to become blurry before being obstructed altogether.
After being inspired by Levenson's speech, MrBeast set out to cure 1,000 people of their preventable blindness by funding the restorative surgery.
Recalling the moment MrBeast reached out, Levenson described how he 'got a call from a stranger' who said his name was MrBeast, and that he was 'kind of a big thing on YouTube'.
A post on the Facebook page for SEE International, the nonprofit where Levenson works as Chief Medical Officer, describes how MrBeast told Levenson he'd seen his TED Talk and 'wanted [Levenson] to help him restore the sight to thousands of blind people all around the world'.
Upon hearing this, Levenson admitted: “I had never heard of MrBeast so, I almost hung up. But I gratefully did not hang up.”
Thanks to Levenson's decision to stay on the phone, he arranged to collaborate with MrBeast and was able to provide sight-restoring surgeries in Jacksonville, Florida.
SEE International then coordinated international programs for MrBeast’s team which allowed them to reach people suffering preventable blindness in Jamaica, Honduras, Namibia, Mexico, Indonesia, and Brazil and conduct restorative surgeries to 1,000 people within the space of three weeks.
The doctor has explained that 'half of all the blindness in the world is people who need a 10 minute surgery'.
Commenting on the achievement, Levenson said: “If MrBeast can light a fire, and if we can get governmental and private support behind it, we can end half of all the blindness in the world."
SEE International described it as an 'honour' to work with MrBeast and his team to bring people's sight back.
Emily Brown