Cardiologist Peter Macdonald is free to work again at St Vincent’s Hospital and the Victor Chang Institute. Yet the medical research industry remains captured by the pro-Israel lobby. Wendy Bacon and Cathy Peters report on the Sohn Hearts & Minds Conference last week.
After ten weeks of enforced absence, cardiologist Professor Peter Macdonald is back in his laboratory at Victor Chang Cardiac Research Institute (VCCRI) in Sydney.
VCCRI had instructed the renowned cardiologist not to return to his laboratory after media reports of a comment he made at a non-work forum on August 30, suggesting Israel’s intelligence agency Mossad could be responsible for two Australian anti-semitic incidents.
Macdonald did not mention either VCCRI or his employer, St Vincent’s Hospital.
VCCRI CEO Professor Jason Kovacic had issued a media statement on September 3rd, which criticised Macdonald’s comment as ‘antisemitic and conspiratorial’ and ‘antithetical to our aim of fostering community wellbeing’ on the same day that the comment was quoted in The Australian.
The Executive Council of Australian Jewry called for Macdonald’s suspension. As Kovacic and VCCRI Chair Matthew Grounds declined to answer MWM’s questions, we do not know which pro-Israel influencers led VCCRI to act so precipitously and without any investigation or opportunity provided to Macdonald to explain his comment.
St Vincent’s crisis triage: heart doctor Macdonald back on the wards after witchhunt
On November 9, Kovacic’s media statement disappeared from the VCCRI’s website
as had a similar statement by St Vincent’s (MacDonald’s employer) two weeks earlier.
Macdonald has not commented publicly but the quiet removal of the statement indicates that he held his ground and refused to apologise. He has been seen at a pro-Palestinian march during his period of forced leave.
In a letter in support of Macdonald, the Medical Association for the Prevention of War wrote:
“Accusations of anti-Semitism are extremely serious. Vexatious or unfounded accusations distort our understanding of what anti-Semitism truly is. They have a chilling effect – by threats and intimidation – on the rights to freedom of speech and political opinion, and can leave health advocacy wide open to political influences.”
Macdonald survived the Zionist attack without resorting to court action. But if a senior cardiologist working on a $20m public grant can be removed from his work site for ten weeks for being cynical about Israel’s intelligence agency, one can only wonder what it would be like for a younger doctor who felt compelled to raise concerns about Israel’s genocide and destruction of Gaza’s health system.
Sohn Hearts & Minds Conference
While Macdonald was away from his lab, Grounds and Gary Weiss, who is a long term VCCRI Board member with strong pro-Israel links, were busy preparing for the10th annual Sohn Hearts and Minds Conference.
Hearts & Minds Conference. Image: sohnheartsandminds.com.au
The conference is a novel medical research funding approach that Grounds and Weiss brought from New York to Sydney in 2016. Each year, selected leading fund managers share their best investment idea for the following year with a high paying audience at a one day conference. The speakers donate their services free for what is a major PR opportunity.
The conference operates alongside the Hearts and Minds Investment company (which MWM will cover in a following story.)
Over ten years, more than 30 charities have received funds from Hearts and Minds. Victor Chang has received by far the biggest proportion including $20m over the last four years.
Hearts and Minds describes its conference as “Australia’s dynamic day of exclusive idea-sharing, all in support of medical research”. The 800 participants had each paid $3,500 to attend the event.
Orchestras and rock stars
The conference kicked off last Thursday evening with a cocktail party for 300 VIP guests who included Kovacic and Philip Lowe, a VCCRI Board member and former Reserve Bank governor. The party was held in Machine Hall, a trendy converted substation in Sydney’s CBD. An orchestra played from a mezzanine level.
On Friday, attendees filled Sydney Opera House’s Dame Sutherland Auditorium to hear Treasurer Jim Chalmers, international guests and top local professional investment managers spruik their share market pick for 2026.
The conference website promotes the conference as having individuals worth $1 trillion collectively in the room to hear “the world’s leading thinkers share insights that matter.”
According to the Hearts and Minds website, Gary Weiss chairs the committee that chooses fund managers who speak at the conference.
Grounds has said that New York-based billionaire hedge fund manager and philanthropist Daniel Loeb was always on their list of most desirable speakers. He came in 2023 and was billed as a top speaker this year. Loeb is CEO of $4B fund Third Point and is on the Council of rightwing think tank, The American Enterprise Institute.
Heartless. Victor Chang Cardiac Institute and the Israel lobby
Loeb is one of the best known supporters of Israel in the US. He has been quoted as saying “If Israel was a company, I would invest in it.” Earlier this year, Gary Weiss’s son Ben, who is a venture capitalist in Israel, was quoted as saying Loeb was treated as a ‘rock star’ in Tel Aviv.
Both the World Health organisation and the UN Human Rights office, alongside leading human rights NGOs, have accused Israel of deliberately destroying the Palestinian health system. This is a war crime and crime against humanity. In this context,
the choice of a speaker who so strongly aligns himself with Israel’s war machine is questionable.
Loeb is a donor to the 8200 Alumni Association of former Israeli Defense Force (IDF) members of the notorious Unit 8200, the intelligence arm of the IDF. Microsoft recently terminated this Unit’s access to its Azure Cloud following an investigation which exposed how it used Azure Cloud to run a mass surveillance system that collected, stored and analyzed millions of civilian phone calls from Gaza and the West Bank, targeting the Palestinian population.
Also worst caricature of me award.
— Daniel S. Loeb (@DanielSLoeb1) November 16, 2025
When Loeb decided to redouble his efforts in Israel by setting up Third Point Ventures in Tel Aviv in 2022, he recruited Sapir Harosh, a Unit 8200 veteran active in the Alumni Association as well as previously working for the Israeli state-owned arms company, Rafael. Several of the companies that Hanosh has invested in since joining Third Point are also founded by 8200 veterans.
These companies include NextSilicon, an AI chip startup founded by Elad Raz who worked on classified projects for the IDF, and Zenity, an AI cybersecurity company founded by Ben Kliger, an 8200 veteran who also worked for Israel’s Prime Minister’s office.
Tainted money
Loeb has played a prominent role in US debates about Israel’s war on Gaza. He was one of a group of American business leaders exposed by the Washington Post as having secretly pressured the previous New York City Mayor, Eric Adams, to use the police against pro-Palestinian student protesters at Columbia University.
After the protests continued, Loeb announced that he would shift his graduate hiring practices away from Columbia and other universities he perceived to be anti-Israel. He shifted a $1 million donation from Columbia to the pro-Zionist University of Yeshiva.
The Foundation he runs with his wife Margaret Munzer has donated millions to pro-Israel organizations from 2019 to 2023, including some $400,000 to the US ‘Israel on Campus Coalition’, a group that Nation magazine reported to have links to US intelligence and which has been accused of surveilling and doxxing anti-genocide student protestors.
Loeb was appalled by the selection of Zohran Mamdani as New York Mayoral candidate and donated $750,000 to his opponent Cuomo. He is now concerned he will impose a Soviet-style bureaucracy.
When UN Rapporteur Franscesca Albanese released her recent report finding that the ongoing genocide in Gaza is a collective crime, sustained by the complicity of influential third states that have enabled longstanding systemic violations of international law by Israel, Loeb retweeted Israel’’s Ambassador to the UN Danny Danon speech
accusing Albanese of being a ‘witch’ weaving ‘spells’ to her 164,000 followers.
Square Peg dark hole
The only company to have two speakers at last week’s conference was venture capital giant Square Peg, which has teams in Tel Aviv, Melbourne, Sydney and Singapore. Its CEO Paul Bassat is an outspoken supporter of Israel and contributed to a $US20m fund named Iron Nation to support Israeli start-ups during the conflict in Gaza.
Iron Nation has invested in a number of companies including Airwayz which is involved in the development of autonomous drone defence technology. Its CEO is Brigadier General Yaron Rosen, who led the Israeli Airforce Joint Operations Division and was Chief of IDF Cyber Staff.
Another start-up being supported by Iron Nation is Link 5, which is headed by a former fighter in IDF elite special forces unit Sayeret Matkal who has said his “goal is to transform the battlefield in a way that reduces risk to soldiers.”
Square Peg manages $US3.6B in assets and has also invested heavily in Israeli start ups, including some founded by ex-Unit 8200 or elite IDF military intelligence such as Aidoc or Exodigo.
Square Peg’s Portfolio Manager, Ben Hensman was one of ten fund managers selected to spruik their chosen company for 2026 at the Opera House on Friday. He recommended Israeli firm Monday.com which has come under international protest and scrutiny for its work with the Israeli government throughout the Gaza genocide. Prior to this controversy, this company had included Benjamin Netanyahu’s government on its website as a case study.
Only friendly media invited
MWM wanted to report on the Hearts and Minds conference but were told that only the media partners who pay are allowed to attend. The partners include AFR, SMH and The Australian, which produced multiple positive stories, photos and even cartoons before, during and after the conference. That is the beauty of having media partners.
None of this publicly available information exposed here was mentioned by the media partners. At an entertaining upmarket event framed around the likely value of shares, the political context is irrelevant, although we can’t be sure about the networking around the conference where the real action often happens.
As the conference crowd headed for post conference drinks, displaced Gazans were waking to more serious health risks as floods mixed with leaking sewage from a drainage system destroyed by Israel bombs.
Wendy Bacon is an investigative journalist who was the Professor of Journalism at UTS. She worked for Fairfax, Channel Nine and SBS and has published in The Guardian, New Matilda, City Hub and Overland. She has a long history in promoting independent and alternative journalism.
She is a long-term supporter of a peaceful BDS and the Greens.
Cathy Peters is a former ABC RN producer/executive producer and Greens councillor on the former Marrickville Council. She also worked for a state Greens MP and is a long-time advocate for Palestinian rights. In 2014, she co-founded PSNA / BDS Australia. She has Jewish heritage, has travelled and volunteered in the Occupied Palestinian Territories.