The content creator and American YouTuber, MrBeast has been credited with pioneering a genre of YouTube videos that centers on expensive stunts.
Photo via People
For his latest stunt, the YouTuber is changing lives by paying for cataract removal surgery for 1,000 people who were blind or near-blind but could not afford the surgery.
“We’re curing a thousand people’s blindness,” MrBeast, whose real name is Jimmy Donaldson, said in a video on Saturday (28 January), which had more than 43 million views at the time of writing.
The video includes heartwarming before-and-after footage of patients seeing clearly after the surgery.
Some were even given cash donations and other gifts by the YouTuber.
MrBeast teamed up with ophthalmologist and surgeon Jeff Levenson to perform the first round of surgeries in Jacksonville, Florida.
For over 20 years, Levenson has coordinated the "Gift of Sight" programme, which provides free cataract surgery to uninsured patients who are legally blind due to cataracts.
"People who need a 10-minute surgery account for half of all blindness in the world," Levenson says in the video, referring to cataract removal surgery.
In September, Levenson received a call from a member of MrBeast's team. "I'd never heard of MrBeast," he admitted. "I nearly hung up. But, thankfully, I did not hang up."
They began by contacting homeless shelters and free clinics in the Jacksonville area to gather a list of patients who required cataract surgery but could not afford it.
They eventually had 40 patients, and Levenson performed all of their surgeries in a single day, beginning at 7 a.m. and ending at 6 p.m, as reported by CNN.
What a kind and amazing thing to do for someone!
