Leading UK cardiologist calls for immediate suspension of mRNA Covid vaccination

New paper by Dr Aseem Malhotra for the Journal of Insulin Resistance

This is pretty stunning.

Dr Aseem Malhotra, preeminent cardiologist and public medical expert, is calling for mRNA Covid vaccination to be suspended world wide until the raw trial data has been released and analysed by independent experts, and safety signals have been addressed.

In a two-part peer-reviewed article published today in the Journal of Insulin Resistance, Malhotra provides a review of the evidence from both randomised trials and real world data pertaining to Covid mRNA vaccines. The results are sobering:

”In the non-elderly population the “number needed to treat” to prevent a single death runs into the thousands. Re-analysis of randomised controlled trials using the messenger ribonucleic acid (mRNA) technology suggests a greater risk of serious adverse events from the vaccines than being hospitalised from COVID-19. Pharmacovigilance systems and real-world safety data, coupled with plausible mechanisms of harm, are deeply concerning, especially in relation to cardiovascular safety. Mirroring a potential signal from the Pfizer Phase 3 trial, a significant rise in cardiac arrest calls to ambulances in England was seen in 2021, with similar data emerging from Israel in the 16–39-year-old age group.”

(emphasis mine)

Malhotra concludes that, due to the persistent and widespread misinformation about risks and benefits of these products, even in medical professional circles, ”It cannot be said that the consent to receive these agents was fully informed, as is required ethically and legally.” For this reason, he says that, “a pause and reappraisal of global vaccination policies for COVID-19 is long overdue.”

The two article parts are linked at the end of this post. Meanwhile, for the elevator pitch version, watch here:

Remember, Malhotra went on Good Morning Britain to promote Covid vaccines during the initial rollout. He was one of the first to roll his sleeve up to take the primary series of Pfizer shots in January 2021. He regarded criticism of Covid vaccines as anti-vax propaganda. He has done a complete 180.

I have great admiration for Malhotra’s intellectual courage and humility in publicly reversing course on this. Unfortunately, it was the sudden and inexplicable cardiac death of his 73 year old father in July 2021 that planted the seed for Malhotra’s line of enquiry into Covid vaccine safety, particularly pertaining to cardiac health, which is his area of expertise. Malhotra’s father had received two of Pfizer’s mRNA shots within the six months prior to his death. Other than that, he was in excellent health when he died, and Malhotra could not make sense of his post mortem results, which showed severe blockages in two of his three major arteries.

Several months later, Malhotra came across a peer-reviewed abstract which showed strong correlation between mRNA vaccines and significantly increased the risks of a coronary events. This made him wonder if his father’s inexplicable death could be related to the mRNA vaccine, and thus he began a systematic review of the data.

PART ONE

Key findings:

• Way more people need to be vaccinated to prevent infection or death than is typical of other, more highly effective vaccines (eg: smallpox). The public were misled, particularly in the use of relative risk reduction (RRI) instead of absolute risk reduction (ARR) in media and government communications around the benefits afforded by vaccination.

• Reanalysis of mRNA vaccine trial data shows that one is more likely to suffer a serious adverse event from the vaccines than to be hopsitalised with Covid. Analysis of real world pharmacovigilence databases confirms the signals safety signals from the mRNA trials. Studies have further confirmed for cardiac events in particular, that the rate of incidence linked to mRNA vaccination is greater than background or Covid related incidence.

• Due to the above two points, patients have been denied informed consent, which is ethically required for any medical intervention to go ahead. For this reason, and because of the concerning safety signals related to administration of these products (from Pfizer and Moderna’s trial data, and from real world data), mRNA vaccination should be suspended for the time being.

Malhotra notes the documented rises in emergency ambulance calls for cardiac conditions in particular, which correlate with vaccine roll out (but not with prior Covid spread in the community). He also makes comment on the spike in non-Covid related all-cause mortality seen across Western (highly vaccinated) countries:

“One has to raise the possibility that the excess cardiac arrests and continuing pressures on hospitals in 2021/2022 from non-COVID-19 admissions may all be signalling a non-COVID-19 health crisis exacerbated by interventions, which would of course also include lockdowns and/or vaccines.”

It made me think of this ludicrous clip from April of this year, in which QLD Minister for Health Yvette D'Ath claimed that a sudden 40% rise in code 1 emergency ambulance calls definitely could not be explained:

“I don’t think anyone can explain why we saw a 40% jump in code 1s… I’ll walk into an ambulance service and they’ll say, we had a 30% increase in code 1s yesterday. Can’t tell you why. We just had a lot of heart attacks and chest pains and trouble breathing, you know, respiratory issues. Sometimes you just can’t explain why those things happen.”

She even closed with a tidy little ‘it’s not the vaccines though’ rejoinder. Clown World. I covered it a few months ago HERE.

PART TWO

In part two, Malhotra offers explanation for how health professionals and officials like D’Ath could remain so blind to the evidence right in front of them, and why the media have similarly maintained such myopic and misleading coverage of the pandemic and the mRNA vaccines.

Malhotra describes the public health response to the Covid pandemic as, “unethical, coercive and misinformed … undermining the principles of ethical evidence-based medical practice and informed consent.”

Malhotra identifies regulatory capture as a primary underlying cause for the abysmal failure of public health policy and messaging:

“Underlying causes for this failure include regulatory capture – guardians that are supposed to protect the public are in fact funded by the corporations that stand to gain from the sale of those medications.”

(emphasis mine)

Regulatory capture
Regulatory capture can impact (but is not limited to) the research feeding into approvals, the approval process itself, the shaping of the knowledge environment around the approval and roll out, and suppression of unfavourable information. Anyone who has watched Dopesick or read Bad Pharma knows that regulatory capture and its associated evils have long been known.

In 2004, Dr Marcia Angell^, Former-Editor-in-Chief of the New England Journal of Medicine, stated the problem succintly in an article for The New York Review,

”Now primarily a marketing machine to sell drugs of dubious benefit, this industry uses its wealth and power to co-opt every institution that might stand in its way, including the US Congress, the FDA, academic medical centers, and the medical profession itself.”

In a passage that should make readers turn pale, Malhotra shares that,

“One researcher at a prestigious UK institution contacted me to inform me that in his cardiology department a group of academics were deliberately suppressing research that revealed that the mRNA vaccine was shown to significantly increase coronary risk as determined by cardiac imaging as compared to the unvaccinated. The chair of the group expressed concerns that publishing the data may result in loss of funding from the pharmaceutical industry.”

Frightening.

Media and social media censorship
Malhotra also addresses censorship and the generally shoddy reporting on Covid, particularly relating to the mRNA products.

In a nutshell, it’s:
Everything, all the time, “Sponsored, by Pfizer.”

That social media platforms continue to promote misinformation and censor evidence-based lines of enquiry is unsurprising given their financial ties to the pharma companies that stand to benefit from such an arrangement (Malhotra references the Facebook/Merck partnership as example). The complicity extends to the companies’ partner ‘Fact Checkers’, which are routinely funded, directly and indirectly, by big pharma (one such example HERE). Malhotra only mentions it in passing, but the influence of government pressure on social media platforms is possibly another major problem. At the time of writing, Malhotra would not have been aware that the Whitehouse privately demanded that Twitter deplatform independent journalist Alex Berenson for questioning Covid vaccine effectiveness (he was later reinstated after taking Twitter to court for violation of their own community guidelines). They did the same to Naomi Wolf (her claims have been proven to be accurate, but she has not taken legal action and has not been reinstated to Twitter).

The importance of metabolic health
Malhotra is widely known for his efforts in highlighting the importance of good metabolic health to cardiovascular health (and human wellbeing, more generally). I first came across Malhotra years ago at a Low Carb High Fat conference in South Africa (long story, don’t ask), where I was impressed by his holistic approach, which was based on sound evidence and a seeming genuine desire to see patients flourish.

It is unsurprising, then, that Malhotra expresses dismay at the lack of public health messaging around the importance of metabolic health in improving Covid outcomes. Some salient facts:

• More than 90% of the deaths from COVID-19 occurred in countries where more than 50% of the population is overweight or obese.

• The United Kingdom’s biobank data during the first wave revealed a more than fourfold higher risk in hospitalisation from COVID-19 depending on lifestyle factors.

• Postulated pathophysiological mechanisms of risk and complications from infection include an array of markers that have insulin resistance and chronic inflammation at the root.

• In the UK, of 175256 deaths associated with COVID-19 (2020–2021 inclusive), less than 10% (17 371) had COVID-19 as the only cause on the death certificate, suggesting that the risk to those individuals with optimal metabolic health from COVID-19 was significantly smaller.

• Reversal of metabolic syndrome (ie: poor metabolic health) has been shown to occur in up to 50% of patients – independent of weight loss – within four weeks of dietary changes alone.

It was grossly negligent, therefore, for public health messaging and spending to focus so aggressively on measures that provide comparatively little benefit, while failing to encourage improvements in metabolic health, which stood to offer significant benefit.

FIN

Malhotra concludes with a call for the medical profession to do better. Metabolic health must be prioritised and explained. The flow of misleading evidence needs to be stopped, and real evidence-based medicine must be privileged. Policy should be based on a framework of ethical and evidenced-based decision making. Transparency is non-negotiable. There is a strong moral case that mRNA vaccination should be suspended.

I’ll let Malhotra have the final word:

“We must use this as an opportunity to transform the system to produce better doctors, better decision making, healthier patients and restore trust in medicine and public health. Until all the raw data on the mRNA COVID-19 vaccines have been independently analysed, any claims purporting that they confer a net benefit to humankind cannot be considered to be evidence-based.”

Curing the pandemic of misinformation on COVID-19 mRNA vaccines through real evidence-based medicine, Dr Aseem Malhotra, Journal of Insulin Resistance.

READ PART ONE HERE

READ PART TWO HERE

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POST NOTE

^Google Dr Marcia Angell’s name and your first search page will likely be a list of hit pieces. What I noticed from a cursory reading of this Forbes article announcing Angell’s loss of credibility is that they play dirty (or stupid?) with circular and straw man arguments in much the same way that the hallowed ‘Fact Checkers’ do. For example, where Angell suggests that drugs are being over prescribed due to big pharma influence on health research (which informs the perceived need for drugs), the author cites the evidence of big pharma studies countering Angell’s viewpoint as unequivocal proof that her claims are unfounded. The circular nature of the journalist’s argument appears to be lost on him, and will probably not be detected by many of the educated but unthinking readers (Nassim Taleb’s Intellecutal Yet Idiots, or IYIs) of Forbes Magazine, either. Sadly, and gratifyingly, the main of Angell’s claims in the linked Forbes article (from 2012) are actually corroborated in Malhotra’s paper, with abundant high-quality citations. Malhotra seems to be held in high regard across the board for the time being. One wonders how long this will be the case.