Three hundred Canberrans gathered this week to hear British cardiologist, Dr Aseem Malhotra, who is calling for the suspension of mRNA injections pending an inquiry into emerging evidence of harms.

An independent re-analysis of the original Pfizer and Moderna clinical trial data, conducted by some of the world’s top medical scientists and published last year, found that patients are more likely to suffer serious harm from the vaccine – hospitalisation, disability or a life-changing event – than they are to be hospitalised with Covid. This was always the case, even when the original Wuhan strain was prevalent. For Dr Malhotra, the appalling conclusion is inescapable: “these vaccinations should never have been approved for use in a single human”.

Dr Malhotra is well-known in the UK as a campaigner for better patient outcomes in the treatment of heart disease. He challenges the model of healthcare that “is geared towards treating symptoms and disease with medications” while “ignoring or neglecting the lifestyle changes that would improve people’s mental and physical health”.

As Dr Malhotra explains: “Everything I do, everything I write about or campaign on always comes back to ‘how do we optimise people’s mental and physical health – they are interlinked. Is the information I am giving to my patients – are the pills I am prescribing – genuinely beneficial? How beneficial are they? Are we explaining those benefits to patients in the way that we should be explaining them?”

Dr Malhotra’s advocacy for better diet has brought him into conflict with the processed food industry and he has questioned the evidentiary basis for Big Pharma’s claims that statins – “the most lucrative pharmaceutical product in the history of western medicine” – genuinely reduce the risk of heart attack in the way that is claimed.   

Following the lockdowns of 2020, Dr Malhotra expected an uptick in heart-related problems. Eighty per cent of heart disease is related to lifestyle and diet, so enforced inactivity, unhealthy eating habits and stress would predictably take a toll. In January 2021, he appeared on Good Morning Britain to encourage vulnerable populations – the elderly and the immune-compromised – to take the newly-launched Covid injection. Dr Malhotra himself took two doses of Pfizer. So, too, did his father.

Over the course of 2021, several things happened that prompted Dr Malhotra to reconsider his opinion:

• A trusted colleague commented that Pfizer’s initial clinical trials demonstrated four cardiac arrests in the trial cohort, compared with only one in the placebo group. It was a potential signal but nothing could be certain.
• Dr Malhotra’s father died unexpectedly of a heart attack. As a cardiologist with intimate knowledge of his father’s medical history and lifestyle, Dr Malhotra was unable to explain the rapid narrowing of the coronary arteries revealed by the autopsy.
• An academic colleague confided that their cardiac research unit had stumbled upon evidence demonstrating increased coronary inflammation in vaccinated individuals. This information was suppressed for fear that publication would jeopardise research funding.
• The American cardiologist and researcher, Stephen Gundry, published an abstract for a forthcoming paper noting a jump from 11 per cent to 25 per cent in markers of coronary inflammation following vaccination. As a cardiologist, Dr Malhotra appreciated the extraordinary nature of this change in such a short period of time.
• A journalist from the Times contacted him for comment on reports that heart attacks in Scotland had increased by 25 per cent.

By October, Dr Malhotra had quite a different message for the UK public. In an interview that went viral, he told the audience of GB News that there were enough signals of potential harm to justify suspending the vaccine, pending an official investigation.

The push-back he received was not unexpected. As Dr Malhotra told his Canberra audience on Tuesday, you need to develop the hide of rhinoceros to withstand the retribution that predictably follows any challenge to vested financial interests, particularly powerful ones. Dr Malhotra dug further into his research and, in 2022, published a two-part peer-reviewed paper entitled “Curing the pandemic of misinformation on COVID-19 mRNA vaccines through real evidence-based medicine”. These papers tell the story of “how we got it so wrong”.

Dr Malhotra points out, for example, the obvious problems that follow when national regulators – responsible for ensuring that new pharmaceutical products are safe before they are authorised for public use – are dependent on Big Pharma funding. “Most people don’t know that”, he says. “The Chair of the British Medical Association didn’t believe me that our regulator takes 86 per cent of its money from Big Pharma”. Australia’s Therapeutic Goods Administration (TGA) derives 96 per cent of its income from the companies it is supposed to be regulating. Seventy per cent of the World Health Organization’s money comes “with strings attached”.

Dr Malhotra’s point is, of course, that these organisations are not truly independent. Nor is the compromising influence of Big Pharma confined to national regulators:

“Basically, what we have is increasing visible and invisible unchecked power of Big Pharma over the last several decades – over regulators, academic institutions, the media, politicians. And now we are dealing with the consequences of it.

“If you take a step back and think you have ‘psychopathic entities’ (that is, companies that demonstrate lack of empathy, lack of remorse, a willingness to deceive for profit, etc.) pulling the strings, you can see that is going to influence everything downstream in a negative way.”

Having failed to exercise the proper due diligence at the outset of the vaccine rollout, Dr Malhotra is concerned that national regulators are now compounding the problem by failing to respond rationally to the mounting evidence of harms. All over the world, highly vaccinated countries are recording uncommonly high excess death rates (that is, above the usual number expected in an average year) since the beginning of the vaccine rollout. As Dr Malhotra says:

“Norman Fenton, Emeritus Professor of Risk Information Management at Queen Mary University in London, says that 50 per cent of excess deaths in the UK since 2021 are directly or indirectly caused by the Covid vaccine. What we know from the Australian Bureau of Statistics is that most of these excess deaths now in Australia are not Covid-related. And given all the other evidence we have about the harms of the vaccine, it’s very clear that these have to have been playing a significant role. Is the Covid vaccination the number one factor? I can’t tell you for sure. Is it a major contributing factor? Almost certainly.”

Meanwhile, the TGA claims that only 14 of the 900+ deaths reported to their monitoring system are actually vaccine-related. When asked about this claim, Dr Malhotra responded by saying “they are living in cloud cuckoo land and they are insulting the medical profession and the public”.

“If you put any of those guys on the stand in a court of law, I strongly doubt they will be able to categorically say they believe there have only been 14 deaths from the vaccine once all the evidence is presented. I think some of this is wilful blindness. I think they actually cannot conceive of what they have done because it’s horrific.”

Dr Malhotra speculates that the enormity of the error partly explains the reluctance of bureaucrats to face facts:

“Most people believe they are doing the right thing … Let’s have some empathy and compassion for them … If I’m correct, this is a lot for them to absorb. Psychologically, it’s much easier to bury your head in the sand and pretend it doesn’t exist.

“Having said that, it’s their duty and responsibility to know that when the evidence changes and new information emerges, they should act on it. There’s one thing committing a mistake in the beginning, there’s another thing where you actively suppress or ignore evidence to the contrary and that, for me, is worse.

“I was indoctrinated into the belief that this vaccine was safe and effective. But when evidence came to light, straight away I acted on it. That’s what they are not doing, unfortunately.

“The facts are very clear. This is not a battle of intellect, rationality and facts; this is a psychological battle.”

Dr Malhotra admits that speaking out takes courage but contends that the longer authorities remain silent, the more people will suffer because “the problem isn’t going to go away by itself”.

He admits that public trust in the medical profession will be damaged by these revelations and that it will take make many years to regain that trust. Dr Malhotra is confident that there are some simple changes that will bring lasting benefits for the future but that this process can only begin by acknowledging that a mistake was made and that structural change is needed if we are going to stop this happening ever again.

In bringing this message to Australia, Dr Malhotra is supported by the Australian Medical Professional Society (AMPS), an association formed to support doctors whose jobs and/or professional licences were threatened because they raised ethical objections to lockdowns, masks and vaccination mandates. For those who wish to hear Dr Malhotra’s message in full, online tickets to the final event in Perth will be available from the AMPS website soon.

By Elisabeth Taylor