Stuff you don’t need to know
By Gary Scarrabelotti
Public meetings and rallies, they’re not my thing. Mostly, I shy away. Neither group think nor impassioned shouting matches appeal. But the Covid experience drew me out.
A while back — it was May 31 — I went to a gathering in Canberra at which the principal guest speaker was Dr. Aseem Malhotra. He is a British cardiologist who has locked horns with his political and medical establishments over the Covid-19 vaccination program.
Malhotra took issue with the global Covid vaccine campaign in an article published by the Journal of Insulin Resistance on 26 September 2022 in which he called for a “pause and reappraisal”.1
Breakaway
To pause and reappraise. That’s hardly radical. In other contexts, it might be termed the “precautionary principle”. But if you’ve read the latest edition of his Wikipedia profile, Aseem Malhotra has been marked down by social media — in the manner Bolshevik — as a veritable “former person”.
His alleged crimes: misrepresenting research; cherry-picking data; speaking of his own (personally painful) experience; and, maybe worst of all for a doctor, siding with patients. A sensible follower of “The Science” would dismiss such “former people”.
For me, however, following the norm doesn’t come easily and my attention had already been attracted to Malhotra for his pre-Covid practice as a breakaway cardiologist. So, there I was on a cold Canberra night, against my ordinary inclinations, waiting to see and hear him on Covid vaccines.
Malhotra happened to be in Australia as a self-funded part of a nationwide tour organised by the Australian Medical Professionals Society (AMPS).
AMPS is a new organisation. It was called forth by the Covid crisis to represent doctors and other medical professionals critical of the public health measures taken, of the unquestioning compliance of their existing professional associations and of Australia’s crushing régime of medical regulation.
Aseem Malhotra had been a medical media star in the United Kingdom. Before Covid, he had managed an uncommon feat: while preserving a reputation as an accomplished medical practitioner and go-to national commentator on public health, he critiqued his profession over its approach to the treatment and prevention of coronary heart disease (CHD).
Malhotra rejected the claim that dietary fat was the root cause of CHD. He called into question the usefulness of cholesterol testing as a predictor of heart disease and heart attacks. With diagnostic boldness, he and his collaborators sought to redefine CHD as an inflammatory disorder.2 Bravest of all, he went on to call out the pharmaceutical industry as a corrupter, in general, of medical research and practice and for the way in which it had inserted a particular family of drugs — statins — into his profession’s CHD treatment protocols. Statins, he argued, were ineffective in reducing the incidence of disease while, at the same time, they exposed patients to rarely explained risks. This represented, Malhotra judged, a failure of medical ethics: patients were denied the opportunity of giving “informed consent” to their proposed treatment or assistance in evaluating alternatives.
What’s remarkable is that Malhotra’s standing within the British medical profession was not derailed by the position he took over CHD. Sure, his position was heretical; and, sure, there were critical challenges. Even so, his professional resumé spoke of respectability and success. These included, significantly, regular publication in leading medical journals such as the BMJ, the British Journal of Sports Medicine, BMJ Open Heart, JAMA Internal Medicine, Prescriber, The Pharmaceutical Journal, and European Scientist. There was, moreover, the credibility bestowed by his frequent appearances in mainstream media ‘pop health’ columns ranging from The Guardian and BBC Online to The Washington Post.
My point?
Malhotra was a man at the top of his profession, an experienced operator in the public domain, courageous and sure enough of his position to tackle his peers: well prepared, in other words, to rise to new challenges should they break upon us.
And so, they did. Covid happened.
Died suddenly
There was nothing precipitate, however, about the position Malhotra would eventually take on the official Covid response.
Initially, he was ‘all in’ with the Covid “narrative”. His first concern was, in fact, with “vaccine hesitancy”. In January 2021, he had himself twice vaccinated (Pfizer) and then, in February, went onto ITV’s “Good Morning Britain” to speak in favour of vaccines and of vaccination against Covid.
As we now know — well, some of us do — from the vaccine roll-out onwards, people started dying suddenly. One of them, six months after taking his Pfizer shots, was a Dr Kailash Chand OBE, a former deputy chair of the British Medical Association and Malhotra’s father. He died unexpectedly of a cardiac arrest.
Malhotra was stunned. Cardiologist though he was, he could not explain what had happened to his father:
“… his post-mortem findings … I found particularly shocking and inexplicable. Two of his three major arteries had severe blockages … I knew his medical history and lifestyle habits in great detail … previous heart scans … a few years earlier … had revealed no significant problems with perfect blood flow throughout his arteries and only mild furring …
“I couldn’t explain his post-mortem findings, especially as there was no evidence of an actual heart attack but with severe blockages.“3
Dr Chand’s passed away on 26 July 2021. It was not until November of the same year that Malhotra got his first serious indication that his father’s death — and the rapid development of arterial blockages which it revealed — might have been traceable to the Pfizer vaccine.
That pointer came in the form of an Abstract in the journal Circulation4 which reported that mRNA vaccines contributed to a sharp rise in inflammatory factors and therewith, apparently, a marked acceleration in the formation of arterial blockages. Given Malhotra’s earlier work treating heart disease as an inflammatory disorder, this rang alarm bells. It was then that he began digging in earnest into the research data on mRNA vaccines.
What he discovered was, so to speak, forbidden knowledge.
The first thing Malhotra learned was that mRNA vaccines were rather ineffective.
Not effective
To gauge effectiveness, we’d need to know how many people we’d have to vaccinate to prevent one death: in the jargon, the number needed to treat (NNT). Well, if you segment the vaccinated population by age, based on UK figures,5 you might find something like this:
| Age Group | NNT | Covid Deaths Avoided |
| 80+ | 230 | 1 |
| 70 – 79 | 520 | 1 |
| 60 – 69 | 1,300 | 1 |
| 50 – 59 | 2,600 | 1 |
| 40 – 49 | 10,000 | 1 |
| 30 – 39 | 27,000 | 1 |
| 18 – 29 | 93,000 | 1 |
What leaps off the page here is that the mRNA mass vaccination programme has been quite ineffective, except maybe for those over 70 — which implies that a more targeted campaign, focused on the over-70s, might have been a prudent strategy.
Of course, as Malholtra has pointed out, jabbing whole populations to save a few lives with poorly performing vaccines might be justifiable if the vaccines were no more harmful than they were ineffective. But that’s not the case. And here’s the clincher to his argument.
A group of medical scientists led by Joseph Fraiman re-evaluated the data generated by the original Phase 3 trials of the Pfizer and Moderna mRNA vaccines. What Fraiman and his colleagues found was that vaccinated subjects in the trials exhibited a 1‑in-800 greater risk of serious side effects compared those in the placebo group.6
Now let’s unwrap that.
Fraiman et al were not interested in any old side effects like sore arms, headaches, a brief dizzy spell and the like.
What they looked for were “adverse events of special interest”(AESI): namely, medically well-defined events that ended in death, or were life-threatening when they occurred, or required hospital treatment, or a longer stint in hospital for those already there, or significant disabilities, or birth defects or other “medically important events”.
Not safe
So, to recap, 1‑in-800 vaccinated subjects in Phase 3 of the Pfizer and Moderna trials suffered one or other (and sometimes multiple) carefully defined “adverse events of special interest”: all of them serious illnesses, some of them ending in death.
Now let’s feed that 1⁄800 number into the table above. What we get is this:
| Age Group | NNT | Covid Deaths Avoided | Vaxed persons with AESIs |
| 80+ | 230 | 1 | 0.29 |
| 70 – 79 | 520 | 1 | 0.65 |
| 60 – 69 | 1,300 | 1 | 1.63 |
| 50 – 59 | 2,600 | 1 | 3.25 |
| 40 – 49 | 10,000 | 1 | 12.5 |
| 30 – 39 | 27,000 | 1 | 33.75 |
| 18 – 29 | 93,000 | 1 | 116.25 |
As you can see — as plain as a pikestaff — for groups under the age of 70, vaccination racks up more people suffering AESIs (including deaths) than deaths avoided by vaccination. This phenomenon is pronounced for those under 60 and wildly off the scale for those below 40.
Reminds me of that crazy Vietnam war justification, attributed to a US Army officer, “We had to destroy the village to save the village.”
So, friends, Malhotra would ask (and I with him), ‘Why would you do that?’
‘Why would you mass vaccinate low-risk age groups to save one life in tens of thousands while notching up (potentially) more deaths from serious adverse events than you can avoid by vaccinating those groups against Covid?’
‘Is there any logic in that?’
Reminds me of that crazy Vietnam war justification, attributed to a US Army officer, “We had to destroy the village to save the village.”
So, yes, I was impressed by Dr. Aseem Malhotra and by his address that cold May evening in Canberra. Since, however, I was already familiar with the man and his position, everything turned out much as expected.
What I was not prepared for, however — because I had not attended closely enough to the meeting’s agenda! — were the other people who also spoke that night: two of whom were folk whose lives had been turned upside-down by their encounter with the Pfizer vaccine. Their stories affected me more deeply than Malhotra’s no-turning-back critical stance on the Covid vaccines. And that is how it ought to have been, for these were the people for whom Malhotra, and others like him, have been speaking: real people whose actual suffering has been obscured by the cloud of statistics, scientific lingo and acronyms of the medical literature, even that which has indicated their plight.
For Kara Potter and Rado Faletič, both Canberra locals, whose addresses to the gathering had me riveted to my seat, there was also a note of “no-turning-back” in their stories. It came in the form of a question, more or less explicit: will there be no-turning-back from the multiple serious injuries they have suffered as a result of accepting public health advice and getting vaxed?
What has happened to them, experiences that still shake me up to recall, I will relate in my next blog.
For now, my parting observation is this: whatever they — the controllers of “The Narrative” — say, have no fear; all will be set right, in the end.
VERY MOVING ARTICLE
This is an excellent and well-researched study of the work of one man. I’ve never seen the stats better presented. It ended on a positive and hopeful note — I just hope it’s justified!
David Daintree
Colebrook, Tas