‘Emergency no longer exists’: Doctors call for Covid vaccines to be pulled to reassess safety
A petition calling for Covid vaccines to be pulled has attracted high-profile backers — including one of Donald Trump’s key appointments.
A petition calling for the “immediate suspension” of mRNA Covid vaccines has attracted a number of high-profile backers — including the man picked by US President-elect Donald Trump to lead the country’s main public health research agency.
The Hope Accord, an online petition launched earlier this year, states that a “growing body of evidence suggests the widespread rollout of the novel Covid-19 mRNA vaccine products is contributing to an alarming rise in disability and excess deaths”.
Such claims have repeatedly been rejected by public health authorities and leading medical experts.
“This new technology was granted emergency use authorisation to address a situation that no longer exists,” the petition states.
“Going forward, the burden of proof falls on those still advocating for these products to compellingly demonstrate that they aren’t resulting in net harm. Until such evidence is presented, regulators should suspend their use as a matter of standard medical precaution.”
The petition was co-created by Dr Joseph Fraiman, a Louisiana-based ER physician and medical researcher.
Dr Fraiman was the lead author of a study last year that reanalysed Pfizer and Moderna’s original randomised trials, concluding that the rate of serious harm from the vaccines was one in 800, far higher than previously suggested.
Dr Jay Bhattacharya, a vocal critic of Covid lockdowns who has been picked by Mr Trump to run the National Institutes of Health (NIH), called Dr Fraiman’s study “probably the most important paper during the pandemic” about Covid vaccines.
“It was a very rigorous paper and I think [it] had probably the biggest impact in my thinking about the safety of vaccines,” Dr Bhattacharya said in a July interview with Dr Fraiman for his podcast, The Illusion of Consensus.
Writing on X at the time, Dr Bhattacharya said the debate had convinced him to sign the petition calling for the vaccines’ regulatory authorisation to be pulled.
“I hesitated to sign because I was concerned that some patient groups may still benefit from it,” he said.
“Joe, very reasonably, asked me how we could know who falls into those categories. The answer, of course, would come from randomised clinical trial evidence with solid clinical endpoints like prevention of long Covid, hospitalisation or death.
“By the end of the debate, Joe had convinced me that not pulling the authorisation makes it more likely that we will never get good clinical trial evidence testing to check whether such groups still exist in a setting of widespread recovered immunity.”
New on my Illusion of Consensus podcast, I debate with @JosephFraiman on his HOPE Accord, a public petition to restore ethics to public health and to pull regulatory authorization for the marketing of the covid mRNA vaccine.
— Jay Bhattacharya (@DrJBhattacharya) July 11, 2024
I hesitated to sign because I was concerned that some…
Dr Bhattacharya’s public support for the petition is noteworthy as he could soon be in charge of the NIH’s $US47 billion ($74 billion) annual budget, which funds research into vaccines, cancer and other diseases.
His nomination would need to be approved by the Senate.
The Hope Accord petition also calls for a “comprehensive re-evaluation” of the safety and efficacy of all Covid vaccines, including a “full exploration of mechanisms of harm to provide insight into their impact on the human body, both short and long term”.
“Effectiveness must be reassessed through a comprehensive review of actual clinical impact on illness and mortality, as opposed to synthetic results based on modelled assumptions,” it states.
‘Conspiracy theories’
British cardiologist Aseem Malhotra, who co-created the petition, published an open letter on Tuesday in response to a long-running disciplinary probe by the UK’s General Medical Council (GMC) over complaints he was spreading “Covid vaccine misinformation” and “conspiracy theories”.
“There is undeniable evidence that there are serious risks associated with Covid-19 vaccine for at least some individuals,” he wrote.
“At this point in time, the evidence of the Covid mRNA product doing significantly more harm than good is overwhelming, even for the highest-risk groups.”
Professor Angus Dalgleish, head of oncology at St George’s Hospital in London, and Australian immunologist Robert Clancy, Emeritus Professor at the University of Newcastle, have backed Dr Malhotra’s claims in letters of support provided to the UK medical practitioners register.
“Two of the world’s pre-eminent experts in oncology and immunology respectively feel there is strong mechanistic and clinical evidence through different pathways, including prolonged immunosuppression and DNA contamination, [that] the Covid mRNA vaccines cause cancer,” Dr Malhotra said.
Prof Dalgleish, a prominent Covid sceptic, stated that he had “witnessed an outbreak of melanoma relapses in patients that had been stable on my immunotherapy treatment programs for over five to 18 years”.
“The only thing they had in common is that they had all had booster vaccines which as predicted were causing T cell suppression,” he wrote.
“I continue to see these relapses as well as rapid cancer progression after these totally unnecessary boosters. The tragedy is that all oncology doctors are seeing this but are afraid to speak out with a few exceptions.”
Prof Clancy, who was denounced by the University of Newcastle in 2021 as “not an expert” on Covid after controversial comments supporting the use of hydroxychloroquine and ivermectin, said in his letter that the mRNA vaccines had “attracted a forest of red flags including unprecedented mortality and morbidity, unknown genetic confusion, and disappointing clinical value”.
“Why is it that all doctors are not screaming for review of mRNA vaccines?” he wrote.
Dr Malhotra is also supported in his GMC complaint by former Australian tennis champion Pat Cash, now a BBC commentator, and Jay Naidoo, a prominent South African trade unionist and anti-apartheid leader.
“My advocacy to suspend the Covid-19 mRNA vaccine is not an isolated voice,” he wrote.
“The longer the General Medical Council, the Secretary of State for Health, and the Chief Medical Officer delay on acting on this, the greater the harm to public health, the further decrease in trust in the medical profession, and the more strain on an already failing NHS.”
‘No credible evidence’
Claims that Covid vaccines have contributed to a rise in excess deaths have repeatedly been rejected by the Australian government, including the Department of Health and Aged Care and the Australian Bureau of Statistics (ABS), as well as independent bodies like the Actuaries Institute, which maintain there is “no credible evidence” supporting such a link.
The Health Department, which encourages Australians to “rely on reputable sources of information”, says Covid vaccines “have been thoroughly assessed by the Therapeutic Goods Administration (TGA) and found to be safe and effective”.
“The TGA checks all Covid-19 vaccines for quality, safety and effectiveness before approving them for use in Australia,” it states on its website.
“This is the same process that all vaccines go through in Australia. Medical experts at the TGA continuously check all vaccines to make sure they are safe. Vaccines are only approved for use in Australia after they have been assessed to show that the benefits of the vaccine outweigh any risks.”
The Health Department notes that “millions of people around the world have now had Covid-19 vaccines, giving us real evidence and data that support using the vaccines” and “clinical trials and real-world data show that Covid-19 vaccines are highly effective at preventing severe illness”.
Modelling by Monash University and RMIT earlier this year suggested the vaccine rollout saved nearly 18,000 lives in NSW between August 2021 and July 2022, during the end of the Delta wave and the arrival of Omicron.
The World Health Organization (WHO) says that in 2021 alone, Covid vaccines “saved at least an estimated 14.4 million lives worldwide”.
A recent paper in the journal Vaccines estimated the timely rollout of Covid jabs resulted in overall benefit to the Australian economy of $181 billion.
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