Eroding trust in healthcare a ‘good’ thing, Make America Healthy Again medical chief says
The divisive cardiologist who has the ear of Robert F. Kennedy argues the loss of trust in health systems in Australia, Britain and the US is good for patients.
It was during his time as a young medical student at the Prince of Wales Hospital in Sydney that Dr Aseem Malhotra saw the power and pain of social advocacy in public health.
The divisive British cardiologist, who now has the ear of Robert F. Kennedy as the chief medical adviser to the Make America Healthy Again campaign, told The Australian how the war against Big Tobacco waged by Sydney University emeritus professor Simon Chapman became a major influence in his thinking.
In his lectures, Dr Malhotra often quotes Professor Chapman saying: “As soon as your work threatens an industry or an ideological cabal, you will be attacked, sometimes unrelentingly and viciously, so you have to grow a rhinoceros hide.”
And Dr Malhotra has now developed an incredibly thick hide.
With no sense of irony, the doctor who has been a leader in questioning the safety of Covid-19 mRNA vaccines and the ubiquitous use of statins for lowering cholesterol, as well as railing against Big Pharma and Big Food, tells The Australian there has been a huge loss of trust in health systems in Australia, Britain and the US.
That, he believes, is a good thing.
“For me, there’s a massive crisis of trust. I’m sure it may be the same in Australia. It’s the same in the UK, it’s same in America,” Dr Malhotra says.
“I think there has been a decline in trust, in a good way, that has opened up wider thinking about how one can improve one’s health.
“And I think the Australian public, I suspect, like the American public and the British public are becoming more concerned and asking questions, which they wouldn’t have been doing before.”
Dr Malhotra is calling for a major overhaul in medical education to better train doctors to communicate health statistics to their patients.
While he points to the public’s loss of trust in medicine, many of Dr Malhotra’s colleagues in the medical community have lost trust in his public messaging. Some argue his views are dangerous and his messages filled with misrepresentations rather than good science.
Dr Malhotra believes health has been over-medicalised and lacks transparency.
He also thinks lifestyle changes should be first-line treatments for low-risk people, rather than going straight to medications such as cholesterol-lowering statins.
“I have a deep conviction in protecting patients and the community and, you know, making sure that I and other doctors are adhering to the high standards of evidence-based medicine,” he says.
After spending years working for the NHS in Britain, Dr Malhotra now works as a private consultant at HUM2N; a longevity clinic that spruiks itself as a “biohacking” lab. It offers treatments such as hyperbaric oxygen therapy, which it says “may help relieve mild discomfort”; cryotherapy, which it says may “promote wellbeing”, and; vitamin IV infusions. According to the clinic’s website, membership requires a one-off payment of £499 ($1023) and a monthly fee of £349.
Dr Malhotra maintains he is not against medications, but describes as “psychopathic” the way the pharmaceutical industry makes money, and worries it has too much influence.
He now is an influential adviser to the US Health Secretary at a time when the Trump administration is looking at imposing high tariffs on imports of pharmaceuticals.
At the same time, aggressive lobbying by the powerful US pharmaceutical industry has explicitly targeted Australia’s prized Pharmaceutical Benefits Scheme.
Dr Malhotra told The Australian the PBS should “100 per cent, absolutely” be protected in trade negotiations.
“All medicines need to be affordable for the regular person,” he says.
“The evidence tells us that you can have a much more efficient, high-quality healthcare system and much lower cost income at the moment, because a lot of the costs are because of excessive prices of drugs and a lot of waste in the system for unnecessary investigations, unnecessary treatments.”
Dr Malhotra has been well known in the UK for years after he successfully campaigned while working for the NHS to get the sugar content reduced in popular foods. That was more than a decade ago and he has remained in the public eye since, talking mostly about health, nutrition and cardiology.
During the pandemic he even appeared on morning television to caution against vaccine hesitancy, and spoke of the importance of older people getting their Covid immunisations.
But that changed after his father died from cardiac issues some months later. His father’s death was not attributed to vaccines but Dr Malhotra is convinced otherwise.
Since then, he has conducted his own research, cited questionable science, and advocated for the suspension of Covid mRNA vaccines.
He has been accused of spreading misinformation and of misrepresenting statistics, including during an interview with BBC News in 2023 when he made claims about excess deaths from Covid vaccines.
The broadcaster was forced to fact-check his statements, and corrected some statements and apologised for allowing Dr Malhotra to go unchallenged, saying it should have been better prepared.
Later that year, Dr Malhotra toured Australia as the drawcard for an event titled “Curing the corruption of medicine, a new beginning”.
He used the tour to again call for the suspension of Covid mRNA vaccines and was later condemned for suggesting cricket legend Shane Warne’s death in 2022 may have been linked to the Covid vaccine. He was not the sportsman’s doctor.
That tour helped build his supporter base and he met a range of politicians, including former senator Gerard Rennick and South Australian One Nation MP (now independent) Sarah Game.
He also met respected ophthalmologist and 2020 Australian of the Year Dr James Muecke, who attended one of Dr Malhotra’s talks in Adelaide.
When photographs of the pair emerged online, after being circulated and promoted by Dr Malhotra, it led to a public uproar and headlines questioning how the celebrated ophthalmologist could support an “anti-vaxxer”.
“I attended out of respect for his years of support to me, indeed it was the first time we had formally met,” Adelaide Now later quoted Dr Muecke as saying.
“I was unaware of the content of either presentation.
“It’s really just an example of supporting friends and colleagues when they present.”
Dr Malhotra has maintained Australian connections for decades. In 2000, he says, he completed a medical school placement at Sydney’s Prince of Wales Hospital. He also has a large social media following in Australia.
Dr Malhotra’s influence through social media worries other health professionals and doctors such as Jason Kovacic, executive director of the Victor Chang Cardiac Research Institute.
“Speak to any health professional and they’ll likely say that one of the biggest issues they face today is patients who make decisions about their medications based on something they heard on a podcast, read on the internet or in a book, or saw in a social post,” Professor Kovacic writes in The Australian.
“Some of the people putting out these stories are wellness influencers without any medical background, but others have science and medical CVs stretching back decades. It’s these ‘experts’ that worry me the most because, why wouldn’t you believe a doctor? Especially one that has just been promoted to one of the highest-profile jobs in the world like Dr Aseem Malhotra.”
Dr Malhotra argues that his stance on Covid vaccines and the use of statins has been misrepresented as an “extreme version” of his views, and he rejected descriptions of him as anti-vaccine or a “statin denier”.
He says he is a “big supporter of traditional vaccines” but believes the benefits of the Covid vaccine were “grossly exaggerated and the harms were underplayed”.
He insists he is “not against statins (but) against the lack of transparency in their prescription”, claiming that raw data has not been independently evaluated. As a result, he says, statins have been overprescribed to low-risk patients who would have achieved better quality-of-life outcomes through lifestyle changes.
Fellow doctors have previously complained about some of Dr Malhotra’s Covid claims to the UK’s General Medical Council, which regulates doctors.
After initially deciding it would not take action, the GMC is now reviewing that decision.
Dr Malhotra has seen the “shift” in public opinion over healthcare play out in the UK and US, and wonders if the same thing is happening in Australia, adding that he would be up for another speaking tour of the country.
“I would obviously go to keep the campaign going for better transparency in healthcare,” he says. “For me, this is an international problem.”
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