Social media platforms target cardiologist who went from booster to critic of COVID vaccines

As a CDC committee votes this week to potentially add COVID-19 vaccines to the routine schedule of immunizations for all ages, a British cardiologist who once promoted COVID vaccination on TV will go before Parliament to argue the opposite.

Aseem Malhotra, who recently wrote an unusual first-person medical paper calling for a "pause and reappraisal of global vaccination policies for COVID-19," has become increasingly vocal in his skepticism of the jabs since his healthy father's inexplicable cardiac death six months after vaccination.

In a phone interview with Just the News, he called COVID vaccines "one of the worst pharmaceutical interventions in the history of medicine" whose harm is so thoroughly documented that "it shouldn't even be worthy of debate" to pause vaccination campaigns.

The only explanation in his mind is "the increasing unchecked power of Big Pharma over the last two decades" and "willful blindness" of policymakers and regulators. 

That's one reason he published in the Journal of Insulin Resistance — it doesn't take money from corporate interests. "I want a good rebuttal" to the paper, but most criticism has consisted of "character assassinations," Malhotra said. 

He's testifying on COVID vaccine damage before the All-Party Parliamentary Group in the House of Commons Thursday. "The British government must announce an immediate halt to the UK's Covid-19 vaccine programme and launch a public inquiry to fully assess the risks and benefits associated with new mRNA vaccine technology," Malhotra wrote.

The CDC's Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices (ACIP) will undertake "recommendation votes" for the adult and child/adolescent immunization schedules and COVID vaccines, according to the Federal Register notice for the meetings Thursday and Friday. 

This is despite the fact that vaccines for younger children are still under emergency use authorization. The FDA itself warns healthcare professionals not to use Pfizer's fully approved Comirnaty vaccine "interchangeably" with its EUA vaccine for children 5-11.

Malhotra, who previously campaigned to tax sugary drinks and against overprescription of statins, told Just the News he never faced censorship before COVID. 

Facebook locked him out of his account for 24 hours after he shared Florida Surgeon General Joseph Ladapo's controversial assessment of post-vaccination cardiac deaths in young men, Malhotra told GB News. Twitter briefly censored Ladapo's tweet thread as well.

Facebook extended the lockout another few days, Malhotra said, after finding a two-week-old video where he called for a pause on COVID vaccination until "all the raw data" on trials "has been released for independent analysis." He accused Facebook of "trawling through" his account "looking for misinformation."

It's not Malhotra's first tiff with social media, he told Just the News. Facebook censored him last year for sharing a Journal of the American Medical Association Pediatrics study, later retracted, that found dangerously high carbon-dioxide intake in masked schoolchildren. Facebook threatened to penalize users for sharing the paper even before its retraction.

LinkedIn permanently suspended him last year for sharing his appearance on GB News discussing a possible link between mRNA vaccination and heart attacks, Malhotra said.

While LinkedIn said he could appeal the decision, it didn't respond to multiple appeals he filed. "I suspect this is [due to] Bill Gates," a major funder of vaccine research and former chairman of LinkedIn parent Microsoft, he said.

His deplatforming by LinkedIn made Malhotra "a little bit more careful" about what he said, given the anonymous complaints filed against him with the General Medical Council and "trolls" claiming he's spreading misinformation.

But Malhotra is pleased that he has not otherwise been canceled. He remains visiting professor of evidence-based medicine at Brazil's Bahiana School of Medicine and Public Health, president of the Scientific Advisory Committee of the U.K. Public Health Collaboration charity and a trustee of The King's Fund, which advises the U.K. government and just invited him to its annual conference.

Other medical professionals who challenge COVID conventional wisdom have faced puzzling apparent restrictions on their social media usage. 

Indiana University immunologist Steve Templeton, who writes the "Fear of a Microbial Planet" newsletter and forthcoming book, told a listserv recently it has been "impossible for me to gain followers" consistently on Twitter for several months, speculating he's been "shadowbanned."

He told Just the News "there were a lot of people that are seeing weird things happening to their follower numbers lately" and wondered if "COVID militants" were also losing followers.

Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn didn't respond to queries.

The latest wave of social media censorship comes as mainstream scientific discourse is taking heart inflammation following COVID vaccination more seriously.

This week, the journal Science said "several new studies suggest" these heart injuries can take "months to heal," with unknown long-term consequences, and that doctors are divided on the risk-benefit calculus for boosting young people. FDA advisor Paul Offit is well-known for his skepticism of boosting young people and voting against so-called bivalent vaccines that include Omicron subvariants.

A joint CDC-Kaiser Permanente Northern California study in the Annals of Internal Medicine this month found the risk of two-dose myocarditis or pericarditis to be one in 6,700 for boys 12-15 years old, and one in 8,000 for 16-17 year-old boys. The risk for the two age groups went opposite directions for boosters: one in 16,000 and one in 6,000. 

Men 18-29 were just behind them in risk, around one in 11,000 after the second dose and one in 19,000 after boosting.

Several doctors remain unimpressed by the quality of evidence made public for the authorization of bivalent boosters. 

Pfizer's human data showing "an increase in circulating antibodies seven days after the dose" say little about protection against severe disease or the duration of elevated antibodies, Nicole Saphier, assistant professor at Weill Cornell Medical College, wrote for Fox News. 

"To put this plainly, there are no data on the bivalent booster shot in kids," safety data for their age group or effect of the new boosters on previously infected or boosted children, she said.

"I'd love to see the data on the Omicron vaccine in children but the Biden admin will not release it," Johns Hopkins medical professor and National Academy of Medicine member Marty Makary tweeted. "Why can't it be made public?"