Bartholomew's Notes

From the website of South African academic publisher AOSIS:

…Writing in the peer-reviewed Journal of Insulin Resistance (JIR), one of the UK’s most eminent Consultant Cardiologists Dr. Aseem Malhotra, who was one of the first to take two doses of the vaccine and promote it on Good Morning Britain, says that since the rollout of the vaccine the evidence of its effectiveness and true rates of adverse events have changed.

In a two-part review article entitled “Curing the pandemic of misinformation on COVID-19 mRNA vaccines through real evidence-based medicine,” he writes that real-world data reveals that in the non-elderly population, the number needed to vaccinate to prevent one death from Covid-19 runs into thousands and that re-analysis of randomised controlled trial data ( that first led to approval of the vaccines for BioNTech/Pfizer and Moderna) suggests a greater risk of suffering a serious adverse event from the vaccine than to be hospitalised with Covid-19.

The review article makes only passing reference to “insulin” as a nod to the journal’s stated purpose, and the journal appears to have been chosen simply because Malhotra is a member of the editorial board. The editor, one Caryn Zinn, is a nutritionist.

Assuming that the peer review process was as rigorous as claimed, publication means that a couple of academics looked the paper over and decided that the issues it raises are worth airing. It’s a baseline for the start of an academic discussion. However, Malhotra and his supporters appear to believe that publication is a landmark event that establishes widespread vaccine injury as confirmed scientific fact. Malhotra has even given a lengthy press conference about his paper in the Upper Hall at the Emmanuel Centre – chosen due to its Westminster location – under the auspices of the World Council for Health, an organisation described by Vice in February as “an umbrella group for purveyors of COVID misinformation”.

Malhotra was previously profiled by the Guardian in 2018, when Sarah Boseley noted his views on statins:

Malhotra urges a low-carb, high-fat diet. His book, The Pioppi Diet, has the distinction of being named by the British Dietetic Association as one of the five worst “celeb” diet books in Britain…

…[In 2016] Malhotra was expressing strong views about statins, claiming in a BMJ article that was later partially retracted that they caused side-effects in 20% of patients. On BBC radio, he went further. “It was actually probably an underestimate,” he said, and questioned the benefits of the drug for any patient, citing the cholesterol sceptic Michel de Lorgeril.

He was accused by Prof Rory Collins at Oxford University of endangering lives. Collins said scare stories about statins could do as much harm as Andrew Wakefield did when he claimed that vaccines caused autism.

Malhotra’s father died of an unexpected heart attack last year aged 73, six months after being vaccinated. In his review article Malhotra explains that his father had been in good health, and that vaccination must therefore be the reason for his death.

It remains to be seen how academics respond to his paper formally, although engagement on social media has been scathing: on Twitter, James Neill has a handy “Master list of debunks” thread that includes threads by Viki Male, Frank Han, John Bye, Dr Barrett, Medlife Crisis, Demian Tresch, Health Nerd, Carol Jasper and David Robert Grimes. Wider context has also been provided by the Counter Disinformation Project.

Advance news of Malhotra’s paper was given to John Bowe, a retired actor who runs a self-styled “vaccine injury” advice line (discussed here). The fulfillment of prophecies that vaccination would cause widespread death and harm is not self-evident, and so the faithful have taken to scouring the media for anecdotes about sudden deaths and attempting to discern signs and proofs by sifting through published statistics. Malhotra does a bit of both.

On 12 September Bowe announced “something massive is coming next week”, and he warned “DONT GET JABBED”. On 23 and 24 September his associates Neil Oliver and James Melville also indicated that they were in the know, and Melville explained that there had been a delay due to the mourning period for the Queen. Followers were thus kept in eager anticipation for two weeks – by the time of the big reveal, many of them may have already declined booster jabs and invested personal credibility in exhorting friends and relations to follow suit. As such, they were primed to accept Malhotra’s paper uncritically.

Invitations to the press conference were apparently handled by one James Freeman Wells, a former Brexit Party MEP, and he is currently complaining that “the UK press” did not attend. Wells has also recorded a video with Malhotra, available on his “Freeman Reports United Free Press” website and the conspiricist video-sharing site Brand New Tube (discussed here). Wells’ previous subjects have included the New Zealand web show Counterspin (“labelled far-right by legacy media”, according to Wells) and Australian Senator Alex Antic. The video of the press conference, meanwhile, was handled by “Oracle Films”, which specialises in interviews with Covid vaccination sceptics such as Matt Le Tissier and Robert F. Kennedy Jr.

In other words, Malhotra is deeply embedded within a conspiricist milieu and online media network, and this is his target audience/congregation. This is also reflected in the paper itself – he is listed as the sole author, but his acknowledgements include references to “Dr Clare Craig for edits and data analysis, and Alex Starling for comments and suggestions”. Some deleted Tweets that undermine Craig’s general credibility have been helpfully preserved by Neil O’Brien MP, and can be seen here. If she did the data analysis, one wonders why she was not listed as a co-author.

Last October, John Bye noted that Alex Starling had had an online exchange with one Paul Yowell about how the MPs William Wragg and Christopher Chope could be furnished “with the right information” so that they would start asking questions about adverse vaccine reactions rather than just vaccine effectiveness. That may explain why there is now an “All-Party Parliamentary Group on Covid-19 Vaccine Damage“, chaired by Chope. According to the World Council for Health, the original plan was that Malhotra’s presentation would be at a launch event for this APPG (which they misname as the “All-Party Parliamentary Group on Vaccine Damage”).

UPDATE: A former broadcast executive named Mark Sharman attended the press conference and complains:

Rows of empty chairs stood testimony to the indifference as a senior physician presented his findings at a press conference in London today (Tuesday September 27th). Only GBNews and a Polish crew attended.

Meanwhile, John Bye has posted an account to Twitter. The original thread is the best place to access this (he includes screenshots from various sources), but as a bit of future proofing here is the text:

Within a minute of starting, Aseem Malhotra managed to crowbar in a reference to the Holocaust. Talking about “wilful blindness”, he implied that people “ignoring” covid vaccine injuries, which he falsely claims are common, are comparable to Germans ignoring Nazi atrocities.

He also confirmed that anti-vax disinformation group HART helped him write his paper, saying he asked Clare [Craig] and HART to estimate how many people they think would need to be vaccinated to prevent one covid death. Needless to say, their estimate is wildly inaccurate.

HART’s estimate is based on UKHSA data which a) specifically says it shouldn’t be used to judge vaccine efficacy, b) has confounding factors re: who got vaccinated, and c) is widely acknowledged to overestimate the unvaccinated population (and so underestimates their death rate).

Later on Malhotra cited HART again, saying “the HART group are very good”. Er .. no. “They’ve looked at ambulance data, and after the vaccine rollout we found there were an extra 14,000 out of hospital cardiac arrests that are unexplained.” Many are likely to be covid related.

Bizarrely, Malhotra pointed at high rates of cardiac / respiratory arrest call outs in 2021-22 and said they “should have stopped” after the first wave in March 2020. Er .. why? The second wave was even bigger, and we’re still dealing with the long term impacts of covid.

HART aren’t the only anti-vax group Malhotra name dropped. He said “I spoke to [RFK Jr] for the very first time yesterday. He called me and was congratulating me on the paper.” RFK Jr is founder of Children’s Health Defense, which campaigns against routine childhood vaccines.

Earlier Malhotra had dismissed concerns about the MMR vaccine, saying “traditional” vaccines are amongst the safest treatments. So why is he chumming with RFK Jr and the WCH when both promote the work of Andrew Wakefield, who falsely claimed the MMR jab causes autism?!?

After Malhotra finished, Ryan Cole made even wilder claims about covid vaccines, and Tess Lawrie wrapped up by claiming “there’s no longer any doubt among independent experts who have no conflicts of interest that what are called covid-19 vaccines are neither safe nor effective”.

Lawrie then told anyone worried by the nonsense they’d just heard to check the World Council for Health website “for information on what may help reduce the impact of the covid injections on your health”. This includes everything from ivermectin (of course) to .. potatoes?

Things got really wild in the Q&A session though. Responding to a question from unemployed actor John Bowe, Ryan Cole suggested the only reason vaccinated people aren’t all dying is because most of us got “duds” due to “poor manufacturing”. Malhotra didn’t challenge this idiocy.

Malhotra did compliment fellow low carb diet fan turned covid crank Ivor Cummins on his “documentary” though. He also did a separate interview with Ivor after the main event, which is now being teased with a clip in which (hilariously) Malhotra doesn’t get a word in edgeways.

Responding to a question from former Brexit Party MEP James Wells, who seems to have setup the press conference, Malhotra also said he thinks “big pharma” is funding studies linking excess cardiac deaths to covid to divert attention away from their vaccines.

Malhotra admits that severe covid (which hundreds of thousands of people in the UK have had) can lead to heart attacks, but that “it’s complete and total nonsense” that mild covid can also cause complications. “Show us the data”, he said. Here you go: [Link]

Things went off the rails at the end of the Q&A though, when a member of the audience asked “if you still believe in airborne viruses”. Amidst nervous laughter from the panel, Malhotra refused to take the microphone. Sadly these are the kind of people he’s associating with now.

Tess Lawrie however said that while “I think our current understanding is that [viruses do exist], there’s a lot that needs to be discussed now in terms of our understanding of disease causation and so on, so let’s start asking these questions and having these conversations”.

GBNews (which has a history of promoting Covid vaccination scaremongering) also invited Malhotra onto the channel, where he was interviewed by Dan Wootton.

UPDATE 2: Also at GB News, Mark Dolan has declared Malhotra to be the UK’s “Greatest Briton”, based on a nomination from Dominique Samuels. In Dolan’s view, “we need to have a grown up conversation about vaccine mandates, vaccine safety and victims of injuries from the vaccine”.

UPDATE 3: Malhotra’s paper is discussed in depth by David Gorski here. A more general critical overview of his career and self-presentation is provided by Christopher Snowden here.

UPDATE 4: Malhotra is now giving his imprimataur to any social media claim about vaccination harms. In one Tweet, for instance, he amplifies someone calling themselves “Jabby Dodger Bex”, who claims that a “friend at work” had phoned her up to narrate her own demise just minutes after being vaccinated. Malhotra’s assessment of this anecdoate is that “this is just awful”.

UPDATE 5: Malhotra was a guest at a birthday party for Covid conspiricist influencer James Melville. He’s been part of the Melville crowd for some months.

UPDATE 6: A critique of Malhotra’s study has appeared on Health Feedback.

UPDATE 7: A long factcheck from the AFP.

UPDATE 8: Further discussion by me.

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