Coronavirus: Thread

[grarpamp]

https://twitter.com/DrAseemMalhotra/status/1613837487796850688

2023’s biggest TV moment.

    BREAKING BBC News:

    Cardiologist says likely contributory factor to excess
cardiovascular deaths is covid mRNA vaccine and roll out should be
suspended pending an inquiry.

    We did it. We broke mainstream broadcast media 🔥🔥🔥
pic.twitter.com/F72YS7JAuE
    — Dr Aseem Malhotra (@DrAseemMalhotra) January 13, 2023

A few minutes into the conversation, he began discussing what people
should do to reduce the risk of heart disease. He said, "One of the
reasons this is coming to the news just now, obviously there has been
a big concern about excess deaths... since the pandemic there has been
30,000 excess deaths specifically due to coronary heart disease,
that's my area of expertise... What my own research has found and this
is something that is probably a likely contributing factor, is that
the COVID mRNA vaccines do carry cardiovascular risk."

He added that a likely cause of his own father's death after he had a
cardiac arrest was the two doses of the Pfizer vaccine he received six
months earlier.

Burak asked him, "That's been proven medically, has it?"

He responded claiming there was "lots of data" to support his claim.
He added, "The vaccine has certainly helped people who are high risk,
but now we should be reassured that [the] Omicron circulating is
really no worse than the flu. This is really time to pause the vaccine
rollout."

During the interview, he said that he called for the vaccine rollout
to be suspended pending an inquiry because of the "uncertainty" behind
excess deaths.

As I write this, the seven minute clip of him being interviewed on a
BBC news show on January 14th passed 14.8 million views [ZH: 17.8
million now]. Now, wouldn’t you think that merited some form of
acknowledgement from the BBC? If you were the BBC’s Head of Programmes
wouldn’t you think: “Wow, we’ve had 14.8 million views, there’s a
programme in this?”

It seems incredible that the BBC and, by association, the Government,
think they can just bury the story. As if, so long as it isn’t
mentioned, the other 50-odd million people in the country won’t also
think, “Hmm, there’s something not quite right about these vaccines”.
Surely radio silence only adds to the unease. Since the creation of
the ‘Trusted News Initiative’, I’ve lost all trust in the BBC. Its
obsessive focus on Net Zero and intersectionality sounds suspiciously
like a USSR era Pravda piece about tractor production in Murmansk.

I suspect the reason the Malhotra clip has cut through so far and fast
is because it perfectly resonates with people’s ‘lived experience’;
everyone knows someone whom they suspect has been harmed by the
vaccines.

My own sister-in-law dropped dead of SADS (Sudden Adult Death
Syndrome) back in August 2022. A fit, size 10, keen cyclist, found
dead in her garden one morning.  She had been just about to set off on
a bike ride. The autopsy could find no specific cause, noted some
small clotting in the heart, but nothing that the pathologist seemed
to think should have killed her.

She’d had three doses of the vaccine. I’ve no idea whether the
vaccines were the cause or contributory to her death, but I did feel
that if a more open debate about the safety (or otherwise) of the
vaccines had been allowed, at least the pathologist might have been
open to considering it, even if only to dismiss it for specific
reasons.

But, of course, whether the vaccines were responsible or not, there
was absolutely no reason for her to have been vaccinated in the first
place. Like everyone else who is not vulnerable, she was never at any
risk from Covid. She’d had Covid in 2020: a day in bed, slight
headache, backache. It held no fears for her, but she wanted to go on
holiday.

It wasn’t only her family that were taken aback by my sister-in-law’s
death. In the small Cumbrian town in which she lived, a bloke keeled
over in the street with a heart attack. In a nearby village someone
else died suddenly, all within a week or so. To everyone it seemed odd
– it was the talk of the town. And though the talk was always in
hushed voices, word of mouth is a powerful medium.

A friend told her neighbour, a hospital nurse, about my
sister-in-law’s death. “Oh,” she replied, “we call it a Covax death,”
as if they happen all the time. Another friend, on hearing the tale
told me of her nephew, 27 years-old, had a stroke a couple of weeks
after his second vaccine. Everyone has a story.

The start of the 2021 football season kicked off a similar round of
whispers. Trevor Sinclair, the football pundit, got in trouble for
even daring to raise the issue on air. Virtually every game seemed to
have either a medical emergency on the pitch or one in the crowd,
sometimes more than one. I was at a Mansfield Town game many years ago
when they were having an FA cup run. In a game against West Ham,
someone in the crowd had a heart attack. It was quite a thing, but in
all the hundreds of games I’ve ever watched, that’s the only time I
remember a game stopping for such an incident. Then suddenly last year
it was happening every week.  Related to the vaccines? I don’t know,
but I think someone should be looking into it, not gaslighting the
millions watching into believing this was normal.

Of course, people are going to speculate. The BBC do themselves no
favours by pretending it isn’t a real concern.

But, what’s becoming interesting now are the conspiracy theories.
Cock-up or strategy? Could a BBC news producer or editor really be so
detached from the biggest story of the past two years to not know that
Dr. Aseem Malhotra is a vaccine sceptic? The shock on the face of the
interviewer is perhaps more understandable if all she does is read
autocues, but for someone who is responsible for a BBC news programme
not to be aware is frankly incredible, in the true sense of the word.
If it’s ‘incredible’, so the conspiracists argue, then it must have
been planned. Does this signify a change in the mood music? The
producer should be grateful that the BBC’s Trusted News Initiative’
has yet to fully embrace Pravda’s modus operandi, or else they’d have
been taken outside and shot. A fate that might yet, metaphorically,
befall both the BBC producer and Dr. Malhotra, courtesy of the GMC.

The Chinese Communist Party didn’t abandon ‘Zero Covid’ because of a
few protests, but because it wasn’t working. Infections were taking
off regardless of strict lockdown measures. It’s the same with vaccine
scepticism. Doubts about vaccination will only continue to grow while
deaths exceed normal levels. Dr. Malhotra’s piece may yet push us past
the tipping point where these concerns have to be addressed.

My personal view is that vaccines played an important part in breaking
us out of the unsustainable lockdown loop. I don’t think vaccines made
much difference to lives lost – the emergence of Omicron and prior
natural immunity did that – but vaccination gave the elderly the
confidence to emerge from behind their locked doors. We’d have been as
well off giving everyone a saline shot rather than blowing billions on
vaccines. No, the real crime lay in extending vaccines to those who
didn’t need them.

If we’d stuck with Plan A, articulated by both Kate Bingham and Matt
Hancock back in late 2020, and only offered vaccines to the elderly
and vulnerable, confidence in all vaccines wouldn’t now be at all-time
low.

It’s worth remembering that boosters haven’t been offered to the
non-vulnerable under-50s for about 18 months, and since not even the
manufacturers claim any ongoing efficacy for vaccines after about six
months, then the only possible reason for not offering additional
vaccine boosters to the under-50s is because it’s thought they’ll do
more harm than good.

So, does the Dr. Malhotra appearance herald a change in tack by the
BBC? Are the vaccines about to be thrown under a bus? I doubt it, but
I bet there are a few TV production companies lining up a debate
somewhere and just looking for a TV broadcaster to commission it. You
never know, maybe Twitter could air it live, there’s a record TV
audience just waiting to watch it. I’m sure such a debate could
‘educate, entertain and inform’. Something the BBC was once quite good
at.