Twenty-eight deaths with cardiovascular involvement outlined in medical literature were likely caused by COVID-19 vaccination, according to a new study.
Dr. Peter McCullough, a cardiologist, along with co-authors, reviewed all published autopsy reports featuring myocarditis, or heart inflammation, following COVID-19 vaccination.
After excluding some papers for not meeting prespecified criteria, the group determined that of the remaining 28 patients all likely died from vaccine-induced myocarditis.
The determination came after the doctors performed an independent review of each case.
The available evidence “suggests that there is a high likelihood of a causal link between COVID-19 vaccines and death from myocarditis,” the authors wrote in the paper.
The deaths occurred in China, Germany, Japan, New Zealand, South Korea, and the United States. They included some sudden deaths.
“The current position statements disseminated from medical institutions and government agencies indicate that COVID-19 vaccine-induced myocarditis is mild and transient,” Nicolas Hulscher, a graduate student at the University of Michigan School of Public Health and one of the co-authors, told The Epoch Times in an email. “However, our study indicates that this is most likely not the case.
“We must further investigate the underlying determinants of COVID-19 vaccine-induced myocarditis for the purposes of risk stratification and mitigation in order to reduce the population occurrence of this fatal iatrogenic syndrome.”
The paper was published by ESC Heart Failure on Jan. 14. Limitations included the small sample size. Three authors reported affiliations with the Wellness Company, which they said had no role in the study.
Autopsies
Many of the deaths were reported in 2023, including five by German researchers.
The researchers outlined autopsy findings from people who died unexpectedly at home within 20 days of receiving a COVID-19 shot and determined that for five people, the vaccination was the likely cause of heart inflammation, which in turn caused the deaths.
The researchers went through each of the other possible causes and ruled them out, Dr. Andrew Bostom, a heart expert based in Rhode Island who reviewed the paper, told The Epoch Times previously.
“Then, they came up with the most plausible proximate cause being vaccination,” he said.
Another eight of the deaths were reported by South Korean researchers, who found vaccine-induced myocarditis “was the only possible cause of death.” All eight people died suddenly.
The remaining deaths covered in the new paper include two teenage boys who died in their sleep in the United States soon after vaccination. Dr. James Gill, the chief medical examiner for Connecticut and a co-author of the paper that reported those deaths, has since said that the death certificate of one of those boys mentioned vaccination as the cause of death. Dr. Gill declined to comment on the new paper.
Twenty-six death certificates in the United States list COVID-19 vaccination as a cause of death, an Epoch Times review of certificates from some states found. Many states haven’t disclosed the death certificate data.
Part of Bigger Effort
Mr. Hulscher, Dr. McCullough, and others published a paper in 2023 reviewing 325 autopsies of patients who died after COVID-19 vaccination. That paper was swiftly removed by The Lancet, on whose preprint server the paper was briefly available. The Lancet alleged that the study’s conclusions were “not supported by the study methodology.”
The paper concluded that about three-quarters of the deaths were directly due to COVID-19 vaccination, or that vaccination was a significant contributing cause.
“Our newly published study overcame the headwinds of medical censorship after Elsevier and Lancet retracted our main paper describing the overall population of autopsied deaths,” Mr. Hulscher said.
The group later uploaded the preprint to Zenodo, another server.
The new paper published by ESC Heart Failure only has four authors, compared with nine for the original publication.
The researchers searched for autopsy reports involving COVID-19 vaccination and myocarditis through July 3, 2023, on PubMed and ScienceDirect, two publication databases. They excluded some studies, including those with no listed vaccination status and animal studies.
The group ended up including 14 studies covering 28 autopsies in their review.
Dr. McCullough and two other doctors independently reviewed each case and assessed causality through factors such as demographic information and the descriptions of the case. Determination of a causal link required that two out of the three doctors found causality.
“Our data are consistent with the overall epidemiological literature concerning COVID-19 vaccine-induced myocarditis where the Bradford Hill criteria support causality from an epidemiological perspective,” the authors wrote. “This includes biological plausibility, temporal association, internal and external validity, coherence, analogy, and reproducibility with each successive report of myocarditis-related death after COVID-19 vaccination.”
Bradford Hill criteria are a set of principles that can be used to assess causality.
Comment
Dr. Dick Bijl, a physician-epidemiologist and former president of the International Society of Drug Bulletins, said the review is “a clear demonstration of how we can combine clinical findings with autopsy findings and come to robust conclusions.”
“The use of Bradford Hill’s criteria is interesting and certainly warranted, yet I would like to have seen a table in which for each case the number of positive elements of Hill’s criteria were illustrated,” Dr. Bijl, who wasn’t involved in the study, told The Epoch Times in an email.
“In epidemiology, causal inferences are hard to be made and the only proper way to prove them are properly designed and executed randomized trials.”
A secondary analysis of Pfizer and Moderna trial data showed that vaccinated people were more at risk of serious adverse events of special interest, including myocarditis.
Regulatory authorities should have made vaccine makers do more trials, including some with endpoints of serious disease and death, but didn’t, he noted.
“Still, they could have given a temporal market authorization with the pertinent obligation that this permission will be stopped when the results of these trials were negative or were not performed,” Dr. Bijl said. “Now, we are confronted with a situation that the deaths of healthy people are likely related to improperly studied vaccines and could have been avoided.”
From The Epoch Times
