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[RUSH TRANSCRIPT BELOW] Dr. Kirk Milhoan is a pediatric cardiologist and senior fellow at the Independent Medical Alliance. He has been treating children with myocarditis and other cardiovascular issues associated with COVID-19 and the COVID-19 vaccines.

“Four years later, five years later, I’m seeing this constant and dramatic change in who I’m seeing coming to see me. They’re complaining their heart doesn’t beat normally. And it beats fast for no reason at all,” says Dr. Milhoan. “Specifically after the second dose of the new platform for the COVID vaccine, we were seeing an increase in myocarditis in children that we’ve never seen before with any vaccine product in children.”

In this episode, we dive into the apparent rise of cardiovascular conditions in children and how to better address and understand them.

“We need to return the idea of a patient-doctor relationship,” says Dr. Milhoan. “You’re not a consumer. We’ve made this too marketing-oriented. We need to go back to: ‘I’m a physician who cares for you because I have compassion for you. And because of my compassion, I want you to do well, and I want you to be healthy.’”

Views expressed in this video are opinions of the host and the guest and do not necessarily reflect the views of NTD.

RUSH TRANSCRIPT
Jan Jekielek:

Dr. Kirk Milhoan, such a pleasure to have you on American Thought Leaders.

Thanks for having me. I really appreciate it.

There’s been a marked rise in cardiac problems in children over the last several years. A lot of different information out there about that, all the way from this isn’t happening to it being a massive problem. What’s the reality?

The reality is something really happened. What people are sensing has happened, has happened. And we have seen a change in myocarditis in children, especially in boys, that is temporally related to the introduction of the COVID vaccine. We had seen a little bit of inflammation of the heart in something that’s called multisystem inflammatory syndrome in children that caused almost the whole body to become inflamed. But specifically after the second dose of the new platform for the COVID vaccine, we were seeing an increase in myocarditis in children that we’ve never seen before with any vaccine product in children.

Well, and this is something that was talked about actually pretty early in the deployment, that there was this issue with myocarditis.

Yes, with more of the FOIA [Freedom of Information Act] requests, and understanding what was going on beforehand, even in their phase two and phase three trials, this was a concern. They had put that in as a concern. It would be something, it would be one of the ones they were watching for as a signal.

Can you quantify for me where we stand today? I mean, you yourself are a cardiologist, for a pediatrician, what are you seeing?

So I think we have seen the peak of the myocarditis in terms of the acute myocarditis because hardly any children are getting any more of the vaccine or boosters. It’s still happening, but very little uptake, especially because the parents just don’t want it anymore. COVID has largely gone away; it has become much more just like a respiratory illness, and so the fear of their children dying or causing someone else to die, that’s gone away. So the myocarditis has decreased.

I’m seeing something else that is completely different that is taking up an enormous amount of my time. And this is inappropriate tachycardia or a fast heart rate where they’ll be sitting on a couch and all of a sudden a kid complains, “Mom, my heart’s racing.” So that’s what I’m seeing more of. The problem with the myocarditis that we saw, especially in 2021 and 2022, is that it could be a silent killer. And that is, the scar can be there, and a scar forms after myocarditis, which is inflammation of the heart.

So you can imagine it’s sort of like a charley horse. If your muscle gets bruised, if you get a charley horse, what do you want to do? You want to rest that muscle. If you go on a long run and your legs are sore the next day, you’re like, “Oh my gosh, my legs, I just want to rest. I don’t want to do anything.” That is what myocarditis is like; it’s inflammation of the heart.

The problem is we never allow our heart to rest. So we are expecting that heart to beat almost every second, every minute, every hour, every day. It’s a heart that needs time to repair. And the way the heart repairs is a lot of times what it does is it sends in all these agents that sort of cry foul and say something’s wrong. And so the body says, “Okay, what must we do? We’ve got to come in here. Something’s injured us.”

And so what they’ll do is sort of make little dams with fiber, which causes these little fibrous scars. If there’s a lot of damage, you’ll have big scars, and if there’s little damage, you’ll have little scars. It’s really hard for us, in our basic evaluation of children, to know if they have silent big scars or silent small scars. We can usually help them identify if they have low risk for a heart event.

But this is the big concern; what people have been seeing is it seems like a lot more athletes, just from what is concerned, a lot more elite athletes have died following the vaccine. And that is where I hear concern, not only from doctors asking, “Can I approve this child to do sports?” but also from athletes asking, “Can I push myself? Am I safe to push myself?”

Well, and so how common is this exactly? That’s the other question. This certainly isn’t everybody by any means.

No, not at all.

That’s one piece. The second piece is people recover from this.

We’re still trying to figure this out because we don’t necessarily know how many people might have it silently, so the absolute numbers are questionable. I think if you were to look at some cardiac effects that people are still having, we’re probably looking at maybe 4% of the population, so 96% are maybe having no cardiac effects at all from this. But this is very specific to the age and sex of the person. So teenage boys and young adult males were the most likely population to have myocarditis and cardiac issues.

This is exactly what I was going to ask. So it’s four, I mean, four out of 100 is not a small number, but is that of all people or people who have had a particular type of COVID product?

No. So when we look at it, it looks like it starts right around puberty. So as males come into puberty, they have an increase in testosterone. Testosterone is a pro-inflammatory hormone. It happened typically in this young adolescence to young adulthood is where we saw the most. We saw it in women; we saw it in older people. But that’s where the real spike came.

Tied with a testosterone increase, basically.

Yes, that’s what it seems like. I also, when I treated patients with COVID, some of the ones that were the hardest to treat that seemed to be really affected significantly by COVID itself were the bodybuilders. And maybe they were taking some other substances to help their bodies get big. But I think probably that maybe increased testosterone, also that pro-inflammatory hormone, was adding to the inflammation that the virus caused because of the spike protein, or the vaccine caused because it asked our body to make spike protein, which is an incredibly pro-inflammatory agent to your body.

You could be getting myocarditis just from COVID. Are you suggesting it’s dose-dependent? Like how much spike is how?

So there was a beautiful study done by the Nordic countries. They probably have the best capture of medical data from how they run their health care systems, their electronic medical records. And so they published this in JAMA Cardiology, and it was 23 million people. They looked at their vaccination status by age, sex, which vaccine they got, how many did they get, did they get one of one and one of the other.

So they looked at all these things, and what they found was that the unvaccinated had the lowest amount of myocarditis. If you had one Pfizer, you had more than if you were unvaccinated. If you had two Pfizer, you had even more. If you had one Moderna, it was more. If you had two Moderna, it was even more. And if you mixed them, it seemed even higher. All of these were above what we saw with the unvaccinated.

So that sort of answers the question: which is worse, to be unvaccinated or vaccinated for myocarditis? It was worse to be vaccinated, and the Moderna, which seemed worse, is supposed to have three times as much genetic material in it than Pfizer did, so we have a dose response that sort of helps us with establishing causality.

And does that increase in genetic material translate into an increase in spike?

We believe so. Unfortunately, those studies were never done to see actually how much spike was being produced and sampling that, and so we’re starting to see it in retrospect as we look back at the different studies. When we look at all these things, then we go, “Okay, now this has myocarditis.” I mean, it’s a very scary word if you just say myocarditis in children. If we were to look at all of our comers, most of the time what we see is caused by a virus. There are certain numbers of viruses that give these kids; some are born with myocarditis, their heart dilates because it’s weak. But it’s a very scary word.

And so in the Lancet study, they started looking at how many kids had myocarditis from the vaccine, so it was temporally related to the vaccine. They said, “Okay, at 90 days, let’s study them and look at everything and see how it looks.” And so they studied everything. They looked at all the different ways that we make ourselves feel better about clearing a child to do athletics. So that’s often what a pediatrician does: Is it okay for this child to play sports?

I’m sure you get a lot of people asking you that exact question.

How can I be sure it’s safe for my child to play sports? They got two vaccines. So what we typically do is have a physical exam. Most of the kids, it’s normal. Ninety days after they had myocarditis, their physical exam was normal. We do an EKG; the EKG is normal. We do a stress test where we put them on a treadmill. We look at the EKG; it’s normal. We do an echocardiogram; it’s normal.

But in 50% of the cases, if we looked at the cardiac MRI and looked for scar, there were still 50% that had scar in their heart. So it’s a very complex test where we inject a heavy metal called gadolinium, and it goes and gets stuck where there’s swelling or where there’s an actual fibrous scar. And we saw it at three months; there was still scar there. So it probably means that that is past swelling and that a scar has actually formed.

The problem with scars in the heart is that the heart has a whole electrical system that allows the beat. It initiates a beat, and then it spreads throughout the whole heart through an electrical system. Those scars act as short circuits, and they can potentially cause problematic or even fatal rhythms where the heart stops beating, and people can die from it. So depending on how much scar you have, it can dictate what your risk is. If you have enough of this scar, you even have an indication to put in an implantable defibrillator to shock your heart if it goes into a bad rhythm.

So what’s concerning for me as a cardiologist is all the things I normally would do for a child to determine if they are safe to exercise. Usually, I would do an exam and put them through a few tests, and I would say, “Oh, normal.” If I were really concerned, I’d put them on a treadmill. The problem is that in 90 days, those kids were all normal. Then the discussion is, “Okay, which kid would I give a cardiac MRI for?” which a lot of insurance companies didn’t want to cover.

Yes, it’s a non-trivial thing.

Dr. Milhoan:

It’s a non-trivial thing and there’s always a risk. Anything we do has a risk. If you inject a dye for a radiologic procedure, it has risks. Some people have a real allergic reaction to it. So we’re trying to evaluate these kids, which, in my opinion as a pediatric cardiologist and with over 20 years of experience with pediatric vaccines, we usually have a lot of time to test them before we try these things out on kids. Unfortunately, this has come out very quickly. It was a whole new platform. Now we’re seeing problems that are even in excess of what we considered might be a problem at the beginning.

And now you’re talking in terms of heart problems.

Yes.

So just like the overall incidence of heart problems, this is taking us back to the beginning. You said that the phenomenon is real.

Yes.

Any estimates on how real?

I think those are the hard numbers. I can tell you that as we look at vaccines causing injury, we have looked for the last 30 years, and we have the same amount of vaccine injury sort of sitting as a baseline. We’re looking at 280 to 290 million vaccines a year, and we have this baseline. Then all of a sudden, in 2021, this huge spike comes up, and the spike for myocarditis is something we’ve really never seen before. So what does it mean?

You’re saying it has persisted at some level, even though it’s not really something that’s being given anymore.

Like I said, at 90 days, 50% were still shown to have some scar. As you start to get tissue and people die, and we do studies, there was a recent study that showed that not only big scars, but there are micro scars of people who died after maybe having not only the two series but multiple boosters after that. So this is the idea that this inflammation is now forming scars.

But these micro scars are something that I wouldn’t be able to see on a cardiac MRI; you would have to have a piece of tissue to actually look at underneath a microscope. And we don’t like to go into the heart and take a bite of muscle from the heart. Nobody likes that; we sometimes do it, but we really don’t want to. So if there’s any way we can do it without going into the heart and pulling out a little chunk of heart, we’d like to do that.

You mentioned these elite athletes. There are all these memes and so forth about this happening. Is that a real phenomenon?

This is where it depends on whose paper you want to listen to. A recent paper came out and said there is no increase. They looked at this. I think that we’re really concerned as we look at these studies: do we really have all the information? Doctors have a sense, and I think a lot of people watching TV have a sense that, wow, usually we would see maybe one elite athlete die a year. It would be big news, a very prominent elite athlete.

But it seemed shortly after the COVID vaccine came out, I think everyone had a sense. And I think that that’s how a lot of science starts, especially in medicine. We see something that gives us a hunch, and then we ask if we have a reason to be concerned that that hunch might be in response to something we did as doctors. And boy, as a physician, I hate to think that I’ve caused harm. Oh, I would rather not do medicine than cause harm. I didn’t go into medicine to cause harm, especially for this great, vibrant athlete.

I mean, I saw this one kid. I got called down to the ER to see him. They said, “Yeah, he has a low heart rate,” and he was two weeks out after his second injection. He was the star running back. I mean, this kid was just, I mean, just pure muscle and great. I walk in the room, and his heart rate is at 20, right? And I said, “Don’t you guys think somebody should be in this room with him if his heart rate is 20?”

That’s very low. What would be a normal rate for someone?

An athlete might need to get down to 40. I feel okay if an athlete is at 40 when he’s lying in bed. But 20 is something that concerns us. So I think the fact that we do have a model. We’ve had, when the Koreans did autopsy studies, and we see this in sudden cardiac death; there was inflammation in the heart. There was scarring in the heart. As we get more and more data out, we’re starting to look at these things. For some people, the spike protein, which is really one of the main causative agents, is inflammatory. That means it causes the body to respond as if it’s being attacked. And also, it’s cardiotoxic.

So these are things that we have a lot of reasons to be very concerned about. If there is, we have this hunch of an uptick in people dying suddenly during exercise, which puts a lot of stress on your heart. A lot of these kids we don’t find because what happens to a teenage male when you ask them, “Why don’t you get up?” They say, “I’m tired. I don’t want to get up.” That might be the same symptomatology if they have myocarditis.

But if all they do is sit around, maybe that’s the kid who likes to play games all day, and he’s a gamer, and he wants to be a professional gamer. So he’s sitting in a chair all day. We may never see an episode in him because he’s never stressed his heart. But if you take an elite athlete, once they get into puberty, once they get testosterone, children before puberty act differently in sports than when they’re after puberty. After puberty, they’ll push themselves well beyond pain. Before that, they just quit. They’ll just say, “I’m done.”

So when we have these elite high school athletes, they know when something’s wrong, and they’re coming in and telling us, “I just don’t feel right.” Now what I’m seeing now, four years later, five years later, is this constant and dramatic change in who I’m seeing come to see me. They’re complaining their heart doesn’t beat normally, and it beats fast for no reason at all. So that’s what I’m seeing more now.

And you think that with a bit of work, you might see that it’s due to this scarring.

Due to the scarring, or there was a new study that came out. It’s a preprint study out of Yale that was talking about how they’re looking at this spike protein that was supposed to be generated for a short period in time, just in your arm where you’re injected, now has gone throughout the body. In some people, as long as they looked, they were still producing more spike protein.

So this shot that was supposed to come in, give us a short little thing of a protein, ask your body to make this protein, then your body makes an antibody response, and then it sort of stops. For a lot of people, it’s not stopping. It’s almost like being in a chronic vaccinated state, as opposed to allowing the body to make an immune response and then settle back down.

And again, so I mean, this highlights the fact that just all of us are different, right? All of us have just different physiologies, different peculiarities, different genetics, you know, resulting in those different environmental factors that have influenced us. And so something that might be, you know, just a huge problem for one person could be not at all for another. It’s not a one-size-fits-all.

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The Rise in Cardiovascular Conditions, Myocarditis in Children: Dr. Kirk Milhoan