Under the Trump administration’s “Operation Warp Speed,” COVID-19 vaccines were brought to market in record time at the height of the global pandemic in 2020. The public-private partnership between the federal government and pharmaceutical companies like Pfizer, Moderna, and Johnson & Johnson was meant to facilitate and accelerate the development, manufacturing, and distribution of vaccines, therapeutics, and diagnostics to stop the spread of COVID.
Four years later, there are more questions than answers about the safety and efficacy of the vaccines, in particular, and many officials in Donald Trump’s new administration have been on the record voicing their concerns.
Renowned cardiologist Dr. Aseem Malhotra, a close advisor of newly confirmed Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., is among the critics and is calling for a “global moratorium” on COVID vaccinations until there is a better understanding of how they affect the body. On Wednesday’s show, he joined Megyn to discuss what the research has shown and why he believes Trump may have been misled by Big Pharma about the risks of the shots.
What We Know Now
While those who raised questions and concerns about the COVID-19 vaccines were long-accused of spreading “disinformation,” Dr. Malhotra said the misinformation has often come from the shots’ fiercest advocates. “One of the things that keeps getting perpetuated in the media is… that the COVID vaccine has saved millions of lives,” he said. “The data on which that information is based is the lowest-level quality of evidence. It’s not even considered in the hierarchy of evidence-based medicine.”
He cited “one of the leading figures in the world in evidence based medicine,” Carl Heneghan of Oxford, who wrote an article saying the claim “is implausible.” In the United States, Dr. Malhotra said “the most cited medical researcher in the world,” Professor John Ioannidis at Stanford, wrote an article in a peer-reviewed journal in 2022 saying non-randomized studies that found COVID vaccines to be beneficial or preventing deaths may lead to “spurious estimates.”
Meanwhile, Dr. Malhotra said there is “rigorous data” that refutes the claims that the COVID vaccines were protective. “When the original trials were re-analyzed by independent scientists in the peer-reviewed journal Vaccine… What they found is, from the very beginning, you were more likely to suffer serious harm from the COVID mRNA vaccines, than you were to be hospitalized with COVID,” he explained. “And that serious harm rate in the trial was only a short term harm… and that was a rate of about one in 800.”
And then there are what Dr. Malhotra called the “long term harms” of the vaccines, which include spikes in autoimmune conditions, myocarditis, and even death. He said Dutch researchers suggested COVID vaccines have contributed to 2 million excess deaths globally, while studies are increasingly looking into how they are behaving in the body over time.
Megyn has shared that she tested positive for an autoimmune condition after getting her first booster shot, and Dr. Malhotra said so-called “vaccine injury” has touched his family as well. He developed psoriasis about 18 months after the vaccine that he believes is linked, while his father had what he described as a “sudden cardiac death” six months after getting two doses of Pfizer. He believes it was “almost certainly” because of the vaccine.
Trump’s Role
This is why Dr. Malhotra believes it is time to halt the administering of the COVID vaccines and boosters and Trump is the man for the job. “He is exactly the disruptor we need right now to really change the system for the good,” he noted. “And he has made some really important comments about making sure Big Pharma companies are accountable.”
At least so far, the president has stopped short of explicitly criticizing the shots, but Dr. Malhotra believes that will change. “I think he was deceived. He was misled by these drug companies,” he said. “We need to get to a situation where he comes out says, ‘Listen, we did this with the best of intentions… We may have saved some lives – certainly in the high risk people – but… the fact that it was given to so many other people at low risk… it is very clear with the evidence that we have done more harm than good here and it needs to stop.'”
He admitted it is an uncomfortable conversation around an “uncomfortable truth,” but Dr. Malhotra said it needs to happen. “We need to identify who is at risk so people don’t worry unnecessarily… and then we can use the best minds of science and medicine to actually allow research to take place to find the solution,” he concluded. “This is going to be an ongoing issue, and we need to talk about it right now so that we can stop problems in the future.”
You can check out Megyn’s full interview with Dr. Malhotra by tuning in to episode 1,014 on YouTube, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you like to listen. And don’t forget that you can catch The Megyn Kelly Show live on SiriusXM’s Triumph (channel 111) weekdays from 12pm to 2pm ET.