A Lancet review of autopsy data of over 300 post-COVID-19 vaccination deaths would challenge the mainstream narrative on the safety of the shots, but was removed within 24 hours of the initial submission, said cardiologist Dr. Peter McCullough, the paper’s leading author and prominent COVID vaccine skeptic.
“Pre-print servers go through a check to make sure all the elements of the paper are there, but it is not peer-reviewed by external doctors. And the preprint server simply offers people a chance to look at the data themselves and decide,” he told host Jan Jekielek. “I think that’s perfectly fair to look at the tables, look at the figures.”
“Obviously, we struck a very important gap in knowledge and the world needed to know the results,” the doctor added.
Less than 24 hours later, however, it was taken down with a note implying that the study violated the medical journal’s “screening criteria.”
“This pre-print has been removed ... because the study’s conclusions are not supported by the study methodology,” Lancet’s note read.
Study Findings
For the study, the researchers looked at 678 papers and narrowed down 44 that contained 325 autopsy cases. They then performed what is called a “blind adjudication” by having three physicians independently review all deaths and determine whether COVID-19 vaccination caused or contributed significantly to them.“We use the standard called PRISMA, where we searched for every paper possible. We sorted through hundreds and hundreds of manuscripts because deaths can be reported as different clinical syndromes are coming out after the vaccine,” Dr. McCullough said, noting that they took out cases that obviously had nothing to do with vaccination.
“There were deaths where there was an auto accident or a suicide. There were some cases in nursing homes where people are on hospice and it looked like they were in their last days of life. We just couldn’t attribute it to the vaccine,” he explained. “But the striking cases were people who were perfectly healthy, who had no other medical problems. The only new thing in their life was a vaccine, and then they died with an obvious syndrome like a blood clot, or heart damage, or myocarditis.”
“This is important because when these papers were originally published, the authors didn’t know the full breadth of safety profiles of the vaccine,” the doctor continued. “Initially there were some autopsies from Germany [where] people died of blood clots shooting to lungs. The authors concluded that it wasn’t vaccine because at that time they didn’t know the vaccine causes blood clots, but we do now.”
To that end, a total of 240 deaths (73.9 percent) were identified as directly due to or significantly contributed to by COVID-19 vaccination.
The most implicated organ system in COVID-19 vaccine-associated death was the cardiovascular system (53 percent), followed by the hematological system (17 percent), the respiratory system (8 percent), and multiple organ systems (7 percent), according to the paper. The mean time from vaccination to death was 14.3 days, with most deaths occurring within a week from the most recent jab.
Without further detail from Lancet, it is hard to tell exactly in which way the study’s methodology might have failed to support its conclusions. On the other hand, Dr. McCullough said they used standard methodology and did reach realistic results.
“We didn’t come up with an unrealistic number. We didn’t come up with 100 percent or zero percent of deaths were due to vaccines. We came up with a reasonable number that’s defensible,” he said. “In the supplemental tables, people can go through every case and decide if they agree or disagree, and that’s fair. That should be up on the pre-print server so the world can see it.”
“The main thing people want is they want access to the data. They simply don’t want data censored off of the internet,” he added. “We should have grand rounds on this. We should have broad internet discussions on it. People maybe want to discuss specific cases—maybe the authors [of the 44 papers] themselves want to look at it.”
Dr. McCullough also highlighted the fact that this paper didn’t even touch the question of the trade-off between the efficacy and the potential harms of getting the jab. “That’s a subject for a different analysis a different day,” he said. “This is simply a descriptive report.”
“In the setting of COVID, when it comes to the vaccines, papers get special attention. Because there are individuals who don’t want to have a fair presentation of data when it comes to safety.”
