Autopsy Studies of COVID-19 Illness Rule Out Extensive Myocarditis

By Peter A. McCullough, MD, MPH

From the original Baric study demonstrating beta-coronavirus loading in laboratory models can cause myocarditis to the first year of the COVID-19 crisis there has been a concern that SARS-CoV-2 infection in humans could cause heart inflammation. Epidemiologic studies relying on ICD codes triggered by routine cardiac troponin testing and or results implied that hospitalized patients were developing myocarditis with the respiratory illness. None of these studies were confirmed with clinical adjudication or autopsy. In 2020 the NCAA Big Ten athletic conference, US Military, and many other organizations screened for myocarditis on clinical grounds—handful of cases were found without any reported hospitalizations or deaths. Tuvali, et al from Israel, demonstrated that myocarditis in 2020 was not any more common that the low levels of baseline myocarditis from parvovirus, giant cell, and other conditions.

Almamlouk et al performed a systematic review of 50 autopsy studies and 548 hearts of patients who died of or with COVID-19. Usual post-mortem findings of tissue edema and necrosis were reported commonly. About two thirds of hearts had SARS-CoV-2 found in the tissue. However, none of the hearts had extensive myocarditis as the cause of death.

Almamlouk R, Kashour T, Obeidat S, Bois MC, Maleszewski JJ, Omrani OA, Tleyjeh R, Berbari E, Chakhachiro Z, Zein-Sabatto B, Gerberi D, Tleyjeh IM; Cardiac Autopsy in COVID-19 Study Group; Paniz Mondolfi AE, Finn AV, Duarte-Neto AN, Rapkiewicz AV, Frustaci A, Keresztesi AA, Hanley B, Märkl B, Lardi C, Bryce C, Lindner D, Aguiar D, Westermann D, Stroberg E, Duval EJ, Youd E, Bulfamante GP, Salmon I, Auer J, Maleszewski JJ, Hirschbühl K, Absil L, Barton LM, Ferraz da Silva LF, Moore L, Dolhnikoff M, Lammens M, Bois MC, Osborn M, Remmelink M, Nascimento Saldiva PH, Jorens PG, Craver R, Aparecida de Almeida Monteiro R, Scendoni R, Mukhopadhyay S, Suzuki T, Mauad T, Fracasso T, Grimes Z. COVID-19-Associated cardiac pathology at the postmortem evaluation: a collaborative systematic review. Clin Microbiol Infect. 2022 Aug;28(8):1066-1075. doi: 10.1016/j.cmi.2022.03.021. Epub 2022 Mar 23. PMID: 35339672; PMCID: PMC8941843.

In summary, this review should be the nail in the coffin in ruling out COVID-19 illness as a cause of fatal myocarditis. Despite the virus being found in heart tissue, it was not causing significant inflammation. The explosion of fatal myocarditis by report of unexplained cardiac arrest, adjudication, and at necropsy must have another explanation than SARS-CoV-2 infection. The only new proven cause of heart damage in human populations is COVID-19 vaccination. Vaccines used in America (Pfizer, Moderna, Janssen, Novavax) have been demonstrated to cause myocarditis as published in the peer-reviewed literature.

These observations call for immediate access to the CDC COVID-19 vaccine administration database for physicians and other providers who are managing the burgeoning caseload of myocarditis. This will be the only way the epidemiology of COVID-19 vaccine induced myocarditis can be studied and patient outcomes can be improved.

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Daniels CJ, Rajpal S, Greenshields JT, Rosenthal GL, Chung EH, Terrin M, Jeudy J, Mattson SE, Law IH, Borchers J, Kovacs R, Kovan J, Rifat SF, Albrecht J, Bento AI, Albers L, Bernhardt D, Day C, Hecht S, Hipskind A, Mjaanes J, Olson D, Rooks YL, Somers EC, Tong MS, Wisinski J, Womack J, Esopenko C, Kratochvil CJ, Rink LD; Big Ten COVID-19 Cardiac Registry Investigators. Prevalence of Clinical and Subclinical Myocarditis in Competitive Athletes With Recent SARS-CoV-2 Infection: Results From the Big Ten COVID-19 Cardiac Registry. JAMA Cardiol. 2021 Sep 1;6(9):1078-1087. doi: 10.1001/jamacardio.2021.2065. PMID: 34042947; PMCID: PMC8160916.

Tuvali O, Tshori S, Derazne E, Hannuna RR, Afek A, Haberman D, Sella G, George J. The Incidence of Myocarditis and Pericarditis in Post COVID-19 Unvaccinated Patients-A Large Population-Based Study. J Clin Med. 2022 Apr 15;11(8):2219. doi: 10.3390/jcm11082219. PMID: 35456309; PMCID: PMC9025013.

Almamlouk R, Kashour T, Obeidat S, Bois MC, Maleszewski JJ, Omrani OA, Tleyjeh R, Berbari E, Chakhachiro Z, Zein-Sabatto B, Gerberi D, Tleyjeh IM; Cardiac Autopsy in COVID-19 Study Group; Paniz Mondolfi AE, Finn AV, Duarte-Neto AN, Rapkiewicz AV, Frustaci A, Keresztesi AA, Hanley B, Märkl B, Lardi C, Bryce C, Lindner D, Aguiar D, Westermann D, Stroberg E, Duval EJ, Youd E, Bulfamante GP, Salmon I, Auer J, Maleszewski JJ, Hirschbühl K, Absil L, Barton LM, Ferraz da Silva LF, Moore L, Dolhnikoff M, Lammens M, Bois MC, Osborn M, Remmelink M, Nascimento Saldiva PH, Jorens PG, Craver R, Aparecida de Almeida Monteiro R, Scendoni R, Mukhopadhyay S, Suzuki T, Mauad T, Fracasso T, Grimes Z. COVID-19-Associated cardiac pathology at the postmortem evaluation: a collaborative systematic review. Clin Microbiol Infect. 2022 Aug;28(8):1066-1075. doi: 10.1016/j.cmi.2022.03.021. Epub 2022 Mar 23. PMID: 35339672; PMCID: PMC8941843.

Ecological Data Point to COVID-19 Vaccines as a Determinant of Increased All-Cause Mortality

By Peter A. McCullough, MD, MPH

The biggest global news story in 2021, 2022, and now in 2023 is that people around the world are dying in ever great numbers as the pandemic winds down. This is just the opposite of what was expected since COVID-19 mortality was largely in the elderly and those with many medical problems, the viral illness should have had a “culling” effect leaving 2022 and now 2023 to have decreased mortality.

Multiple sources of data suggest the swell in mortality occurring is not just among the elderly. Edward Dowd’s book “Cause Unknown”: The Epidemic of Sudden Deaths in 2021 & 2022 numerous sources of insurance data are cited suggesting death claims among working age persons are skyrocketing.

Aarstad et al have published an ecological analysis demonstrating that deaths tracked with increased COVID-19 vaccination rates. But as the authors point out, these observations are not conclusive that the vaccines independently are responsible for the alarming trend.

Aarstad, J.; Kvitastein, O.A. Is there a Link between the 2021 COVID-19 Vaccination Uptake in Europe and 2022 Excess All-Cause Mortality?. Preprints 2023, 2023020350. https://doi.org/10.20944/preprints202302.0350.v1.

Public health agencies should immediately merge the vaccine administration and all cause death data to analyze temporal association. In other words, to produce a frequency histogram of deaths occurring on days 0, 1, 2, 3, etc. after the shot. From a regulatory perspective, any death within 30 days of an injection should be attributed to COVID-19 vaccination since all vaccines have conclusively caused death(s) as published in the peer-reviewed literature. Given the long-acting nature of mRNA and Spike protein, one could argue any death within a year is reasonable to consider as a vaccine death.

In conclusion, governments hold all the data on vaccination and death and it will be public health agencies or independent researchers who acquire the data that will deliver these important answers. Death cannot remain “cause unknown” forever.

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Aarstad, J.; Kvitastein, O.A. Is there a Link between the 2021 COVID-19 Vaccination Uptake in Europe and 2022 Excess All-Cause Mortality?. Preprints 2023, 2023020350. https://doi.org/10.20944/preprints202302.0350.v1.

Lipid Nanoparticles Drive mRNA Delivery to Placenta and Hopefully no Further

By Peter A. McCullough, MD, MPH

COVID-19 vaccination in pregnant women evokes the most horror of any safety scenario for the genetic vaccines (mRNA, adenoviral DNA) because there are two patients, the mother and the fetus. Violations of medical ethics have been called from the very start since pregnant women and those of childbearing potential were excluded from the randomized trials used for EUA approval for the FDA. Never has an excluded group been freely given a new product by government agencies (CDC/FDA) when they were excluded from trials just a few months earlier.

Many have wondered if the babies have mRNA within their systems. No studies have demonstrated vertical transfer of mRNA. A paper from Young et al in mice show that lipid nanoparticles enhance delivery to the placenta compared to saline or free mRNA, however there was no evidence of reporting (luciferase) in the fetuses. Delivery of mRNA for Spike protein to the human placenta and local production of the Wuhan Spike protein would explain the increased fetal loss risk that is being observed in vaccinated women by Thorp et al.

Let’s hope these preclinical data hold up in humans since so many young mothers either were duped or forced into COVID-19 vaccination. Young parents who have become enlightened should vigilant for any medical problems in their babies if the mother has been vaccinated.

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Lipid Nanoparticle Composition Drives mRNA Delivery to the Placenta Rachel E. Young, Katherine M. Nelson, Samuel I. Hofbauer, Tara Vijayakumar, Mohamad-Gabriel Alameh, Drew Weissman, Charalampos Papachristou, Jason P. Gleghorn, Rachel S. Riley bioRxiv 2022.12.22.521490; doi: https://doi.org/10.1101/2022.12.22.521490

Programming Fear

The security analyst and author, Gavin de Becker, just gave a fascinating interview on Tucker Carlson Today. He must surely have one of most extraordinary life stories in history, beginning with a childhood of high, unpredictable drama and adventure. While most children would have been crushed by the chaos of it, in his case, it seems to have sharpened his senses and made him lightning fast on his feet.

In the summer of 2007, a Colorado game warden told me about Mr. de Becker’s book, The Gift of Fear. The warden often went undercover to perform sting operations on illegal poachers, some of whom were involved in multiple criminal enterprises. As a law officer—alone in the country with armed men while pretending to be their friend in order to bust them for poaching—he needed to be constantly vigilant to signs that his subjects’ were beginning to regard him with suspicion.

He told me he’d found Mr. de Becker’s book useful because it illustrated for him just how sensitive our intuitions are for detecting danger. If your intuition tells you that you are in the presence of a predatory or hostile man—even if he is assuring you of his friendship and affection—you should always listen to your intuition. Though it’s not infallible, it’s so accurate that we second guess it at our peril.

This principle applied equally to the game warden and the men he was trying to sting, who were often wily and alert to the possibility of law officers in their midst. My game warden friend practiced being in tune with his intuitions and trusting them. To be sure, he was in the business of dealing with dangerous humans. Because we humans are apex predators and often prey on each other, nature has instilled in us the capacity to sense the presence of a dangerous man, even if he’s an artful dissimulator.

Our threat detection system is calibrated differently for men and women. Women may be twice as sensitive to danger because they frequently look out not only for themselves, but also for infants in their care. Dr. McCullough and I have often observed that the greatest soldiers of the medical freedom movement are mothers who quickly detected that our ruling class is full of predators.

As Mr. de Becker points out in his Tucker Carlson interview, while modern humans are inclined to second guess their intuitions, they are nevertheless easily programmed to fear what they are told to fear by authority figures. In this way, our archaic threat detection system can be hijacked and exploited by tyrants, who have always incited fear to augment their power. When we are mortally afraid, our survival instinct is to fight or flee from the threat, not to think about it in critical way.

By constant fear-mongering, our health agencies and media conditioned us to:

1). Excessively and indiscriminately fear COVID-19 without consideration for the fact that it’s a markedly risk-stratified illness.

2). Irrationally fear early treatment modalities such as hydroxychloroquine and ivermectin, which are (in fact) some of the safest drugs known to man.

Through its COVID-19 PSYOP, our government and media generated an overwhelming desire for anything that would deliver us from the purported danger. This, in turn, made us vulnerable to the lie that the so-called COVID-19 vaccines are safe and effective. The result of this PSYOP was an extreme distortion of reality that enabled our overlords to hijack and pervert our natural capacity for fear.

Thus we witnessed the bizarre spectacle of pregnant mothers receiving the new, experimental gene transfer shot, even though pregnant women were excluded from the human trials. Contrast this with hydroxychloroquine, which has, for decades, been known to be perfectly safe for pregnant women, with hundreds of millions of doses tolerated by this cohort in tropical countries where malaria is endemic.

In the United States it has long been standard for pregnant women to abstain from drinking a single glass or wine or eating raw-milk cheese, but many of these same women lined up to receive the experimental shots developed at “Warp Speed.” This was a stark example of the “fear programming” that Mr. de Becker elucidates in his interview.

Another stunning perversion of fear was the false claim that COVID-19 posed a significant risk to young athletes, while simultaneously insisting the mRNA COVID-19 shots present none. In fact, it’s the opposite, with young athletes at virtually zero risk of severe COVID-19, but especially susceptible to vaccine-induced myocarditis and pericarditis.

I strongly recommend watching the interview and picking up a copy of the book Cause Unknown, by Ed Dowd, for which Mr. de Becker assisted with research and analysis and wrote the Afterword

Great Texas COVID-19 Tragedy

By Peter A. McCullough, MD, MPH

Recently a tweet popped up implying that lower Texas vaccination rates were responsible for deaths with COVID-19 through 2021 and mid 2022. I live in Texas and have been treating patients with high risk COVID-19 from the very start of the crisis.

Despite all the hopes and aspirations for those pushing vaccine ideology, prospective, randomized, double-blind placebo controlled trials in 2020 never demonstrated reductions in hospitalization and death. As a result, no therapeutic claim of survival can be made by anyone. Reduction in the risk of death is listed in the “benefit” section of vaccine consent form. COVID-19 vaccines have never saved lives.

Of the ~90,000 deaths through September 1, 2022, and ~40,000 after May 1, 2022 when vaccines had been widely deployed for five months, none of them were prevented by COVID-19 vaccination. By December, 2021, failure of COVID-19 vaccines was very obvious with the Omicron outbreak which was largely among the fully vaccinated.

Adapted from Hotez PJ (2022) The great Texas COVID tragedy. PLOS Glob Public Health 2(10): e0001173. https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pgph.0001173

The real tragedy in Texas and all over the world was the absolute or relative lack of early combination therapeutics at home in high risk COVID-19. Gkioulekas et al concluded that by December of 2020, we had clear and convincing evidence (P<0.01) that early treatment was effective in reducing hospitalization death, a claim that could never be made for COVID-19 vaccines. Verkerk et al demonstrated the vast majority of hospitalizations and deaths occurred as a result of little or no access to early combination therapy. Failure to treat resulting in avoidable death is always a tragedy.

In conclusion, readers of the peer-reviewed literature and social media should be wary of vaccine ideology as promoted by those with a vested interest in developing vaccines, NIH funding, or close ties to the biopharmaceutical complex. Early therapeutics has been a bright spot in the pandemic. High-risk index cases among the vaccinated and unvaccinated benefitted from compassionate care which was the best chance to survive the illness and avoid hospitalization and death.

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Hotez PJ (2022) The great Texas COVID tragedy. PLOS Glob Public Health 2(10): e0001173. https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pgph.0001173

Verkerk, R., Kathrada, N., Plothe, C., & Lindley, K. (2022). Self-Selected COVID-19 “Unvaccinated” Cohort Reports Favorable Health Outcomes and Unjustified Discrimination in Global Survey. International Journal of Vaccine Theory, Practice, and Research, 2(2), 321–354. https://doi.org/10.56098/ijvtpr.v2i2.43

Gkioulekas, Eleftherios & McCullough, Peter & Zelenko, Vladimir. (2022). Statistical analysis methods applied to early outpatient COVID-19 treatment case series data. 10.22541/au.164745391.17821933/v4.

Senate Committee Handles Bancel with Kid Gloves

By Peter A. McCullough, MD, MPH

In 2006, Stephane Bancel was a sales director then head of Belgium operations for Eli Lilly, a mid to high level big pharma sales executive. In 2007 he catapulted to become CEO of French diagnostics company BioMérieux and began work with the Chinese to build the biosecurity annex level 4 at the Wuhan Institute of Virology. His company trained the Chinese lab technicians. Bancel then joined startup Moderna in 2011. Moderna’s has three patents that claim priority to applications filed between 2011 and 2016 covering its foundational intellectual property on mRNA, code to SARS-CoV-2 Spike protein, and related functions. In April 2020, Moderna’s sales and stock price skyrocketed on the promise of a COVID-19 vaccine that was planned for years. Bancel’s stake of the company is about 9% and net worth estimated to be ~$6 billion.

While the countenance Senator Rand Paul was stern and his questions on the surface appeared intimidating, he and the committee failed to drill Bancel on issues that would reveal corruption, racketeering, fraud, conspiracy to commit domestic terrorism, public harm, or mass negligent homicide.

Here are five question sets the Senators either didn’t have the foundational understanding, perceptiveness, or courage to ask:

  1. What was Bancel’s involvement with the Chinese in the construction of the lab annex? Was it intended for bioterrorism? How many times did Bancel visit the lab between 2007 and 2020?

  2. Did Moderna collaborate with or rely upon Dr. Ralph Baric’s NIH work on chimeric SARS-CoV-2 as published in 2015 in Nature Medicine and the Proceedings of the National Academy of Science? Is the patented genetic code for Moderna mRNA derived from Baric’s chimeric virus or another one originating from the WIV BSL-4?

  3. Did Bancel know ahead of time his product would cause myocarditis, neurologic injury, blood clotting, and immunologic syndromes (VITT, MIS)?

  4. How many deaths and serious adverse events did Moderna record in its 90 day obligatory post-release safety data? Why has this dossier not been released to the public? When will it be? Assuming Moderna’s dossier has similar numbers of fatalities to Pfizer, why did Moderna fail to pull their product off the market early in 2021 due to excess risk of death?

  5. Has Moderna or FDA or any third party at any time inspect its mRNA1273 vaccine for quality, purity, and concentration as it is being produced by biodefense contractor National Resilience or other supplier? How dose Moderna assure the quantity of mRNA in the final fill and finish of the vials before they are shipped to pharmacies and vaccine centers?

In conclusion, the Senate Committee on Health, Education, Labor and Pensions needs to step up its game if America wants to get to the bottom of what is going on with the COVID-19 vaccine debacle. I suggest they call in some doctors with courage, expertise, and clear vision to advise them on questioning. Wednesday March 22, 2023 fell short by a Kentucky mile and Bancel must be skipping away in relief.

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Leake JS, McCullough PA. Courage to Face COVID-19: Preventing Hospital Deaths While Battling the Biopharmaceutical Complex

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