#1979 - Dr. Aseem Malhotra

How are you?

So, you know, since I was a kid, I'd probably come over and meet them and, you know, come up to San Jose and, like every other year.

And then over the past few years, for different reasons, which we'll probably get into, I focused more of my work on prevention.

Probably I became sort of I broke into the mainstream around sort of. 2011. Initially because I wrote an article, which was a front page commentary in the Observer newspaper, which is part of the Guardian Group in the UK. Basically, as the cardiologist was saying, you know, why are we serving junk food to my patients in hospitals? And that was after I'd met with Jamie Oliver, who I'd written to. So that's how I kind of started campaigning on the issues around obesity at that point, and not shortly after, not long after that. Joe I then had sort of went into a deep dive to try and understand why we had an obesity epidemic.

So what was driving that? what was the role of cholesterol in heart disease, overprescription of statins, saturated fat. And essentially, that culminated me publishing a piece in the British Medical Journal in 2013. October, Basically, which was titled Saturated fat is not the major issue and suggesting we should be focusing on sugar, we got it wrong on saturated fat.

We're overmedicating millions of people on statins. Cholesterol is not that bad as a risk factor for heart disease. And that's really where I sort of broke into the mainstream. BMJ Press released it, it was front page of three British newspapers.

I was on Fox News, Chicago, CNN International, and that's really when I started my kind of activism to try and fight back against medical misinformation. And a kind of deep understanding that what was driving poor health for many, many people was biased and corrupted information that was coming from two big industries big food and big pharma.

I think only now more people are really becoming aware of it. And I think one of the things I discovered when I looked into the whole issue about saturated fat and sugar, etc. is, you know, in the sort of 50s, 60s and 70s. There were two scientists who were really at war around what was driving heart disease. Because heart disease really started to increase in the United States from 1920 and peaked around 1960 1970 in terms of death rates from coronary artery disease. And Ancel Keys was the American physiologist from Minnesota who said that saturated fat was a culprit.

And then there was John Yudkin, who was a British endocrinologist, nutrition scientist, who basically said that it's sugar. But because the sugar industry was so powerful, they were able to put all of their resources and energy into supporting Ancel Keys, who did take money from sugar industry. It later emerged and silenced John Yudkin. And for decades, we were under this false belief that it was saturated fat, that was a big culprit in heart disease. And the other thing to add into this, which wasn't fully accepted or known at the time, was the now acknowledgement of the impact of smoking. So, you know, it took about 50 years between the first link between smoking and lung cancer that were published in the British Medical Journal. Before we had any effective regulation on tobacco control, you know, tobacco control interventions, government interventions.

And now we know that when you look at the decline in death rates, specifically death rates from heart disease, in the last four or five decades. Almost half of that, Joe, can be attributed to reduction in smoking. So these are things that weren't really fully accepted and understood at the time. And the reason for that, and this is really interesting, is the tobacco industry adopted a corporate playbook, you know, I call it a dirty tricks corporate playbook of planting doubt. Cigarettes were harmful, confusing the public denial, and even buying the loyalty of bent scientists. So when there was people, doctors and public health advocates saying smoking is a problem with the heart, scientists were paid to write articles in medical journals saying it's not smoking, it's stress.

People who smoke are more stressed, and it's nothing to do with the cigarettes. So, you know, this is history repeating itself in a way, and denialism. And this is another thing I find quite fascinating. I mentioned this in some of my lectures. As well as late on As 1994, the CEOs of every major tobacco firm went in front of U.S.

Congress and swore under oath. They did not believe nicotine was addictive or smoking caused lung cancer.

Right, so, you know, all of that was thrown in. And so once I kind of as a practicing cardiologist, as a regular frontline jobbing doctor who was seeing since I qualified, more and more people getting sick, more chronic disease. I started to think, Hold on, is there something we're doing wrong as a medical profession? are we giving the wrong advice? What's actually going on here?

And when I did that deep dive and went into the root cause of it, I then realized that, you know. The system, unfortunately, had become increasingly corrupted over many, many years by these powerful commercial entities, whose only interest, for legal reasons, is to abuse profit for shareholders. Not to look after your health.

So when I published a piece in the British Medical Journal, so it was October 23rd, I'll never forget this 2013.

It got a lot of attention. At this stage. I'm what we call a specialist registrar in cardiology, so I'm not a consultant. I'm not top of my grade yet.

I'm still, I'm finishing my training, I'm almost a fully-fledged cardiologist, I'm doing intervention, keyhole heart surgery. And the first thing that happened to me, Joe, which I haven't really spoke about publicly before, is, imagine, front page of three British newspapers. A lot of attention and a lot of people were happy, because suddenly, you know, the front page headline was Butter is back. Cardiology says eating butter does not cause heart disease.

Right, I know that brings a smile to your face, and I know why. I mean, you know, who doesn't like eating butter? But it was true.

It was what the facts told us at the time, so I published this stuff, but I also what I did at the time is in that 800-word editorial. I basically also went for one of the most prescribed drugs in the history of medicine, which are statin drugs. Because I had to make the link of everything. So if saturated fat doesn't cause heart disease, but we know saturated fat can raise cholesterol, that means cholesterol isn't that important.

And if cholesterol isn't that important, why are we giving all these people statins? So I was able to scientifically and rationally put all that jigsaw together. And in that piece, one of the things I wrote is. I said that the side effects of statins are underrepresented in clinical trials. And the side effects usually are things like muscle aches and fatigue. And this was also part of my clinical experience as a cardiologist.

I was seeing way more people anecdotally, although I've managed tens of thousands of people in my career. In terms of patients, I was seeing way more people with side effects from statins I diagnosed than what was actually in the published literature. What was coming through in the medical journals where doctors were being told side effects are rare, less than 1 chance of getting fatigue or muscle symptoms. I was seeing about 20 and there was a reference that I used in my article, which suggested a recent study in the community in the United States, which suggested that one in five patients probably get side effects from statins. Now, you know, that is so we put that in the paper. Can I stop you for a second?

But the reason, Joe, that they were not reported, and that came up later on. This is something I didn't know as a medical student, as a qualified doctor, as a specialist, is. Until then is a lot of the clinical trials that are conducted that drive guidelines, these randomized trials, where you give patients. You know, one group gets the statin and one group gets a dummy pill, and they don't know whether they're getting the dummy pill or the statin. And then they're followed up and you see whether they have less heart attacks and what side effects they get. Is that there's something called the pre-randomization running period.

So before the trial actually starts, people are enrolled, and then if you get side effects, you are taken out of the trial before it starts. So what happens is, yeah, oh, wow, yeah.

So what happens is the end result of those trials is therefore biased towards people who didn't get side effects. And then even then, they're, you know, so there's a big under-reporting issue.

Oh, wow. But that doesn't make sense. Because if you're going to enroll into a trial, Joe, you're probably going to be someone who's enthusiastic to be part of this trial. So they use this broad umbrella term non-compliant, and some of them may well have been non-compliant. You know, people are, you know, I'm going to start.

I don't really want to take a pill, I've been taking it for weeks now, whatever, but actually later on, when you look at real-world data, you know, certainly in the United States. A larger study, called a Statin Survey done in the United States, basically reveals that within about a year of people being prescribed statins. 75 of them will stop taking it. And when you ask them why, 62 of those 75 that stopped taking, it said they got more side effects. So there's a huge discrepancy there.

So I was using my clinical experience, understanding how the trials are run. I wrote this piece and this is really fascinating, Joe, so I'll get on to the second part of this in a second. At the same time, John Abramson, who I know you've interviewed. He wrote a piece in the BMJ at exactly the same time as me, which was specifically about, Should we be giving more people statins?

So people at what we call low risk of heart disease. Which would essentially mean, because, you know, there were mutterings from guideline bodies saying, you know, maybe we should give more people statins to prevent heart attacks. And what that would have meant in reality, Joe? If it was taken up, that would mean practically everybody over the age of 50 would suddenly be at a risk that they would deem required the use of statin drugs. So John and his colleagues....

And both our pieces. My piece was peer-reviewed, so was his, and in his article, he basically said, Listen, if you're low risk of heart disease, then your risk of the benefit of statins is really, really negligible. About 1 in 140. Chance of it preventing you having a heart attack, or a non-fatal heart attack, or a non-disabling stroke over five years, based upon industry-sponsored data. Still.

So there's still a bias there, but even when you look at that, it's still very marginal. It will not prolong your life. But he also referenced the same reference I put in saying from a community study, actually, 1 in 5 people get disabling side effects. I'm going to come on to that story later because it's really interesting.

So the first thing that happened to me is the very next day after I'm in the news, I get well. Actually, I'll tell you something more interesting. So I go on CNN International. So I'm a junior doctor at this point in the British National Health Service, and I'm in the green room. About to go live on air for CNN to debate with a professor, who I won't name at Imperial College, who is a very big proponent of statins. And I'm about to go on air. And he, basically, he meets me there and he's like, he's almost frothing in the mouth.

He's really angry, I'm really angry with what you did. I've never met this guy before. And he started repeating this mantra, basically, he basically said. For every one millimole lowering of LDL cholesterol, which is what statins do, you have a 20 reduction in heart attacks.

And he said, Almost like a religious mantra, he kept saying the same thing again and again and again. And I just, I stayed calm. I said, Listen, you know, I think this merits debate. I think there's a big problem of overprescription of statins.

I don't think that everybody should take statins. I think it has a role in some people. And he kind of calmed down. We went on air and the discussion really focused on the fact that, you know, this cardiologist here is saying, it's okay to have steak. Do you agree with him?

And, you know, and the discussion ended up being quite reasonable. But I got a little bit of a kind of like, you know, I felt almost it was a veil threat. You know, this guy's a very powerful guy, you know? In the cardiology community and the scientific community in London, everybody kind of knows each other, you know, this kind of person. Things could happen where people like that could potentially, you know, have conversations and wreck your career.

But I was, you know, for me, I'm just committed to the truth. So I kind of, you know, I didn't know what was coming. The very next day in my hospital, I get a phone call and I just started working that couple of weeks earlier. As what we call an interventional fellow, so I was the main guy who was being trained up to be the next what we call interventional cardiologist.

So they choose people. I was selected in this university hospital to be the guy that essentially does the procedures and operations with supervision to become completely independent. And I was doing, you know, I started doing stents and doing stuff independently and I was good at it. So I get a phone call from the secretary of the medical director and she says, You know, Dr.

So-and-so, I won't name him, you know, would like to meet you. And I just got a feeling that it wouldn't be good. And I spoke to, you know, when I published this piece, because this it's called. Croydon University Hospital went in the news. A lot of the staff were really proud, like I had, you know, the nurses and secretaries coming up to me and saying, thank you, well done.

It's so great to see this in the news and we're really proud of you and you represent our hospital and this kind of stuff. And I said, Well, the medical director wants to see me. He said, Oh, no, I'm sure he wants to congratulate you.

And I wasn't quite sure, so I go up to his office, never met this guy before, he opens the door, doesn't shake my hand, he's literally red in the face.

And he doesn't, he says. Come in, sit down.

I sit down and he looks at me and he says, Do you know your duties as a doctor? I've been speaking to the General Medical Council about you now, just for the audience. Here. General Medical Council are the regulatory body that control doctors licenses to practice. They can remove your license to practice.

Right, and I'm sitting there, going, OK, he says. What? Tell me, what have you done? You know, I've read this article and this is a tweet here, you know, saying that statins are over prescribed. Blah, blah. And I talked him through it.

And he goes, Are you telling me that our nurses can tell our cardiac patients that they can eat butter now? It sounds ridiculous, Joe Now, right? But he was really serious about this, so I, I calmly just spoke, said, Listen, this isn't.

This is the thing that got me. I said, Listen, I've written this in the British Medical Journal, one of the highest impact medical journals in the world. This was peer reviewed and I think there is a scientific case here. And I just talked to him, you know, without getting emotional.

And it was really interesting by the end of the conversation, he said to me. He said, I very much hope that in 10 years from now, I can tell my grandkids that I sat opposite the man. The cardiologist that busted the myth of saturated fat causing heart disease, Wow.

Right?

What happened over the next few months, though, was something I never could have predicted, but really shaped me in many ways to be the person I am today.

I this story had legs, so it kept dragging on. In terms of, you know, there was a lot more stories now in interest about butter and saturated fat. In fact, there was a front page I don't remember this time magazine, there was a 2014..

There was a front page story, Is Butter Back? And it was triggered by my article because a journalist called me and spoke to me. I didn't. I wasn't quoting the article in the end. But he said, Listen, we're going to look into this. And they got lots of different nutritional scientists and made the case that butter was fine.

Probably OK in terms of heart disease, but what happened after that was because I'd also attacked statins, you know, and of course, a huge industry. I think. Well, let's just try and give some context here, Joe.

The statin industry, or the cholesterol lowering industry, I mean, it's a trillion dollar industry. There's a lot of money, a lot of people make money from the fear of cholesterol and the prescription of statins. In fact, there's estimates now that globally, in terms of prescriptions, up to one billion people are prescribed statin drugs.

In the United States, it's at least 30 million people taking them, probably more. So. I had really said, essentially that most of those people don't need to take the time, and and more more than that. I said. We should tell patients honestly and break down the information the way they can understand and say, listen. If you're low risk of heart disease, you haven't had a heart attack, your benefit of statin is one percent, right?

And when you tell people that most people don't want to take the pill anyway. So I said, this is about ethics and evidence based medicine, so I kept that discussion going. And then one of the cardiologists, the lead cardiologist in the department. He came up to me one day, a couple of months later and said, Listen, I think I was on Channel 4 News talking about it or something, and he said, Listen, you know, I respect your opinion, blah, blah.

However, you can't keep saying this publicly, and if you do, then there may be an issue about your job here. So I kind of thought, OK, well, and I'm not saying anything wrong. Something else came up, I was quoted another article.

And then, you know, I had had a job in this place, Joe, for one year. This is my interventional fellowship, you know, being doing the specialist training, final stages to being an interventional cardiologist.

And I then got a letter out of the blue, four months into the job, saying that we have decided to discontinue, you know, your fellowship, and you've got two months notice.

I've never received a single complaint from a patient. And I got to get on with my colleagues and the staff and everything, so there was no reason. But he basically said to me, you know, off the record, it was because of this, and clearly someone higher up had had a conversation, I suspect.

Right, a journalist who's a Guardian journalist who I knew also when I told him about this at the beginning, he said. Aseem, You know, just be careful, because you know, I've seen this happen before. You know, the pharma companies are very powerful. And someone will just need one phone call to the CEO and they'll say, shut this guy up, right?

And we'll get on to other stuff later. That's been quite similar, but yeah, sorry, go on.

Very few people have total cholesterol that high, and we have to also understand that most of your cholesterol is genetic, 80 of the cholesterol is genetic 80 80%.

Because cholesterol is a really important molecule in the body, it's important for maintaining cell membranes. It's an important role in the immune system, hormones, hormones, vitamin D synthesis, all of that stuff, right?

So it's genetic, you can alter it with your diet, the components of it, something called triglycerides and HDL, so-called good cholesterol, right? So the total cholesterol was not a very good indicator, so if it was very, very high, there was association. But what's interesting about that is almost all of those people had a genetic condition which gave them very, very high levels of cholesterol.

It's called familial hyperlipidemia, it affects 1 in 250 people, right? And then at the very other end from Framingham, the very low levels of cholesterol, less than 150 milligrams per deciliter, or 4 millimoles. In European terminology, there was almost no heart disease. So again, there's genetic factors there, so basically, people with genetically low cholesterol tend to not develop premature heart disease.

Another interesting caveat most of that data on the development of heart disease was only up to people who are 50 or 60.

And what wasn't publicized is that once you hit 50, as your cholesterol dropped in Framingham, your mortality rate increased. Never really discussed, so I looked at all of this, so that's interesting.

But I think the thing that really sort of was a nail in the coffin for me in understanding the association of cholesterol and heart disease was very weak was. William Castelli, who is one of the co-directors of Framingham, a cardiologist in 1996, did a full summary of Framingham. And he said this, he said. Unless you're because you know you're going to talk about, you may be thinking, Okay, hold on. There's good cholesterol and bad cholesterol, so he specifically focused on what we call LDL bad cholesterol.

And he said, Unless your LDL cholesterol is above 7.

8 millimoles per liter, which is something like Joe, it's probably at least 300, pretty much around 300 milligrams per deciliter. It has no value in isolation of predicting heart disease. So what they determined from Framingham was your risk of heart disease. As one of the risk factors was your total cholesterol divided by your HDL, the good cholesterol, the ratio.

So that's the first thing. So the association of cholesterol and heart disease is quite weak, first and foremost. The second question is, when you try and prove that there is a biomarker that is causal in heart disease, you want to show that? If you lower it, then there is a difference in heart attacks and strokes, for example. And only in 2019. More recently, I co-authored a paper in BMJ Evidence-based Medicine with two other cardiologists. And what we did was we looked at all the drug trials of lowering cholesterol to find out is this true?

When you look at it in totality, not cherry-picked evidence, is there a correlation with lowering LDL cholesterol and total cholesterol and preventing heart attacks and strokes? And this is based upon randomized control trial data, so this is the most robust evidence you can get. Joe No clear correlation, it was B.S.

The whole thing was BS in that sense, like it's very weak, if anything, so that means. So, then the next question is, well, hold on, how do statins work? and that's the question you asked me earlier.

And it's a great question, it's a really important one. Statins do have a small benefit, but one of the properties of statins which isn't talked about is they have anti-inflammatory and anti-clotting benefits. So even though they lower LDL cholesterol, the real benefit in preventing heart attacks and strokes is through that mechanism.

But when you break it down, as I said before, your risk is, you know. The benefits are about 1 if you're low risk of heart disease, but if you've had a heart attack, and many patients I see have had heart attacks. And they get automatically put on statins and the cardiologists rarely even check their cholesterol. Because in the cardiology community, we kind of knew that it was like, it doesn't matter what your cholesterol is. Let's put them on a statin because the trials show there are benefits.

But what are those benefits when you break them down? In absolute terms, this is really crucial and important, and this isn't cherry-picked stuff, this is what all the evidence shows and it's been peer-reviewed, etc.

If you've had a heart attack, a patient comes to me, Doc, shall I carry on this statin? or I've been put on this statin or I'm getting side effects? I say to them, Listen, let me just explain to you the benefits first, so that you don't have an exaggerated fear of stopping your statin.

And you also don't go around with the illusion of protection, thinking that's the only thing I need to do now.

Over a five-year period. If you take your statin religiously and don't get side effects, because, remember, the trials took out people with side effects. So, best-case scenario, your benefit of a statin is 1 in 83 for saving your life and 1 in 39 in preventing a further heart attack. A lot of people find that quite underwhelming.

Another way of looking at the statistics, Joe, and this is important for populations looking at those trials. And what I'm about to tell you when I talk at conferences to doctors and general practitioners. And there's like a gasp from the audience when I tell them this.

And this is published in the BMJ. So in the randomized trials, you look at an average. If I ask you that question, right? You've had a heart attack. Let's say, for example, and statins are one of those prescribed drugs that are, you know, miracle cure or whatever.

One of the most potent, beneficial drugs in the history of medicine if you take those, if you take statin for five years. Having had a heart attack in that five-year period, how much would you think or hope it would add to your life expectancy? You've literally survived a heart attack, right? And now you've been given this pill, which your doctor is telling you, this is, you must never stop.

This is going to save your life. How much would you hope it would add to your life expectancy over a five-year period? Over that period, you know, we can increment.

Yes, just over four days.

There's a separate analysis done. They looked in European countries, high-risk and low-risk people of heart disease over 12 years. Was there a difference in, was there a reduction in heart disease death rates because of statins? And the answer was no. And that doesn't mean that the data is fraudulent, it's been misrepresented. But if you accept, say it's a four-day increase, right?

But these are in people who didn't get side effects, who were adherent to statins, and real-world data tells us Joe. Even people who've had heart attacks, maybe 50 of them, will stop taking it just within a few years, mainly because of side effects. You can understand why that hasn't had an impact on the population, but think about that this is one of the most powerful, lucrative drugs in the history of medicine.

And this is how marginal, let's be polite here, how marginal the benefits are.

In March 2014, I got a phone call, an email, initially from the editor of the British Medical Journal, and she said, Asim, let's have a meeting. I think I went to meet her and she said, There is a man called Professor Sir Rory Collins. Professor Rory Collins is probably considered in the world the lead statin researcher. He's at Oxford University.

He got his knighthood from the Queen because of his work on statins. He has said that you need to retract Abramson and Malhotra's papers because there is a significant error on the side effect issue. And this is going to cause harm. People are going to stop their statins. And she said straight away, No, I'm not going to retract it, but we're very happy if you would like to send a critique and then we'll publish it. But for some reason, he decided he didn't want to do that, so this back and forth was going on.

And then, out of the blue, he decides whether it was him or somebody else to go to the Guardian newspaper. And I get a phone call from the Guardian and the BBC, which again was headline news, that what Abramson and Malhotra had done, it became a news story. Front page of the Guardian was so damaging in terms of their error on the statin side effects issue that people will die. Essentially, this is almost as bad as they were trying to make parallels with Andrew Wakefield and the whole Measles Mumps rubella issue. That happened many, many years ago. That was the scientist that lost his license because he linked the MMR vaccine to autism.

So they were trying to create that kind of frenzy and I'm like, whoa, this is okay. So I went on BBC and I stood my ground and that I think put the BMJ under pressure. And then the next thing that happens is, I remember I was with my cousin in New York. I'll never forget this. And I get an email, a press release from the BMJ, which I knew was going to, you know, and this is, to be honest, it's an attack on one's credibility.

But the BMJ then decided they were going to send our articles for an independent review whether or not they should be retracted. And Joe, just to put things in context here, that's potentially career destroying. In the sense that if my article got retracted, it got so much publicity and I genuinely believe what I said was correct. But it gets retracted, then your credibility is undermined pretty much forever, and your career's, you know, it would be career destroying for me. I'm at the beginning of my career, so I was on trial essentially for two months, if you like.

And, you know, that was, it was tough, it was very, very tough. There was a panel they convened, they asked me to, you know, send in responses and whatever else. I didn't know what was going to happen. And then I think it was August 2014. I remember it broke the news and it was, you know, I got an email. And basically, the panel had come back 6-0 unanimous in our favor.

Wow, there was no call for retraction because John Abramson went through a lot during that period as well. I know you interviewed him, yes.

And we talked and whatever else when that happened. Joe, There were two things I could have done. One was, wow, this is like too much. I don't think I can handle this. I'm just going to, you know, I'm going to hide away and just keep a low profile.

But I thought, No, you know what this is about, ethical, evidence-based medical practice. There were some corrections that needed to be done, some caveats that they added in into the papers around the side effects issue. So I carried on this campaign, I carried on publishing in other journals, kept talking about transparent communication, ethical, evidence-based medicine. Statin over prescription?

There are other things we can be doing in terms of lifestyle, right? which are going to be more powerful, you know, whether it's low-carb Mediterranean diet exercise. Why are we not focusing our attention there, rather than just giving people all these pills that they think is going to protect them from heart attacks? And in most cases, it doesn't. And in that journey, and this went on for a few years, this is where things got really interesting.

So to answer your question, yes, there was a lot of backlash, it was tough, there was a bit smearing going on. But I realized then, you know, as a public health advocate, that you've got to have a thick skin and grow a rhinoceros hide. And those are the words from a man called Simon Chapman.

Simon Chapman is a professor of psychology in Australia. He was considered the lead campaigner in making sure there was tobacco control in Australia. And he wrote a paper talking about his 38-year career in public health advocacy and gave 10 lessons. And one of those lessons is this. As soon as your work threatens an industry or an ideological cabal, you will be attacked, sometimes unrelentingly and viciously.

So grow a rhinoceros hide. And I thought, You know what, I'm up for it, I'm up for it. So many more people came out of the woodwork to support me. Other doctors said, You're right, you know?

And I thought this is about truth and transparency, and about ethical medicine, and highlighting all the corruption and the conflicts of interest. One of the things that Professor Collins hadn't been made apparent is his department had taken over 200 million pounds at Oxford for doing research into statins from the drug industry. And they also kept the data commercially confidential. So most of the publications and guidelines that were coming on statins were emanating from that department, where no one had been able to independently verify the data. And he is quoted in the Guardian saying only problematic side effects from statins affect one in 10,000 people.

So I thought, this is something this doesn't add up. I think these are biases, conflicts of interest. I'm not saying that he was deliberately malicious, but I think there's a huge conflict of interest there that is clouding his judgment. Plus, he's not a clinician.

He doesn't see patients, so there's all of those things that I think limit his ability to really look at the evidence properly.

And 2016, you really couldn't make this up 2016. So he's campaigning, saying side effects almost non-existent. I get a phone call from the Sunday Times journalist, a guy called John Ungar-Thomas, great guy, and he said, Asim, you won't believe what I found out.

Because the reason this came out in 2016, they decided to republish. So what? Collins said? He says there's a lot of discussion about statins and side effects. We're going to reanalyze our own data again and look into this. So they published this piece in The Lancet in 2016, and they basically said the same thing again. Side effects Statins are rare.

Less than 1. Maybe get some mild muscle aches, that kind of thing. A week later, this journalist calls me and he says, I found something really interesting, what is it? He said. In the United States, there is a genetic test called StatinSmart, which is the company. Boston Heart Diagnostics is a company that is marketing.

This has a license to market this product. And on their website, the Genetic Test The co-inventor of this genetic test is Professor Sorori Collins. And on their website, they're selling this test to basically try and figure out who's likely to get side effects. So you do this test and it tells you whether or not you like to get side effects from specific statins or not. And it says 29 of all statin users are likely to get significant muscle symptoms or side effects from statins.

Whoa? And he did a freedom of information request to Oxford University. I published on this with John Abramson. Actually, we did this in one of the papers we wrote later on.

And Oxford University came back and basically said, he asked them, How much money have you taken from selling this device? And it was something in the order of. The university had received £300,000 and Professor Collins department had received about £100,000..

It doesn't make any sense. So, in one sense, he's saying side effects are non-existent. Yeah, he's co-invented a test to try and detect who's likely to get side effects. And on the website, it got taken down after that. Interestingly, we published it and we highlighted this.

But it's like, hold on, they're kind of making money from both sides here. And for me, it just highlighted, you know, this was all really for me. Like a symptom of a system failure. Where, you know, there are all these concealed conflicts of interest. People are being selective with the information they put out.

And ultimately, at the root of the problem, Joe, is that these big, powerful pharmaceutical companies, these corporations, have more and more control and unchecked power over these institutions. There are conflicts of interest, but people don't know about it. And when you tell people that story, when I give talks and lectures and I bring that up, it's just pin drop silence. People are just shocked, some of them are angry.

They feel they've been deceived, like, how is this acceptable?

And the Union of General Practitioners, the British Medical Association's General Practitioners Committee, actually revolted. This had never happened before, and they said, No, we're not going to accept this. And they had to make a U-turn. So that, for me, was a victory based upon this sort of campaigning that I'd been part of.

But now, more recently, with all these excess deaths that are happening. Our chief medical officer a few months ago came out and suggested that. One of the reasons there's been these excess cardiac deaths is because people aren't taking their statins. Which was then refuted because Carl Hennigan, who's the director of the Center for Evidence-based Medicine, Oxford, he's non-conflicted, they don't take any money from him. He's a very rigorous guy in terms of the way he does his analysis and his department showed that that wasn't the case.

And, you know, I think that maybe was part of a distraction. But there is still now a push again to get more people on statins. And I suspect a lot of it is because, you know, if you think of the business model of the drug industry, it is to get as many people taking as many drugs as possible, for as long as possible.

2018 I am asked to go to the Cambridge University Union by the BMJ to be part of a team. To debate with AstraZeneca, and I end up debating with the CEO of AstraZeneca. And the motion put forward, which was debated in Cambridge University, was from them. We need more people taking more drugs, that was their motion.

And it was just, Yeah, so that's their business model, Joe. People need to understand what we're up against here. But that isn't the solution to good health. In fact, over-medicated population now is a big public health crisis, even pre-pandemic.

One estimate from Peter Gosher, who is a co-founder of the very prestigious independent Cochrane Collaboration in the BMJ, suggests that. The third most common cause of death now globally, after heart disease and cancer, is prescribed medications, what your doctor prescribes for you, mainly because of avoidable side effects, and these are avoidable because the decision-making and the prescription often doesn't involve informed consent. And when you tell people the full benefits and harms in absolute terms of drugs, mostly, they're more conservative, they're less likely to take the pills.

But also the information that doctors are using to make clinical decisions are based upon these industry-sponsored trials, where they keep their data commercially confidential. Which ultimately means that the safety and the benefits are grossly exaggerated.

And when I tell my patients, I have conversations with my patients about this stuff all the time and I just ask them what they think. And they're shocked. Most doctors, even I was not aware of this, Joe, until I really looked into it properly. I was the conventional doctor doing his job. Who took the publications in The Lancet, in the New England Journal of Medicine, as gospel truth?

Biblical Gospel truth never questioned it. And now, you know, I look to people like John Ioannidis, who you may be familiar with. So he's a professor of medicine at Stanford. he's the most cited medical researcher in the world.

You know, he's considered a medical genius, very high in scientific integrity, and he wrote a paper 2006. I think it was in PLOS one which was entitled Why most published research findings are false. And one of the things he writes in there, with his own mathematical modeling of the reliability of research, and this is fascinating, he says. The greater the financial interests in a given field, the less likely the research findings are to be true.

And they will do what it takes to do that, including compromising physicians, compromising researchers, compromising journals. And that this is just there's not a lot of recourse for the person like yourself that steps out, you stick your neck out there and you get attacked. And fortunately for you, you had all your bases covered and the data was so obvious that you were able to survive this. But for the most part, most physicians, most doctors, most clinicians, they don't want to get involved in that.

And so they toe the line.

And quite often, and I know you discussed in detail around the whole Vioxx scandal with John. But quite often, the way that these big corporations operate as legal entities, I'm not pointing fingers at people within them. I met Pascal Sotiris, I had dinner with him, who's a CEO of AstraZeneca.

He even sent me a book afterwards to my home address. He knows where I live, so I better be careful. But he seemed like a nice guy, right? But in their roles, they are only responsible to their shareholders. But the problem is, and we see this historically, is quite often.

And Dr. Robert Hare is a forensic psychologist who was behind the original international. We call DSM criteria for psychopathy, and he says that as these legal entities, quite often in the way they conduct their business, actually fulfill the criteria for psychopath. So callous, unconcern for the feelings of others, incapacity to experience guilt, deceitfulness, conning others for profit. And we have precedent.

We have history of that. Between 2003 and 2016, most of the top 10 drug companies paid fines totaling about $33 billion for illegal marketing of drugs. Hiding data on harms, manipulation of results, and when those crimes were committed. In most cases, they end up making more profit from sales of the drugs than they do from the fines. So there's no incentive to stop doing what they're doing, and ultimately, the patients suffer.

But I don't want to throw the baby out with the bathwater here because someone might say, Well, hold on, Dr. Malhotra. But aren't the drug industry responsible for these lifesaving treatments? And blah, blah, and yes, they are.

But the question is, what is the net effect of them? So if you look in the last 20 years, I'll just give you some examples here. Between 2000 and 2008, of the 667 drugs approved by the F.DA, only 75 percent of them were found to be copies of old ones. So the drug companies will change a few molecules here and there on an old drug, rebrand it, rename it, patent it. Make lots of money, and then they move on to the next one, so there's huge waste.

Only 11 percent of them were found to be truly innovative, as in a therapeutic clinical benefit over the previous drug. So there's all this waste. In France, something similar between 2000 and 2011, of almost 1,000 drugs were approved by their regulator. Again, most of them were copies of old ones.

But about double the amount of drugs, Joe, 15 percent of those drugs were approved were found to be more harmful than beneficial, compared to about 8 percent that were therapeutic benefits. So what does that mean when you look at it in its totality, with the waste and the harm? The overall net effect of the drug industry, in my view on society in the last two decades has been a negative one.

Wow.

It's a social science, it's a constantly evolving science we're taught in medical school. 50 percent of what you learn is going to turn out to be either outdated or dead wrong within five years of your graduation. The trouble is nobody can tell you which half, so you have to learn to learn on your own.

And we see that, you know, we now see that in the world, you know, United States. You've lost two years off your life expectancy in the last few years in the in the UK. Since 2010, Joe, we've had a leveling off, a stalling of life expectancy and an increase in people living with chronic disease. So for me, as a doctor, I think to myself, hold on a minute.

You know, fine, this is multifactorial, but if we as a profession, collectively, we're doing everything right, according to the best available evidence. Why are our patients getting sicker? Don't we have a responsibility to understand why and then do something about it?

Right, and that can apply to medications, it can apply to ultra processed food, which is addictive for a lot of people, right?

But what I've come up with when you think about the drug industry and what Dr. Robert Hare talks about psychopathic is something called the psychopathic determinants of health.

And, you know, Richard Horton, who's the editor of The Lancet, actually came to one of my lectures in London recently. And then he referenced me talking about this in one of his pieces. It wasn't a completely positive piece on me, I'll be honest, with a little bit of a subtle hatchet job, but he talked about, you know, Malhotra talks about the psychopathic determinants of health.

If you think conceptually, Joe, we talk about these very powerful entities that have a big influence on our lives. And if they are psychopathic, you know, it doesn't take a rocket scientist to figure out. That's going to have a downstream effect on society, that's going to be negative culturally. You know, people staying silent when they should be speaking up.

You know, I've been contacted by doctors who agree with me privately, but say I wouldn't say that. Or and. And this is, this is what we're having to deal with now, and this is they've, they've got more power than they've ever had, I think. Joe. Over our lives and influence, and if a psychopathic entity has so much power and control over our lives, of course it's going to be negative.

And we need to basically fight back.

So I hadn't looked at it in that much detail, and I just made the presumption that this was going to be safe. Don't know how effective it was going to be, but it was going to be safe. And as a result, and some of it was also, you know, so during the Covid pandemic, I was very outspoken, making the link between obesity and poor Covid outcomes.

In fact, to the point where I was getting pretty mad that there wasn't enough coverage on this. Like, we've got this. Pandemic that affects, you know, disproportionately affects the elderly, there's no doubt about it. The very beginning was particularly devastating for older people, but there was like a thousand fold gradient difference in risk.

If you were young versus old, like even now, even early on, you know. John Ideas Jay Bhattacharya. They did this analysis, essentially suggesting that for younger people, it was actually less lethal than the flu, but for older people, very old people, it was. It was. It was quite bad at the beginning. So I noticed this link with obesity and I said, Listen, you know, this is my work over many years.

One of the things I also advocate for is that for people to understand that. If you change your diet just within a few weeks, depending where you're starting from, you can potentially even send your type two diabetes into remission. You can reverse the most important risk factors for heart disease. So I knew that if if people were told that when this, when this virus was, you know, when the pandemic started, this was an opportunity. Actually, we already had this slow pandemic of chronic disease, which we hadn't effectively curbed anyway. This is a great opportunity for government to say, Listen, guys, now this is a time to sort your diet out.

Take vitamin D, you know, really, just optimize your immune system. And it wasn't happening so. But in all of that, I looked at all of the risk as well.

And it was clear that this was, you know, not very risky. For people who were my age, you know, 20. I'm 45 now, so I was 43, you know, 42, 43 when, when the whole vaccine rollout started. My father, who was a retired general practitioner but vice president of British Medical Association, very prominent doctor in the UK.

He and this gets into the emotional side a little bit, because, you know, I think this, this is is relevant. He was very keen that I take the vaccine, and I think it was because he had an exaggerated fear for me, right, like many people had.

We'd lost our mother just a few years earlier. I lost my brother when I was young, so I was his only surviving immediate family member. And he had this and he was saying, you need to take the vaccine, No, please, please, please.

Dad, you know, I don't really need it, you know? No, no, no, take it, take it. This went back and forth.

I said, OK, fine, I'll have it, but I thought, anyway, as a doctor, I'm going to take it, I'm going to protect my patients. You know, let's see what happens. So I took the vaccine.

And then, about a month later, a film director friend of mine, Gurinder Chadha. You might be familiar with some of her work. Bend it like Beckham. It's a movie she did, Blinded by the Light, which is about Bruce Springsteen. I did quite well over here.

So she was sending me all this stuff, saying I see him and watch about the vaccine. And it was kind of blogs and it was stuff saying, like, you know, microchips, depopulation agenda, fertility problems. I said, Gurinder, To be honest, I was polite, I said, I don't think there's any real good evidence here. I think this is scaremongering.

And I said, You know, I think you're high risk, you're type two, diabetic, you're overweight, et cetera. I think you should have it. So she said, Great, you know, she trusts me.

So she took the vaccine and then she tweeted it out and the next thing, I'm on. Good Morning Britain in February 2021 asked to tackle vaccine hesitancy, which was higher amongst people from ethnic minority backgrounds. I think it's probably similar in the states as well. One of the reasons for that as well, by the way, Joe, is a lot of people from those backgrounds are from poorer backgrounds, and understandably they have less trust in government. You know, they're the neglected people in society in many ways.

So you can see why they felt that way. And I went on, Good morning Britain. I didn't point fingers and said, My God, these people are crazy. Whatever else I said, Listen, let's understand that there are rational reasons why people don't want to take the vaccine. Look at the history of the drug industry for the last several decades and the amount of fraud.

I think they wouldn't expect me to say this. I said. Think about all the fraud they've committed. I understand that, but I said. Having said that, when you look at traditional vaccines, they're some of the safest. And that's kind of pretty much where I left it.

At a time, Joe, when we were only in the UK at that point, there was only the recommendation for the vaccine to be given to people at high risk. I never expect. Even then, like, friends were calling me and younger people said, No, you don't need to take it, you're under 50, you're fit and healthy. No, no, even at that time.

But this is just for high risk people. So I took it, I swallowed the pill, and then, yeah, I mean, things changed very dramatically within a few months.

And again, I didn't fully appreciate it at the time, but now I know the mechanism of harm, it makes sense. So I actually within so I'm very much into my fitness. Joe I've been like, you know, I captain sports teams at school, university.

I'm an obsessive exerciser, like every day, you know, I don't feel good if I haven't gone to the gym and done something, you know, almost every day. I started noticing within a few weeks that my energy level started to get depleted quite significantly, my sleep was disturbed, and then I went into clinical depression.

I was diagnosed with clinical depression, didn't take any pills, it was probably mild to moderate over a few months.

And I spoke to him about it, and, you know, he said, Yeah, this is, this is depression. So yeah, so. But the one thing I noticed more than anything else is my energy levels were I couldn't like, I'm a very active, energetic guy and I just couldn't leave the house.

I didn't, I couldn't leave the couch, I was completely depleted.

So a significant number, well, we don't know, we don't know the exact numbers. But one of the reanalysis of Pfizer's own trial by independent researchers published in General Vaccine. One of this in the clinical trial itself. One of the severe adverse effects in the clinical trial was psychosis, at least in one patient.

I started to just focus on going back to the basics, getting good sleep, resting, etc. And I came out of it, you know, I came out of it slowly. I started getting my energy levels back. Took about three months, three to four months.

But then what happened was just when I'm coming out of the clinical depression, starting to feel better. And I told my dad about it. You know, my dad was, you know, we were very, very close, so he knew everything that was happening. You know, one of the things, by the way, one of the, you know. When people go into clinical depression, one of the symptoms is suicidal ideation, as in thoughts about committing suicide.

That's actually one of the symptoms. And I remember going for a walk with him, I was feeling so low. And, you know, I went up to visit him in Manchester. And I just said to him, I said, Yeah, I, you know, I'm having a thought of just, you know, going and jumping in front of a car. It was fleeting.

I wasn't going to do it, but I knew that I was that depressed, that I was even to have even that thought entering your mind. But anyway, I, you know, I'm a resilient, tough guy. I just, I just wrote. I knew I was going to get better, I just had hope.

And I got better slowly with time, and when I came out of it, that's when, you know, a real sort of tragedy hit me again.

Because me and my dad was still also mourning the loss of my mom. It only been about two and a half years since my mom died. And I get it was I'll never forget. This July, the 26th, 5pm 2021. My dad calls me and he says, Asim, I've got chest discomfort.

And in medicine, 80 of your if you're a good doctor, 80 of your diagnosis comes from the history. If you listen to your patient, then you will get the diagnosis just from that discussion. If you know, you know, from symptoms, you know, you can usually, and he said, and what he describes sounded cardiac, which is typically, said Asim. He's a doctor, but he was also a little bit concerned. I said, Tell me about it, he said. I said, How bad is it out?

And he said, like, six out of 10 feeling a bit sweaty, I've got an ache in the center of my chest. I said, Is it going anywhere? I said, Yeah, into both shoulders, and for me, I was like, Okay, didn't sound like an over massive heart attack.

But it was concerning. I said, How long have you had it for? He said. I've had it for probably at least 20 to 30 minutes. I said, Okay, I said, Dad, you need to call an ambulance.

Now I don't want to scare him. I said, you need an ECG straight away, right? You need an EKG to see whether this is an acute heart attack, but you need to call an ambulance. And he was reluctant.

You know, I don't know why the NHS was under pressure. He didn't want to, just he thought he thought that maybe he was. You know, it was nothing major, and I said, No, listen, I don't. hopefully it's nothing major. But you need an ECG, you need to call an ambulance 999..

And he didn't want to do it.

And he was busy with something. But he said, Listen, I'll call him. And in the end, what he did was he called, um, two of his neighbors, who are both doctors, who happened to be home. I think they'd finished work and, uh, so I get in the shower. I said, Listen, I'm going to get on the train and come up.

I get in the shower, come out of the shower. Um, I call him back, you know, cause I was about to. Just I was just changing, getting ready to get on the train. And there's no answer, I keep calling, no answer.

Then one of his neighbors, a doctor, she answered the phone and she's hysterical, and she says, Asim, your father's had a cardiac arrest and we're doing CPR now. I went into kind of cardiology, tried to take control of the situation, be as calm as possible. Mode, and I said, Tell me what happened, said, Well, we walked in, we saw him.

He was a little bit sweaty. My husband, her husband's anesthetist. He was there. He'd already called an ambulance, you know? uh, called 999 and was on the phone. And while he's on the phone to the ambulance, my dad just keels over. Now, Joe, I've done a lot of work and even published on out-of-hospital cardiac arrests and what determines survival.

And if you are going to have a cardiac arrest, if you are unlucky enough to have it, you are super lucky. If it's witnessed by two doctors who are going to do CPR. And an ambulance has already been called, and we know the ambulance. Response times in the UK have, and I've published on this stuff is almost within eight to 10 minutes. In these sorts of calls. They will be there and your chances of survival are high in that situation, right? You've got CPRs witnessed and they usually get a defibrillator on you.

Within 10 minutes, you've got probably more than a 50 chance of surviving.

Ambulance didn't show for 30 minutes and I remember just facetiming them and they put the cardiac monitor on and it was a flat line. And I said, there's nothing to do here, don't you know? They carried on. I said, No, just stop.

You know, I've led cardiac arrest teams, so I know there's no point just jumping on his chest now. There's nothing that we can do here. And and it was, it was shocking beyond belief. I couldn't, I couldn't understand it. My dad was a very fit 73 year old. You know, he would, I mean, I consider myself quite athletic, you know, and he would out walk me when we were going for walks during lockdown.

He was very active mentally, he was on TV, talking about lockdowns and whatever else, and um, it didn't make any sense. So I. Two things happened, first and foremost, I organized a postmortem, but they then also investigated, like, how has this happened?

Why is it happening? It's taking 30 minutes to get there. And this links back to some of my earlier work in terms of speaking out and if you like being a whistleblower. So I get contacted about two weeks later because I tweeted it out, you know, my dad was a well-known doctor.

It was big news story in The Guardian. You know, the mayor of Manchester who was friends with him. I mean, my dad was a wonderful human, said, You know, we've lost one of the kindest souls to ever walk the earth. I mean, he was that kind of human, it was that well-loved and liked by people. And um, I. I got a phone call from somebody senior in the health department linked to the government called NHS England.

And she was crying, she was a nurse, senior nurse, and she knew my dad and said, It seems something I've got to tell you. I said, What is it? She says. The Department of Health, the government, had known for at least for several weeks throughout the whole country that, um. Ambulances were not getting anywhere close to their targets for treating people for heart attacks or cardiac arrest. But had made a decision to deliberately withhold that information.

And for me, that, you know, that that was, um, that was quite upsetting. Because if I had known that, if we had known that, I wouldn't have asked him to call an ambulance, you know, the neighbors could have. The nearest hospital was like a five minute drive. Joe, They would have, you know, he would have, somebody would have taken him there. Even if he had a cardiac arrest on route, they would have been able to get to defibrillator and he probably would have survived. So I thought, this is, you know, I need to do something about this. People need to know, because it was still kept hidden.

So I I with a journalist in the in the UK called Paul Gallagher with the Eye, I've done a lot of work with him, great journalist. He then started doing an freedom information requests, getting information from the ambulance service, trying to find out what happened, et cetera, et cetera. And we determined that this was the case, that there was all these delays and had been going for a long time. And then I wrote an article in the Eye Newspaper.

It became a BBC news story, but just before I published it, I contacted a cardiologist who I considered to be one of the good guys, Joe.

I think it's unfair to name him and I said, Prof, I call him Prof. I said, I just want you to know this is what's happened, happening. You should be aware of this and I'm going to, you know, get it out to the public.

People need to know, you know, this is a big problem because it might change things a little bit. It's not, but at least we highlight the problem and try and find solutions. And people then, in these similar situations, one of the interesting thing is. This nurse that called me said to me that two weeks earlier, her own husband was playing soccer and came back from soccer with chest pain. She didn't even bother calling the ambulance before my dad had his cardiac arrest because she knew it wasn't going to get there.

She got him in the car, drove down the highway, the freeway, to nearest hospital, into the accident emergency department. And they diagnosed an acute heart attack and took him for emergency acute heart surgery. You know, so, so she knew this stuff and did, didn't, you know, obviously, call an ambulance. So I told this to this professor of cardiology and a text message, and you know what? he replied to me.

ASIm I wouldn't publicize this if I were you. You're only going to make yourself enemies. And I want to do whatever I can to help you get a job back in the NHS, right? Because by this stage, I wasn't working in the NHS, I was only doing private care.

And I said, Prof, what about our duty to the public and to patients? No answer. Why am I telling you this, Joe? Remember, earlier on, I talked about the so-called psychopathic determinants of health.

There is a cultural problem in our profession where people are afraid to speak out for their patients, even if it's something that's important and true. So what does medicine become when doctors can't even speak the truth? But I didn't care for me, this was more important than anything, so I got this out and it became a new story.

And I was interviewed by the BBC and it was a big, you know? And then, and after that, all these stories start coming out, you know? I made the so-called injustice visible through the mainstream, but it still bugged me. You know, how did my dad have a cardiac arrest? So his postmortem findings came back and two of his three major arteries were severely narrowed, right?

Critically narrowed 90 in what we call the left anterior descending artery, the most important artery to the heart, and the right coronary artery. And I thought, this is weird. I knew my dad's lifestyle inside out, I knew his cardiac history inside out.

There was no cardiac history, he had something called a calcium score done a few years earlier. He had blood flow to his arteries were all normal. This is a guy that only two years earlier, on a badminton I was Manchester Champion school's champion in badminton, right? Singles badminton. I don't know if you've ever played it, but it's a very it's like playing basketball.

For a cardiovascular system, it's really heavy and for the first time in, God knows, probably about 30 years. He beat me in the first game 15-1, and I was like, my God, how's my dad beating me here? You know? We were very competitive with each other, I mean, it was, we played for an hour.

And at the end, almost at the end of the hour, Joe, I got back in. It was like, tied, I ruptured my achilles, right? It was that bad. And I was about to tweet and just share. I was like, I'm really proud of my 73-year-old dad.

He literally almost beat me in badminton, right? He was that fit, so it didn't make any sense.

So severe narrowings and I'm just okay, what was it was? He really stressed, you know, stress, by the way, severe psychological stress can cause these sorts of issues with the heart. But again, didn't buy it.

And then October, November, 2021, I get alerted from a cardiologist friend of mine, who's one of the smartest cardiologists in the country. I think, I mean, he's a brilliant mind. And he sends me an abstract from Circulation Cardiology Journal, done by Stephen Gundry, who's a cardiothoracic surgeon. I think, based in New York. And I read this abstract and I'm like, Wow. And what he found was in he'd been following up several hundred people in their 50s with a test that he does called the pulse Score, which correlates the blood test. And it measures markers of inflammation in the blood. Joe, which have been validated and correlated with heart disease risk and heart attack risk.

And what he found was that within eight 10 weeks of these patients taking the Moderna or Pfizer vaccine mRNA vaccines. Those markers of inflammation in the blood had increased to a level where their risk of a heart attack went from 11 at five years, just within two months to 25, which is a huge like to give it context. If I today decided I was going to smoke 40 cigarettes a day, eat junk food, you know, hammer it all night, not sleep, stop exercising. I couldn't even get close to increasing my risk that much in two months now. It's one bit of data, and of course, in medicine, which we've talked about is not an exact science. You never rely just on one bit of data, you look at other bits of data as well, and what kind of picture does all the information start picking? So at that point I was like, Okay, now I can understand there's something now that fits with what happened to my dad. But if this is real, this is going to be a problem. Because I know you're essentially for populations of people who may not know. They've got a little bit of mild furring that isn't going to cause them a problem for 20 years. Suddenly, you're going to get an increase in heart attacks much more quickly.

Then what happened was I got contacted. It all happened within a few weeks. A journalist, I think it was from the Telegraph or the Times, I can't remember, asked me to comment on the fact that there'd been an unexplained increase, about 25 increase in heart attacks in Scotland in hospitals that people can't explain, so, they said. Dr. Mohocho, What do you think is going on? And then the third thing that happened was I was a whistleblower from a prestigious university in the UK. Contacted me cardiologist and he said to me he was very upset, he said. It seems something I've got to tell you, I don't know what to do, but I need to tell you this.

I said, What is it? He said this research group had accidentally found with the use of coronary imaging techniques, so this is specialized, high-tech scans of the arteries of the heart. That in the vaccinated, there was increased inflammation of the arteries of the heart, and it wasn't there in the unvaccinated, which again would increase heart attack risk. But they had a closed meeting and they said. We're not going to publish these findings or talk about it further because it may affect our funding from the drug industry.

And I, at this stage, Joe. I was like, Okay, now I've got three bits of data, there's enough here for me to at least ask the question. So I go to one of the more semi-mainstream news channels in the UK, it's called GB News. And I went to them, I said, Listen, something I want to talk about. I said, you know, I've done stuff with them before and basically, and they said, come on, let's talk about it. So I talked about this on GB News and it went viral, you know, and I didn't say stop the vaccine or whatever, I said, Listen, there's a signal here that needs to be looked into. We've got these unexplained heart attacks happening, we've got this evidence from circulation, I've been told by this whistleblower. Let's look at this a bit further.

And what happened then was just so bizarre. It was almost around the same time. I don't know if it was, maybe it may have been just after that, Joe. Our secretary of State for Health, Sajid Javid, gets up in parliament and says, I've decided to pass. We need to pass legislation to ensure that all healthcare workers get vaccinated, and if they don't, they lose their job now. We've never done that in this country. I know you've had maybe mandates for other things. We never mandate any medical intervention in the UK, we've never done that before. I thought, this is odd, I said right now. First and foremost, by this stage, Joe, we knew it wasn't stopping transmission, right?

It probably wasn't going to stop infection either, you know? The narrative kept changing. We were told it was going to stop infection. Now it's going to prevent you having severe disease, you know, it kept changing. I said this should be an individual choice. Now there's no. You know, healthcare workers are not protecting their patients by being vaccinated. They may be protecting themselves. We'll get into that data shortly, but they're not protecting their patients. Therefore, there's no reason, you know, we shouldn't mandate this. So then I literally launched into this. I was still, interestingly, at that point, getting mainstream media interviews because people wanted to talk about what happened to my dad. And the ambulance delays. So I went on BBC News and I got it in there. I said, by the way, guys, you know, you know, because it's a doctor module. What's behind our healthcare crisis?

I said, Well, you know, we've been talking about this for years. We've not tackled prevention. We've gotten this obesity epidemic right, and that's putting more and more stress on the system. And has been for a long time. Without any more resources. We've got an overmedicated population, we've not dealt with that, you know, up to one in five people over the age of 65 are hospitalized. Joe, because of side effects, right? I said. But there's something else we should talk about as well. We could lose 80,000 jobs in the NHS if we mandate this vaccine and people decide not to take it, and that will be a disaster. But it's not scientific and it's not ethical.

And then they were kind of cut me off at the end. And then I was on Sky News. I kept doing this and then I thought, You know what? I don't just believe in public health advocacy, I'm somebody also that does things behind the scenes. I meet politicians. I've worked with people in very senior positions in the health service, in health policy, I've had roles with those people. And I thought, let's have a dialogue and conversations and giving people the benefit of the doubt and understanding. They may be ignorant or have the illusion of knowledge, let's have a conversation with them. So I call up the chair of the British Medical Association.

And I was in America at the time, I'd come because I live alone now, right? So I lost. All my family and my closest family are in California, and they said, Asim, just come and spend a couple of months with us. So I get to the states around the end of November 2021. And the first thing that happens is I get an email from a very prestigious medical body I'm associated with. I won't name them.

And they say, Dr. Malhotra, We've received a number of anonymous complaints from doctors that you are spreading anti-vax disinformation. Purely upon that interview on GB News, where I said, there's a signal we need to look into it, that's all I did. I was like, Jesus, you know, really?

And it was obviously stressful. I had to respond and it took a month and they left me with a warning at that point. But I realized something else was going on here, so I called up the chair of the BMA. His name's Chand Nagpal.

And I said, Chand, I need to talk to you, and he listened for two hours. I talked him through every bit of data that I'd come across and things about the vaccine, and he said the same. He said, I'll be honest with you.

He said Nobody I've spoken to in health policy, my colleagues, appears to have critically appraised the evidence. As well as you have, most of them are getting their information on the benefits and harms of the vaccine from the BBC.

So he said, Listen, OK, Asim, I'm with you. The medical colleges and the BMA, anyway didn't support mandates. They were kind of silent about it, they weren't proactive. I was probably one of them.

There was a few campaigning doctors in the UK and an organization called Together Declaration that got involved in it. And I went on the full offensive, you know, through social media, through mainstream media, and said, we need to get this overturned. I had people, nurses and doctors, almost in tears, contact me who were unvaccinated, and I said, Listen, hold firm, you know, they passed this in parliament.

Most of the MPs voted for it, it was going to be in legislation and I said, hold fire, this is not going to happen. Do not get vaccinated if you don't want to get vaccinated.

And literally last minute, like a week before, this was going to become come into effect where people would lose their jobs. The chair of the BMA was speaking to Sajid Javid after speaking to me and all these people campaigning, and we got it overturned.

It didn't make any sense. So yes, then then I decided at that point, I'd started to really critically appraise the data properly. I thought there's a big mountain to move here. It's not an easy one. You know, I've just gone on TV and questioned about heart side effects.

And suddenly, one of these medical bodies I'm affiliated with is, you know, coming after me. So I thought, You know what I'm going to do my best? What can I do here historically? Joe, Over the last 10 years, I've published a lot in different medical journals. And I only write stuff which I think is important in disseminating the truth. Something I believe is important for the public and for patients, and even for doctors, and almost all that every time I publish something, and I kind of became good at this is I've got into the mainstream news. Whether it's about, you know, the harms of excess sugar or the statin thing, or cholesterol, or low carb diets, or whatever, or the harms potentially of vegan diets.

Right, I've done lots of these things and I thought, let me try. And, you know, publish this in a medical journal. I thought carefully, like it wouldn't be easy to publish something like this, even if what I'm saying is factually correct. So I went to a journal called the Journal of Insulin Resistance.

It's not well known, but it's a credible journal and I spoke to the editor. Often you just say, Listen, is this something you're interested in? What do you think? They'll say, No, Asim, just forget it.

And she was very open, right? and she was very pro-vax. Actually at the time. She was a bit shocked with what I was telling her, but she respects me.

She knows my work over a number of years. So listen, you know, Asim, let me look at it. And I can at least say that. I'll send it for a peer review, right? There's no guarantees of anything, but I can send it for a peer review. So tell me what you've got.

So I spent several months I wrote this piece, Joe, it was 10,000 words, that was the other thing. most journals wouldn't accept that many words.

And I'd written that, and it was in two parts because I thought.

People have been so indoctrinated with this narrative, I need to walk them through it. As someone who was vaccinated who went on, Good morning Britain, right? I'm one of you.

I'm not, you know, it'd be less easy to attack me and to walk them through my journey. In understanding how the data, new data had emerged. That made us think differently about what we were told at the beginning. And to break it down in absolute terms, what are the benefits and what are the harms? My dad's story was included in that, and then the part two was how we got it wrong.

Why we got it wrong and what are the solutions moving forward? And this journal also doesn't take money from industry, so that's why it was non-conflicted, it was open access. I wanted this to be free.

A lot of these journal articles are paywalled, you have to subscribe, etc. so I wanted it to be free to everybody. That's the reason I went to this journal. Yeah, I have a role.

People have somehow attacked me and saying, Oh, he's on the editorial board and stuff like that. Yeah, I have a role as a kind of advisor, this non-paid role, whatever, it's kind of because I've done work on this area. Like, what kind of articles should we be looking at? So, you know, they don't normally accept articles from people who are on the editorial board. But they said, Listen, you know, we'll let you do one as a one-off.

But the peer review process was very rigorous. I've never been through a rigorous peer review. Back and forth, lots of changes, etc. etc. So I published this article September 2022..

And you know, what was? Let me just summarize it, Joe?

The reality is this.

In my whole career, looking at all the drugs and knowing about many different drugs that are prescribed, I've never seen something. When you look at the data which has such poor effectiveness and such unprecedented harms in my career, it's like nothing I've ever seen before.

So in the summer, towards the end of last year, second half of last year. The journal Vaccine Peer Review, This is like the highest impact medical journal for vaccines, right? They published a reanalysis of Pfizer and Moderna's original double-blinded randomized control trials. So this is the level, the highest quality level of evidence, okay, with all the caveats, drug industry sponsored all that stuff, right? But still what we call the highest quality level of evidence.

Done by independent researchers Joseph Freeman from Louisiana, he's an E.R. doctor, clinical data scientist. Associate editor of the BMJ. Peter Doshi, Robert Kaplan from Stanford, right. Some very eminent. In terms eminence of integrity, right, I'm not for eminence-based medicine, but I'm for people who have eminence of integrity, right? They published this reanalysis and what they found was this in the trials that led to the approval by the regulators. We'll get into regulators in a minute. Around the world. You were more likely to suffer a serious adverse event from taking the vaccine hospitalization, disability, life-changing event than you were to be hospitalized with Covid. So what that means is it's highly likely.

This vaccine, mRNA vaccine should never have been approved for a single human in the first place. And that rate of serious adverse events, Joe is 1 in 800, and it's at least 1 in 800. Because that just covers the first two months of the trial.

In general, what happens is drug companies design trials where they choose people who are less likely to get side effects. So they're generally healthier, right? And then because it's the first two months and I found a mechanism of harm with accelerated heart disease. Like, my dad died six months after two doses of the vaccine. And we have autopsy studies now showing that that can happen several months after.

Yeah, it's Beggar's belief and that, you know, I published this information and there's been an evolution. So the question now, I think, people, what we want to do? Like, we talk about statins, right? Same sort of thing, same sort of concept. What is your individual benefit in absolute terms?

So there's a table, actually. I shared it with Jamie earlier. I don't know if we can bring it up because I think it'd be nice to see it. So the UK government only earlier this year, about two or three months ago, I think there's the first country in the world to publish that substantial data. They released information looking at per million people vaccinated versus per million people unvaccinated by age group. Okay, during the Omicron strain, right? So this is UK government data, so table four. It says numbers need to vaccinate for prevention of severe hospitalization, okay, from two doses of Pfizer.

So if you look at the first column, Joe. If you're 70, you have to vaccinate 2,500 people to prevent one person being hospitalized with severe Covid. If you're 60, 5,700, you start getting lower age groups 30 87,600, for example, if you're 20 to 29, over 100, well, over 100,000 people. I mean, this efficacy level, effectiveness level is just if it wasn't so serious, it would be laughable.

So Carl Hennigan, who's a director of Center of Evidence-based Medicine, Oxford and also general practitioner, talked about the fact that he had a couple of patients who had terminal cancer, for example, and didn't get vaccinated. And then they end up dying of Covid because they were already sicker. Well, what I'm saying to you, Joe is this is likely an exaggerated benefit, right? But when you balance that against the harms, which are consistent of at least one in 800 after two doses. And there is some evidence that the more doses you have, the higher those harms become.

It becomes a no-brainer. I mean, if you ask it now. If I was to ask and ask patients this, even older patients this. If I would give them that information in that way, Joe, most people would not take it. So there's the informed consent issue. But then there is the fact that, you know, we consider vaccines to be completely safe traditionally.

One in 800 is a very, very high figure. We've pulled other vaccines for much less. 1976 Swine flu vaccine was pulled because it was found to cause a debilitating neurological condition called Guillain-Barré syndrome in about one in 100,000 people.

Rotavirus vaccine, pulled in 1999, suspended because it was found to cause a form of bowel obstruction in kids in one in 10,000.

This is at least one in 100. I mean, it's a no-brainer. So the question then is, why have we not paused it? What's going on here?

And I think the barrier that we've got Joe to deal with with. A lot of people who are not enlightened or is awake or familiar, or understanding this information, it's a psychological barrier, it's not an intellectual one.

Right, this is willful blindness, you know, a concept, a psychological phenomenon which we're all capable of in different circumstances. Where human beings turn a blind eye to the truth. In order to feel safe, avoid conflict, reduce anxiety, and protect prestige and fragile egos.

So we've got to deal with that, right? And we can see this happening. You know, historically, you know, this has happened in many different circumstances. Look at Hollywood and Harvey Weinstein, for example.

Right? People kind of knew, but they didn't want to really talk about it, or they didn't want to, you know? But eventually the truth comes out and then we have to deal with the fallout of it. You know, the Catholic church and child abuse, pedophilia, right?

For many, so many people knew, but they buried their heads in the sand. We're dealing with a very similar psychological phenomenon, but the other phenomenon we've got, and I think we shouldn't underestimate it, is the one of fear, right? So just a few weeks ago, Isabel Oakeshott, who's a journalist in the UK, she had access to WhatsApp messages between the Secretary of State for Health and other people in the Cabinet.

And it was a front page of the Telegraph newspaper at the beginning of the pandemic, and one of those messages revealed.

We have to frighten the pants off the public, something along those lines, right? So they wanted to create this fear. And when you're under a forced compliance to force compliance, and when you're in a state of fear psychologically. Joe, two things happen. one is you're more likely to be controlled.

Right, and that's what they wanted. But also it inhibits your ability to engage in critical thinking. And many people are still under fear. And if you and I'm a numbers guy, I think numbers are important.

I think when I have conversations with patients, I want to break numbers down in a way that they can understand. So we all had a very grossly exaggerated fear. Many people did, maybe not you, Joe, but many people did of the virus at the very beginning.

S suggested that 50 percent of American adults thought that their risk of being hospitalized with Covid was 50 percent. One in two, when the real figure at that time was about one in 100. In fact, I did a subsequent analysis in my paper because a lot of my paper also focused on the fact of lifestyle and obesity. And all those things we can do to improve our immune system. And at the very early stages, you know, Wuhan strain in the U..K. Looking at middle aged people, the risk of hospitalization if you were an obese, sedentary smoker?

From a poor background, socioeconomic background, class was one in 350. Something like that, if you were active, not overweight, non-smoking, you know, healthy diet, all that kind of stuff. Your risk of hospitalization was almost four to five fold less, five fold less so one in 1500..

Wow, yeah, massive difference.

And that's what happened.

Do you think there is any hope that something like this, which was such an event where? I don't know what? The full numbers of people worldwide who were administered this, do you know what the numbers are?

Okay.

But then I said to you, Joe, so your benefits? About one in 200, but the harms seem to be at least early on, so the short term harms are one in 800. At least now we can make an individual choice. But my guess is in my own experience with patients, even with that information, where there's still you can argue that benefits outweigh the harms. The harms are so significant in terms of numbers that most of those people, Joe would choose not to take the vaccine. Does that make sense?

Because everybody desperately wanted the pandemic to be over.

Why was that not discussed?

You know, the clinical decision making is more subtly driven by this commercial interest.

We're fighting to free the world from corporate tyranny, and I think the way we've got here in some ways was predictable because of that unchecked power. And I think because everybody has been somehow affected by the vaccine, whether they took it or not, they took it. They may either have suffered a side effect or known someone that suffered a side effect. Or later on, become familiar with the fact that they were kind of conned or duped and saying they were going to protect other people. Or if they didn't take the vaccine, they were gaslighted.

They couldn't travel, people lost their jobs, and it's affected everybody pretty much in the world. So I think this truth, this expose, if you like, of this truth will help people understand that actually. And this is what people like me are doing, and people like yourself is really to just highlight that this is a system failure.

We've got here by stealth, we've got here because a lot of people don't understand the system failures that they would not find acceptable. For example, why does the F.D.A. take 65 of its funding from the pharmaceutical industry? Why does the regulator in our country? Which, by the way, the British Medical Association chair didn't know until I gave a lecture. And was shocked when I told him that 86 of the funding of the MHRA in our country comes from pharma, people would find this unacceptable.

But that also means there are solutions, there are solutions moving forward where people can feel more confident in the information they're getting. Even doctors is likely to be clean, or as clean as possible and closer to the truth when it comes to knowing the absolute benefits and harms of medications. So that ultimately means changing the law, Joe, we've got here because of unethical, unjust, unscientific laws, if you like.

And when I look and trace the roots of it all, this really started. The acceleration of this process, started from maybe well-intentioned, I think, neoliberal economic policies adopted by Ronald Reagan in the 80s and Margaret Thatcher in the U.K. 1992. I think it was George Bush senior that then allowed the F.D.A. to take money from the drug industry. Before that, that was essentially through public funding.

Academic institutions, most in the UK, now get most of their funding from pharma when it comes to medical research. Before, in the 80s, they didn't. So I think when people understand that, you know. John Ioannidis also wrote this great paper a few years ago, called How to Survive the Medical Misinformation Mess. And he talks about the fact in the United States, and you spend almost 4 trillion, more than 4 trillion dollars on health care, you know, 18 of your GDP. He says that 20 to 50 of health care activity in the United States is inappropriate, wasteful and harms patients.

Actually gives no benefit. And he said, one of the reasons for what drives this is that the first thing is most. You know, first thing is, most. Published research, much if not most published research, is unreliable, not useful to policymakers and not good for patients. But the second bit is most health care professionals, most doctors, are not aware of this, they're not aware of these system failures, right? Don't make the assumption that your doctor knows about this.

And then they lack the critical appraisal skills to understand the evidence and then translate it into a way that patients can understand. And this is part of conditioning. We're not conditioned in medical school to think in these ways about informed consent, about understanding the data properly. It's not rocket, it's not difficult. So there needs to be a shift, you know, as well, culturally, you know. People need to understand that good health in general doesn't come out of a medicine bottle.

You know, what determines your health are social conditions, right? The conditions in which we are born, we grow, we live, we age, we work. Understanding the impact of severe psychological stress and how that can shorten your lifespan, right? So, for example, a very good paper published in Nature in 2012 by Elizabeth Blackburn, who was a Nobel Prize winner. And Lisa Epple, psychologist in California, was called too toxic to ignore.

And they talked about the impact of psychological stress on genes that control the aging process and disease. And one of the things that was really startling to me when I looked at it is that. If you are a mother of a disabled child, the chronic stress associated with that is the equivalent of 10 years of aging. If you're a victim of severe psychological abuse as a child, or sexual abuse, that can, at the extreme end, knock off 20 years of your lifespan. Because the disease process, what happens to the genes epigenetics, manifests itself later on. I think these things are important to discuss Joe as well, because it helps us also try and think about how do we create the conditions in society for everybody? Where they have an opportunity to be the best version of themselves?

And what do I mean by that is have optimization of mental and physical health? Now, that brings me on to, you know, what is health? I'm not a big fan of the World Health Organization these days because I think they've been corrupted by these commercial entities as well. Right? You know? Most of their funding now comes with strings attached, according to Margaret Chan, the former director general of the World Health Organization.

You know, second biggest funder of the World Health Organization, you've talked about this before. Bill Gates, right? Who's heavily invested in pharmaceutical industry stocks McDonald's and Coca-Cola. So the World Health Organization, unfortunately, are not independent. However, let's say something positive about them. They have this great definition of health a state of complete mental, physical and social well-being, not merely the absence of disease or infirmity.

So if we start from that place of that definition and understand it. And also realize that. You can't have optimal mental health without having optimal physical health, and you can't have optimal physical health without having optimal mental health because it's interlinked, I think we then branch out and we think about how can we create those conditions so that people have, for example, you know, the right wages, you know, if you're in a low pay, high demand, low control job, the impact on your health is effectively a death sentence. You know, these are the kind of discussions we need to be having, you know, politically and in the medical establishment, and with the public as well.

So people who have, you know, conditions, or who are obese, for example, are overweight. So one of the things I've been doing with vaccine injuries patients myself is actually implementing these lifestyle changes, like eat real food. You know, do 30 minutes of moderate activity a day. Let's really focus on your stress levels, and a lot of these people are getting better because of that, but there's a lot of uncertainties.

What are the? Are there any other drugs? You know, I know that, you know, at the FLCC conference, which I'm attending in Dallas and speaking at, you know, at the moment, there are doctors there that are producing protocols that seem to be working observationally. Whether it's vitamin infusions, the lifestyle, even the use of Ivermectin apparently seems to be helping some patients as well, which is really interesting.

But the problem, Joe as well, is that because the establishment is ignoring what is now a pandemic of vaccinated people. We can't devote as much resources as we'd like into research and into managing these people. Because a lot of these people, you know, these patients, are being being gaslighted still by their doctors, and that's a big issue. I mean, even last week, there was an interesting case that was reported in the BBC where a young 32 year old, fit and healthy psychologist in the NHS took the AstraZeneca vaccine. We use that initially in the UK as well. And within 10 days, he died of a severe stroke.

And the death certificate the wife fought for, I mean, kudos to her, she fought for him and for justice for him. And the death certificate said he died of natural causes. So it ultimately went to court and the coroner confirmed that this was absolutely likely caused by the AstraZeneca vaccine. You know, so these sorts of discussions need to keep, you know, we need to keep having them.

Because people will with any other medication, people on any other medication, it seems like it wouldn't be so easy to dismiss. Like, when people got strokes with Vioxx, people weren't saying, Oh, come on, you just had a regular stroke, the Vioxx didn't have anything to do with it. But with this, you do see that narrative like, you know, hey, he had a heart attack seven days after he was vaccinated. While people have heart attacks, there's no consideration for a novel treatment that has been administered to hundreds of millions of people in this country.

No consideration to maybe that had a factor. In fact, they actively try to ignore that as a possible factor. And I have talked to so many people that have had either similar situations to yours or worse, where they had an adverse effect from the vaccine. And these anecdotal stories of people and their doctors reluctance to admit, or to even consider that it had anything to do with that is quite shocking.

I think what's made this worse is that many of these doctors, and many people themselves, one, they've had it. They bought into the narrative. And we have to also have, we have to think empathetically and compassionately with them, in the sense that, I think we have to have that conversation. And the understanding that changing one's mind in general is actually, for many people, quite an emotionally traumatic experience.

If you think about it, and then you know. We are strong enough and mature enough to be able to, you know, understand what's happened here and to try and move forward constructively. But for most people, the kind of discussion we're having now about all of these system failures and the corruption and people being harmed. And you know, this vaccine, that almost certainly, I think quite likely. These drug companies knew already about the harms before they were rolled out. That's why they got immunity from getting sued if people got vaccine injured, because they knew it's a lot to take in. Joe, it's much easier to bury your head in the sand and to ignore this willful blindness.

It's an easier route to take than to confront these truths, but we have to confront the facts, because if we don't, it's only going to keep happening.

I'm not talking about medical health professionals, I'm talking about journalists, I'm talking about people in the public eye. I'm talking about influencers and celebrities that have initially stated that you should go do this, I'm doing this.

You should do this. Those people are still carrying water for the pharmaceutical industries. To cover up their own either incorrect assumptions and assertions, or whatever reason they want to do it, they're doing the work for them. Like, when you see if someone talks about having some sort of a vaccine adverse side effect, they're attacked. I've seen people get attacked.

I've seen people talk about someone they know that got sick or even died and they'll get attacked. It's very strange because it's become much more of a medical issue and it turned into a tribal issue. And in this country, it's very separated in terms of ideological inclinations. You have your Republicans, and you have your Democrats, your right wing people and your left wing people.

The right wing people are more reluctant to take it, they're more reluctant to believe they were, you know, they were seeking alternative treatments, some of them were ineffective. And then you had, and unfortunately, a lot of those people were unhealthy to begin with, and then you had the left wing people who were all in.

They were getting Pfizer tattoos, they were showing photos of them getting vaccinated, they were posting their little stickers, Got vaccinated. They, you know, they had their little hypodermic needle emoji in their little bio. It's wild shit because it became a tribal identity signifier.

It was a signal that you were sending out to other people that you are on the right side, you've done the right thing.

So it's not an easy thing for people to do, It's the right thing to do. It's about living virtuously. As doctors, we're also taught if evidence changes, we need to change the evidence, but not everybody feels comfortable doing that, Joe.

And I think that there's some of it is probably fear of getting attacked. I mean, I, I know some celebrity figures that privately, you know, name them who are completely, you know, I agree with you, seem, keep going, we support you, et cetera. Thank you. And they send me all these, but they won't come out and speak out.

And I was like, you know if, you know, even if half a dozen well-known celebrity figures. Joe came out simultaneously and said, We are very concerned this vaccine is causing harm. Please suspend it. Following an investigation, I think this issue would probably end overnight. It honestly doesn't take that many people of prominence to really speak out.

And I don't know if you've watched the movie, she said, which is around what happened with Harvey Weinstein. No, so, and this is corroborated, you know, obviously movies can sometimes be fictional, but this is, this is very accurate. And one of the things that comes out in that film is that all these women who had suffered at the hands of Harvey Weinstein. When the journalists went to them, I think it was New York Times originally that broke the story. They were all very, very scared of speaking out on their own, like they would get attacked. And you know, he was so powerful and all of that influence.

But what the journalists did is that they got several of these women. And they basically were honest with him, saying, listen, so-and-so is going to say it as well. It's not, you're not going to be alone. And the line was, when they jump, they all jumped together.

Right, so we haven't got, I think we are, we're getting there. We have to just keep speaking the truth and sort of letting go of the outcome because it's the right thing to do. But I, you know, if there are people out there who have a voice, who have a platform, and I know some of them. By the way, I'm talking about some really big name celebrities who message me like very, very famous people who say, thank you, keep going. And I've said to them, Will you speak out?

And they just, let's get it.

They just want to tell you, and a lot of them have stories. And the amount of people that I know that have come up to me privately to tell me about their own vaccine industry injury. Rather. And about how they've been either ignored or dismissed by their physician, how they've sought other doctors out. And the reluctance of admitting that this was somehow or another, connected. They want to think of the vaccine as being an overall absolute positive, a miracle of science. This is what got us through this.

Sure, there is always going to be some side effects because you're administering to a massive amount of people. That's the narrative they get from their doctor, yeah.

He was considered as the chief orchestrator of the release of Nelson Mandela from prison. He served in his first cabinet. And he contacted me a few months ago. And I was a bit overwhelmed because I was like, he's a South African elder, he's one of the most powerful voices in Africa.

And he said, Asim, I followed what you've been doing, thank you, and I was like, Wow, I support you and what can I do to help? et cetera, et cetera. And what he said to me, and he also said this recently on GB News, he said, Asim. What we are dealing with here, the scale of the problem, the battle we have, is far bigger than what we fought in terms of apartheid.

And this is a guy at the age of 36 who thought he was going to be killed, who had people with Ak-47s looking for him. Because during that time, it was pretty horrific. What happened to ethnic minority dissidents in South Africa? People were put in prison and then they were murdered in prison. I mean, that's what we're talking about here, he said. This is far bigger.

There's so much money involved in this, and there's so many people, particularly after it's already been administered. They don't want to harm the industry like this is already done. The last thing we want to do is decrease profits even more. Yeah.

So let's figure out a way to raise the profits up to a similar level that they achieved over the last few years. And how do we do that? And here's an interesting thing that's come out recently. In the United States, the original vaccine is now no longer approved.

But I think what's going to happen is they are still going to keep using it in the winter. Like with the flu vaccine, they're just going to add it in. Here's the Covid vaccine for you, which is the same stuff. So I don't think it's an acceptance that, you know, we've realized there's a problem. We're going to just slowly just introduce something else.

I think it's the same problem, I mean. On that note, though, Switzerland and even Germany now are essentially stopping the use of these vaccines. And I think what we must be very aware of, Joe, is that we shouldn't let them slowly phase out this vaccine. It may end up happening here as well, as if nothing ever happened. And they move on to the next thing, because that's what they've done with other drugs in the past.

You know, I was involved in a case in the UK with a drug that was used heavily here as well. It's called Alteplase. It's a clot-busting drug and it's used for strokes, emergency use for strokes. And I got contacted by a whistleblower many years ago, who then published a letter in The Lancet. Who basically looked at the data on which the drug was approved and said it was flawed. There was evidence of potential fraud.

And eventually, this went up to the regulator, it got publicized in The Lancet. I helped him get it on BBC News and Channel 4 News. If it didn't get there, I don't think it would have got the attention it needed. And ultimately, the regulator got involved and I was peripherally aware of the investigation. If you like, into this drug.

And I was getting informed by people there that they didn't really know what to say or what to do, they couldn't really answer the important questions. He asked them about the regulatory approval and data, which was clearly, obviously showing significant harm and hardly any benefits in terms of causing brain bleeds. And probably several thousand people died unnecessarily because of it. And what they did was it was one of the quality markers in hospitals. The hospitals would be remunerated if they used this drug in a timely fashion.

They just removed it one day from the website of this being a quality marker of care. It was removed and it just stopped being used. And then they moved on to something else. It never got publicity.

That actually, we likely shouldn't have ever approved of this in the first place. And the information that we used was potentially fraudulent or flawed. And therefore they just carry on. So we must be very careful. We must be aware, Joe, that they potentially could do this.

Now it's already kind of happened. You didn't use this in the U.S. but in many European countries, one of the vaccines that was used at the beginning for Covid was AstraZeneca.

By the summer of 2021, most European countries had suspended the AstraZeneca vaccine. They stopped using it, but no one really knew about it. They kind of heard there was a few cases about rare blood clots or whatever, right? Reporting these very, very rare blood clots.

And then suddenly they stopped using it. It wasn't well publicized. And then I found out. Only a few months ago, because I focused on the mRNA Pfizer vaccine, I didn't look at AstraZeneca. I got contacted by some people in India.

It was being used, so it was suspended in European countries because of these quite significant common, serious adverse events. It was used, continued to be used even now in India under a different name. It's the same vaccine, it's called Covishield.

And when I saw that, I was shocked. So I went to India, gave some lectures over there. Engaged with mainstream journalists over there who know me and see me as a credible voice. In lots of areas, whether it's heart disease or diet, or heart stents or whatever.

And I said, I need to get this into the mainstream media. So I basically gave a lecture. And up until the summer of 2021, there was a paper published I can't remember, it was one of the immunology journals.

And it basically said, at that stage, the AstraZeneca vaccine was worse than Pfizer, for cardiovascular effects, worse than Pfizer. So I got this into the mainstream, into the times of India, and what's really interesting about this, and it links into something else in South Africa. I didn't know.

I went there just because I wanted to help people. I was giving lectures, but I had people coming up to me after my lectures, like widows crying, saying. A nurse, I remember, came up to me and said. My husband, who was fit and well, had this, and he basically dropped dead of heart attack two weeks later.

I know this is what it was. Thank you for everything you're doing. I got it into the Times of India and it got some publicity for the first time in that country and I wasn't aware.

I didn't do it for this reason. I then met a very prominent lawyer in India who was involved in a case where a young activist has accused one of the richest men in India who was involved in the rollout of the Covid vaccine? I wouldn't agree with what he said, I'm just going to tell you in a second. But he basically, through social media, this young activist said that this guy has committed mass murder.

So this man is suing for literally millions of pounds. This young guy who's like a nutrition scientist who doesn't have much money on this, saying that this is defamatory. The vaccine is safe and effective. And the accusation from this young activist was that this guy should have known or knew. And why did he support the use and made a lot of money out of the AstraZeneca vaccine? So I meet this lawyer and the case is ongoing.

And they weren't really getting anywhere until he puts in front of the judge. An article in The Times of India, where me, the British cardiologist, have said this is a big problem. And this was suspended. And he said it completely turned the judge. You could see that he turned, his eyes lit up. And he was like, the reason I'm saying this, Joe, is that even the judiciary, you know, this is the battle we face.

So many people have been indoctrinated, there are so many biases here that one of the ways that we combat this. And I think your platform is probably one of the most important potentially in the world. On this, let's not underestimate that is disseminating this truth. Traditionally, it's been through legacy media who are failing the public at the moment, they are acting in ways that are anti-democratic.

They're being economical with the truth, they are deliberately suppressing information.

What we are trying to do here if we want to revolutionize health care, we want patients and public to get a better deal. We want a better democracy. Is we make this injustice visible? That's what Mahatma Gandhi said. How did he get the British colonialists out of India? How did he expose? Everything that we're doing was wrong? Make the injustice visible?

And traditionally, the most effective way to do that is through the mainstream media, but the legacy media. I think people are losing trust. Even smears and attacks have happened to me after I went on the BBC to talk about statins. And then, you know, mentioned, I don't know if you know about this, but it was a few months ago. I mentioned excess deaths could be because of the vaccine. Got a lot of views, like 25 million views on Twitter. But there was a backlash immediately, where the Guardian newspaper, WHO. I've written 19 opinion editorials for over the years, including three front page commentaries for The Observer, went for me and undermined my credibility.

There was a quote from a cardiologist saying he doesn't have a career in cardiology. It's just ridiculous.

The comment section in the Guardian initially, and even the Times newspaper that did something similar were largely supportive of what I was doing. So there's a disconnect here and I think the legacy media, they're losing out, I think they're in big danger. And I think one of the things that you do, Joe, is because you have these conversations, you're willing to hear different points of view.

That's what people want, Joe. That's what people really want, and people ultimately, they want access to the truth and they want to do the right thing. You know, they hate to see injustice, so we keep making the injustice visible and we will win this.

And it was a massive post, it was thousands and thousands and thousands of comments. Obviously unverified, anecdotal. You don't know what I mean. It could be all disinformation, who knows?

But the shock of seeing that printed, and this was early on. This was when people were still very much on the narrative that the vaccine was getting us out of this. The vaccine was safe and effective, and only fools and conspiracy theorists were willing to not to risk their lives and not not participate. And it was, it was pretty stunning, that feeling I get that. That's the same I get from conversations with people. Where they tell you about their uncle, their friend, their this, their that, their brother, their son. They tell you about these injuries.

And then they tell you about the struggles of getting people to connect them to the vaccine. They talk about how they've tried to get it in the VAERS report and the unsuccessful attempts to do that, even though the VAERS report is pretty, pretty extensive. With vaccine injuries, it's the whole thing. Seems like there's a lot of people that don't want to talk about it but have stories and feel very fucked over.

You're right, we can't always be definitive that it's the vaccine. But coming back to the basics of what we learned in medicine. 80 of your diagnosis comes from the history, so listen to the patient and most of the time they will give you the answer. Something like this that you just discussed was recently published in a journal called BMC Infectious Diseases High Impact Journal.

And it was a survey conducted interesting analysis of American people. The sample size wasn't massive, I think it was about 3000. And the calculations that were done suggested, when they extrapolated up, that. There may well be up to 1 million serious adverse effects from the Covid vaccines in the United States in 2021 alone, and 278,000 fatalities, right?

Just from this survey, where people knew of somebody or maybe had an injury who died, it's still that's very telling. It's important information I think, to have a discussion about now. This paper, only a couple of weeks ago, April, the 11th, was retracted because the journal was put under pressure. Not because they committed some fraud or whatever else.

There was no real good reason, given we are not something around. You can't draw causal inference from this paper, which was in the paper anyway. I mean, the people who wrote it are saying, of course, you can't say it's causal, but it's still important. This is the level that there could be.

They said it was it could be that high. We need to have these discussions. And also if there's such a disconnect, Joe, between how patients and the public feel. And they are now not trusting or believing the medical establishment. That's not good for medicine, it's not good for democracy.

It's not good for government.

For societies to flourish constructively and progressively, people need to be able to trust each other, and you can only trust each other if you believe people are telling the truth. So we are heading down a very dangerous path, you know, until we can release the world from this corporate tyranny. This is the battle we face, you know, the one of truth versus money, materialism, and, dare I say, in some ways, psychopathy and spiritualism, right?

And we need to go back to understanding what does it actually mean to be human, what does it mean to be a good human? what does it mean to lead the good life? And that is underpinned by also basic values honesty, integrity, you know, empathy, compassion, courage. This is what we need to be teaching.

There's a cultural issue here, I think there's also that's what's led us a little bit and it's hindering us to making progress. Because these people, as you know, even your friends and celebrities, why don't they just be brave enough to just come out and speak the truth?

It's only going to get worse. It isn't even about being virtuous or courageous for me, it's about being rational, it's about being rational. So we need to keep having these conversations and hopefully with time situation, people will, you know, I think more and more people are speaking out.

More doctors are speaking out. Certainly, when I started, you know, I was, I was one of the lone voices. There are people like Peter McCullough, who's been brilliant on top of this for a long time. But more and more doctors now, more and more people speaking, I feel most for my, my profession.

I'm more worried about them than anyone. I mean, of course I. My patients are being harmed. But in terms of the trust that has been eroded, you know, it's going to take, we have to accept it, the trust has been eroded.

It's going to take time to regain that trust. But the longer the medical establishment ignore the fact that, you know, they are essentially slaves to corporate, tyrannical, and often psychopathic entities. So that as long as they continue to ignore that, our patients are going to suffer more and more.

The increase in overall mortality is pretty unprecedented, correct?