Dr. Aseem Malhotra, Britain’s high-profile cardiologist and previous supporter of mRNA COVID vaccines, has called on Australia’s medical regulator to suspend COVID vaccine mandates, saying the evidence against their use has been “overwhelming.”
This comes as the secretary of the Australian federal Department of Health, Professor Brendan Murphy, called the continuation of COVID vaccine mandates in Australia unjustified.
Speaking to The Epoch Times on June 3 during his nationwide tour hosted by the Australian Medical Professionals Society (AMPS), Malhotra said that, in his opinion, the mRNA vaccine “was always going to do more harm than good.”
Meanwhile, Australia’s Therapeutic Goods Administration (TGA) maintains that the “protective benefits of vaccination far outweigh the potential risks.”
Currently, Pfizer, AstraZeneca, and Novavax are provisionally approved for use by the TGA, while Moderna has been fully approved.
During his talk on June 1, Malhotra pointed to health data and related heart complications—such as cardiac arrhythmia, heart failure, cardiac arrest, myocarditis, and periocarditis—that have seen an uptick since the vaccine rollout.
“But nobody knew about it, doctors didn’t know about it, and in medicine, unless you’re aware of a potential side effect or a diagnosis, you'll always miss it or think it doesn’t exist. And that’s what’s been happening. That’s why a lot of vaccine-injured are getting gaslighted,” he said.
Malhotra also pointed to data released by the UK government that compared the benefits of vaccination between 1 million vaccinated people and 1 million unvaccinated people. While he admits the data has “healthy user bias”—where people who weren’t vaccinated were sicker than people who were vaccinated on average—he said the data shows that many thousands of people need to be vaccinated to prevent a few from being hospitalised.
For example, for a 70-year-old, 2,500 people need to be vaccinated to prevent one person from being hospitalised with COVID, while that figure is 5,700 for 60-year-olds, 53,000 for those under 40, and just under 200,000 for people under the age of 30.
“I’ve never come across anything in my whole career in medicine, anything I’ve heard about any drug, any pharmacological intervention, has efficacy or effectiveness is this poor,” he said.
However, a spokesperson for the TGA also told The Epoch Times in an email that it rejects Malhotra’s safety claims on the COVID-19 vaccines, saying that it has “a well-established and effective system in place to detect and investigate potential new safety issues relating to vaccines.”
“Data from clinical trials and extensive use of the vaccines around the world demonstrates that the benefits of each COVID-19 vaccination continue to outweigh the known risks,” the spokesperson said.
Campaign Despite Being Controversial
Malhotra has emerged as a controversial figure since 2022, when he called for the suspension of Britain’s vaccine mandates, which was overturned for NHS workers in April 2022. However, Malhotra was a staunch supporter of the vaccine just a year prior.Yet despite being now labelled an “anti-vax leader” and spreader of vaccination misinformation, Malhotra said it was the death of his late father, Dr. Kailand Chand—a general practitioner and former deputy chair of the British Medical Association—after having two shots of the Pfizer vaccine and his quest to search for the “truth” of the vaccine side effects in the form of data that led him on this campaign.
“I campaigned heavily on this issue to get the vaccine mandates overturned [in the UK],” he said.
“[A]nd ultimately, I remember I was getting nurses and doctors—people I know who were in tears—calling me up, and I said, stand your ground. It was getting passed in Parliament … and only a few weeks later, we got it overturned.”
Malhotra’s Take on Australia’s Vaccine Mandates
Malhotra told The Epoch Times that Australia had one of the most “draconian” COVID measures in the world, including lockdowns, which had a “lingering effect” that he suspects led to the vaccine mandates.He added that Australia has had “very effective, important, evidence-based, right and democratic public health policies,” such as compulsory seat belts in cars and tobacco control.
“With that in mind, you can understand a little bit why [policies] may have been draconian in this instance,” he said.
However, he emphasised that of all the medical regulators around the world, Australia’s Therapeutic Goods Administration (TGA) receives 96 percent of its funding from large pharmaceutical companies, which he also claims has a “huge influence” over the medical regulator and with some politicians.
Despite almost exclusively relying on the pharmaceutical industry, Australia’s TGA “firmly denies” that its funding is a “conflict of interest (COI),” according to Dr. Maryanne Demasi, a medical investigative journalist.
“I think financial interests fuel the problem, but most of it is because people are being given half-truths and misleading information on which they’re making decisions,” Malhotra said.
Meanwhile, One Nation Senator Malcolm Roberts has called on the federal government to act immediately to end all vaccine mandates that were still in effect at “government workplaces and immediately act to pass One Nation’s vaccine discrimination bill so no further harm is done in the private sector.”
Roberts made this comment following Murphy’s public statement in which he believes COVID vaccine mandates to be unjustified.
Currently, the topic of vaccine injuries has been “shrouded in a veil of secrecy and silence,” according to legal firm Sydney Criminal Lawyers, who say that the government needs to facilitate more open discussions around the mandates.
“This is too little too late for the thousands of people who have suffered life-changing injuries as a result of mandates or lost their livelihoods because of their choice to remain unvaccinated,” Roberts said on June 1.
In spite of this, Malhotra sees an opportunity for medicine.
“I see this crisis as an opportunity actually to restore trust and rebuild and take medicine back to where it should be, which is to promote practice, very simple. That’s why I’m an advocate for ethical, evidence-based medicine.”
As of May 28, the total number of adverse events reported to the TGA was 138,730. However, Malhotra believes this figure to be much higher.
