It wouldn’t be WorldNetDaily if it wasn’t promoting bad studies that fearmonger about the COVID vaccine, and Art Moore is at it again in a Sept. 27 article:
A top London cardiologist who was one of the first to take the COVID-19 vaccine and promote it on British television now is calling for a suspension of the shots, arguing in a scientific paper that there is evidence the risk of harm is greater than any benefit.
Dr. Aseem Malhotra, who presented his paper at a news conference in the British capital Tuesday, said “there is a strong scientific, ethical, and moral case to be made that COVID-19 vaccines rollout must stop immediately until raw data has been released for fully independent scrutiny.”
His paper, published in the Journal of Insulin Resistance in two parts, here and here, is titled “Curing the pandemic of misinformation on COVID-19 mRNA vaccines through real evidence-based medicine.”
Joined at the news conference by Dr. Ryan Cole, a Mayo Clinic-trained pathologist, and Dr. Tess Lawrie, co-founder of the non-profit World Council for Health, Malhotra said real-world safety data indicate a rise in hospital cardiac arrests and heart attacks linked to Pfizer’s COVID-19 mRNA vaccine.
The presence of Cole and Lawrie — both prolific COVID misinformers that WND has previously promoted — should be a warning that this was going to be a misinfo-fest. So Moore quickly moved to try and burnish Malhotra’s alleged credibility:
An internationally renowned expert in the prevention, diagnosis and management of heart disease, Malhotra is a fellow of the Royal College of Physicians and president of the Scientific Advisory Committee of The Public Health Collaboration. He also is an honorary council member to the Metabolic Psychiatry Clinic at Stanford University School of Medicine.
Actually, as Science-Based Medicine noted, Malhotra published a book promoting what the British Dietitic Assocation called one of the “Top 5 worst celeb diets to avoid in 2018.” Moore continued:
He began his presentation, hosted by Lawrie’s World Council for Health, talking about the concept of “willful blindness.”
“I was willfully blind, certainly in relation to the vaccine and the harms, until I wasn’t,” he said.
Malhotra said that’s why it’s crucial that the issue be tackled both with the facts and with compassion, “because there are many people who are still willfully blind.”
As happens so often with so-called studies that Moore promotes, this one is shoddy. As Health Feedback documented, Malhotra’s article “cherry-picked evidence supporting the narrative that COVID-19 vaccines are ineffective and possibly harmful, while ignoring the larger body of evidence showing that COVID-19 vaccines are safe and effective.” Science-Based Medicine further exposed the shoddiness of Malhotra’s research:
As I said at the beginning, one of the favorite tactics of quacks, cranks, and antivaxxers is projection: To accuse their critics of what they themselves are guilty of, and both of Dr. Malhotra’s articles are prime examples of this tactic, starting right from the title, in which he claims the mantle of evidence-based medicine for himself against what he characterizes as “misinformation” coming from health authorities and the conventional press. Interestingly, Dr. Malhotra barely uses the word “misinformation” in his first article, but uses it much more frequently in his second article, as though he were doubling down on his first assertion.
[…]For instance, COVID-19 cranks (like Dr. Malhotra) take advantage of the low quality and reliability of a lot of medical research to contribute even more to that low reliability by publishing propaganda in journals like The Journal of Insulin Resistance. Indeed, I once called this phenomenon scientific review articles weaponized as disinformation, a label that describes Dr. Malhotra’s two part “narrative review” quite well.
Looking back at both articles, it’s clear to me that the first article was intended to sow doubt about COVID-19 vaccines through the use of a compelling anecdote about his father followed by cherry-picked data. As much as I might feel sorry for Dr. Malhotra because of his loss, I cannot allow that feeling to prevent my directly addressing his misuse of the anecdote of his father’s death to spread fear, uncertainty, and doubt about vaccines. The second article is more of a generalized antivaccine rant that uses tried and untrue techniques that try to paint big pharma and government regulatory entities as so completely corrupt (as well as ideology- and profit-driven) that they ignore evidence of harm.
[…]Dr. Malhotra’s article is projection, pure and simple, or, as I put it: “I know you are, but what am I?” He’s accusing conventional medical authorities, big pharma, and social media companies of spreading medical misinformation about COVID-19 vaccines by using the very techniques of misinformation that he claims to decry, such as cherry-picked studies and conspiracy theories, to do it. I know you are, but what am I, indeed.
Rather than noting any criticism of Malhotra’s work, Moore simply parrots it. And he continued to do so: Moore uncritically repeated Malhotra’s claims in an Oct. 5 article, and he gave Malhortra another uncritical platform to spread misinformation in an Oct. 19 article:
A top London cardiologist who was one of the first to take the COVID-19 vaccine and promote it on British television is warning his colleagues and the public he has evidence tying the incidences around the world of “unexpected” cardiac events in otherwise healthy people to the COVID-19 vaccines.
Dr. Aseem Malhotra made the statement in a video posted Wednesday on Twitter.
“It is my duty and responsibility as a consultant cardiologist and public health campaigner to urgently inform doctors, patients and members of the public that the COVID mRNA vaccine has likely played a significant role of being a primary cause in all unexpected cardiac arrests, heart attacks, strokes, cardiac arrhythmias and heart failure since 2021, until proven otherwise,” he said.
Moore censored the fact that Malhotra’s earlier work had been exposed as the misinformation it is — instead, he parroted it yet again, right down to the bogus appeal to authority by listing his credentials.
An inquisitive reporter Moore is not — he’s nothing but a partisan stenographer.