Dr. Aseem Malhotra on vaccines: what the evidence says · JRE #1979
SUBJECT: VACCINES
Not a true/false call. Every claim is logged with its sources; read the exhibits below.
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
What the evidence says 01 / RECORD
Misleading. The 278,000 deaths and roughly 1 million serious adverse effects figures Malhotra cites are real numbers, but they come from Mark Skidmore's online survey study in BMC Infectious Diseases (Jan 2023), which the journal RETRACTED on April 11, 2023. Malhotra presents a discredited, retracted extrapolation as a credible finding. The study asked about 2,840 respondents whether people in their social circle had died from the vaccine, then scaled up self-reported perceptions to the whole US population. The NIH PubMed Central retraction note (confirmed live) states the editors retracted the article because the methodology "does not prove causal inference of mortality," study limitations were inadequately described, "there was no attempt to validate reported fatalities," and there were "critical issues in the representativeness of the study population and the accuracy of data collection." It also notes an ethics discrepancy: the author claimed IRB approval, but the study was actually exempt from ethics review. The figures are far above CDC/FDA/VAERS safety-surveillance data. The author disagrees with the retraction. Because the extrapolation rests on unverified secondhand perceptions rather than confirmed vaccine-caused deaths, and the paper was withdrawn from the scientific record, citing it as evidence of vaccine harm is misleading. No allowlisted source supports the figures as valid; the allowlisted retraction refutes their credibility.