A former adviser for the Make America Healthy Again movement who is now working to replicate the movement in Europe has said the public deserves an apology for Covid vaccine mandates.
In a commentary published in Science, Public Health Policy and the Law, cardiologist Dr Aseem Malhotra and co-author psychologist Dr Andrea Nazarenko argue that informed consent, the ‘fundamental’ principle of healthcare, was abandoned in the Covid pandemic, eroding trust in public health institutions.
They claim that by enforcing mandates and downplaying potential side effects of the new vaccines, such as myocarditis, authorities ‘silenced truth seekers’ and damaged confidence in healthcare systems.
‘Until the most urgent questions are answered,’ they wrote, ‘nothing less than a global moratorium on Covid mRNA vaccines, coupled with formal, unequivocal apologies from governments and medical bodies for mandates and for silencing truth seekers, will suffice.’
‘Restoring legitimacy requires three concrete commitments: Full transparency of data, independent evaluation of evidence, and accountability through both policy change and public acknowledgement of harm.’
At the federal level, America enacted several Covid vaccine mandates that were not removed until May 2023, including a requirement that all employees be vaccinated or undergo weekly testing.
Some states, mostly Democrat-led, such as California, Oregon and New York, went even further and fired state employees who refused the vaccines.
There were also widespread mask mandates and lockdowns put in place across the US. Many of these policies remained in place for months, and in some states health officials have reinstated mask mandates in certain settings in response to rising viral cases.
Dr Aseem Malhotra (pictured) was formerly named MAHA Action’s Chief Medical Advisor
Following the orders, trust in America’s health system declined, with 61 percent of citizens now saying they have confidence in the CDC compared to 73 percent in December 2020.
There have also been 14,800 claims for injuries people claim they suffered because of the Covid vaccines filed in the US to date, of which only 122 have resulted in a payout for compensation.
An estimated 270 million Americans received at least one dose of the Covid vaccine, with the shots estimated to have prevented more than 3.2 million deaths and 18.5 million hospitalizations. Serious adverse side effects of the inoculation are believed to be rare.
In an interview with the Daily Mail ahead of the commentary’s publication, Malhotra said: ‘In retrospect, this mandate on the general public, particularly on people at low risk like young adults, was criminal.
‘They were getting close to no benefit from the shots, while at the same time exposing themselves to serious potential harms.’
Malhotra was an adviser to Health Secretary Robert F Kennedy Jr’s MAHA Action movement, but has now joined a team of doctors working to Make Europe Healthy Again (MEHA) in order to replicate the movement in other countries.
In the paper, titled ‘Mandates and Lack of Transparency on COVID-19 Vaccine Safety has Fuelled Distrust – An Apology to Patients is Long Overdue,’ the doctors warned of the harms linked to Covid vaccination, and called for further investigation.
‘Perhaps the most egregious failure to learn from emerging evidence concerned vaccine safety signals,’ they wrote.
‘The original trials characterized the vaccines as safe, with mostly short-term, mild-to-moderate reactions. [But] within six months of roll-out, safety signals emerged, yet policies and recommendations largely persisted.’
Brianne Dressen (pictured), a mother of two from Utah, received AstraZeneca’s Covid vaccine as part of clinical trials in November 2020, at the age of 39. Within an hour, she developed a tingling sensation in her arm, and soon she was unable to walk
Lindy Ayers (pictured), a 31-year-old army veteran from Arkansas, has been wheel-chair bound since her second Pfizer shot in 2021 as part of the federal government’s military mandate
Lindy Ayers, 31, is shown above. She has now been diagnosed with an injury caused by a Covid vaccine
Older adults and those with underlying conditions were at much greater risk of hospitalization or death from Covid, compared to healthy children and younger adults who had a much lower risk of complications from the virus.
At the same time, however, the Covid vaccines were linked to myocarditis, or heart inflammation that is often mild and eases in a few days, but in rare cases can be fatal in younger individuals.
This raised concerns over whether the risks of vaccinating young adults and children against Covid outweighed the potential benefits.
The authors added: ‘It is understandable that, in the early days of the pandemic, decisions were made under uncertainty, guided by the best evidence available at the time. However, such justification cannot extend indefinitely.
‘Once new evidence emerged and challenged initial assumptions about the benefits and risks, the ethical obligation was to reassess policy accordingly.’
Dr Mattias Desmet, a clinical psychologist at the University of Ghent, Belgium, who was not an author on the paper, told the scientists in a press release that their paper described the ‘true tragedy’ that emerged during the Covid pandemic.
‘Society has placed its fate in the hands of a science that is no longer a science,’ he said, ‘a science that lost all sense of truth.’