A CLIP SPREAD by Irish social media accounts showing a doctor telling a US Senator that mRNA vaccines should be taken off the market is based on a long-debunked misreading of official death statistics.
“The pathway to preventing more harm is: all the vaccines need to be pulled off the market and withdrawn. That needs to happen immediately,” Dr Peter McCullough says in the clip, backed by the theme tune for Stranger Things. “What’s at stake here is death. And the deaths that were reported by Mr Dowd and others.”
The footage is taken from a three-hour roundtable discussion, hosted by US Senator Ron Johnson, which featured many known spreaders of misinformation about Covid-19 vaccines, including McCullough, who said in October his board certifications in internal medicine and cardiology were being revoked by the American Board of Internal Medicine – though this process seems to be ongoing.
McCullough is known for spreading false and outrageous claims about Covid-19 and vaccines, including making headlines by appearing on the Joe Rogan podcast where he claimed, among other things, that the Covid-19 pandemic was planned; vaccines were fatal and weren’t safety tested and killed thousands; that you can’t catch Covid-19 twice; and that other treatments for Covid-19 were intentionally suppressed in order to spread fear and death; leading to controversy for both Rogan and Spotify, who were accused of helping to spread misinformation.
The host of the roundtable, Senator Ron Johnson, has held many similar discussions, which featured many of the same speakers, including McCullough, whose participants came to similar conclusions: that vaccines are unsafe and should be discontinued in favour of disproven treatments like ivermectin and hydroxychloroquine.
However, while the past utterances of the people featured in the video might give us reason to be sceptical, this does not disprove the claim made by McCullough in the video, that vaccines should be taken off the market because of the “deaths that were reported by Mr Dowd”.
This is a reference to Edward Dowd who had spoken earlier at the same event.
Dowd is described in the video as a former senior investment advisor; he has no medical experience or training listed on his LinkedIn page (though has written a book called Cause Unknown: The Epidemic of Sudden Deaths in 2021 & 2022).
Dowd claims in the video that between 2020 and 2021 there was a shift in “excess mortality from old to young. In 2020, it was mostly old people”.
Dowd illustrates this with a chart which appears to show that, in the third quarter of 2021, people aged 25-44 died at a much higher rate than would have been expected (though the same chart shows they also died at consistently high rates throughout 2020, before the vaccines were rolled out to that age group).
Dowd suggests that, because these deaths coincided with vaccine mandates in the United States, the vaccines must be the cause.
“The only thing that changed to detrimentally affect the employed versus the much less healthy general population, is vaccines and mandates,” Dowd sums up. “Why are our health authorities still pushing this vaccine?”
However, this claim is old, and has been debunked by both Reuters and AP since March.
The data presented in the chart is not publicly available, though one doctor who appears to have successfully reverse engineered it using CDC data says it does not account for seasonal variation.
While the chart may not accurately reflect the extent of excess deaths, CDC data does show that there were significant excess deaths in the third quarter of 2021.
However, CDC data also shows that this was not during a time of high vaccine uptake in the 25-49 age group, whose uptake rate had peaked months before the spike in excess deaths began.
If a delayed response to the vaccine was responsible for the deaths, we might expect to see similar peaks in the number of deaths in older groups, who had received the vaccines earlier, in the second quarter of that year. No such pattern appears on Dowd’s chart.
CDC data also shows that, while there were significant excess deaths in the third quarter of 2021, so too were there through 2020, before the vaccines were first administered.
This number shrinks dramatically toward the baseline when deaths caused by Covid-19 are excluded.
In other words, the excess throughout 2020 are largely explained by Covid, and the jump again in excess deaths in the third quarter of 2021 corresponds with the deadly Delta wave that swept through the United States.
Moreover, analyses of the deaths during this time show that vaccinated people were far less likely to test positive for Covid or be hospitalised than vaccinated people.
As such, we find the claim in the shared video clip, that vaccines need to be pulled off the market and withdrawn as they are causing harm, is based on a misreading of statistics, and is false.
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