Doctor makes misleading Covid vaccine claims on Diary of a CEO podcast
In a recent interview with the businessman and television personality Steven Bartlett, a doctor made two misleading claims about Covid-19 vaccines that are similar to those we have fact checked before. The conversation took place on Mr Bartlett’s chart-topping Diary of a CEO podcast. At the time of writing it has been viewed more than 650,000 times on YouTube alone.
We’ve also seen links to the podcast shared on Facebook.
Dr Aseem Malhotra, a cardiologist we have fact checked in the past, spoke about a range of subjects in the interview. We analysed the video using our AI tools and while we’ve not attempted to check all the claims in the interview, have focused here on two misleading claims about the Covid-19 vaccines.
We’ve often written about vaccine misinformation, which can seriously harm people if they use it to make decisions about their health.
We have contacted Dr Malhotra and the Diary of a CEO podcast for comment.
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Covid-19 vaccines saved far more lives than they cost
At one point Mr Bartlett asked Dr Malhotra: “Do you believe that if we hadn’t introduced the vaccine, more or less people would have survived Covid?… Was it a net positive that we had a vaccine?”
Dr Malhotra replied to this: “I have come to the conclusion that the Covid vaccine introduction has had a catastrophic net negative effect on the population and society.”
This clip also appeared at the beginning of the video on YouTube.
Later, Mr Bartlett asks: “Do you think there would have been less deaths overall if we hadn’t had a vaccine?”
In response to this, Dr Malhotra says: “Yes.”
As we said in a previous fact check of Dr Malhotra in January 2023, there is clear evidence that the Covid vaccines prevented overwhelmingly more deaths than they caused.
Office for National Statistics (ONS) data shows that, in England, 63 deaths involving Covid vaccines were registered up to July 2023. But analysis from the UK Health Security Agency found that the vaccines prevented 127,500 deaths in England up to 24 September 2021.
Commenting on another piece of analysis it carried out, a senior ONS statistician also said: “Whilst vaccination carries some risks, these need to be assessed in light of its benefits. Our analysis shows that the risk of death is greatly increased following a positive test for COVID-19 even in young people and many studies show that vaccines are highly effective at preventing hospitalisation or death following COVID-19 infection.”
A WHO study published earlier this year found that “COVID-19 vaccines have reduced deaths due to the pandemic by at least 57%, saving more than 1.4 million lives in the WHO European Region”.
Circulation article corrected
At another point in the interview, Dr Malhotra mentions a scientific article about Covid-19 vaccines.
He says: “A publication appeared in the journal Circulation, which is considered the premier cardiology journal, and a cardiologist called Steven Gundry… published an abstract where he looked at several hundred of his patients who had taken the Covid vaccines… Within eight weeks of taking those jabs, their baseline risk went from 11% chance of a heart attack in five years to 25% chance.”
This appears to be a reference to an article by Dr Steven Gundry that was published in Circulation in November 2021, and made these claims.
However, as we wrote when Dr Malhotra cited the article before, it was given an expression of concern by the journal soon afterwards. In its note at the time, the journal said there were “potential errors”, adding: “Specifically, there are several typographical errors, there is no data in the abstract regarding myocardial T-cell infiltration, there are no statistical analyses for significance provided, and the author is not clear that only anecdotal data was used.”
The following month the abstract was corrected in a number of significant ways. One of the changes in the corrected version of the article made clear that the numbers Dr Malhotra cited were “based on data which has not been validated in this population”.
We could not find any examples of Dr Malhotra mentioning this important context in the interview.
