An 18-minute video entitled “Dr. Peter McCollough in an expert hearing in the EU-parliament” was uploaded onto the online video platform Rumble on September 17, 2023 and since shared more than 1,100 times on Facebook.
In the video, McCullough, a cardiologist who has become known for spreading disinformation, talks about the pandemic and mRNA vaccines, claiming that patients were incorrectly treated and that the vaccines have caused a second “wave of injury”, following the first wave of Covid-19 itself. Ultimately, he calls for the vaccines to be banned.
The video comes with a Courageous Discourse logo, referring to McCullough’s website and newsletter.
The video has also circulated in other languages, including German, English and Slovak.
AFP has debunked several claims made by McCullough, for example here and here.
Contrary to McCullough’s claims, the European Medicines Agency (EMA) states that millions of lives have been saved by Covid vaccines (archived version) and there is “no evidence of an increase in deaths related to Covid-19 vaccination in any age group” (archived version).
As the agency explains, the vaccination programme against Covid-19 is the largest of its kind in history, with almost 1 billion doses of the vaccines administered in the EU and EEA. Researchers have estimated (archived link) that during the first year of Covid-19 vaccination the vaccines more than halved the global death toll due to Covid-19. The WHO has estimated that there were 14.9 million excess deaths associated with the pandemic in 2020 and 2021 (archived version).
In an email to AFP on September 26, a spokesperson explained that “before their authorisation, the vaccines were tested in tens of thousands of participants in randomised controlled clinical trials to confirm they met EMA’s scientific standards for safety, efficacy and quality”.
“With a COVID-19 death toll of over 6.9 million people worldwide reported to WHO, and over 23 million estimated excess deaths linked to the pandemic, with still unknown long-term consequences of the disease, the human cost of natural immunity to COVID-19, letting the virus infect an unprotected population, is not tolerable,” they said.
On July 12, 2023, the European Parliament stated in a resolution (archived version) that the vaccines authorised in the EU were effective in avoiding serious disease and death.
McCullough’s September talk is rife with more specific misleading and false claims. Experts interviewed by AFP said that so far the benefits associated with Covid vaccines outweigh their risks, with severe adverse effects rare and lesser than those associated with the illness itself. Research into the benefits and risks of the vaccines continues, they said.
Talk not an official hearing
The video title refers to an “expert hearing” at the EU parliament, and its description links to MEP Christine Anderson’s website, which advertised an “expert hearing in the EU Parliament” on September 13, 2023 entitled “Health & Democracy under WHO’s new proposed rules”. It lists several speakers as well as five MEPs as hosts. Behind McCullough, a banner with the German text “Identitat und Demokratie” is visible, referring to a far-right group of MEPs.
However, the talk was not an official hearing.
As explained on the parliament’s website, a parliamentary committee is “permitted to organise a hearing with experts, where this is considered essential to its work on a particular subject”, explaining that “most committees organise regular hearings, as they allow them to hear from experts and hold discussions on the key issues.”
The website lists all committee hearings. There are no hearings listed for September 13 when the event involving McCullough took place.
In an email to AFP on September 28, the European Parliament press service confirmed that the event “was not an official event of the European Parliament and it was not organised nor funded by the European Parliament”.
“It would seem that some MEPs took part in the event. As mentioned in Article 2 of the EP Rules of Procedure, Members of the European Parliament ‘shall exercise their mandate freely and independently, shall not be bound by any instructions and shall not receive a binding mandate,'” they added.
Amount of vaccine mRNA declines over time
During his talk, McCullough makes several misleading and false claims about the safety of Covid mRNA-vaccines.
mRNA-vaccines against Covid – that is, Pfizer BioNTech’s and Moderna’s vaccines – contain mRNA which instructs the recipient’s cells to produce spike protein, a protein that enables the coronavirus to enter cells. The immune system starts to produce antibodies and specific white blood cells against the protein, so that if it later encounters the actual virus, it will produce an immune response. Other vaccines, such as the AstraZeneca and Janssen vaccines, are so-called viral vector vaccines, which also contain the genetic instructions for the protein, but they come in a weakened virus. Protein-based Covid vaccines, such as Novavax’s vaccine, are in turn based on specific parts of the virus that the immune system must recognise to create a response, coming with a laboratory-made protein fragment.
From autumn 2023, Sweden’s Medical Product’s Agency recommends vaccination against Covid-19 with Pfizer’s mRNA vaccine (Comirnaty) or Novavax’s protein-based vaccine (Nuvaxovid).
In the video, McCullough claims that mRNA and spike protein continue circulating in the body, and that mRNA cannot be broken down, resulting in a range of adverse effects. He alleges that “there’s not a single study showing that the messenger RNA is broken down.” However, according to experts, this is not correct.
Frederic Altare, from Inserm, France’s National Institute of Health and Medical Research, told AFP in July 2023 that the “production of spike protein is very transitory, which is enough to induce a particular immune reaction to spike, but the injected RNA as well as the proteins the production of which it induced are disintegrated very quickly.” On September 5, 2023, he added that recently “certain modifications made to the vaccine RNA as well as to the spike protein it produces have improved the life expectancy of both the RNA and the protein it produces, in order to improve their capacity to activate a stronger immune response.” However, he added that only pieces of this spike protein could remain in the body, and that “for the time being nobody has shown any activity from these kinds of fragments”.
A spokesperson for the Swedish Medical Products Agency said in an email on September 29 that free mRNA is eliminated fast by RNA-breaking enzymes, whereas because a vaccine has mRNA within lipid particles, the mRNA is protected for as long as the particles are intact, meaning that mRNA can be detected for longer.
Bowen Li, an assistant professor at the University of Toronto specialising in RNA vaccines and therapeutics, agreed. “mRNA breaks down quickly in tissues and blood, often within days, due to its inherent fragility,” he told AFP on October 6. “This characteristic explains the meticulous handling and strict cold storage requirements for mRNA vaccines.”
The spokesperson also said that the breakdown of mRNA and spike protein has been observed empirically, contrary to McCullough’s claim. “The small amounts of spike protein that are produced make it hard to determine how quickly it is eliminated. Therefore a study has been done where one used mRNA for a protein that can be detected through emitting light (luciferase). The maximal expression of the protein was seen after 9 hours. After 9 days the protein could still be detected but the amount was more than 1,000 times lower than after 9 hours.”
In addition, this fact check by Health Feedback (archived version) lists a number of studies pointing to the limited lifespan of vaccine mRNA.
McCullough also refers to “papers by Castruita” showing “mRNA circulating for a month” as evidence for his claims.
He does not give exact references for the research he cites, but an online search brings up a study (archived version) by Castruita et al., published in APMIS, a journal of pathology, microbiology and immunology, in March 2023.
The researchers found “full-length or traces of SARS-CoV-2 spike mRNA vaccine sequences” in the blood up to 28 days after Covid-19 vaccination in 10 out of 108 samples from patients with chronic hepatitis C. However, the findings cannot be used to support McCullough’s argument that vaccine mRNA does not disappear from the body.
“There is no evidence for long term persistence over time,” Henrik Westh, the corresponding author for the paper and clinical professor at the Department of Clinical Medicine at the University of Copenhagen, told AFP on September 29. He explained that the coverage, or how much vaccine is seen, is “high just after vaccination, declines over time and is gone after 28 days in our cohort of patients”.
“There are no data on any side effects associated with our findings. I believe in fact that it could be an advantage for the immune response to Covid vaccination,” he said.
( AFP / John SAEKI, Laurence CHU)
Higher risk of cardiovascular complications with Covid-19 than vaccines
McCullough goes on to claim that the vaccine spike protein causes “four major domains of disease”. He names “cardiovascular disease” as the first domain, mentioning myocarditis, “acceleration of atherosclerotic cardiovascular disease”, heart attacks or “cardiovascular arrest”, postural orthostatic tachycardia syndrome (POTS), aortic dissection, atrial fibrillation and other arrhythmias.
However, there is a higher risk of cardiovascular complications with Covid-19 than the vaccines, experts say.
Of the conditions mentioned by McCullough, only myocarditis — inflammation of the heart muscle — along with pericarditis – inflammation of the lining around the heart – are noted in the Pfizer (archived version) and Moderna (archived version) product information documents. Both of them come under “very rare” side effects in the documents as well as on EMA‘s website.
This was confirmed by Peter Liu, vice president of research and chief scientific officer at the University of Ottawa Heart Institute, in an interview with AFP on October 4. “It is true that there are these rare incidences of myocarditis and pericarditis following the mRNA vaccines and a little more common with Moderna than Pfizer initially and generally in young men,” he said. “The incidence is still very, very low, less than eight per million.”
“The risk for myocarditis exists for virtually all viral diseases, and even if Covid didn’t have as big a risk for myocarditis per case as for example influenza infection, there were many cases of myocarditis globally because of the illness because so many got ill,” Mats Borjesson, a professor at the University of Gothenburg, told AFP on October 10. He specialises in sports cardiology, among other things.
“The risk of myocarditis in the case of Covid infection is clearly higher, which altogether leads to a clearly reduced risk of myocarditis if you have been vaccinated,” he said. “Myocarditis secondary to vaccination also means a milder form of myocarditis than secondary to infection.”
A Nordic study (archived version) published in May 2022 found that 9-28 people in 100,000 contracted myocarditis after Moderna’s vaccine, and 4-7 in 100,000 after Pfizer’s vaccine. Cases were “very rare” and most common among 16-24-year-old men. Most of the instances were found to be mild.
In October 2021, the Public Health Agency in Sweden decided to stop giving the Moderna vaccine to those born in 1991 or later, citing the risk of myocarditis as a reason. It pointed out, however, that the “risk for an individual to be affected is very small”.
McCullough cites a paper he has co-authored, allegedly showing that 100% of deaths after vaccination where myocarditis is suspected are due to the vaccine. AFP identified the paper as a preprint published in 2023, looking at 28 autopsy cases with “COVID-19 vaccine-induced myocarditis as a possible cause of death”. Preprints have not undergone peer review, and their quality can vary vastly.
Stuart Ray, a professor of medicine at Johns Hopkins University who specialises in virology, pointed out several issues with the preprint. “It is rife with inaccurate statements about COVID-19 vaccines and misleading citation of sources. The report’s retrospective analysis of 28 autopsies conducted during a time period associated with 1 billion doses of vaccine does not provide evidence of a causal link between vaccination and cardiovascular complications. The authors do not adequately address confounding causes and other important limitations,” he told AFP on October 4.
Liu added that in many of the cases cited in the paper, the patients were in a very old age category. The age is not compatible with myocarditis associated with vaccines, he said.
As for the other complications mentioned by McCullough, Liu explained that while they are sometimes reported post-vaccination, they are common conditions and associations with the vaccines are incidental.
“Whether vaccines could also cause other serious cardiovascular events, like the infection itself does, has been debated,” Borjesson said. “Case reports have been written (atrial fibrillation etc.) but there is a lack of population-based studies that support this. A study showed no increase in myocardial infarction after vaccination while another study showed a smaller risk of myocardial infarction after Covid-19 in fully-vaccinated people. When it comes to stroke, there have been conflicting results (increased and decreased risk).”
Liu explained that there is some discussion of the risks with Covid-19 itself. “For example, he talks about the acceleration of atherosclerosis or orthostatic tachycardia syndrome and atrial arrhythmias. These are actually associated with Covid. These are actually some of the features of long Covid,” he said of McCullough’s claims.
Ray agreed. “Vaccination to prevent COVID-19 is very uncommonly associated with cardiovascular complications — and the latter are more commonly associated with COVID-19,” he said.
McCullough goes on to claim that the “cardiovascular domain of damage in the human body from the vaccine is substantial, more than anything we’ve ever seen with cholesterol, high blood pressure, diabetes.”
Liu referred to a paper (archived version) by the Global Cardiovascular Risk Consortium published in The New England Journal of Medicine in October 2023, which identified five common risk factors for cardiovascular disease.
“Particularly high blood pressure is the leading cause, high cholesterol is next, diabetes as the major driver of the cardiovascular mortality worldwide,” Liu said of the findings. “You have to keep in mind that high blood pressure occurs in one in four people,” he said, adding that heart attacks and strokes are not seen in the numbers that would be expected if they were associated with the vaccines as McCullough claims.
Ray confirmed this. “With the exception of rare cases of myocarditis (which is more strongly associated with COVID-19 infection than with the vaccines), there is no rigorous evidence to support the suggestion that mRNA vaccination to prevent COVID-19 carries risk of cardiovascular [complications] comparable to high cholesterol levels, high blood pressure, or diabetes mellitus.”
McCullough also links myocarditis caused by the vaccines to cardiac arrests among young athletes. AFP has debunked several similar claims in the past, for example here and here.
( AFP / Jonathan NACKSTRAND)
Risk of blood clots higher with Covid than vaccines
McCullough also mentions “blood clots like we’ve never seen before”. He claims that the spike protein is “the most thrombogenic protein we’ve ever seen in human medicine”.
Clotting complications have been associated with vaccines against Covid, but these have been linked to the AstraZeneca and Janssen vaccines, both viral vector vaccines, rather than the mRNA vaccines.
“Some adenovirus vector based COVID-19 vaccines have, rarely, been associated with more serious blood clotting complications. Serious blood clotting complications are not strongly associated with mRNA vaccination,” Ray said.
Liu added that “there is actually this cerebral venous thrombosis risk which is very, very low, which occurs more commonly in middle-aged women (…) but is actually associated with the AstraZeneca vaccine which is a more traditional viral based vaccine.”
Borjesson said there was “no evidence” for the description of spike protein as the “most thrombogenic protein”.
Liu explained that blood-clotting is a more common complication in patients infected with Covid-19, commonly believed to be linked to the ACE2 receptor, used by the virus to enter the target cells.
Ray also underlined that blood clots are more common with Covid-19 rather than vaccines. “A striking feature of the initial wave of COVID-19 was clotting complications – and available evidence suggests that mRNA vaccination to prevent COVID-19 is far less strongly associated with blood clotting than the disease they prevent,” he said.
AFP has fact-checked several claims about vaccines and blood clots, for example here and here.
Neurological and immunological side effects very rarely associated with adenovirus vaccines
The two other so-called domains of disease McCullough mentions are neurological and immunological side effects. More specifically, he lists stroke, Guillain-Barré syndrome, ascending paralysis, small fiber neuropathy, numbness and tingling, ringing in the ears and headaches as examples of the former, and vaccine induced thrombotic thrombocytopenia and multisystem inflammatory disorder as examples of the latter.
However, while possible links between vaccines and many conditions are researched, causal links between mRNA vaccines and most of the conditions have not been established.
Of the conditions listed my McCullough, only headaches are mentioned in the Pfizer and Moderna production information documents, under “very common side effects”.
AFP showed the list of adverse effects to the Swedish Medicinal Products Agency. “A very large number of different kinds of events, including what is listed in the question, have been reviewed for a possible causal link with the Covid-19 vaccines. For those types of events where a causal relationship seems plausible, they are classified as side effects and listed in the product information,” they said, adding that other cases are monitored. “It is important to remember that these vaccines have been given to a very large number of individuals around the world (millions) and that a great number of these individuals have had other illnesses before vaccination and/ or are affected by (worsened) illness at some point after vaccination even if there is no causal relationship.”
Li agreed. “It’s essential to distinguish between events that occur after vaccination and events caused by the vaccine,” he said, explaining that while rare side effects beyond the commonly observed ones have been reported, the causal relationship between the vaccine and many of the severe conditions listed by McCullough is not established.
EMA’s safety committee looked into cases of multisystem inflammatory syndrome, a rare condition affecting many parts of the body, reported after Covid vaccination, but to date concluded there was insufficient evidence on a possible link between the vaccines and the syndrome.
Some of the conditions mentioned by McCullough have been linked to other Covid vaccines than the mRNA ones. The product information for both the Janssen (archived version) and AstraZeneca (archived version) vaccines mention Guillain-Barré syndrome and blood clots in combination with low level of blood platelets, or thrombocytopenia, as “very rare” side effects. This is confirmed by EMA‘s website. As explained on the 1177 website, in Guillain-Barré syndrome the immune system attacks the nerves; it can be life-threatening, but most patients recover with correct treatment.
Flawed studies cited as support
In addition to the preprint on myocarditis he co-authored, McCullough also uses other papers to support his claims about vaccines.
One is a paper by “Schmeling and colleagues from Denmark” which McCullough says shows that 30% of people who take the vaccine have no side effects, 70% have moderate side effects and 4.2% have serious side effects, depending on the vaccine batch.
The only relevant paper AFP could find is this research letter in the European Journal of Clinical Investigation, entitled “Batch-dependent safety of the BNT162b2 mRNA COVID-19 vaccine” and published in March 2023. It looked at rates of suspected adverse effects between different batches of the Pfizer vaccine administered in Denmark.
The exact figures mentioned by McCullough are not found in the letter, but it argues that 4.22% of all vaccines doses represented batches associated with most suspected adverse effects, 63.69% batches with the next most effects and 32.09% the least. So, the 4.22% does not refer to the proportion of people who have serious side effects, contrary to McCullough’s claims.
What is more, the letter mentions as one of its limitations that the data it uses, the Danish Medical Agency’s reporting system for suspected adverse effects (SAE), is a “passive reporting system” and that “reports from these systems are subject to reporting biases, with potential for both under- and over-reporting, as well as incomplete data and variable quality of the reported information”. The authors conclude that because of this, “signals detected by these systems (…) generally cannot be used to establish causality.”
Li agreed. “They didn’t account for factors like prior COVID-19 history, specific types of SAEs, or demographics of SAE cases,” he said, adding that “subsequent, more extensive studies would be needed to corroborate or challenge these findings.”
Moreover, in this article (archived version) in Sundhedspolitisk Tidsskrift, a Danish paper focussing on health policy, experts point to a number of errors in the study’s statistical methods and the data it is based on. For example, the batches with more reported potential side effects were the first batches delivered to Denmark and administered to those most vulnerable to Covid-19.
The Swedish Medical Products Agency told AFP that they had not seen any evidence to support the conclusions drawn about certain batches causing more adverse effects than others.
McCullough also claims that the “largest autopsy study ever assembled of death after Covid-19 vaccination worldwide”, which he was an author of, found that 73.9% of the deaths after vaccination are due to the vaccine.
AFP fact-checked the study in July, interviewing experts who pointed to flawed methodology and doubts about the authors’ credentials. The preprint, archived here, appeared first on a preprint server associated with The Lancet, but was then removed as its methodology did not support its conclusions.
Vaccines considered safer than immunity through infection
Alongside the claims about the mRNA vaccines, McCullough also addresses questions about the treatment of Covid. He alleges that only early treatment and acquiring natural immunity could prevent hospitalisation and death, and that “the majority of hospitalizations and deaths were completely avoidable in the highest risk patients with early intervention”, such as virucidal nasal sprays, gargles as well as intravenous and oral drugs administered at home.
However, as explained by the Swedish Medical Products Agency, it is safer to be vaccinated than to be infected with Covid. “Covid-19 has proved to be a serious and unpredictable disease, generating new diagnoses in healthcare, such as long Covid,” it says.
The EMA spokesperson told AFP that while natural immunity is effective, it wanes over time and entails the potential risk of severe disease. “While waning also happens with vaccination, vaccine boosters reinforce the ability of the body to build resistance against the disease without having to be exposed to potentially severe outcomes of the disease again,” they said.
McCullough does not specify what drugs “administered at home” he means. Standard treatment advice includes over-the-counter medicines such as paracetamol or ibuprofen for fever, while other medication is available to hospitalised patients, as explained on the 1177 website on Covid-19.
AFP debunked claims about gargling as a prevention method for Covid early on in the pandemic, including here. Both EMA and the Swedish Medicines Agency confirmed to AFP that currently there are no virucidal nasal sprays available for the treatment of Covid.
“No nasal spray or mouth wash with anti-septic or virucidal properties has demonstrated efficacy in COVID-19 patients, even at the earliest stage of the disease,” the EMA spokesperson said.
( AFP / John SAEKI, Laurence CHU, Janis LATVELS)
Unreliable associations
At the end of his talk, McCullough mentions that the Association of American Physicians and Surgeons (AAPS) and World Council for Health advocate for the ban of vaccines.
The AAPS issued a statement in March 2023 calling for a “moratorium” on “Covid-19 shot mandates and genetic injections”, as it describes vaccines, while the World Council of Health claimed that the vaccines were “unsafe” as early as 2021.
AFP has previously fact-checked both the AAPS and the World Council for Health for sharing vaccine misinformation.
McCullough also notes that he moderated a session at the US senate on December 7, 2022, where the expert panel concluded that all Covid vaccines should be withdrawn. A Google search brings up a press release about a roundtable discussion organised by Senator Ron Johnson on that day, with a video of the event on Johnson’s Rumble channel showing McCullough in attendance. Speakers notably included Robert Malone, whose false claims about Covid vaccines AFP has debunked several times before. AFP has also fact-checked claims made during Johnson’s roundtables previously.
Anna HOLLINGSWORTH
AFP Finland
Translated and adapted by Anna Maria JAKUBEK
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