A leading Australian cardiologist has hit back at calls to pull the mRNA Covid vaccines from the market due to possible heart risks, saying there is “no link” to cardiac deaths as claimed by a British doctor this week.
Professor Jason Kovacic, executive director of the Victor Chang Cardiac Research Institute and practising clinical cardiologist at St Vincent’s Hospital in Sydney, was responding to comments by Dr Aseem Malhotra, a prominent critic of mRNA vaccines who is currently on a speaking tour of Australia.
The controversial British cardiologist this week told news.com.au that the rollout of the Pfizer and Moderna shots should be suspended pending an inquiry into emerging safety evidence, that prior vaccines “have been pulled for much less”, and suggested the Therapeutic Goods Administration (TGA) had been involved in a “cover-up” of adverse event data.
But with Australia recording tens of thousands of new Covid cases a week as winter begins, and very low rates of booster vaccine take-up, a spokeswoman for the Victor Chang Institute said “we should be doing everything we can to encourage people to have boosters and not scare them unnecessarily”.
‘Not reputable’
“There’s a lot of information out there — some is good and reputable and some is not so reputable — and I think it’s very confusing to the public to have all of these people saying different things,” Prof Kovacic said.
He pushed back at suggestions the medicines regulator or health profession had anything to gain from covering up data, highlighting the well publicised dangers of blood clotting linked to AstraZeneca that ultimately led to the vaccine being discontinued in Australia.
“That was clearly and transparently reported by the TGA and in the media,” he said.
“My mother, she got a blood clot from AstraZeneca and is still taking blood thinners to this day. Nevertheless, she’s gone on to have other vaccines since. There was clear and transparent reporting and action was taken, the government ordering in supplies of Pfizer and Moderna, such that use of that vaccine was no longer necessary. That case study has been forgotten in the narrative of everything else that’s going on. The medical profession, when things don’t go as we’d like, we have no problem acknowledging it.”
Prof Kovacic said similarly, incidents of myocarditis and pericarditis — inflammation of the heart or lining around the heart — from mRNA vaccines had been “widely and openly reported”.
According to the TGA, myocarditis is reported in one to two out of every 100,000 people who receive Pfizer or Moderna, but young men and boys are more at risk.
The medicines regulator has to date identified 14 reports where the cause of death was linked to vaccination, from 986 reports received and reviewed, with only one — 21-year-old Melbourne student Natalie Boyce — linked to heart complications from an mRNA vaccine.
“I’ve got a couple of cases of possible mRNA vaccine-related myocarditis — males, fairly young, who came in with some mild to moderate chest pain — they were very mild and went home within 48 hours from hospital and have been fine since,” Prof Kovacic said.
“I have many more patients that have myocarditis related to Covid, and some of them are still struggling. I’ve got a lot more patients I’m seeing on an ongoing basis with Covid-related myocarditis, and I’m actually not seeing any of the vaccine-related cases.”
He said nationwide there had been “one of two reports of severe myocarditis” from mRNA vaccines and one death, “but it’s out there in the public domain, no one’s hiding [anything]”.
No death link
Meanwhile, he said claims by Dr Malhotra about vaccines causing sudden cardiac death had been disproved by a recent Australian study.
Dr Malhotra, 45, a National Health Service-trained consultant cardiologist and prominent public health commentator for many years in the UK, appeared on breakfast TV in 2021 to encourage Britons to get vaccinated.
But in July 2021, his father, Dr Kailash Chand, former deputy chair of the British Medical Association (BMA) died unexpectedly of a cardiac arrest at 73.
“At the time people were trolling me, saying it was the vaccine, and I got really angry and blocked them, because that was not my mindset — but then I started to notice increased incidences in cardiac deaths and I started to wonder,” he told The Telegraph earlier this year.
He would come to attribute the death of his father, who he described as “one of the fittest guys I knew”, to the Covid booster shot six months earlier.
Dr Malhotra has since courted controversy with inflammatory statements on social media linking high-profile deaths or injuries to the vaccine, and has also suggested unusually high excess death rates in many developed countries are due to the vaccination rollout — a claim widely disputed by experts.
“Basically, all patients with unexpected heart attacks or cardiac arrests have to be seen as being caused by the vaccine until proven otherwise — even several months later, so even, I would say, up to two years since having the vax,” he said this week.
“As a cardiologist, it is unusual to see sudden cardiac death. We have a mechanism of action, it would be unscientific not to include it as a potential cause.”
But Prof Kovacic said a study published in the journal Circulation earlier this year by Dr Elizabeth Paratz from Melbourne’s Baker Heart and Diabetes Institute showed the vaccination rollout was not associated with any increase in out-of-hospital cardiac arrests (OHCA) in Victoria.
“Our statewide analysis of OHCA in young people did not demonstrate increased rates of overall OHCA, myocarditis causing OHCA, or unascertained OHCA during the Covid-19 pandemic or after the introduction of nationally mandated Covid-19 vaccination,” Dr Paratz wrote in the paper.
“Causes of death in young people experiencing fatal OHCA within 30 days of their Covid-19 vaccination were consistent with pre pandemic causative profiles.”
Prof Kovacic said the data was “very, very clear”.
“There was an absolute flatline or stable rate of out-of-hospital cardiac arrest through those three time periods at around 80 to 90 per month, with no change whatsoever either with Covid or with Covid and vaccination,” he said.
“Bearing in mind that during that period there were millions of people getting vaccinated in Victoria, I think this paper is really telling. It’s a well conducted study that really does prove convincingly there’s no link.”
Vaccine injuries ‘regrettable’
Prof Kovacic did not deny there were genuine vaccine injuries, but maintained that the benefits far outweighed the risks.
He conceded that despite any risk-benefit calculation, Covid vaccination was uniquely controversial because it was mandated.
“It is challenging and it’s a difficult area and we were never going to get consensus agreement at the time, but I think there are historical examples of spectacularly successful mandates that today as a community we wholeheartedly endorse,” he said.
“I think legislation to make seatbelt-wearing compulsory is a good thing, things like blood alcohol limits for driving, crash helmet wearing for motorcyclists — we support those for obvious reasons that it saves lives. It gets more difficult when there are potential downsides to that mandate, having a vaccination there are definite risks and complications.”
But he argued vaccine mandates were “made for the greater public good”.
“I fully appreciate and recognise that some people in good faith adhered to mandates, got a vaccination and had a complication … however as a healthcare provider I can see the need for the greater good of society,” he said.
“We were in severe lockdowns, it was an unprecedented time, and we’ve pulled through it. Whilst there are definitely individuals that were harmed through vaccination, as a global community we’ve pulled through pretty well.”
Asked what he would say to someone like Gareth O’Gradie, a Melbourne primary school teacher left permanently disabled with part of his heart removed after developing severe pericarditis from the Pfizer vaccine, Prof Kovacic said “sorry” was “not good enough”.
“Balancing this is always going to be really difficult,” he said.
“I don’t think there is ever going to be an adequate response to those people that did have a serious reaction to the vaccination. Those people deserve all the compassion and care we can muster. It’s very unfortunate and regrettable.”
But he said the alternative “would have been to have ongoing lockdowns for two-and-a-half years in order to avoid widespread infection and death across the community”.
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“If we’d extended those lockdowns … the mental health issues, suicides, domestic violence, depression, all the things that would have happened have to be juxtaposed against that,” he said.
“I remember in the peak of Covid going into the ICU, [there were] 20 patients in the ICU and 19 were unvaccinated. It was a very clear picture that vaccination was saving lives.”
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