Social media platforms target cardiologist who went from booster to critic of COVID vaccines
Aseem Malhotra, who recently wrote an unusual first-person medical paper calling for a "pause and reappraisal of global vaccination policies for COVID-19," has become increasingly vocal in his skepticism of the jabs since his healthy father's inexplicable cardiac death six months after vaccination.
In a phone interview with Just the News, he called COVID vaccines "one of the worst pharmaceutical interventions in the history of medicine" whose harm is so thoroughly documented that "it shouldn't even be worthy of debate" to pause vaccination campaigns.
The only explanation in his mind is "the increasing unchecked power of Big Pharma over the last two decades" and "willful blindness" of policymakers and regulators.
Malhotra, who previously campaigned to tax sugary drinks and against overprescription of statins, told Just the News he never faced censorship before COVID.
Facebook locked him out of his account for 24 hours after he shared Florida Surgeon General Joseph Ladapo's controversial assessment of post-vaccination cardiac deaths in young men, Malhotra told GB News. Twitter briefly censored Ladapo's tweet thread as well.
Facebook extended the lockout another few days, Malhotra said, after finding a two-week-old video where he called for a pause on COVID vaccination until "all the raw data" on trials "has been released for independent analysis." He accused Facebook of "trawling through" his account "looking for misinformation."
It's not Malhotra's first tiff with social media, he told Just the News. Facebook censored him last year for sharing a Journal of the American Medical Association Pediatrics study, later retracted, that found dangerously high carbon-dioxide intake in masked schoolchildren. Facebook threatened to penalize users for sharing the paper even before its retraction.
LinkedIn permanently suspended him last year for sharing his appearance on GB News discussing a possible link between mRNA vaccination and heart attacks, Malhotra said.
While LinkedIn said he could appeal the decision, it didn't respond to multiple appeals he filed. "I suspect this is [due to] Bill Gates," a major funder of vaccine research and former chairman of LinkedIn parent Microsoft, he said.
His deplatforming by LinkedIn made Malhotra "a little bit more careful" about what he said, given the anonymous complaints filed against him with the General Medical Council and "trolls" claiming he's spreading misinformation.
But Malhotra is pleased that he has not otherwise been canceled. He remains visiting professor of evidence-based medicine at Brazil's Bahiana School of Medicine and Public Health, president of the Scientific Advisory Committee of the U.K. Public Health Collaboration charity and a trustee of The King's Fund, which advises the U.K. government and just invited him to its annual conference.
Other medical professionals who challenge COVID conventional wisdom have faced puzzling apparent restrictions on their social media usage.