COVID-19 Vaccine Benefits Outweigh Small Risks, Contrary to Flawed Claim From U.K. Cardiologist

The mRNA COVID-19 vaccines from Pfizer/BioNTech and Moderna have been shown to be safe and effective, both in clinical trials and in numerous studies conducted since their release. Vaccine safety monitoring systems have worked as expected to identify a few rare serious side effects, but evidence shows that the benefits of vaccination continue to outweigh any potential risks. 

COVID-19, the disease caused by SARS-CoV-2, has killed more than 1 million people in the United States, and more than 6 million have been hospitalized with the disease since the beginning of the pandemic, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Some fraction of people suffer from lingering or new symptoms after their infections that can last for months or years and be debilitating. 

But on an episode of “The Joe Rogan Experience” podcast that aired on April 29, Dr. Aseem Malhotra, a British cardiologist known for spreading misinformation about the vaccines, misleadingly claimed that data from the original mRNA COVID-19 vaccine trials showed the vaccines are more harmful than the disease. His claims are based on a problematic reanalysis of the trial data published in Vaccine last fall. 

“In my whole career, looking at all of the drugs and knowing about many different drugs that are prescribed, I’ve never seen something when you look at the data which has such poor effectiveness and such unprecedented harms,” Malhotra said, in a section of the three-hour-interview that went viral on social media.