COVID-19
Study showing ‘high likelihood’ of link between COVID vaccines and death republished in peer-reviewed journal

From LifeSiteNews
By Dr. Suzanne Burdick, The Defender
The largest COVID-19 vaccine autopsy study to date has been republished in a peer-reviewed journal after twice being censored. The study’s lead author said it provides ‘robust evidence’ that the vaccines can cause death, meeting the FDA’s criteria for ‘an immediate market withdrawal.’
The largest COVID-19 vaccine autopsy study to date has been republished in a peer-reviewed journal — after twice being censored, according to Nicolas Hulscher, the paper’s lead author and an epidemiologist at the McCullough Foundation.
Science, Public Health Policy and the Law on Nov. 17 published the study, which had been previously withdrawn from Preprints with The Lancet and Forensic Science International.
Hulscher told The Defender the study’s republication signals a “pivotal victory for transparency and accountability in science.” It also marks “a significant setback” for actors in the biopharmaceutical complex and “their Academic Publishing Cartel,” Hulscher said.
Hulscher’s co-authors include Dr. Harvey Risch, Dr. Peter A. McCullough and Dr. William Makis.
Hulscher told The Defender the study provides “robust evidence that COVID-19 vaccines can cause death. This means that the FDA’s [U.S. Food and Drug Administration] criteria for a Class I recall have been fulfilled, warranting an immediate market withdrawal.”
The FDA defines a Class I product recall as “a situation in which there is a reasonable probability that the use of or exposure to a violative product will cause serious adverse health consequences or death.”
Risch, professor emeritus of epidemiology at the Yale School of Public Health, told The Defender that the COVID-19 vaccine spike protein “can stay around in some people and continue to do inflammatory damage in any site where it gets to through the bloodstream.”
In ‘striking act of censorship’ publishers withdraw study, shut down debate
The study’s publication in Science, Public Health Policy and the Law is the latest twist in an ongoing saga as the authors have tried to get their research out to the public and scientific community, Hulscher wrote on Substack.
The study results were first made public on July 5, 2023, as a preprint with The Lancet on SSRN, an open-access research platform.
However, Preprints with The Lancet removed the study from the server within 24 hours, posting a statement that the study’s conclusions were “not supported by the study methodology,” The Daily Sceptic reported.
McCullough told The Epoch Times that the study was experiencing “hundreds of reviews per minute” before its removal.
Preprint servers offer a place for the public to view scientific reports and papers while they undergo peer review, making scientific findings available immediately and for free and opening them up to broader public debate.
The authors subsequently posted on the Zenodo preprint server, while the review underwent peer review at Forensic Science International. It was downloaded over 130,000 times.
On June 21, 2024, after successful peer review, Forensic Science International published the study.
Within weeks, the study became the top trending research paper worldwide across all subject areas, according to the Observatory of International Research, Hulscher recalled.
“Unfortunately,” Hulscher wrote on Substack, “in a striking act of censorship, Elsevier and Forensic Science International withdrew the article on August 2nd, 2024 in flagrant violation of their own withdrawal policy and COPE guidelines.”
He said they “left no traces behind, completely wiping our paper from the webpage.”
Elsevier and Forensic Science International said that “members of the scientific community” — who remained anonymous, Hulscher pointed out — cited numerous concerns about the study, including inappropriate citation references, inappropriate methodological design and a lack of factual support for its conclusions.
READ: Slovak COVID commissioner calls pandemic a ‘fabricated operation,’ calls for end to vaccines
The concerns were “unfounded,” Hulscher wrote. The study authors wrote a rebuttal defending their study and submitted a revised manuscript. However, Elsevier and Forensic Science International rejected the revised manuscript.
Hulscher noted that Elsevier and Forensic Science International “failed to follow the proper scientific discourse method of allowing debate in Letters to the Editor.” Instead, they shut down the possibility of debate by censoring the study.
“This type of academic censorship poses a serious threat to the progress of scientific discovery,” he said.
73.9% of deaths reviewed by authors linked to COVID vaccines
As The Defender previously reported, the study authors did a systematic review of studies on autopsy findings following COVID-19 vaccination.
They first searched PubMed and ScienceDirect for all published autopsy and necropsy — another word for autopsy — reports related to COVID-19 vaccination in which the death occurred after vaccination.
They screened out 562 duplicate studies among the 678 studies initially identified in their search. Other papers were removed because they lacked information about vaccination status.
Ultimately, they evaluated 44 papers containing 325 autopsies and one necropsy case. Three physicians independently reviewed each case and adjudicated whether or not the COVID-19 shot was the direct cause or contributed significantly to the death reported.
They found 240 of the deaths (73.9%) were found to be “directly due to or significantly contributed to by COVID-19 vaccination.” The mean age for death was 70.4 years old.
Primary causes of death included sudden cardiac death, which happened in 35% of cases, pulmonary embolism and myocardial infarction, which occurred in 12.5% and 12% of the cases respectively.
Other causes included vaccine-induced immune thrombotic thrombocytopenia, myocarditis,multisystem inflammatory syndrome and cerebral hemorrhage.
Most deaths occurred within a week of the last shot.
The authors concluded that because the deaths were highly consistent with the known mechanisms for COVID-19 vaccine injury, it was highly likely the deaths were causally linked to the vaccine.
They said the findings “amplify” existing concerns about the vaccines, including those related to vaccine-induced myocarditis and myocardial infarction and the effects of the spike protein more broadly.
They also said the studies have implications for unanticipated deaths among vaccinated people with no previous illness. “We can infer that in such cases, death may have been caused by COVID-19 vaccination,” they wrote.
READ: Peer-reviewed study finds over 1,000% rise in cardiac deaths after COVID-19 shots
The authors acknowledged some potential biases in the article.
First, they said, their conclusions from the autopsy findings are based on an evolving understanding of the vaccines, which are currently different from when the studies evaluated were published.
They also noted that systematic reviews have bias potential in general because of biases that may exist at the level of the individual papers and their acceptance into the peer-reviewed literature.
They said publication bias could have affected their results because the global push for mass vaccination has made investigators hesitant to report adverse events.
They also said their research did not account for confounding variables like concomitant illnesses, drug interactions and other factors that may have had a causal role in the reported deaths.
This article was originally published by The Defender – Children’s Health Defense’s News & Views Website under Creative Commons license CC BY-NC-ND 4.0. Please consider subscribing to The Defender or donating to Children’s Health Defense.
COVID-19
Maxime Bernier slams Freedom Convoy leaders’ guilty verdict, calls Canada’s justice system ‘corrupt’

From LifeSiteNews
The leader of the People’s Party of Canada says Tamara Lich and Chris Barber were victims of a ‘political witch hunt.’
The leader of the People’s Party of Canada (PPC) ripped Thursday’s federal court ruling that found Freedom Convoy leaders Tamara Lich and Chris Barber guilty of mischief, saying the court siding with the government amounted to a “political witch hunt.”
“It is disheartening to learn that two of the heroes of the Freedom Convoy, @LichTamara and @ChrisBarber1975, have been found guilty of mischief in the longest and one of the costliest trials in Canadian history,” Maxime Bernier wrote Thursday on X.
“This clearly was a political witch hunt.”
Bernier added that in his view the reality is that Canada’s justice system is “corrupt.”
“Trudeau and his ministers who illegally invoked the Emergencies Act and violated basic rights will go unpunished,” he noted.
“Our justice system is corrupt to the bones.”
On Thursday, Justice Heather Perkins-McVey, the federal judge overseeing the mischief trial, delivered her verdict, finding both Lich and Barber guilty of mischief.
Perkins-McVey seemed to agree with the Crown’s case that Lich and Barber’s influence on the Freedom Convoy constituted public mischief but did dismiss the Crown’s Carter Application accusing Lich and Barber of conspiracy outright.
Lich and Barber both faced six charges each, those being charges of mischief, obstruction, intimidation, and counseling others to commit mischief and intimidation. After the court reconvened Thursday afternoon, Lich was acquitted of four of her six charges, with the fifth charge, counseling to commit mischief, being stayed by the judge.
As for Barber, the court found him guilty of mischief as a principal offender and as an aider and abettor. It also found him guilty on the charge of violating a court order.
As for sentencing, the court will reconvene on April 16 at 1:30 p.m. EST, at which time it will say when a date and time for sentencing will be held.
Lich and Barber both face a possible 10-year prison sentence. LifeSiteNews has reported extensively on their trial.
The Lich and Barber trial concluded in September 2024, more than a year after it began. It was only originally scheduled to last 16 days.
Lich and Barber were arrested on February 17, 2022, in Ottawa for their roles in leading the popular Freedom Convoy protest against COVID mandates. During COVID, Canadians were subjected to vaccine mandates, mask mandates, extensive lockdowns and even the closure of churches.
Despite the peaceful nature of the protest, Prime Minister Justin Trudeau and his Liberal government invoked the Emergencies Act to clear out protesters, an action a federal judge has since said was “not justified.” During the clear-out, an elderly lady was trampled by a police horse and many who donated to the cause had their bank accounts frozen.
COVID-19
Trump’s new NIH head fires top Fauci allies and COVID shot promoters, including Fauci’s wife

From LifeSiteNews
“During the pandemic Fauci’s bioethicist wife, Christine Grady, offered nurses a choice: Get vaccinated, or lose your job,” noted The COVID-19 History Project on X. “Yesterday, she was offered a choice: Transfer to an office in Alaska, or lose your job. What’s fair is fair. Everyone deserves a choice,” explained the COVID watchdog account.
On day one of his new job as head of the National Institutes of Health (NIH), Dr. Jay Bhattacharya removed four powerful agency heads, including Dr. Anthony Fauci’s wife, Christine Grady, and others associated with the questionable handling of the COVID-19 shots.
Grady, who had served as chief of the agency’s Department of Bioethics, and other longtime Fauci allies in top posts at the NIH involved in the development and distribution of the untested COVID shots produced by Big Pharma were offered jobs in Alaska and other remote locales far away from the NIH’s sprawling Bethesda, Maryland, complex just outside Washington, D.C.
The purge came amid massive layoffs in health-related agencies under the umbrella of Health and Human Services (HHS), now headed by the Make America Healthy Again (MAHA) movement’s founder, Robert F. Kennedy Jr., who has long questioned vaccine safety and American medicine’s focus on treating disease rather than preventing it.
A total of about 20,000 personnel – mostly bureaucrats – or about 25 percent of the HHS workforce have been or will be handed pink slips amid Kennedy’s realignment of the agency.
MAHA critics were quick to call Tuesday’s axing of Fauci confederates as “one of the darkest days in modern scientific history” fueled by Kennedy’s desire to exact revenge on Fauci’s former trusted associates who represent the antithesis of the MAHA movement.
However, the revamping of the federal government’s side of the health industry is no more harsh than the treatment meted out by those formerly in control who, at best, suppressed, and worst, punished those who questioned their iron grip on health-industry regulations and standards.
For years, Kennedy’s critics have dismissed his quest to revamp healthcare and his questioning of the efficacy of the COVID-19 mRNA jabs as anti-science, labeling him as an “anti-vaxxer” in order to suppress his messaging.
Dr. Francis Collins – whom Bhattacharya replaced as head of NIH – in an October 2020 email to Fauci condemned Bhattacharya as a “fringe epidemiologist” because he had co-authored the Great Barrington Declaration, which criticized harmful COVID lockdown policies.
“During the pandemic Fauci’s bioethicist wife, Christine Grady, offered nurses a choice: Get vaccinated, or lose your job,” noted The COVID-19 History Project on X.
“Yesterday, she was offered a choice: Transfer to an office in Alaska, or lose your job. What’s fair is fair. Everyone deserves a choice,” explained the COVID watchdog account.
“We spend 4X more than Italy on healthcare — and live 7 years less. Dead last in cancer rates. This isn’t science — it’s a system profiting off sick kids,” explained Calley Means, RFK Jr. HHS advisor during an interview with Laura Ingraham following the NIH firings.
“Firing the people who oversaw this? That’s step one,” declared Means.
Other NIH officials who were offered reassignments were Dr. Jeanne Marrazzo, who succeeded Fauci as head of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID), Dr. Clifford Lane, a close Fauci ally who served as deputy director for clinical research at NIAID, and Dr. Emily Erbelding, NIAID’s microbiology and infectious diseases director.
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