Recently, he has been in the news mainly because of his statements on COVID-19 vaccines:
- Malhotra was a prominent speaker at the Reform UK party conference in September 2025. During his main-stage speech, he made headlines by claiming that the COVID-19 vaccine was a “significant factor” in the cancer of members of the royal family.
- Malhotra was appointed as Chief Medical Adviser to the “Make America Healthy Again” (MAHA) campaign group. This group was co-founded by Robert F. Kennedy Jr., who is the current US Health Secretary.
- Following his statements at the Reform UK conference, the General Medical Council (GMC) confirmed that it is examining his comments to determine if they warrant action.
- This is not the first time Malhotra has been reported to the GMC over his views on COVID-19 vaccines. A previous complaint was made in 2022 and 2023, and in 2024, the GMC acknowledged it had made an “error” in not investigating the matter sooner, stating it would reconsider its review.
- Malhotra is a regular guest on various media outlets and podcasts, often those with a right-leaning or anti-establishment audience, to promote his views on the COVID-19 vaccine. This includes interviews with UK newspapers like The Telegraph, where he claimed the vaccine had “done more harm than good.”
I am seriously puzzled by Malhotra: what turns an evidently decent cardiologist into a raving anti-vaxxer? When looking him up on ‘X’, I found his comment from October 2022:
It thus seems that, when Malhotra was mourning his father’s death, he made a vow. He believes that his father’s death was a result of the Pfizer-BioNTech mRNA COVID-19 vaccine and publicly stated that his father, who had a history of heart disease, suffered a sudden cardiac arrest 6 months after receiving his second dose of the vaccine.
Before that sad event, Malhotra had been an advocate of vaccinations. But now he argued that the mRNA vaccines carry a significant risk of cardiovascular harm and that the risks outweigh the benefits for many people, especially younger individuals. He thus has repeatedly called for a global pause on the use of mRNA vaccines.
Yet, the overwhelming evidence shows that COVID-19 vaccines are safe and effective, and that the benefits far outweigh the risks. True, a very small number of cases of myocarditis have been linked to the mRNA vaccines, but this condition is usually mild and much more common and severe with COVID-19 infections of unvaccinated people.
Consequently, Malhortra’s views have been described as dangerous misinformation by many experts. A junior doctor has even launched a legal challenge against the UK General Medical Council for its refusal to investigate Malhotra’s misinformation.
Altogether this is a sad story, I find. A young man you really should know better gets blinded by a very powerful and painful anecdote. This experience and his seemingly insatiable need to be in the limelight accelerate his descent into unreason and destroy his initially promising career. As a result, the health of millions is endangered. Tragic!
3 Responses to Aseem Malhotra: “justice for those who have suffered unnecessarily from an mRNA jab”
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I have been waiting for this article. Well written Prof.
Another stark reminder that not all doctors are infallible. I am yet to see a civil debate between Malhotra and an immunologist/virologist/vaccinologist/epidemiologist/statistician but I commend Lucy Johnston for questioning him on GB News.
It seems that his main arguments stem from this paper: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0264410X22010283
And wondered your and your readers’ thoughts about this
Old news, already debunked.
https://sciencebasedmedicine.org/peer-review-fail-vaccine-publishes-antivax-propaganda/
I don’t know whether Malhotra has been influenced by that paper at all, but it definitely doesn’t justify his more recent statements.
What that paper confirms is that:
1. The COVID vaccines referred to in this paper DID undergo appropriate clinical testing (“Pfizer and Moderna each submitted the results of one phase III randomized trial in support of the FDA’s emergency use authorization of their vaccines in adults.”; and
2. Adverse event rates were rare: less than 20 per 10,000 vaccinated.
On the other hand, Malhotra appears to need another factor to blame after he convinced his father to stop taking statins and he later died of coronary occlusion. He initially blamed the ambulance delay, but later shifted is blame to COVID vaccination:
https://sciencebasedmedicine.org/unsafe-and-ineffective-aseem-malhotra/#:~:text=Tragically%2C%20Aseem%20Malhotra%E2%80%99s%20father%20died%20from%20ischaemic%20heart,outcome%2C%20which%20likely%20contributed%20to%20his%20father%E2%80%99s%20death.