A clip of cardiologist Dr Aseem Malhotra on GB News talking about claims linking the Covid vaccines to heart attacks has been viewed over two million times on Twitter. But the research he cites as evidence has serious flaws.
Dr Malhotra failed to mention that the journal which published an abstract of the research has issued an “expression of concern” about it, noting that it contains “potential errors” and “may not be reliable”.
The research was presented at a meeting of the American Heart Association (AHA) in the form of a poster (a format used to present summary findings of research at conferences) and only the abstract has been published in an open-access format.
The AHA asserts that it’s not clear if the results are due to chance or some other factor. A further issue is that the study doesn’t actually measure the risk of heart attacks directly, but the PULS score. There’s little evidence on why this might be a reliable metric to measure the risk of heart attacks.
The author is not clear that only anecdotal data was used, meaning there may be an element of selection bias, affecting the legitimacy results. And in addition to all this, the research has not been peer-reviewed.
All of the above means the work cannot be used as a basis upon which to build the argument that Covid-19 vaccines increase the risk of heart attacks, as Dr Malhotra went on to say on GB News.
Other evidence
The Medicines and Healthcare products Regulatory Agency has identified an increased, though still low, risk of heart inflammation among young men in particular after receiving an mRNA vaccine.
It has also noted that a side effect of the vaccines is a rapid heartbeat.
It has not warned of any other link between the vaccines and any other heart condition.
People who experience adverse health events after vaccination can report them via the Yellow Card scheme to be investigated.
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