British Indian medic calls for public apology over COVID vaccine mandates

London, Oct 10 (PTI) British Indian cardiologist Aseem Malhotra, a vocal campaigner for a more evidence-based approach to all COVID vaccines, and a fellow medic on Friday called for medical bodies to publicly apologise for the implementation of COVID vaccine mandates they claim have fuelled distrust and conspiracy theories.

Writing in the peer-reviewed journal ‘Science, Public Health Policy and the Law’, Malhotra and research psychologist Dr Andrea Lamont Nazarenko call upon the public health establishment to address the shortcomings of COVID-era public policy and acknowledge wrongdoings.

Both authors acknowledge the need for decisions guided by the best evidence available in the early days of the pandemic but insist that such justification cannot extend indefinitely.

“Until the most urgent questions are answered, nothing less than a global moratorium on COVID-19 mRNA vaccines — coupled with formal, unequivocal apologies from governments and medical bodies for mandates and for silencing truth seekers — will suffice,” they write.

Dr Malhotra, an advisor to US health secretary Robert F Kennedy’s Make America Healthy Again (MAHA) Action, is campaigning for wider information access on vaccines as the Chief Medical Advisor to Make Europe Healthy Again.

In the journal commentary entitled ‘Mandates and Lack of Transparency on COVID-19 Vaccine Safety has Fuelled Distrust – An Apology to Patients is Long Overdue’, Malhotra and Nazarenko argue that science must remain the foundation of public health.

“The pandemic demonstrated that when scientific integrity is lacking and dissent is suppressed, unethical decision-making can become legitimised. When this happens, public confidence in health authorities erodes,” they write.

“The role of public health is not to override individual clinical judgment or the ethics that govern medical decision-making. This is essential because what once appeared self-evident can, on further testing, prove false – and what may appear to be ‘safe and effective’ for one individual may be harmful to another,” they add.

The article has been welcomed by international medical experts and scientists, who believe in an urgent need to rebuild public confidence in health authorities.

“It might be impossible to go back in time and correct these major public health failings, which included support of futile and damaging vaccine mandates and lockdowns and provision of unsupported false and misleading claims regarding knowledge of vaccine efficacy and safety, but to start rebuilding public confidence in health authorities (is) the starting point,” said Dr Nikolai Petrovsky, Professor of Immunology and Infectious Disease, Australian Respiratory and Sleep Medicine Institute, Adelaide, Australia.

“This article is a scholarly and timely review of the public health principles that have been so clearly ignored and traduced. Without a complete apology and explanation we are doomed to pay the price for failure to take up the few vaccines that make a highly significant contribution to public health,” added Angus Dalgleish, Emeritus Professor of Oncology, St George’s University Hospital, UK. PTI AK SCY SCY