In defense of my friend Dr. Joseph Ladapo

The LA Times said his study showing the vaccines were harmful was unscientific and flawed and claimed the rates of myocarditis caused by COVID are higher than those from the vaccine. Here's the truth.

I wrote an earlier article on Joe pointing out he’s one of just two honest public health officials in the US that I’m aware of who realizes the vaccines are not safe.

Recently, I wrote this article on the study done in Florida which recommended against the vaccine for males 18 to 39. The reason: a huge safety signal was triggered that is impossible to explain if the vaccines are safe and effective.

The LA Times called his study a threat to public health, flawed, and unscientific.

I’m going to examine each of these claims and show why they are misleading.

Here are the key points:

1. “Flawed”: This is silly. Every scientific study ever done has flaws: biases, confounders, protocol violations, limited number of participants, etc. The study was limited to a certain population, e.g., to rule out COVID as the cause of the effect observed. So this claim means nothing. That is why there is a limitations section to the study. Also, if it was flawed, then why are they touting the parts of the study that agree with their beliefs??? You can’t cherry pick the parts you believe are true on the basis of your belief system. In my case, I’ll point out the big flaw of the study, but the fact that there was a huge statistically significant safety signal despite this flaw is impossible to explain if the vaccine is safe. That’s what the focus should be on. More on that below. So despite the limitation, there was a serious signal there and that’s legit to focus on and it has nothing to do with cherry picking those conclusions I may personally agree with.

2. “Unscientific”: This is silly again. Science is all about fitting observations to the best hypothesis. Always has been, always will be. They observed that vaccinated males had a statistically significant elevation in cardiac death 28 days post vax. Had they concluded the opposite, that the vaccine was perfectly safe, then Ladapo could be criticized as being unscientific. But he reported the signal. On the other hand, newspapers promoting the COVID vaccines as safe as the LA Times is doing should be labeled as unscientific. See Evidence of Harm. Also, the same logic applies again for “unscientific”: either the study is valid or it should be ignored. You can’t cherry pick the parts you believe are true like the LA Times in their claim that the all-cause mortality was lower. You can only cherry pick parts where the data is significant and it is not caused by a limitation of the study.

3. “Even if there were higher cardiac deaths, the all-cause deaths were lower for vaccinated people in that age group.” This is the whopper. The big obvious lie. The study concluded nothing for 18-39 all-cause mortality because the confidence intervals were too wide to make a determination of harm or benefit. But what the study did show clearly was a strong, statistically significant evidence of an increase in cardiac deaths for 18-39 year-olds as can be seen from Table 2 on page 6:

   

   What the LA Times engaged in is deception. All-cause deaths weren’t statistically significant, but the cardiac deaths were up by almost a factor of 2 in men who got vaccinated. That’s nearly a 100% increase in death.

And this should be no surprise since it is consistent with the cardiac rates post vaccine in Israel. The data was so bad that they were not given access to data beyond the initial period.

As for rates of myocarditis caused by COVID vs. vaccines, consider the following anecdote from the first doctor I asked about this. He’s been practicing for 30 years and never saw a case of myocarditis or pericarditis. Since the vaccines rolled out, he’s seen 4 cases. He’s hardly alone. I don’t know of any cardiologist who saw rates of myocarditis drop after the vaccines rolled out, everyone I know has seen the opposite.

I also know of a pediatrician at Stanford who has never seen so many cases of cardiac issues in her career. She is the sole breadwinner in her family so she has to remain silent while other kids die. She isn’t allowed to warn her patients because if she does, they’ll fire her and take away her medical license (AB 2098). If these injuries were from COVID, they’d be encouraging her to speak out. But when it’s from the vaccine, they must all say nothing. This is the story that the LA Times should be writing about. When she notified her peers, she was told that there is no evidence linking all these cases to the vaccine, so it is best not to alarm the public in the meantime until the association is established. But of course, since nobody is doing a study to establish the association, and since only a few kids who died after being vaccinated are given a proper autopsy with the requisite stains to establish causality, causality is never established. Therefore, these doctors have plausible deniability; they know it is happening, they know it is ONLY happening to vaccinated kids, they know it only started after the vaccines rolled out, but until it is published in a paper in a peer-reviewed medical journal, it would be just speculation based on anecdotes. They throw the precautionary principle of medicine out the window when it comes to the “safe and effective” vaccines.

If the vaccines are so effective, where are all the cardiologists who are seeing the dramatic drop in myocarditis cases?

They don’t exist AFAIK. If they do, where are they? That’s a problem for the mainstream media. A big problem. But none of them ask the critical questions because they never consider that they could be wrong.

The ad hominem attacks

The LA Times wrote:

Ladapo has been labeled a “quack” and a “COVID crank.” If there has been any doubt that these labels are justified, they should be dispelled by his latest action.

There is just one tiny problem with that that they missed in the article… p: Ladapo wasn’t involved in the execution of the study; it was all done by the professional staff who are pro-vax (at least they were before they did the study). That’s really significant but the LA Times missed pointing that out.

The one big flaw in the study: the vaccine actually kills more people outside the 28 day window than inside it

The study appeared to show a very small mortality benefit for the vaccine, but if you are a regular reader of my Substack, you know that that’s impossible; these vaccines are all downside. Nobody should take these vaccines. Not ever.

So how did this study show a benefit for vaccination for certain age groups? Do you understand why that happened? The LA Times didn’t. Not at all. None of their trusted sources had a clue.

The explanation is in this article that I wrote 6 weeks ago: Vaccines are taking an average of 5 months to kill people.

There are two time constants for this vaccine: fast (within weeks) and slow (peaking at around 5 months). Some events happen quickly, others are delayed (blood clots), and some events happen both quickly and delayed (such as myocarditis-caused death).

If the vaccine-related deaths all happened in a 30 day window, this study would be very accurate. But they don’t. That’s the big problem.

Here is the problem in a nutshell:

The post-vaccine death curve has a small peak right after the vaccine and a second, larger peak around 5 months later (with a very wide tail).

This makes a self-controlled case series (SCCS) such as this one which only includes people who are vaccinated and die, very problematic.

For example, suppose the vaccine causes everyone to die at 10X the normal rate spread out evenly over the 6 months after getting the vaccine. The SCCS method used here would find absolutely no signal whatsoever.

Here’s an example. Say we have a deadly vaccine which kills 50% of people at exactly 20 weeks out. Those who aren’t killed are fine.

Based on the study design looking at 28 days vs. the range after the 28 days, our vaccine would be a miracle life-saving drug when in reality it should be immediately stopped.

The LA Times and their sources didn’t point this out to anyone. How could they miss this? I guess these people don’t read my Substack.

Is this study worthless for this reason? No, not at all because it found a strong spike for myocarditis despite this limitation. That’s extraordinary and cannot be explained since a “perfectly safe” vaccine should have a relative incidence (RI) value of 1 (rate of death is random) and not close to 2.

Furthermore, we know that myocarditis caused by the vaccine is often sub-clinical and may not manifest itself until the person is under stress, such as soccer players. So the “trigger” may not happen until months after the shot.

What this means is that it is likely not just a death risk elevation of 2X caused by the vaccine; it could well be at least an order of magnitude higher on an absolute basis.

Why do I say that? Because I constantly hear stories from my nurse friends who say, “I’ve been a nurse for 30 years and never saw kids coming in with heart issues like this. Since the vaccines rolled out, it’s now a regular occurrence.” In fact, one of my expert nurse friends thought it was 100X more likely that Gwen Casten died from the vaccine than from “bad luck” based on her clinical experience before the vaccines rolled out vs. after.

But if you want to see how the deaths compare overall for vaxxed vs. unvaxxed, here’s a graph that just came out moments ago:

And the data behind that shows exactly what I am talking about:

See how the COVID deaths are actually HIGHER in the first 28 days than lower (like we would have thought from the study). Also see how the non-COVID all-cause mortality keeps going up? So it makes it look like the vaccines are saving lives when in reality they are just ramping up the kill rate over time.

It’s great to have both perspectives (the Florida study and these UK numbers) to give us great insight as to what is really going on.

This Fox News segment is a MUST WATCH (2 minutes)

Watch particularly at 1:30 into the video where Tucker asks:

“There are 50 states; why is your state the only one telling us this?”

Joe has a brilliant answer:

“I think frankly it’s because we are the only ones who asked the question.”

Yup. Exactly right. No other state wants to expose the truth.

Steve Bannon interview

Ladapo was also attacked by the Washington Post in an article entitled: Experts slam Florida surgeon general’s warning on coronavirus vaccines.

Watch this episode of War Room where Ladapo responds to the Washington Post article (8 minutes) entitled: Dr. Joseph Ladapo: The Left Have Become So Attached To Their Fake Truths That They Ignore Data.

Just 1,435 views. Compare that to the readership of the Washington Post.

In a nutshell, here is the criticism from the unnamed “experts” contacted by the Washington Post:

More than a dozen experts interviewed by The Washington Post — including specialists in vaccines, patient safety and study design — listed concerns with Florida’s analysis, saying it relies on information gleaned from frequently inaccurate death certificates rather than medical records, skews the results by trying to exclude anyone with covid-19 or a covid-related death, and draws conclusions from a total of 20 cardiac-related deaths in men 18 to 39 that occurred within four weeks of vaccination. Experts noted the deaths might have been caused by other factors, including underlying illnesses or undetected covid.

Let’s dismantle each of the claims:

1. Death certificate reliance. Death certificates don’t have any biases. People die when they die. Unless the experts can show that medical examiners are forging the date, this is a “hand waving” argument with not a shred of data to support it. It is a ridiculous criticism and anyone making such a claim that this invalidates the finding should be ashamed of themselves. I would love to interview any of these experts on camera, but they are all camera shy.

2. Skews the results by trying to exclude anyone with covid-19 or a covid-related death. It does nothing of the sort. The study was just to show that the vaccine is safe or not. It is not a comparison with lives saved. They wanted to remove COVID as a confounding variable in the study. That’s all.

3. It draws conclusions from a total of 20 cardiac-related deaths in men 18 to 39 that occurred within four weeks of vaccination. Raw numbers don’t matter if you have statistical significance. Ladapo can’t make up deaths that aren’t there. He analyzed the data available and found a troubling signal that gives him 95% confidence that the vaccines cause harm. If he had more cases, he could get to 99% or more confidence that the effect was not due to “bad luck.”

4. The numbers were small so you shouldn’t change policy based on that. He used the numbers that he had. But Ladapo isn’t making the call in isolation. Ladapo has read many papers showing the vaccines cause harm. What he basically did was to say, “Let’s see if we can replicate these troubling results here with our data just to be sure the effect we are hearing about is real.” So that’s what he did… he verified they were seeing it too. He basically saw it with his own data.

The signal is not only troubling, but it’s seen in other studies like the one by Retsef Levi which was published in a peer-reviewed medical journal. The findings here confirm the effect. It’s just another data point that is troubling that nobody can explain.

Doctors love to attack these peer-reviewed medical journal articles because the fact that they exist makes them look bad. Hence the notation in May that is still on the paper 5 months later!!

Notation added to the Levi paper. Why is it taking so long to resolve this?? Can we see the correspondence? Why not?

Also, isn’t it interesting that after the study showed the vaccines were associated with the higher cardiac rates, the authors were denied access to the EMS data after May 2021? Someone doesn’t want anyone to know how bad things are.

Tucker Carlson Today interview

This interview is from May 2022 was included in the Washington Post article explains it quite well:

The “benefits outweigh the risks” false argument

No they don’t. It’s not even close. These vaccines kill more than 1 per 1,000 people. At best, they might prevent 1 COVID death per 22,000 as I’ve written before. The 1 in 22,000 is right from the Pfizer study, and the 1 in 1,000 is validated in multiple studies.

Here are some recent examples showing this is not the case:

1. The Harvard-Hopkins-UCSF-Oxford study showed that the risks outweigh the benefits. It is unethical to mandate boosters for college students and anyone younger. The study very clearly said, “University booster mandates are unethical.”

2. The Canadian report prepared for the Liberal Party of Canada (Trudeau’s party) showed no benefit for infection, hospitalization, and death for those under 60. “The empirical evidence investigated in this report from PHO and PHAC does not support continuing mass vaccination programs, mandates, passports and travel bans for all age groups.”

3. The Israeli vaccine safety data showed very clearly the side-effects are serious, long-lasting, and caused by the vaccines. Secondly, it showed that the Israeli authorities and the worldwide mainstream media are covering it all up. Nobody wanted to see the safety data they found! I offered it to Bob Wachter who is quoted in the Washington Post article and he didn’t want to see it.

4. Aseem Malhotra and his published papers. He was formerly a vaccine advocate and is now calling for the vaccines to be halted. Why would he do that if the benefits outweigh the risks?

My article “Evidence of harm” is filled with evidence showing this is not the case. Even the phase 3 trial had more deaths in the vaccine group than in the placebo group and the deaths were never properly investigated and Pfizer won’t answer any questions about it.

Sadly, no one in the mainstream medical community is willing to debate this.

Finally, there is the precautionary principle of medicine. We know there are safe and effective methods for treating a COVID infection using existing repurposed drugs, supplements, and doing simple things like nasal rinses after being infected. These methods can reduce your risk of hospitalization and death by 100X or more. There are virtually no side effects to these treatments.

When you have an intervention like a vaccine with a questionable benefit and with a 95% chance that it will double your risk of permanent heart damage, any reasonable health official should opt for the early treatment protocols because they are far more beneficial than the vaccines and have virtually no downside risk. This is why doctors I know do not recommend the COVID vaccines.

Tweet thread

Joe also defends his study here.

Twitter reaction

Twitter censored Joe’s tweet about the study and then changed their minds.

Twitter clearly thinks (now) that it is not misinformation and «sarcasm on> there is no authority who is more highly respected in the medical community than the Twitter censorship network. <sarcasm off>

No debates are allowed

There are no debates about these issues because the vaccine advocates never show up.

The press reporting is heavily biased by consulting “experts” who subscribe to the narrative.

Nobody in the medical community will talk about the very obvious safety signal for “death” in VAERS that has triggered. The CDC was even expressly notified by both me and my followers and they ignore it and will not talk about it.

The death signal is also ignored by everyone in the medical community. Even David Gorski won’t touch it with a ten-foot pole (after being repeatedly asked). Not only do they ignore the death safety signal, but they ignore the fact that the CDC missed it too. That should cause alarm bells in any normal functioning society.

Why aren’t they talking about that?

Sure, when you ignore the safety signals, the vaccine can do no harm.

Why isn’t Dr. Ladapo being interviewed live on mainstream media?

Why isn’t the mainstream television media like CNN inviting Dr. Ladapo on either alone or with a guest that will challenge him?

The answer is simple. They don’t want to let America know that they can’t explain or refute his study. So they ignore it.

That’s why he won’t be on 60 Minutes either. That would be a disaster for those pushing the false narrative.

Summary

Ladapo has a solid track record about being right on all the issues throughout the pandemic as was noted in the Steve Bannon interview.

All studies have limitations. Science is all about open discussion of the limitations of the study and what you can learn from it so you can try to avoid mistakes the next time. Science is never about trying to deplatform and discredit people who are making an honest attempt to find the truth.

Comparing the COVID vaccine against itself in a SCCS such as this one is problematic because the death events caused by the vaccine are not clustered within 28 days of vaccination like they might be with other vaccines.

So in this study, the vaccines can “appear” like they save lives even when they are doing the exact opposite!

The fact that there is a statistically significant 2X elevation in the death rate in the first 28 days is hard for anyone to credibly explain away. No expert to date has even attempted to do so. They can only argue, “Well, the numbers are small so it could just be a statistical fluke.” The problem of course is that it isn’t a statistical fluke at all since it confirms other studies and the cardiologists all know it from their own practices.

Instead of criticizing the Florida study, the mainstream narrative promoters should clearly explain to the public exactly how a vaccine which is so safe can double the cardiac death rate for young people in the first 28 days after COVID vaccination. And they should be asking why Florida is the only state that has dared to even look at their own data.

I’m all ears!