Top COVID-19 Expert: Vatican Violating Code of Bioethics, Must End Vaccine Mandate Now

By Edward Pentin

A leading authority on COVID-19 has called on the Vatican to immediately drop its vaccine advocacy and mandates, warning that its position on the jabs makes it complicit in vaccine deaths and in violation of a critical code of bioethics.

Dr Peter McCullough, a Dallas-based internist, cardiologist, and epidemiologist who has 54 peer-reviewed publications on COVID-19 to his name and has testified in front of the U.S. Senate on the pandemic response, has also called on the Vatican to “immediately start a public interest campaign on vaccine injuries and vaccine deaths.”

Speaking over the phone on Feb. 11, the Feast of Our Lady of Lourdes, he said he believes the Vatican will already “have to account for potentially hundreds of thousands of lives lost due to the vaccine worldwide” because it has violated the Nuremberg Code — a set of ethical principles that rule out any pressure, coercion or threat of reprisal for any medical treatment, especially if it’s new and experimental.

The American specialist has offered to advise the Pope on the vaccines in the future.

A Methodist, McCullough said he has felt compelled to speak up as he sees the loss of life from the vaccines and their adverse effects as unacceptable and those who fail to resist as complicit in a crime. “I cannot stand by and watch this happen without speaking out,” he said. “I do not see how any Christian can.”

Despite the Vatican teaching that vaccination “is not, as a rule, a moral obligation and that, therefore, it must be voluntary,” it now mandates all employees and visitors — except for those attending liturgies and papal audiences — to be fully vaccinated or have recently recovered from the virus in order to enter Vatican territory.

Pope Francis has also been a leading global advocate of the COVID-19 vaccines, calling vaccination “an act of love” and a “moral obligation” and frequently urging equitable vaccine distribution worldwide, especially to the world’s poorest. Last year, he held two secret meetings with Albert Bourla, the CEO of Pfizer, which has a contract with the Vatican to distribute its COVID-19 vaccine.

Francis’ support for the vaccines has also been used to reject religious exemptions, most recently in a Supreme Court decision last Friday that upheld vaccine mandates for public school teachers in New York City.

Here below is the full interview:

 

Dr McCullough, as an expert internist, cardiologist, and epidemiologist, you have examined closely the cardiovascular complications of both the viral infection and the injuries developing after the COVID-19 vaccine. You have also produced 54 peer-reviewed publications on COVID-19. As someone therefore eminently qualified in this area, please could you briefly summarise what your concerns are regarding the vaccines, and the mRNA vaccines in particular?

The vaccines are now known to have a dangerous mechanism of action. That means that unlike other vaccines that are safe and effective, these vaccines, based on their biochemical and physiochemical properties, are expected to be dangerous. And what I mean by that is they are forms of genetic material, either messenger RNA, or adenoviral DNA, that are loaded onto lipid nanoparticles.

Lipid nanoparticles, by design, go to places in the body, go to organ systems in the body, where it would be deleterious to have genetic material delivered. So this is known, and it was known before the advent of these vaccines.

Papers from China studied lipid nanoparticles and it was known that they would go to the adrenal glands, they would go to the human ovaries, go to the brain, the heart, the bone marrow, other vital organs. We have great concern about any vaccine that leaves the arm after the shot and circulates through the body like that, and actually deposits genetic material into cells in the body. Having genetic material delivered into these organs is extremely concerning, also because that genetic material is then taken up by these cells. These cells are not supposed to have that genetic material. The cells have the God-given genetic endowment that’s passed down from generation to generation to generation. We don’t take some exogenous genetic material and then sprinkle it through the body and have a mosaic of cells start to produce a new substance that the human body has never produced before. This is extremely disturbing.

And then there is now the discovery that this genetic material doesn’t go away quickly. Dr. Tony Kyriakopoulos and I recently published a paper on the theoretical concerns, which is in the National Library of Medicine, that [shows] the genetic material of these vaccines could last in the body several months. Now it’s been proven that several months later the genetic material is found in the lymph nodes, so it’s still there.

The genetic material codes for a very dangerous protein are called the Wuhan wild-type spike protein which are the spines on the surface of the virus. These spike proteins confer all the danger of COVID-19. They confer all the lethality of COVID-19. So in a sense, we’ve taken the lethal component of the virus, then we’ve found the genetic code for this, and now we’re injecting the genetic code into human bodies on a mass scale. This spike protein is produced by the body in an uncontrolled fashion for an uncontrolled quantity and duration of time. What’s cohesive with the recent discovery that the genetic materials in the body for months, is that the spike protein is present in the body for months. In fact, the spike protein may be present in the body for over a year.

So what is the order of magnitude of risk, do you think, getting, say myocarditis and strokes and heart attacks from these vaccines? Are these really serious risks and could they become commonplace place because of the vaccine?

Let’s take death as the most serious concern. We’ll use the US, which has 330 million residents, as an example. If we look at all the vaccines combined per year in the United States, across all the multiple injections — and I personally have taken all the vaccines — it’s about 278 million shots per year. That’s a lot. It’s not everybody in the country, but it’s 278 million shots administered to at least a broad group of people.

The number of deaths that would be considered rare, and that we just have to live with, that can happen due to very unusual circumstances, like an allergic reaction, would be about 150 per year. So our Vaccine Adverse Event Reporting System (VAERS) per year records about 150 deaths through all the years up to 2021.

What happened in 2021 is that by January 22 we had already hit 182 deaths — we were already 30 deaths too many. And looking back on it, if we would’ve had a proper data safety monitoring board and proper human ethics committees in place looking at this, we would’ve stopped the US program in February and said, “Listen, there’s too many deaths.”

Now, as we sit here today, we’re at over 21,000 deaths in the same system. So I’m telling you, rare would be 150 for all the vaccines combined, and per product 50. So typically for a drug, if there’s five unexplained deaths within 30 days, it’s a black box warning [the FDA’s most stringent warning for drugs on the market, alerting the public and health care providers to serious side effects, such as injury or death]. If there are 50 deaths within 30 days, irrespective of causality — because we can never really assess causality, just if it happens temporally — if we get to 50 deaths, the product’s off the market.

As we sit here today, we are at 21,000 deaths in our CDC vaccine safety reporting system. So I am telling you, death under no circumstances can be considered rare. Now, the correct way to describe this is that this is the most dangerous and lethal biological product ever used in human history — period.

The after-effects of COVID-19 are often said to affect the heart and in some cases lead to a heart attack. Can we be sure that these deaths are caused by the vaccine, and not by the after-effects of suffering from COVID?

You know, hopefully people who have had COVID haven’t taken the vaccine. The FDA excluded those people from the trials since they had some modicum of immunity. So it’s reasonable to assume that these deaths are people who are trying to protect themselves against COVID and they took these vaccines with the intent of trying to protect themselves.

The exercise that we go through to understand whether the vaccine really caused it is called the Bradford Hill Tenets of Causality. It’s an epidemiologic analysis and I’m a trained epidemiologist. I do this work so I’m very familiar with it.

The first criteria is, is there a dangerous mechanism of action? Is it really conceivable that someone could take up too much genetic material in the wrong location and have it be lethal? Well, I’ve already reviewed that. Absolutely. This is the most dangerous mechanism we’ve actually ever seen.

Number two, is it a large signal? Yes. 21,000 deaths, that’s more deaths than have ever happened in US human history with any product. This is the largest signum we’ve ever seen.

Number three: Is it temporally related to getting the vaccine [the effect has to occur after the cause]. Well, there are two analyses, one by [Jessica] Rose and the other by [Scott] McLachlan, and then there’s CDC data, which is released every week in the open VAERS system. They all agree that 50% of the deaths occur within 48 hours, 80% of deaths occur within a week. So it’s very tightly temporally related.

The next criteria, number four, is it internally consistent? Are there other events that are potentially fatal near misses that occur that are recorded in the system? The answer is yes. There’s been hundreds of thousands of ER visits, hundreds of thousands of severe allergic reactions, over 30,000 cases of heart injury, a large number of cases of heart attacks, strokes, blood clots, because the spread protein causes blood clotting. So the answer is yes, it’s all internally consistent within the same system with non-fatal events.

Now the fifth criteria is whether it is externally consistent, meaning is it seen anywhere outside the United States? So yes, it’s seen in the yellow card [vaccine adverse effect reporting] system in the UK. The same exact pattern is seen. It’s also the same pattern seen in the EUDRA [vaccine adverse effect reporting] system in EU. So that meets criteria 5 and 6.

Then the final criteria would be if you do a randomized trial and you just randomize people to the placebo [a substance that has no therapeutic effect used as a control in testing new drugs] or the active product. What do you see? The answer is that with the Pfizer program, where we have enough extension data, there are more deaths with the Pfizer vaccine than there are with the placebo from the clinical trials. And if you extrapolate that out, it’s consistent.

So we have fulfilled the Bradford Hill Tenets of Causality, and therefore I’m telling you beyond a shadow of doubt that the vaccines are causing loss of human life and it’s not rare. And so because of this, the entire world is protesting these vaccines and you see these protests all over the world. No one wants to take these vaccines. Now they’re being mandated. People are fearful they’re going to lose their lives with the vaccine. So this is about human survival.

Things brings me to my next question, which is we now have 1000 peer reviewed studies questioning Covid-19 vaccine safety and in some countries, such as the United Kingdom, government data appears also to show the negative efficacy of vaccines. And yet the UK authorities and other governments continue to push ahead with vaccination programs and enforce mandates, which in some cases are very stringent, such as in the Vatican, Austria, Italy, Germany, and France. Is there an alternative interpretation of the data which explains this course of action? Are they reading some other data perhaps to come to these policy decisions?

If they are, they don’t present it. I mean, one of the things that’s difficult in the scientific community to accept is that the authorities that are advocating the vaccines provide no justification for them. They don’t justify, they don’t, they don’t prove to the public that they’re safe or effective.

And also there’s an absence of clinical trials?

Right. Their clinical trials have not been updated. So the vaccines continue to mutate, and they continue to use the same products. So all the products were keyed against the original Wuhan strain, the wild-type strain. Now it’s mutated so dramatically that all the studies suggest the vaccines have lost control. So we have two good reports from the United States: first from the CDC, on December 10, and then the second one from [Dr. Joseph] Lewnard et al done at the University of California Berkeley School of Public Health in January of this year, showing over 70% of Americans hospitalized with the omicron variant are fully vaccinated, which is rare, but it can happen,. And that’s consistent with the data in the UK, Denmark, Germany, South Africa, and Israel. The majority of people hospitalized with COVID-19 [in countries] with good data systems are fully vaccinated. It should become relatively self-apparent that the vaccines don’t stop hospitalization, and they don’t differentially provide new benefits. We conclude the opposite: those who did not take the vaccines are doing much better.

Why is it, though, that so much of the mainstream media and the vast majority of doctors and clinicians seem to take a very different view to yours? They still promote these vaccines and dismiss you, Dr. Robert Malone and others as giving out misinformation. How can the average person with no expertise in this area be sure what the truth is when this is the sort of state of affairs that we’re in?

Those who are advocating the vaccines do not give any support for their safety or efficacy, doctors included. So that is the problem. The public must demand that they justify what they’re telling the public, just like I have to justify. That’s the reason why I went through the Bradford Hill Criteria with you. What the public is not getting is fair, scientific information, and the public can see this. That’s the reason why the public is protesting. The public has actually decided who to believe, and they’re not believing the government authorities and the large body of doctors. It’s obvious.

The Food and Drug Administration is partly funded by user fees from companies, many of them pharmaceutical companies, by as much as 45%. Is this part of the problem?

I don’t know. The pharmaceutical funding is part of it, but these struggles are occurring anyway, independent of pharmaceutical funding. They’re occurring in all parts of the world and it doesn’t have to do with Pfizer and Moderna. It doesn’t even have to do with these genetic vaccines. In some parts of the world it’s the Coronavac vaccine from Sinovac which is the Chinese vaccine, and it is a “killed virus vaccine” [a traditional vaccine consisting of virus particles, bacteria, or other pathogens that have been grown in culture and then killed to destroy disease-producing capacity].

So I think there’s some people jumping to some easy conclusions, like, “Oh, it’s just the pharmaceutical companies, they want to kill everybody to push their vaccine.” Well is the Chinese company the same as the American Pfizer and Moderna? The governments are paying for all this anyway. It’s not like people are paying for it. I think tomorrow, if they put this on the open market and say, “Listen, you have to pay money to get your vaccine,” no one would buy these vaccines. I think if they were just electively offered, I don’t think anybody would take the vaccines. In fact back when they were elective in April, no one took them. The word came out that the vaccines were dangerous, people started seeing their family members die, and because of that people didn’t take the vaccines. So we don’t need a lot of data. There was an informal internet survey done last summer on Twitter and the question was asked, “Do you know somebody who’s died after the vaccine?” The answer was about 12%. That’s enough. That is enough.

People talk in the church and on social media that people have lost family members. Everyone knows, no one wants these vaccines. That’s the reason why they’re protesting. That’s the reason why people are walking off the job. The vaccine mandates are leading people to take an injection and they don’t know if they’re going to die or not. They don’t know, in a sense, if they have committed their fatal act.

It just can’t be understated how critical this is. And so what happens is that doctors are telling patients to take the vaccine and patients are running for the hills. They’re changing doctors and saying, “I no longer trust my doctor. My doctor is no longer a trustworthy, believable person. They’re asking me to take a potentially lethal injection and I won’t do it.”

You often see studies coming out, and they’re often published in the mainstream media, saying that these vaccines have saved hundreds of thousands of lives and that the number of lives they’ve saved from COVID far exceeds the number lost by the vaccines. What do you say to that?

Well those are assumptions. The first false assumption is that the vaccines protect against COVID mortality, which they don’t. Not a single randomized trial has shown that. Then you make the next false assumption: that COVID-19 itself is untreatable and we’re just going to let everybody die with COVID-19. And then you put all those false assumptions into analysis, and you’d say, “Well, gosh, the vaccines have saved hundreds and millions of lives.” It’s all a series of false assumptions. The vaccines look like they haven’t stopped COVID at all. They haven’t reduced mortality of COVID at all. We’ve already reviewed the hospitalization data. Anywhere where we actually analyzed hospitalization, they haven’t stopped hospitalizations. They never stopped hospitalizations in randomized trials, they’re not doing that observationally, but the vaccines effectively have caused a massive loss of life, injury and permanent disability. That’s really where we’re at right now.

You’ve promoted for a long time the effectiveness of early treatment over the vaccines.

Right, I was developing and promoting early treatment before the vaccines ever came along. So I was actively engaged in leading the world in treating COVID-19 before the vaccines were ever invented. This  is the stake in the ground and the vaccines never supplanted early treatment. Early treatment just got better and better and better. We have new products, new effective things we have. A recent analysis with omicron now in this paper by Lewnard in southern California shows that zero patients need a mechanical ventilator — zero — and this is the unvaccinated. You don’t need the vaccines. Zero people need to go on the ventilator.

Why hasn’t that message, your message, got through to public health policy in so many countries?

I’ll give you the data. So, there’s roughly 160 countries in the world. Let’s take hydroxychloroquine, the very first product. Now it’s modestly effective, about 25% benefit. Right now hydroxychloroquine is officially adopted for early treatment in 36 countries and by 53 medical organizations worldwide. Let’s take ivermectin. These were the first two early treatments. It’s now officially adopted for early treatment in 22 countries and 39 medical associations worldwide. So the answer there is that it’s partial, right? It’s not that these haven’t be adopted, it’s partial. The question is why haven’t all the countries done it? And what are the characteristics of the countries that have adopted compared to those who haven’t? That’s the real question. So it is interesting that the most westernized and lucrative types of biopharmaceutical markets, which would be the United States, Canada, United Kingdom, EU, South Africa, Australia, two South American countries, those are the ones who haven’t adopted [early treatments]. The countries that are not big biopharmaceutical markets, the Caribbean, the equatorial region around the world, they have adopted them.

So it’s a very interesting. There’s partial adoption of early treatment in the United States. We have four chartered, early treatment medical organizations. We have four and that’s pretty solid. We have treated in our prescription pharmaceutical use of hydroxychloroquine, ivermectin and monoclonal antibodies and we hope [these] will continue to be very robust as we treat patients, to reduce hospitalization death. And we have to treat vaccinated and unvaccinated, there’s no difference because the vaccines don’t work and people get COVID anyway, so we still need to treat them. So it’s imperative for those who have accepted the vaccine to understand that we still need to treat them anyway.

Do you think that the emergency’s lessening now with the omicron variant, that it’s not as serious as it was?

Right, and it’s easily treatable, that’s my experience too. So the emergency phase of the pandemic is now over. Many countries have recognized that. Across the UK, they’ve dropped mandates. Sweden has done the same. Eight states now that have gone against the US president and dropped the mandates, and eight Democratic governors have done that. We’ve always been divided. You know something’s wrong when states within a certain country don’t all behave the same way. We all use the same currency. We all have similar criminal laws and stuff, but we’re widely divergent on COVID-19. We could be in New York State, and people won’t let you go into a building unless you have a mask and a vaccine card, but we can be in Dallas, Texas, and you can walk in and there’s no mask, no vaccine and no discussion. What does that tell you? We’re the same country, with the same virus, so what’s going on, if the virus is the same and the people are the same? The difference is what’s in the minds of people. So there’s two diseases: there’s COVID-19 the disease, and then there’s the mental disease of what we call mass formation psychosis.

Do you think that the Pope, the Vatican and the bishops in general are adequately informed about these vaccines? From what you say, they seem not to be, but do you think they need to be listening to wider sources because at the Vatican they now have some of the strictest mandates in the world: You cannot enter unless you are vaccinated, or you’ve recovered, and you have to wear the N95 masks. What advice would you give to the Vatican about their policy on COVID?

The Vatican should drop all mandates, drop all restrictions, and drop all advocacy or concern for the vaccines. The Vatican immediately should start a public interest campaign on vaccine injuries and vaccine deaths. They should formally apologize for taking a position on the vaccines that’s been deleterious and they will have to account for potentially hundreds of thousands of lives lost due to the vaccine worldwide because the Vatican has violated what’s called the Nuremberg Code — the Vatican has violated a critical code of bioethics and they must immediately recognize this. They must immediately apologize for this grievous error that they’ve committed. The Nuremberg Code states that no one under any conditions must apply any pressure, coercion or threat of reprisal for any medical treatment or procedure done, and particularly when the procedure is new, it’s investigational, it’s experimental, and we don’t know the outcomes.

I’ve just gone over with you that this is genetic material injected in human bodies, and we have no idea how long this is going to last and how great the injuries are going to be. They look catastrophic just at the early view of this. The Vatican must reverse their position. They must listen to people in positions of authority, including myself — immediately. And I’m happy to talk directly to the Pope. This is not a problem of lack of education. The Vatican and all religious leaders have all the information they can possibly have. These systems are open systems. A group from France said in March of 2021, “Shut down the program, it’s not safe.” The paper that I published with [Roxana] Bruno and colleagues, a worldwide paper including Europe, implored all governments to install safety boards and start reviewing the safety data. An evidence-based consulting group in the UK in June of 2021 reported officially to the MHRA and said, “shut down the program.” We’ve had petitions calling for the program to be shut down. This is not a matter of lack of education. This is a problem of complicity. This will go down in history as the Vatican is complicit in the mass loss of life of people by injections.

The Vatican’s Pontifical Academy for Life has also advocated vaccines for children. What’s your view on that?

The younger we go in age group, the risk of COVID-19, the viral illness, progressively goes down. In fact, most children don’t even get it because they’ve already had it and it’s milder than the next common cold that they have. That means the relative harm of the vaccines is even greater. So it is abhorrent. It violates every bit of sacred, religious belief that we have in terms of protecting our family and protecting our children. The Vatican is abrogating one of its principal, Old Testament beliefs which is to protect the children. This is not protecting children. This is overtly harming children. And the Vatican must immediately reverse its course.”

The Pope has called vaccination “an act of love” and a “moral obligation” — would you be willing to offer your advice to the Vatican?

I would be more than happy. As you mentioned, I have 54 peer-reviewed publications on COVID-19. I have over 660 peer-reviewed publications in the National Library of Medicine. I’ve chaired or participated in 2000 days of safety monitoring boards. I’ve had COVID-19 myself twice. I’ve had a family member lose their life to COVID-19. I am an expert commentator on national TV every week for the last two years. I consider myself the most qualified person to opine on COVID-19 and the vaccines than anybody in the world and that can be messaged directly to the Pope. If he wants to talk to the top authority in the world, I am open to a conversation, but it won’t be comfortable for him. So he needs to be warned about this. This is important. One life lost is too many. This idea that it’s a gift, that the Pope is giving a gift of loss of life, is absolutely unacceptable, and it must be met with the strongest of all resistance.

We are at a very, very important point in human history. You can tell by the gravity of these findings and these revelations, this is not a debatable thing. People are losing their lives due to this vaccine.

And I can tell you this much: even if the vaccine really worked, which it doesn’t, but even if it really worked, people still could take their choice: That they could die with a vaccine or die with a respiratory illness, and it would be a choice. It would be a very difficult choice, but they could take a choice. But the fact that the vaccines don’t work and they simply offer an opportunity, a stochastic opportunity to die within a few days from taking the injection, they are wholly unacceptable.

There’s an analysis of mortality, and I’m glad we’re still on mortality because I think that’s the most primal thing that we can consider, published by Ron Kostoff, and the title of the paper is “Why Are We Vaccinating Children?.” This is in the peer-reviewed literature. This has been presented twice by the way at the USFDA meetings in September, and October by external presenters. The cost of analysis says someone at age 65 is more likely to die with the vaccine than taking their chances with COVID-19 and dying of COVID-19 respiratory illness. There’s a fivefold greater chance of dying with the vaccine. This is because if you take your chances with COVID-19, you may or may not get the illness. You could be fastidious and not get much contact and get low exposure, and that doesn’t even factor in early treatment which according to my estimates means 90-95% reductions in hospitalization and death. So you can imagine that it’s a much better choice to just take your chances with the respiratory illness than take your chances with the vaccine. And people say, “well, it’s rare.” Well, I have to tell you when we’re up to 21,000 Americans, this is actually worse than a war. We never said war casualties were “rare.” We took note of every war casualty. Every single vaccine death should be taken seriously. We can’t just write off human life with a casual stroke of a pen. It’s unacceptable, it’s immoral, it’s illegal.

What is your view on the mandates? Given what you say about the vaccines, would you consider them grossly unjust?

There are other mandates. In our US university system, we have requirements for the students to [get] the meningococcal vaccine for meningitis. This is a standard. There’s a waiver system. You can opt out of it, but most people don’t, and 20 million kids a year take them meningococcal vaccine. You don’t see any protests over that. Why? Because it’s an antigen-based vaccine that doesn’t go everywhere in the body. It has a safe mechanism of action. It has a safety track record that’s pristine. Nobody dies of the meningococcal vaccine. It effectively eliminates the chances of getting meningococcal meningitis. So we don’t have outbreaks in colleges anymore. So I’m telling you, a perfectly safe and effective vaccine people would accept. And if the COVID-19 vaccines were perfectly safe and effective, number one, COVID-19 would be gone by now, it wouldn’t be around, and two, people would widely accept it. There wouldn’t be any debate. If the vaccines were safe and effective, nobody would be wearing N95 masks in the Vatican. Things ought to be self-apparent at this point.

There’s a self-apparency here that I think we can’t deny. We ought to start looking at this and be saying, “You know what, let’s just examine ourselves here, this is just not adding up.” Even internal behaviors are not adding up.

What has been the personal cost to you of involving yourself in this cause?

I had no interest in becoming a public figure on this. My entire career and personal finances have been absolutely destroyed through this but I cannot stand by and watch this happen without speaking out. I do not see how any Christian can. It boils down to this idea of complicity. The Bible is loaded with phrases like this. If you stand by and you’re quiet and you watch it happen, you are participating in the crime. It’s clear.

The Church therefore has a duty to speak up.

Yes, there’s no doubt about it.

See here if you would like to donate to Dr McCullough’s campaign.