Aseem Malhotra: Nigel Farage’s quack doctor

One part of his 15-minute speech was widely reported and for obvious reasons. In a section decrying mRNA vaccines Malhotra told his audience that “one of Britain’s most eminent oncologists professor Angus Dalgleish said to me to share with you today that he thinks it’s highly likely that the Covid vaccines have been a significant factor in the cancers in the royal family.”

When asked about this passage later a Reform UK spokesman attempted to duck the Quack, telling the BBC that “Dr Aseem Malhotra is a guest speaker with his own opinions who has an advisory role in the US government. Reform UK does not endorse what he said but does believe in free speech.”

This was an obvious weasel. For several years Reform leaders have explicitly supported anti-vax sentiments. Malhotra – whose views on the vaccines are very well known – had been given a prime spot at the rally and a large part of his speech was taken up with claims about studies supposedly showing the harmful effects of these vaccines. “It is highly likely that not a single person should have been injected with this”, said Malhotra to applause from the hall, and the fact that the jab had been endorsed by the World Health Organisation was a sign that the WHO had been “captured” by Bill Gates.

A week before Malhotra’s Reform appearance the Daily Beast forecast that “a decision to remove the (COVID-19) vaccine from the US market pending further research will come ‘within months,’ citing British cardiologist Dr. Aseem Malhotra.” Officially Malhotra has no position in the US government but is now “chief medical adviser” at an RFK jr fan club cum campaign group called Make America Healthy Again Action, which was launched last December. 

It’s 11 years since I first referenced Dr Malhotra in a column for the Times. The issue was statins. At the time there was a pushback from some physicians on widening the prescription range. In early 2014 the BMJ published two articles claiming that statins caused widespread damaging side effects. Up to 20% of those treated with statins, they suggested, suffered from a range of side-effects ranging from type 2 diabetes to decreased energy.

But within weeks the journal retracted these claims and admitted that they were flawed and had dramatically overstated the risks (and, incidentally, almost as dramatically understated the benefits). One of the authors of these withdrawn articles was Dr Malhotra.

For a few years after that Malhotra enjoyed a place in the health establishment’s sun as an anti-obesity campaigner, before branching off to become one of Britain’s main anti-carbs crusaders. In 2017 he co-authored a diet book – The Pioppi Diet – claiming to be based on the food regime followed by the long-lived inhabitants of a small village south of Naples. Advocating an abstention from all sugars (and therefore carbs) it, of course, bore little relationship to what people in Pioppi actually ate. 

It was yet another fad diet, which worked – as all diets do – by restricting calorie intake. The Labour politician Tom Watson famously followed it and lost a lot of weight. So much so that the book earned an endorsement from the then shadow health secretary and Watson mate, Andy Burnham who wrote “this book has the power to make millions of people healthier and happier”. The British Dietetic Association disagreed and named the book as among “the top five worst celeb diets to avoid in 2018”.

Malhotra followed the first book up with two others: The 21-Day Immunity Plan, published during the pandemic, an evidence-free tome which claimed that following his diet would reduce the risk of suffering badly from the covid virus and in 2021 A Statin Free Life in which, according to the publishers, “he introduces us to his targeted heart-health plan, which, with a diet plan, recipes and advice on reducing stress and increasing movement, can help us to live statin-free and take control of our own health.” Three diet books? Kerching. 

In the early stages of the roll-out of the first covid vaccines – two of which (Moderna and Pfizer) were the novel mRNA vaccines (the “Oxford” or AstraZeneca was a conventional vaccine), Malhotra was a big supporter. By July last year, however, he could be found on the popular Diary of a CEO podcast of the plausible entrepreneur and “influencer” (ugh) Steven Bartlett claiming that the vaccines, far from saving lives, had actually caused them. “I have come to the conclusion,” he told Bartlett – unchallenged – “that the Covid vaccine introduction has had a catastrophic net negative effect on the population and society.”

The available ONS data shows the exact opposite; 63 people in the UK died from conditions involving covid vaccines up to early 2023. By contrast, by the end of September 2021 – ten months after the first vaccines were delivered – according to the UK Health Security Agency, they had prevented over 120,000 deaths.

Why had Malhotra so radically changed his mind? In July he gave an interview to – rather quixotically – the Telegraph’s assistant political editor, Tony Diver. The piece was headlined: “‘The harm caused by the Covid vaccine has been catastrophic’. The British cardiologist on biased drug trials, his role advising RFK Jr and why all vaccines should be reassessed for safety” and if Malhotra’s interlocutor was across the science behind the vaccine controversy, he kept his knowledge well hidden, even beginning with that hoariest cliché of feigned neutrality, “Aseem Malhotra is no stranger to controversy”.

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Malhotra told Diver that what had really set him against the vaccines and turned him from supporter to fierce antagonist was the death of his father at the age of 73. As he explained it:

“When my dad died and had a cardiac arrest, someone tweeted, ‘It’s the vax!’,” he remembers. “I got so angry. I blocked them and thought, ‘This person is crazy and they are mad’. And then, when I spent nine months looking at all the data, and reaching out to other people who have more expertise in particular areas, like immunology, it became very clear that this is what happened.”

Malhotra must have reached out to a very select group of immunologists to come to this conclusion. The overwhelming opinion of British immunologists is that the covid vaccine was not the cause of widespread cardiac events. Diver comments that “although there was no concrete evidence that his father’s death was caused by receiving a Covid vaccine, (Malhotra) believes it is the only explanation for the quick death of an otherwise healthy man”. Which, of course, it isn’t, and it prompts the question, how could a cardiologist of all people believe this?

There then follows a passage where Malhotra salutes the courage of Nigel Farage and adds the information that Malhotra – in addition to his many other sidelines – has been appointed as chief medical adviser to an anti-WHO group, Action on World Health, co-founded by Farage. Writes Diver:

There is talk in Reform circles, given Farage’s popularity with Trump’s team, that Malhotra will address the party’s annual conference in Birmingham this autumn.

And so it came to pass. And there’s another passage which gives the reader an idea of the political economy of anti-vaxerism. Malhotra relates going on GBNews to be interviewed by its chief conspiracist, the Scottish historian Neil Oliver, who was by then already several entrails short of a haggis. Malhotra told Oliver that there existed a “pathological corporate type power mindset (which) probably led to the assassination… of the likes of JFK and then his brother Robert Kennedy Junior who realised what was going on and wanted to stop it”. 

Writes Diver:

“I walked out of the GB News studio and the first person to call me was Robert Kennedy Jr,” he recalls. “And he said, ‘Dr Malhotra, it’s Robert Kennedy Jr here. I want to thank you for your courage.’”

A recent YouGov poll on public attitudes towards vaccination found that 71% of the public expressed trust in covid vaccines. And where 8% of Labour voters, 6% of Tories and 7% of Libdems expressed no trust at all in covid vaccines, among Reform voters that figure shot up to 32%. When asked about vaccines in general only 27% of Reform voters trusted them a great deal – less than half the figure for Labour or Tory supporters.

In the last few days the think tank More in Common has concluded from its own polling that new Reform supporters are less likely to be anti-vax, and the company’s excellent UK executive director Luke Tryl concluded from this that the party was being eccentric in inviting Malhotra to speak.

It may be that Tryl has not followed Reform UK’s attitudes towards vaccination with the same obsessive fascination as some of the rest of us and may not have realised that this is a feature, not a bug. As indeed it has been for right-wing populist parties throughout the democratic world. Scratch an online Lucy Connolly supporter or asylum hotel activist and you will find an anti-vaxer.

If we go back to July 2021 – nine months into the vaccine roll out and with 32% of the UK population not yet having received two doses the then leader of Reform UK, Richard Tice, tweeted that “forcing young girls, who just want to dance, to have vaccines almost certain to mean increased still births, miscarriages, disabled children, infertility. Remember the vaccine’s still on emergency approval only. Revolting, disgusting.”

I hardly need to add that this claim was not supported by the evidence. But by then it was a tenet of right-wing populism to oppose vaccine mandates and any other form of compulsory behaviour, from lockdowns to mask-wearing. And if that opposition was made more effective by claiming that vaccines were harmful, then that was a road happily taken.

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So the answer to Tryl’s point is that Malhotra may not speak to a plurality of British voters, but he speaks to the most engaged and the most active supporters, for whom a pathological distrust of any authority other than their leader’s is an essential motivator. And the US experience shows that for their part, when they support a party in one thing, voters may well try and align their views with their chosen champion on everything else. In other words there isn’t a moderated Reform 2.0 to be had. Vote Farage, get RFK.

Meanwhile Malhotra is raking it in from the books, the paid public appearances, the online publicity and the multiple “chief health adviser” roles. And let’s face it, you can’t make money by telling Reform supporters that vaccines work.

David Aaronovitch writes regularly at Substack