What is the opposite of a Ming Vase strategy? When Keir Starmer had a solid lead in the polls, he was visibly anxious to get to the general election without making any unforced errors. Reform UK have been ahead in the polls for months, but a general election is still a long way off. Their objective in the short term is to present themselves as a professional and serious outfit that is ready to govern. So why on earth did they allow Aseem Malhotra to get on the main stage at their conference on Saturday and allege that members of the Royal family have developed cancer as a result of taking Covid vaccines?
Dr Malhotra’s transition from an NHS-loving lefty who was pals with Tom Watson to a Farage-supporting Robert Kennedy Junior tribute act has been quite something. The controversial cardiologist is now a chief advisor to Donald Trump’s “Make America Healthy Again” initiative and that, perhaps, explains why Reform thought it would be a good idea for him to address their annual conference. If so, they badly miscalculated. Malhotra’s trademark blend of pseudo-science and conspiracy mongering went down depressingly well in the auditorium (I was there) but for the public at large it played into — and largely confirmed — every negative stereotype of Reform supporters.
These are all admirable qualities for a science communicator, but they are also useful techniques for secondhand car salesmen
Malhotra is telegenic, speaks calmly, refers to evidence and calls interviewers by their first name. These are all admirable qualities for a science communicator, but they are also useful techniques for secondhand car salesmen. He peppers his monologues with references to peer review and evidence-based medicine. He quotes respectable scientists such as Stephen Hawking. As the oncologist Dr David Gorski notes, he engages so much projection that it amounts to gaslighting, accusing his critics of unscrupulous methods and complaining about misinformation while portraying himself as a lonely voice for integrity and sound science.
Malhotra first came to prominence in Britain as a spokesman for Action on Sugar, a pressure group that he claimed to have co-founded (Action on Sugar dispute this). From the outset, his approach was to take a grain of truth and blow it out of all proportion. It is fairly obvious, for example, that eating a lot of sugary snacks is not good for your health. It is likely that most people will find changing their diet to be an easier way to lose weight than doing more exercise. It is arguable that saturated fat is not as big of a health hazard as was once believed. But in the hands of Aseem Malhotra, such thoughts are transformed into simplistic and sensationalist slogans such as “sugar is the new tobacco”, “you can’t outrun a bad diet” and “fat is your friend”.
So long as he was spouting this kind of thing to whip up hysteria about sugar and take a pop at “Big Food”, Malhotra was not merely tolerated but actively embraced by the medical establishment. The modern public health movement is the perfect place for someone with a penchant for hyperbole, cherry-picking and accusing one’s critics of being industry stooges to hide in plain sight. He became a familiar face on breakfast television and was presented as a source of wise counsel by the likes of Channel 4 News.
Eyebrows only began to be raised when he started to scaremonger about statins and when his anti-sugar stance turned into a crusade against carbohydrates. In 2013, he asserted in an article for the British Medical Journal (titled “Saturated fat is not the major issue”) that 18-20 per cent of people who take statins suffer adverse side effects as a result. This claim was later withdrawn. In 2015, he co-authored an article for the British Journal of Sports Medicine which stated that the food industry had been “buying the loyalty of bent scientists, at the cost of millions of lives”. This claim was also retracted. In 2016, Action on Sugar informed Public Health England that they had parted company with him because of his advocacy for saturated fat and because he was “completely mad about statins as well.” In 2017, he wrote another article for the British Journal of Sports Medicine, this time titled “Saturated fat does not clog the arteries” which the British Heart Foundation described as “misleading and wrong”. Characteristically, he accused the British Heart Foundation of being “hired hands of those that put private profit over what’s important to patients and public health”.
In the early days of the pandemic, Malhotra rush-released a book titled The 21 Day Immunity Plan which repackaged theories from his much-derided book ‘The Pioppi Diet’ for the Covid era. When his mother, Dr Anisha Malhotra, died of sepsis a year earlier, he blamed it on her vegetarian diet (he has since claimed that she was “addicted to ultra-processed food”). When his father, Dr Kailash Chand, died of a heart attack in July 2021, he initially blamed the North West Ambulance Service for being slow to respond, but in two articles published in the Journal of Insulin Resistance in 2022, he blamed the Pfizer vaccine and called for a moratorium on mRNA vaccines.
The Journal of Insulin Resistance is an obscure publication that has only produced eight issues since it was founded in 2016. Malhotra’s articles had nothing to do with insulin resistance but he was (and still is) on the editorial board. By the time these articles were published, Malhotra was already halfway down the rabbit hole, claiming on television that “the [Covid] vaccine may well have played a part” in the death of the cricketer Shane Warne and cherry-picking a figure from a study in Circulation (which was later corrected) suggesting that mRNA Covid-19 vaccines increased the risk of heart attack among certain people from 11 per cent to 25 per cent.
Malhotra’s claims have been debunked many times and yet the media appearances kept coming long after he had clearly gone to the dark side. In 2023, he was invited onto the BBC News channel to discuss the safety of statins and quickly derailed the interview by suggesting that Covid vaccines had caused tens of thousands of excess deaths in the UK. Last year he appeared on Stephen Bartlett’s Diary of a CEO podcast and claimed that there would have been fewer deaths during the pandemic if there had been no vaccine.
He still takes kernels of truth and exaggerates them until they become falsehoods
Malhotra’s tactics have not changed. He still takes kernels of truth and exaggerates them until they become falsehoods. It is true, for example, that Covid vaccines were not as effective as the first clinical trials suggested (although this was largely because new strains of the virus emerged). It is true that there have been rare cases of myocarditis (1 in 10,000) from the Pfizer vaccine and even rarer cases of blood clots (1 in 100,000) from the AstraZeneca vaccine. It is true that Bill Gates funds the World Health Organisation. It is certainly arguable that vaccine mandates were never defensible except on purely paternalistic grounds and it is undoubtedly true that some senior medics in the USA made claims about Covid vaccines stopping transmission that were not backed up by data. This much is well established, but the narrative Malhotra has been presenting since 2022 — a narrative that was applauded at the Reform UK conference — is that the pharmaceutical industry has killed “millions” of people in the last few years, that millions more have been seriously harmed by Covid vaccines, that drug companies are literally run by psychopaths, that “many doctors” believe that King Charles III and the Duchess of Cambridge have developed turbo cancer thanks to Covid vaccines, that regulators allow dangerous vaccines onto the market because they are being paid by pharmaceutical companies (or “psychopathic entities”, as Malhotra calls them) and that Bill Gates funded the World Health Organisation so that he could make $500 million from Covid vaccines.
This is not just a distortion of the truth. It is lunacy delivered with an agreeable bedside manner. Turbo cancer does not exist. Covid vaccines have been used 14 billion times worldwide since 2020 and there has been no marked increase in the incidence of cancer or heart disease. Bill Gates is trying to give away 99 per cent of his wealth; he neither needs nor expects to make a return on his donations. Malhotra is correct when he says that the Medicines and Healthcare products Regulatory Agency (MHRA) gets most of its “funding” from “Big Pharma”, but he neglects to mention that these are fees for licensing and marketing authorisation, not backhanders or donations.
Every attempt to have Malhotra struck off by the General Medical Council has so far failed. In July, he told the Telegraph that he is still a “practising clinician”, but the self-proclaimed champion of the NHS seems to only do private work these days. He has a job at the HUM2N longevity clinic in Chelsea which offers “biohacking” for £300 a month. When the Telegraph interviewed him he was suffering from psoriasis which Malhotra attributed, not unpredictably, to a vaccine injury. He recently set up a company called Metabolic Reset, which is a “private online community”, and, inevitably, he has a Patreon. Malhotra is living proof that, for some people, there is no such thing as bad publicity. Whether the same applies to Reform UK is more doubtful.
