Heart and Circulatory Diseases: Premature Deaths

Andrew Bridgen Excerpts

Thursday 22nd February 2024 Commons Chamber

[Madam Deputy Speaker]

Order. It will be obvious to the House that we have very little time this afternoon, so I hope that Members will limit their remarks to around five minutes.

[Andrew Bridgen (North West Leicestershire) (Ind)]

Five minutes?

[Madam Deputy Speaker]

Would the hon. Gentleman like to find some way to make the House sit longer?

[Andrew Bridgen]

No, Madam Deputy Speaker. I am just rather surprised. We often have three hours for Backbench Business debates, but we have ended up with an hour.

[Madam Deputy Speaker]

I appreciate the point that the hon. Gentleman is making, but there is nothing I can do about it now. Don’t we all sometimes wish that we could turn back the clock? I do not have that power.

[Andrew Bridgen (North West Leicestershire) (Ind)]

I thank the hon. Member for Watford (Dean Russell) for securing this important debate, and for sharing his personal experience of suffering a heart attack. I am delighted to see that he has made such a strong recovery that he can be here in the Chamber today. I am sure that many Members have been affected by cardiac disease, or know people close to them who have been deeply affected by this appalling and shocking killer.

The Library briefing pack for this debate contains a startling statistic. Almost casually, it mentions that cardiovascular deaths per 100,000 population have risen by 10% since 2019, after falling steadily for decades.

[Madam Deputy Speaker (Dame Eleanor Laing)]

Order. I apologise for interrupting the hon. Gentleman, but I have taken what he has just said to heart. I have done my best to squeeze out more time, and he can have around seven minutes.

--- Later in debate ---

[Andrew Bridgen]

Thank you, Madam Deputy Speaker. That is a 40% increase. Ask and ye shall receive.

The previous steady reductions followed major improvements in public health policy, reductions in risk factors such as smoking, and the controlling of blood pressure, as well as improvements in medical care. Although I am grateful to the hon. Member for Watford for securing this debate, and to the other Members who will contribute, there is an elephant in the room—indeed, there are so few speakers that there is probably room for a herd of elephants. Why has there been a significant uptick in cardiac deaths in recent years? What novel intervention in public health has occurred since 2019?

Some might think that covid is the cause. Not so. The same uptick in cardiac deaths was observable in Australia and Singapore before those countries got covid but after they rolled out the experimental messenger ribonucleic acid injection. Ah, the jab! I can see some Members tutting and turning away. Everyone knows that MPs with a science degree are few and far between, and that some Members’ eyes glaze over when science is discussed. Well, I am one of those MPs fortunate enough to have a science degree. Another was Margaret Thatcher, who was rather prouder of being the first Prime Minister with a science degree than of being the first woman Prime Minister, and rightly so.

Some Members appear to have prejudged the issue. It is often said that it is easier to fool someone than to persuade them that they have been fooled. For posterity, we must remember that it was 11 years after the thalidomide scandal was exposed in 1961 before the word “thalidomide” was mentioned in the Chamber. I refuse to let this new mammoth medical scandal be ignored in the same way.

We are witnesses to the greatest medical scandal in decades—perhaps in living memory, and possibly ever. It is bigger than thalidomide and bigger than the Tuskegee untreated syphilis scandal, in which some black people were deliberately not treated to see what would happen to their bodies over time. It might be bigger than the Vioxx scandal, hitherto the grandaddy of medical scandals.

I can see some Members looking puzzled. Vioxx was a new drug invented by Merck as an alternative to aspirin—a mild painkiller. A researcher first highlighted an issue to Merck’s senior management in 1997, two years before the drug was approved. One in 115 people who took Vioxx suffered a heart attack. Merck’s profits from Vioxx comfortably exceeded the criminal fine, the compensation and the litigation costs after the drug was pulled. It was a good business decision for Merck. Not one pharma executive went to jail for skewing the trial results, for deceiving the regulators or for recklessly causing the deaths of 60,000 ordinary Americans for profit. It is always for profit—lives tragically cut short, families destroyed and children devastated. Imagine the incentive structure in an industry where profits like that can be made, and the corporate greed where there is full immunity from prosecution. In 1986, pharma companies got immunity in the USA for all vaccines. The number of vaccines administered to children in America has exploded since then.

[Sir Christopher Chope (Christchurch) (Con)]

Does the hon. Member share my hope that the Minister, in responding to the debate, will address the article in The Daily Sceptic on 20 February this year by Will Jones, headlined “Covid Vaccines Linked to Large Increase in Heart, Blood and Neurological Disorders, Major Study Finds”?

[Andrew Bridgen]

I hope that the Minister will address that, and of course this will go on. Cardiac deaths were already the biggest killer in our country, but we have a mysterious 10% increase. I am sure that the hon. Gentleman, like others in the Chamber, has witnessed the horrifying sight of super-fit athletes keeling over on pitches around the world. A mountain of peer-reviewed evidence is emerging and hypotheses are being proposed. Numerous cardiologists have concerns, but unfortunately, many experts do not feel able to speak out openly about their concerns because of the climate of fear, and the consequences of whistleblowing or speaking out against big pharma, which has so often been found to be not operating in the public interest, and causing harm. I am afraid that we will see much the same, following the roll-out of the covid-19 vaccines, as we saw with Vioxx and thalidomide, and in so many other cases.

The evidence is mounting up so rapidly, and the only people who cannot appreciate what is going on in this country are those who really do not want to see. The public will be extremely harsh on this Parliament and our response to the covid-19 pandemic, including the roll-out of the vaccines. We were going to stop vaccinating after the over-70s, but we then decided that vaccination would include the over-50s. We then decided it would be for everyone. Then this House took the appalling decision, unsupported by the Joint Committee on Vaccination and Immunisation, in September 2021 to vaccinate children who were at very little risk, if any, of covid, but who have been harmed seriously by the vaccines.

Why ever did we use a systemic vaccine for a mucosal respiratory virus? One expert said last year:

“it is not surprising that none of the predominantly mucosal respiratory viruses have ever been effectively controlled by vaccines. This observation raises a question of fundamental importance: if natural mucosal respiratory virus infections do not elicit complete and long-term protective immunity against reinfection, how can we expect vaccines”

to work, when natural immunity does not give protection? And what is the name of this expert? Mr Anthony Fauci, the former head of the Centres for Disease Control and Prevention in America, who pushed the vaccines.

I wish I had more time, Madam Deputy Speaker; this is a huge issue and we need to debate it again. It is the biggest killer of our constituents, and our fear is that the rate of increase in cardiac deaths will not slow in the UK, or the rest of the world.