Heart and Circulatory Diseases: Premature Deaths

Christopher Chope Excerpts

Thursday 22nd February 2024 Commons Chamber

[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.

[Philip Davies (Shipley) (Con)]

It is a pleasure to follow the hon. Member for North West Leicestershire (Andrew Bridgen), as I often seem to in these debates, which often resemble Madame Tussauds: the same faces appear, time after time. As you will know, Madam Deputy Speaker, I have a reputation for brevity in my speeches, and I intend to support that reputation now.

I congratulate my hon. Friend the Member for Watford (Dean Russell) on securing this important and rather timely debate, and I echo the hon. Member for North West Leicestershire in saying that we enjoy seeing him looking so fit and healthy after the trauma that he had. This is a really important matter, and he is right to raise it today. As I highlighted in last month’s Westminster Hall debate on excess death trends, a recent article in The Lancet found that although the causes of ongoing excess deaths in the UK

“are likely to be multiple”,

Office for National Statistics data showed some clear trends—in particular, the “largest relative excess deaths” since the pandemic occurred in young and middle-aged adults, with the number of cardiac deaths happening outside hospitals being the most elevated. In other words, young and previously healthy people are dying at home from cardiac-related events, and we do not know why.

These are not just numbers and statistics—these are real people, loved ones, often from younger age groups, who are dying before their time. It is urgent and our duty to get to the bottom of the situation sooner rather than later. As I am sure we are all aware, there are many theories circulating about the causes of these excess deaths. One is the possibility of a causal link between the population-wide use of covid-19 vaccines and the marked increase in cardiovascular-related critical events, including heart attacks and strokes, among otherwise apparently healthy people. We do not know if that is the cause or not, because the data is not being released. Until certain data sets are released, it is impossible to rule that theory in or out.

That is why I, along with cross-party colleagues, wrote yesterday to the Secretary of State for Health and Social Care; Professor Steven Riley, the director general for data at the UK Health Security Agency; and Dr Alison Cave, the chief safety officer at the Medicines and Healthcare Products Regulatory Agency. We warn that by withholding official data, the Department, UKHSA and MHRA are helping fuel concerns and hesitancy about public health. We have asked that anonymised record-level official mortality data be released, alongside vaccination dates, doses and co-morbidities, without delay. We understand that the MHRA has collected and already shared this data with pharmaceutical companies to enable those companies to produce post-authorisation safety studies for their products, so I see no reason why it cannot also be shared with parliamentarians and the public right away. Will the Minister say whether that data has been shared with pharmaceutical companies? If so, why is not being shared with the rest of us?

As the Minister surely realises, repetitive generic assurances that the Government and the UKHSA take excess deaths “seriously” and monitor them “constantly”, and that the MHRA have

“systems in place to continually monitor the safety of our medicines”—[Official Report, 16 January 2024; Vol. 743, c. 235WH.]

do not serve to reassure anybody at all. Likewise, the news from the Office for National Statistics this week that it has revised its excess deaths methodology, and that there are suddenly 20,000 fewer excess deaths last year, has done little to quell public concern. If anything, it has done the exact opposite: people cynically see it as a convenient sleight of hand.

As we say in our letter, if the Government and their agencies are not willing to share the data we have requested, will the Minister explain to us why not? We are all on the same side and want to look after people. We are all concerned to do the best we can for everybody, but until we have all the data, we just do not know what we do not know. If there is any potential that public health interventions, such as covid-19 vaccines, are causing harm and premature death to some, we must act on that without delay. If the evidence shows that that there is no issue, then it is in everybody’s interest for that reassurance to be in the public domain as quickly as possible.

[Sir Christopher Chope]

If that information was in the public domain, then the Prime Minister would have been able to answer the question that he was asked in the GB News interview the night before last.

[Philip Davies]

My hon. Friend is right. It is in everybody’s interest that the information be in the public domain, so that we can reassure people, or at least let them know. Frankly, there is never any harm in giving people information and letting them make their own mind up about what has happened.

Opinions need to be put to one side, and the data need to be examined in the cold, hard light of day. Otherwise, we will do harm to people, and we will do even more and irreparable damage to trust in public health policy. I hope that the Minister will provide some reassurance that the data will be forthcoming as soon as possible, and that the Government do not give the impression that there is something to hide.