Autopsies for everyone will end vaccine misinformation immediately?

Although I had mentioned him before, first time I dedicated a post to discussing Steve Kirsch, the tech bro who started out the pandemic two years ago as somewhat reasonable in his desire to fund research into repurposed drugs to treat the COVID-19 who later turned ivermectin zealot, misinformation firehose, and outright antivaxxer, it was about his “secret plan to end the vaccine madness.” More recently, he’s been whining that no one will “debate” him while harboring the apparent delusion that a free-for-all five hour video debate between him and his pseudoexperts versus real experts will end vaccine hesitancy, while complaining about “censorship.” (Of course, what he views as censorship I view as quality control.) Given Kirsch’s history of hare-brained schemes to “end vaccine hesitancy” or “end COVID-19 misinformation,” I was somewhat amused at his latest proposal; that is, until I realized that some people might wonder why it’s not a good idea. His proposal was published on his Substack earlier this week under the title—yawn, again?—A simple way to end vaccine misinformation immediately. The way? Kirsch thinks that an autopsies will do the trick, but not just any autopsies, rather:

If they truly wanted to end vaccine hesitancy, all they have to do is require autopsies if you die within 60 days of vaccination and require the medical examiners to make the required tests to determine vaccine involvement (as doctors Bhakdi and Burkhardt have done) and publish them. Publishing a fraudulent report would be a criminal offense.

This would end the debate. 

Or they could simply require all licensed embalmers to check for the telltale clots and make the numbers public. Again, it would be a crime to falsify reports. 

Or they could do both.

Why don’t they do this?

After reading this “proposal” of autopsies for everyone who dies within 60 days of vaccination, I have…questions. For example, why 60 days? Why not 90 days or 6 months or a year? After all, antivaxxers are always pointing to mythological “long term effects” after vaccines as a reason to reject COVID-19 vaccines as potentially unsafe, their being so new and all that. I do like to point out that they’ve been out for 15 months now, making the “long-term effects” gambit less and less compelling, particularly when combined with the observation that adverse effects from vaccines pretty much always manifest themselves quickly or, at most, within a few months.

Indeed, I discussed this issue in detail once before about a year ago when hack “journalist” Paul Thacker attacked Steve Novella and me using the same “long term safety” gambit.) As I pointed out then, Thacker had to strain mightily to find examples of complications of vaccination that happened more than six months out. They were all very special and rare cases. Even his other favored example, narcolepsy after the H1N1 influenza vaccine Pandemrix, was not convincing, as the narcolepsy was reported only weeks after vaccination. Basically, adverse events of vaccination that manifest themselves long after the vaccine are not a thing, although that never stopped antivaxxers before the pandemic from trying (and failing) to link vaccines to autism, autoimmune diseases, cancer, and pretty much every disease under the sun.

Looking at what Kirsch wrote, I noticed the names of the doctors to whom he referred. They sounded familiar, and so I looked them up: Sucharit Bhakdi, MD and Arne Burkhardt, MD, along with the paper. Then I searched this blog. Guess what? One of them, Dr. Burkhardt, has already been on the receiving end of some not-so-subtle and, in this case, not-so-Respectful Insolence for his shenanigans about COVID-19. In brief, last September he and some other COVID–19 contrarian doctors held a press conference in Germany in which he demonstrated his utter incompetence or dishonesty by showing all sorts of microscopic images of horrible looking things found in COVID-19 vaccines. Why do I say incompetence or dishonesty? Simple. These are the only two explanations. As a pathologist, Dr. Burkhardt should have been able to recognize common impurities like dust and bubbles found in specimens under the microscope. If he couldn’t, then that was incompetence, particularly because the presence of so many artifacts suggests that he didn’t know how to prepare his specimens to minimize such contamination. If he was not incompetent, then that would suggest that he knew what he was looking at but lied about it because he knew the rubes and antivaxxers don’t know what dust and bubbles look like under the microscope and that such artifacts would look very scary indeed to them, particularly under darkfield microscopy. Take your pick. (Maybe it’s both?)

At the time, he had also published an article claiming that 93% of deaths after vaccination for COVID-19 were caused by the vaccine itself. It was a study that was—surprise! surprise!—also touted by Kirsch. Unsurprisingly, the it was also not a good study. In any event, Burkhardt is clearly one of your run-of-the-mill antivax doctors misusing microscopy in the same way that Mike Adams and other cranks did to frighten people about vaccines (and, hilariously, Chicken McNuggets) years before the pandemic ever hit.

So what did this autopsy study by Burkhardt referenced by Kirsch show? In brief, Burkhardt looked at the autopsies of 15 people who died varying times after COVID-19 vaccination. Let’s just say that the window between vaccination and deaths resulting in autopsies was quite…variable. One died a week after vaccination. One died six months after vaccination. (So obviously it had to be the vaccine!) One died an unknown time after vaccination. I was amused by this passage about the autopsies in particular:

Prior to death, only 4 of the 15 patients had been treated in the ICU for more than 2 days. The majority were never hospitalized and died at home (5), on the street (1), at work (1), in the car (1), or in home-care facilities (1). Therefore, in most cases, therapeutic intervention is unlikely to have significantly influenced the post-mortem findings.

I immediately noticed that the numbers didn’t add up. Four patients were in the ICU for at least two days before death, but 5+1+1+1+1=9, and 9+4=13. How did the other two patients die? Were they hospitalized too? Were they in the ICU less than two days before death? Inquiring minds want to know!

I also noticed right away that only one of the patients was what could be described as young (28 years old). The rest ranged in age from 54-95 at the time of death. Nine out of the 15 patients were 70 or older; five were 80 or older. Thirteen out of fifteen were 55 or older. In other words, the vast majority of these patients were at much higher risk of dying in any given six month time period by random chance alone from old age or natural causes just because of how old they were. Going back to my posts on the misuse of the Vaccine Adverse Event Reporting System (VAERS), when you vaccinate millions of people in a short period of time, starting with the elderly, there are going to be a lot of deaths within a month or so (even more for within six months) just by random chance alone unrelated to vaccination just because the baseline rate of mortality in the population. To show that the vaccine might have contributed, the very first thing that has to be demonstrated is that there is a death rate significantly higher than the baseline in the weeks and months after vaccination. There hasn’t been.

Next:

• Not a single death was brought into any possible association with the vaccination by the coroner or the public prosecutor; this association was only established by our autopsy findings.
• The initially performed conventional post-mortems also uncovered no obvious hints to a possible role of vaccination, since the macroscopic appearance of the organs was overall unremarkable. In most cases, “rhythmogenic heart failure” was postulated as the cause of death.

But our subsequent histopathological analyses then brought about a complete turnaround. A summary of the fundamental findings follows.

So conventional autopsies were done and didn’t find anything remarkable that might suggest that the vaccines killed the patients. Only when Burkhardt and Bhakdi started doing all their nonstandard investigations did the real “truth” come out! One wonders why they were called in if conventional autopsies didn’t find anything remarkable. One wonders, one does. Perhaps the families thought that the vaccine was the cause and got these additional tests done, and, of course, Burkhardt and Bhakdi found something:

A number of salient aspects dominated in all affected tissues of all cases:

1. inflammatory events in small blood vessels (endothelitis), characterized by an abundance of T- lymphocytes and sequestered, dead endothelial cells within the vessel lumen;
2. the extensive perivascular accumulation of T-lymphocytes;
3. a massive lymphocytic infiltration of surrounding non-lymphatic organs or tissue with T- lymphocytes.

Lymphocytic infiltration occasionally occurred in combination with intense lymphocytic activation and follicle formation. Where these were present, they were usually accompanied by tissue destruction.

This combination of multifocal, T-lymphocyte-dominated pathology that clearly reflects the process of immunological self-attack is without precedent. Because vaccination was the single common denominator between all cases, there can be no doubt that it was the trigger of self-destruction in these deceased individuals.

To antivaxxers, first and foremost and always, it’s all about the vaccines. Always. Obviously, this small case series of mostly elderly people (and nearly all middle-aged and above) is uninformative without a control group to compare findings in autopsies. Similarly, given the wide range of times after vaccination (again in a small group of patients) it’s really difficult to make any link to findings in the autopsies to the vaccine. Similarly, these patients weren’t even vaccinated with the same vaccines. Some received the Pfizer vaccine. Some received the Janssen (J&J) vaccine. Some received the Moderna vaccine. For two patients, which vaccine wasn’t even known.

So what does Kirsch make of this? He wants autopsies, of course:

I’ll tell you why they don’t do it: They don’t do it because they know the results would be devastating and would immediately halt the vaccine and discredit the FDA, CDC, the entire medical establishment, virtually all members of Congress, and the mainstream media. 

Why doesn’t Florida Governor DeSantis require this in Florida? What is he afraid of? Why doesn’t Governor Newsom require this in California? What does he have to fear? DeSantis would be the most likely of any governor to do this. He could be a world hero if he did this.

My first reaction to the last proposal that Gov. DeSantis order autopsies of everyone in Florida who had received a COVID-19 vaccine less than two months before their death was: Don’t give this crank ideas. My second reaction was: If Gov. DeSantis won’t do this, you really have wandered so far into crank territory that even an arch crank won’t follow you.

Note the conspiracy theory, though. Clearly, the reason that no one is doing autopsies on everyone who dies within two months of receiving a COVID-19 vaccination is because “They” don’t want you to know “The Truth”! In case you didn’t get it the first time around, Kirsch calls out a number of provaccine doctors, as well as COVID-19 contrarians who loudly claim to be provaccine but routinely amplify antivaccine misinformation (e.g., Monica Gandhi, Vinay Prasad, and ZDoggMD), and then concludes that the reason that none of them have called for autopsies for everyone is this:

Any public official could call for this: a mayor, city council member, board of supervisors, etc.

Pfizer and Moderna CEOs could call for this to prove to the world that their product is safe! What do they have to lose??

Any mainstream newspaper in the world could call for this. 

Let’s be honest here. None of those people will call for transparency. They don’t want transparency. They all want to make sure nobody finds out the truth because when they do, all of these people will be discredited for years if not decades for their role in killing over 100,000 Americans.

Instead, you’ll get excuses like “we’d love to do this but don’t have the resources to do it.” Fine. Do 1 out of 10 autopsies picked randomly. Or 1 out of 100. Or cut the time to die to qualify to within two weeks after any COVID vaccine. Or shorter

Apparently, someone has told Kirsch exactly what I was originally going to say: Autopsies are expensive. They’re labor- and resource-intensive, and there is always the question of who pays. It is true that in general, dating back to long before the pandemic, pathologists and doctors have lamented how relatively few autopsies are performed any more. For example, after actor James Gandolfini died suddenly of an apparent heart attack in Italy, David Dobbs wrote an article entitled We Need More Autopsies. In it, he noted that in the 1960s 50% of all in-hospital deaths resulted in autopsies and that now the autopsy rate is only around 5% of deaths, adding that in the US “we usually don’t autopsy people unless the cause of death is mysterious or foul play is suspected.” Of course, what inspired the article was the disconnect between America and Italy; in Italy, an autopsy of Gandolfini’s body was required by law because he had died under medical care. In other words, what Kirsch is complaining about is a phenomenon that varies among countries.

Even so, this is not what Kirsch is demanding. He is assuming that the vaccines are killing people and demanding a very expensive investigation that governments and hospitals are unlikely to undertake. He knows that they are unlikely to do this, too. So it’s a win-win demand for him as a COVID-19 conspiracy theorist and antivaxxer. If “They” don’t do more autopsies on patients who die at some undefined time after COVID-19 vaccination, then “They” are hiding “The Truth” from you. If “They” actually do more autopsies, then you can count on people like Burkhardt and Bhakdi to do what antivaxxers always do and try to cherry pick results that “prove” that COVID-19 vaccines kill. Failing that, they’ll find all sorts of ways to move the goalposts and demand more; for instance, by claiming that the “right tests” weren’t done on the tissues. Alternatively, Kirsch will say that “They” didn’t include patients who had died much longer after vaccination. After all, just as it’s always been with antivaxxers claiming that vaccines can cause horrific complications years and years after vaccination, the conspiracy pump is already primed to do the same with COVID-19 vaccines. Just look at this particular meme that’s been going around:

I’m not opposed on general principle to more autopsies on patients who die unexpectedly. As Dobbs pointed out, autopsy findings add to or alter the cause of death often enough that we really should be doing more autopsies than just of 5% of deaths. Let’s be clear here, though. That more autopsies in general after in-hospital deaths or unexpected deaths would be a good thing, but that’s not what Kirsch is arguing. He’s engaging in a “heads I win, tails you lose” exercise designed to cast doubt on the safety of COVID-19 vaccinations by recommending a massive investigation that isn’t justified by the epidemiological data—or even by VAERS. In fact, what he is proposing would be the exact opposite of a “simple way to end vaccine misinformation.” Even if entirely negative, data from such autopsies would provide endless fodder for conspiracy theorists like Kirsch, and, I suspect, Kirsch knows it.