Clot nonsense weaponized against COVID-19 vaccines

I’ve been writing about Mike Adams and his promotion of pseudoscience, antivaccine misinformation, quackery, and conspiracy theories on his main website Natural News and its many affiliated websites and social media accounts since around 2006. When last we left Adams, he had gone all Christian evangelical conspiracy theorist when he portrayed the large metal bull used as a mascot for the British Commonwealth Games a couple of weeks ago as evidence that Baal or Satan (or both) had taken over the world. At the time, I pointed out that Natural News really should be called the Weekly World News, except that in its heyday almost nobody took Weekly World News seriously or as anything other than entertainment ro read while waiting in a checkout lane at the supermarket, while Adams himself has a distressing number of followers who believe much of the utter bilge he churns out day after day. Before that, teaming with another crank named Jane Ruby, Adams had been trying to blame COVID-19 vaccines for causing blood clots, even going so far as to show clot photomicrographs that only served to demonstrate how incompetent he is at microscopy.

When last I discussed Adams’ misadventures looking at a blood clot under the microscope, I noted that he had claimed that he had done mass spectrometry on the blood clots supposedly taken from “victims” of COVID-19 vaccines after they died in order to “prove” that the clot composition was inconsistent with the supposed “COVID-19 vaccine clots” having come from blood. Basically, his claims, based on misinterpretation of light microscopy and the results of his mass spectrometry were that the clots did not derive from blood and contained what he claimed to be “nanowires” and other things that he couldn’t explain. It never occurred to him, apparently, to ask some real pathologists to look at his microscope slides or even a single clot, and I’m still not clear on why he gram stained the clots instead of staining them with hematoxylin and eosin (H&E), as most tissue sections are stained for histological analysis. In any event, after his having failed to understand the difference between what postmortem clots look like compared to clots that had formed while the person was still alive, when last we left Adams, he had promised to publish a complete report of his clot analysis by mass spectrometry that very same week.

Three weeks later, Adams has finally delivered his report under a typically breathless title of. EXCLUSIVE: Natural News releases post-vaccine clot ICP-MS elemental analysis results, comparing clots to human blood … findings reveal these clots are NOT “blood” clots. Remember how I made fun of Mike Adams years ago for using his secondhand mass spectrometer to look for heavy metals in vaccines and lead in Flint water? This “clot analysis” is more of the same. I’m not an expert in mass spectrometry by any stretch of the imagination. I do, however, have a BS in chemistry, studied advanced biochemistry, have a PhD in cellular physiology, and am an MD, a background that allows me to spot glaring holes in Adams’ analysis even without being an analytical chemist or expert in mass spectrometry. Before I even dig in to the hilarious details, let me just ask any of my readers who do have expertise in mass spectrometry to read Adams’ report and—shall we say?—report back to me in the comments.

Adams begins with his usual hyperbole:

We are now releasing ICP-MS lab test results that compare the elemental composition of human blood to the elemental composition of a clot sample taken from the body of a person who received a covid vaccination and then subsequently died. This clot was provided by embalmer Richard Hirschman, and these clots are being widely reported in the bodies of people who have “died suddenly” in the weeks or months after receiving one or more covid vaccinations.

According to rigorous analysis based on excess death data — summarized nicely by Steve Kirsh at Substack — there are currently around 10,000 people dying each day from covid vaccines. Anywhere from 5 to 12 million fatalities have likely occurred worldwide so far, and with these self-assembling clots continuing to gain size and mass inside the bodies of those who have received the mRNA experimental medicine injections, it is certain that many people who have not yet died from the vaccines will experience death in the coming months and years.

That last bit about Steve Kirsch‘s claims is probably worth a post on its own, because this is a bit of misinformation that seems to be growing and spreading. Basically, Kirsch has of late been claiming that COVID-19 vaccines are killing people way faster than the Nazis killed Jews during the Holocaust, coming up with a figure as high as 12 million dead in under two years, 600,000 in the US alone. (By way of comparison, that number is in the same ballpark as the number of people in the US who die every year of cardiovascular disease or cancer.) Basically, Kirsch keeps finding ways to blame more and more deaths on COVID-19 vaccines, never mind that if the vaccines were really killing that many people that fast public health officials would notice quickly, and it would be impossible to cover up.

Richard Hirschman is worth mentioning again, however, as he is an embalmer who claimed to have found these clots in bodies when he aspirated blood out of the corpse during the embalming process and assumed that they were due to COVID-19 vaccines, even though morticians and embalmers rarely know the vaccination status of the deceased whose remains they are embalming and, given that COVID-19 infection itself can cause abnormal clotting, is more likely, if this observation is actually anything more than just anecdotal, to be due to COVID-19 than any vaccine.

Finally, before I look at Adams’ numbers, I’ll note that he purchased this equipment nine years ago. As I pointed out at the time, Adams purchased an inductively coupled plasma–mass spectrometer (ICP-MS). Mass spectrometry is a technique that produces spectra of the masses of the atoms and/or molecules comprising a sample of material. Basically, MS ionizes the molecules and measures what is known as the mass-to-charge ratio, from which the molecular weight of the atom or molecule can be determined. The signal is produces by a mechanism that can detect charged particles, and the relative abundance of ions is determined. These can be correlated with known masses and characteristic fragmentation patterns demonstrated by various molecules. Mass spectrometry is, as you might imagine, particularly useful for quantifying the content of various elements, particularly metals, because there is much less interpretation involved than in looking the peaks produced by the technique and trying to correlate them to fragments from larger biological molecules. It can be done, but it’s clearly beyond the limited skillset of an amateur like Mike Adams.

As a result, Adams restricts his analysis mainly to metals and trace elements. First, though, he has to brag:

Dr. Ruby connected us with Hirschman and helped arrange for the clot samples which we have tested via ICP-MS in our ISO-accredited, 17025 approved laboratory which specializes in food and water analysis.

In full disclosure, our laboratory is accredited, audited, inspected and validated for ICP-MS testing in food and water samples, as well as other areas such as cannabinoid quantitation analysis in hemp extract samples. However, the accreditation scope of our lab does not specifically encompass human biological samples, as we do not offer such testing to the public. Nevertheless, we routinely test dog food and cat food samples which are, of course, composed of animal flesh and ground blood vessels, meat tissue, cartilage and other animal-derived biological structures, and we are using the exact same sample preparation, digestion, analysis and reporting methods for post-vaccine clot samples. We also routinely test beef, poultry, fish and other meat samples. Thus, we are highly confident in the accuracy of these results. Furthermore, we did not see any failures during the sample prep process. The entire clot was dissolved in nitric acid, meaning its elements went into solution and were able to be analyzed via ICP-MS.

I can’t help but point out here that all this accreditation means is that the lab is maintained adequately and technically competent, meaning that its numbers are accurate and reproducible. It says nothing about the actual experimental design or the interpretation of the results. Elsewhere, Adams brags about this accreditation:

ISO 17025 accreditation is granted by third party accreditation bodies after extensive auditing, proficiency testing and other rigorous compliance activities. Not only is CWC Labs now accredited ISO 17025, but we have achieved this milestone through one of the world’s most recognized international accreditation bodies known as Perry John Laboratory Accreditation, Inc. (PJLA).*

I tried Googling “Perry John Laboratory Accreditation” and came up with nothing but other certificates, like the one Adams links to. Then I looked at it and saw that it said, “Perry Johnson Laboratory Accreditation.” That name sounded very familiar, and the address was in the Detroit metropolitan area; so I went to the website, where I found this video:

So it was that Perry Johnson! This is a guy who ran for the Republican Michigan gubernatorial nomination, billing himself as a businessman and a “quality guru” but failed to get on the ballot when his petitions submitted to the State Board of Canvassers were found to have numerous obviously invalid and even fraudulent signatures. He blamed the company that he had hired to gather the nominating signatures, but let’s just say that this incident made me seriously question this guy’s credibility as any sort of “quality guru.”

For the moment, though, let’s assume that Adams’ accreditation from PJLA is valid. So what? First, it’s only for elemental analysis; it does not accredit him to handle biological or medical samples. Adams even admits that he does not have accreditation to analyze “human biological samples,” but tries to wave away that problem by saying that “we routinely test dog food and cat food samples which are, of course, composed of animal flesh and ground blood vessels, meat tissue, cartilage and other animal-derived biological structures, and we are using the exact same sample preparation, digestion, analysis and reporting methods for post-vaccine clot samples.” Of course, sample preparation is very important for mass spectrometry, as you will see.

Basically, all this accreditation says is that Adams has the minimum skill level of a technician in that he can take a specimen and produce an accurate measurement of, for instance, how much lead or mercury it contains. That’s it. Nothing more. It says nothing about the appropriateness of the analysis or whether the specimens were appropriately collected and representative of the compounds being analyzed. All it says is that, if you give Adams a sample of food, dog food, or a tissue specimen, he will be able to measure the content of elements in it to a certain standard of accuracy. Basically, Adams does a bit of prestidigitation here by conflating technical accuracy with the correctness of his scientific interpretation.

So on to Adams’ “results”:

Although we intend to conduct more tests on clots and blood samples, the data we see so far make it clear that these clots are not “blood clots.” They are not simply made of congealed blood.

How do we know this? Because the elemental ratios and densities are vastly different. Consider the following comparison chart, based on our ICP-MS results (see full results below), and notice the stark differences between the elemental concentrations in blood vs. clot among nutritive “marker” elements such as iron and magnesium:

Element	Blood Results	Clot Results
Mg (magnesium)	35 ppm	1.7 ppm
K (potassium)	1893 ppm	12.5 ppm
Fe (iron)	462 ppm	20.6 ppm
Zn (zinc)	7.9 ppm	2.4 ppm
Cl (chlorine)	930,000 ppm	290,000 ppm
P (phosphorous)	1130 ppm	4900 ppm

As you can see, the post-vaccine clot sample only contains 4.4% of the iron that would be seen in human blood. This alone is confirmation that this clots is not a “blood clot.” In addition, note the near-total lack of potassium (K) in the clot sample. The clot contains less than 0.6% of the potassium as human blood. It’s a similar story with magnesium, too.

Can anyone tell me where Adams went wrong in his assumptions and experimental design? Let’s assume for the moment (even though Adams doesn’t really deserve that consideration) that his numbers are totally accurate and that, for example, there is a lot less magnesium, potassium, and iron in the “clot” he analyzed compared to blood. First, if you know the basics of the clotting cascade and how clots form, you know that clots are not “congealed blood.” Think about it. What is the purpose of a clot? It’s to plug up holes in blood vessels and stop bleeding. To accomplish this, platelets stick to the damaged endothelium (the layer lining the insides of blood vessels), which activates them to release their contents, which then results in clotting. It’s a complex process that is described well enough in a Wikipedia entry, and for purposes of my discussion you don’t need to know the details, just the end result, which is the clot. Contrary to what Adams seems to think, a clot is not made up of “congealed blood,” but rather of mostly proteins, the bulk of which is fibrin, whose molecules are crosslinked to each other.

It is thus completely unsurprising that the elemental composition of a clot is different than blood. Iron is nearly all bound up in the hemoglobin in the red blood cells. Given that clots do not consist primarily of red blood cells, it is not in the least bit surprising that the clot examined would have a lot less iron in it. Similarly, most potassium in the body is sequestered inside of cells, including red blood cells. Given that a clot is not made up primarily of red blood cells and that the cells likely lysed (broke open) to release their potassium into the solution that was likely removed from the clot, it is not surprising that blood would have a lot more potassium in it. (I’ll elaborate on this later.)

So why did Adams use blood as his control comparator? It’s totally the wrong control, because a blood clot is not “congealed blood.” If Adams had the slightest clue about the basic biology and biochemistry of blood clotting, he would know that. (I concede, of course, that it is possible that Adams does know that clots are not just “congealed blood” but also knows that his readers do not. Adams is, if nothing else, the consummate grifter.) It wouldn’t have been that hard to draw blood from somebody—I suggest from Adams—and let the blood clot. It wouldn’t be the best control, as clots that form in tubes are not quite the same clots that form in the body, but it would be closer. Also, I have to point out yet again that the clots that Adams was examining in his previous misadventures in microscopy were almost certainly postmortem clots, not clots that formed while the person was still alive. I explained why then; so I won’t burden you with another explanation now.

There are a number of other problems, in no particular order, most (but not all) pretty obvious:

• Did Hirschman have the family’s permission to use clots from their deceased loved one this way? If not, this “study” (such as it is) was totally unethical from the get-go. Also, arguably, such a study would require approval by an Institutional Review Board (IRB) because it uses human remains. Unfortunately, though, there is little leverage to enforce the requirement that Adams obtain IRB approval if he receives no government funding and isn’t applying for FDA approval for anything.
• No clinical information about the decedent is provided. How old was the person? What did they die of? What medical comorbidities did they have? How long had they been dead when the samples were drawn? Had they even been vaccinated against COVID-19? Had they had COVID-19? Did they die of COVID-19?
• When were the clots aspirated during the embalming process? After all, embalming fluid contains formalin and other chemicals, meaning that the clot analyzed could well be heavily contaminated with formalin, again making the use of blood as a control very problematic.

Another part of Adams’ “analysis” caught my eye:

In addition to the nutritive elements shown above, we noticed a peculiar pattern among electrically conductive elements such as sodium (Na), aluminum (Al) and tin (Sn). For the following table, please note that the tin and sodium results come from a separate “semiquant” report which is less accurate than the “fullquant” analysis used for all the other elements shown here. In essence, the semiquant numbers are accurate in terms of relative concentrations from one sample to the next, but they are not compared to calibrated external samples, so the actual (absolute) concentration reported does not have the confidence interval of the fullquant results:

Element	Blood Results	Clot Results
Na (sodium)	1050 ppm*	1500 ppm*
Sn (tin)	163 ppb*	942 ppb*
Al (aluminum)	1.3 ppm	1.6 ppm

* = SemiQuant results, not FullQuant

With sodium being nearly 50% higher in the clot, and tin showing an increase of 588%, we can only conclude that the self-assembling clot is, in effect, “harvesting” or concentrating certain elements from circulating blood as clot assembly is taking place. It is noteworthy that many of these elements are conductive. Aluminum, for example, is the most common alternative to copper for use in electrical wiring. Sodium is an alkali metal that is highly conductive, and tin is used as the primary component in solder alloys used to manufacture or repair circuit boards.

You can see the numbers on elemental conductivity at this electrical conductivity reference table from Angstrom Sciences.

One conclusion is inescapable: The clot is almost entirely lacking key marker elements that would be present in human blood (such as iron and potassium) yet shows significantly higher concentrations of elements that are used in electronics and circuitry.

First, notice no statistical analysis is provided to demonstrate that the differences in metal levels shown are actually statistically significantly different. For example, is 1.6 ppm statistically significantly different from 1.3 ppm in this analysis? Who knows? Also, what’s up with the higher level of tin (Sn)? Granted 942 ppb is basically roughly 1 ppm, but where did the extra tin come from in the clot results? This is where sample harvest and preparation comes in. For example, what else, besides formalin, is in embalming fluid? Typically, embalming fluid contains a mixture of formaldehyde, glutaraldehyde, methanol, and other solvents. However, because embalming fluid is used on dead people, these chemicals do not have to be medical grade and can easily contain contaminants.

Now let’s look at how Adams prepares his clot specimens:

If anything, the ICP-MS analysis is rather straightforward: Samples are “digested” into nitric acid, this acid is nebulized into a liquid stream which goes through a plasma torch, gets ionized and then directed through a quadrupole assembly that sorts the elements by their mass-to-charge ratios. Each individual element is scanned and counted on a PMT (Photo Multiplier Tube) which translates individual elements into electrical current that can be accurately counted. These results are mapped against external standards which are NIST traceable to provide very accurate calibration curves, which means the quantitation data are extremely reliable.

I will say right here that it is unclear to me whether Adams prepared his blood samples in the same manner, but if he did I would very much expect that it would have destroyed all the red and white blood cells (as intended) and released all the potassium contained in them into solution; that alone could easily explain the results that Adams reports for potassium content. In addition, one has to wonder whether Adams ever compared the mass spectrometry results of his specimens to blanks of just the nitric acid solution that he used to digest the specimens. I’d like to think so, but then this is Mike Adams, and, after all, commercially available nitric acid contains more than just nitric acid; the acid solution itself contains trace metals. Moreover, there is significant variation in results that can be seen with various methods of digestion that use nitric acid, as this paper shows. Come to think of it, is the water in Adams’ lab adequately distilled and deionized? Does he use Millipore-filtered water?

Inquiring minds want to know! Unfortunately, nowhere does Adams provide the necessary information to judge his methods.

Again, though, let’s assume, for the sake of this discussion, that Adams’ determinations of the amount of various minerals in the specimens that he subjected to ICP-MS are accurate? Again, so what? Blood was the wrong comparator, and we don’t even know if the decedent from whom the clot specimen analyzed was removed had even been vaccinated against COVID-19. Add to that his utter cluelessness with respect to his previous light microscopy analyses of the clot, particularly his failure to realize that what he was examining consisted almost certainly not of clots that had formed before death but rather the normal clots that form after the blood stops circulating after death, and this analysis is just plain ridiculous.

Even more ridiculous is Adams’ conclusion, which made me laugh out loud when I read it:

This analysis, notably, does not answer any question of whether these clots are “alive” or dead (like hair and nails). My own professional opinion is that these clots are not living structures. They appear to be self-assembling dead biostructures, from what we can see so far. But that’s just an initial assessment and may change with additional observations or findings. Prions, for example, are self-assembling but non-living biostructures too. They are essentially mis-folded proteins that spread throughout the brain (or other regions), causing morphological alterations that nullify both the normal structure and function of neurological cells. Something does not have to be alive in order to be self-assembling. Even viruses, as described by traditional virology, are dead structures which are nevertheless self-assembling and can “grow” in size and mass in terms of their aggregate population.

Unsurprisingly, antivaxxers have falsely tried to claim that COVID-19 vaccines cause prion disease. As for the analogy to viruses, let me just point out that viruses do not really self-assemble. Rather, they hijack the machinery of living cells in order to force the cell to use its machinery to replicate the genetic material of the virus and use that genetic material to produce the proteins that assemble to make the virus. Viruses will not replicate absent living cells to infect. Adams goes on to present microscopic images of the clot, repeating his ridiculous misinterpretation of what he sees as “not a hair” but a “wire-like” structure, as he did previously.

I do like his invitation, though:

Feel free to share these results, incorporate them into your own videos or podcasts, and offer your own explanations for what might explain this apparent anomaly. Please give credit to NaturalNews.com as the source, as we conducted this exclusive analysis in order to help resolve the mystery of these clots that seem to be killing a large number of people.

Done, done, and done. With pleasure. I rather suspect, though, that my sharing these results, incorporating them into my blog, and offering my own explanations for what might explain Adams’ observations (incompetence and inability to choose proper controls and comparators) were what Adams had in mind.

Adams also writes:

We welcome any feedback on these results, including corrections if any errors are found.

Again, somehow I doubt that Adams will be too welcoming of my feedback, given that the only feedback that I can offer is that his microscopic analysis is risibly incompetent, as is his MS-ICP analysis, an incompetence only surpassed by his interpretation of his results. Either that, or he knows and is lying. As is the case with a grifter like Mike Adams, it could be either or even both, but I lean more towards the latter: He knows what he’s doing is scientifically untenable, but he also knows that his audience doesn’t know it. Just read the comments, if you don’t believe me, like this one:

Strange. If “dead matter” forms non-blood clots… that’s genocidal. People will die from it. The clot is a mutation. It’s not a blood clot but rather a mutation ~ a mutant clot of “dead matter”. I would categorize it as a form of blood cancer. Because it’s an unnatural substance growing in the blood. That’s genocidal ~ a vaccine induced novel blood cancer.

This is basically science word salad or, as I like to call it, “biobabble,” a word I coined based on “technobabble,” a term used to describe sciencey-sounding dialogue in Star Trek that doesn’t actually make any sense.

Also read this one, which made me laugh out loud:

I can see a convergence here. Would be interesting to see an experiment conducted where elements found, no so much in quantity, more in ratio to each other, where Na, Al, Sn, are subjected to 5GHz spectrum shifts. Of particular interest, 26GHz to 30GHz (blood plasma affected), and 60GHz (oxygen atom gets severely affected). Distances of <1M (bluetooth level mV, cell ph. usage), 10, 30, 100 metres. If you find these external influences triggering the coagulation of these an other elements already present in humans, we may have hit the jackpot. It is too much of a coincidence the concentration of “vaccine” deaths to, not just 5G zones, but areas of high wi-fi and microwave exposure.

5G…it had to be…5G.

I just knew 5G had to be involved somehow. Maybe the reason tin levels were elevated in the clots examined was to provide raw material for all the tinfoil hats that clearly need to be made. Those self-assembling biostructures know Mike Adams’ audience.