Originally published August 3, 2023 11:00 am PDT
The Australian Senate’s ‘Education and Employment Legislation Committee’ on Wednesday held a hearing regarding COVID-19 vaccines, which involved an interrogation of Pfizer Australia’s Country Medical Director Dr. Krishan Thiru and Head of Regulatory Sciences Dr. Brian Hewitt.
Queensland Senator Gerard Rennick, a member of the Liberal National Party, asked the doctors whether they knew how Pfizer’s mRNA COVID vaccine causes heart disease.
Australia’s Department of Health and Aged Care has confirmed the link between COVID vaccines and heart diseases such as myocarditis and pericarditis.
“Can you explain the process, why the vaccine causes myocarditis and pericarditis?” Sen. Rennick asked.
Dr. Thiru began by expressing his “confidence in the safety profile” of the vaccine, but was cut off by Sen. Rennick when it was apparent that the doctor was not answering the question.
Calling for a point of order, he again asked the Pfizer doctors, “Do you understand why [Pfizer’s vaccine] causes myocarditis? I want you to explain to me why it causes myocarditis.”
Dr. Thiru said that Pfizer is “aware” of cases of myocarditis associated with the vaccine, before being interrupted again by Rennick and the committee chairman asking the doctor to finish his answer.
Thiru began referring to the number of reports of myocarditis linked to Pfizer’s jab, before being interrupted for a third time by Rennick.
“I’m not referring to the number of reports,” the Queensland senator pressed. “I want you to explain to me the mechanism of how the vaccine causes myocarditis. Do you or do you not understand the mechanism of why the vaccine causes myocarditis?”
“It looks to me like you don’t. And if you don’t understand it, why are you saying the vaccine is safe without qualifying the risks?” he asked.
Even though the committee chair told Dr. Thiru to “get to” Sen. Rennick’s question, the Pfizer doctor began talking about the vaccine’s benefit-risk ratio, before being interrupted yet again by the senator.
“You clearly don’t understand the pathway, do you? Because you can’t explain it,” Rennick said.
Dr. Thiru, who is described as the “‘go-to’ medical expert for Pfizer Australia and New Zealand” on Pfizer’s website, indicated he would have to “come back” to the committee with “whatever information we can provide.”
Watch the exchange below:
American Faith reported how a January publication in the scientific journal Circulation found persistently elevated spike protein levels in those who developed heart disease following COVID-19 vaccination.
Pfizer and Moderna COVID vaccines contain synthetic mRNA that makes the body produce the virus’s spike protein, ideally triggering an immune response and subsequent protection from the virus. The vaccine is injected into the arm and enters the bloodstream, where it produces the spike protein in the muscle, lymphatic system, and other cells.
Myocarditis, which is inflammation of the heart, is recognized as a complication of coronavirus vaccinations, especially in young adult and adolescent males, with cases most often occurring only days after the second vaccine dose.
The study, authored by doctors from Harvard, MIT, and Brigham and Women’s Hospital, provides an in-depth immune system profile of patients suffering from postvaccine myocarditis and found that people who developed myocarditis after receiving the COVID vaccine have high levels of spike protein circulating in their bloodstream.
“We discovered that individuals who developed postvaccine myocarditis uniquely exhibit elevated levels of free spike protein in circulation,” the authors write.
The study also found that spike protein was not broken down or cleared from the body as expected because antibodies, which are proteins produced by the immune system to identify and neutralize foreign substances, do not recognize the spike proteins.
“In postvaccine myocarditis, the spike protein appears to evade antibody recognition” even though the anti-spike antibodies that are generated from the vaccine “are produced in adequate quantities with normal functional and neutralization capacity,” according to the authors.
While the authors state that whether circulating spike protein from mRNA vaccination directly causes myocarditis is “unclear,” they warn about a “growing” body of evidence that spike protein can cause problems in heart cells and blood vessels by affecting enzymes and causing inflammation.
“There is growing in vitro evidence that spike itself can stimulate cardiac pericytes dysfunction or inflame the endothelium, potentially by downregulating angiotensin-converting enzyme 2 expression, by impairing endothelial nitric oxide bioavailability, or by activating integrin-mediated inflammation with hyperpermeability of the endothelial cell layer,” they explain.
The authors therefore conclude that the spike protein produced in the body from the vaccine “may contribute to myocarditis” and that their new data “suggest that there is a potentially unique mechanism of myocardial injury after SARS-CoV-2 mRNA vaccination associated with a robust innate immune response.”
The researchers nevertheless claim these results “do not alter the risk-benefit ratio favoring vaccination against COVID-19 to prevent severe clinical outcomes” even though “the implications of this finding must be better understood” by future study.
