A Lancet review of 325 autopsies after Covid vaccination found that 74% of the deaths were caused by the vaccine – but the study was removed within 24 hours.

The paper, a pre-print that was awaiting peer-review, is written by leading cardiologist Dr. Peter McCullough, Yale epidemiologist Dr. Harvey Risch and their colleagues at the Wellness Company, as well as top pathologist Dr. Roger Hodkinson and others, and was published online on Wednesday on the pre-print site of the prestigious medical journal.

However, less than 24 hours later, the study was removed and a note appeared stating: “This preprint has been removed by Preprints with the Lancet because the study’s conclusions are not supported by the study methodology.” While the study had not undergone any part of the peer-review process, the note implies it fell foul of “screening criteria”.

The original study abstract can be found in the Internet Archive. It reads (with my emphasis added):

Background: The rapid development and widespread deployment of COVID-19 vaccines, combined with a high number of adverse event reports, have led to concerns over possible mechanisms of injury including systemic lipid nanoparticle (LNP) and mRNA distribution, spike protein-associated tissue damage, thrombogenicity, immune system dysfunction and carcinogenicity. The aim of this systematic review is to investigate possible causal links between COVID-19 vaccine administration and death using autopsies and post-mortem analysis.

Methods: We searched for all published autopsy and necropsy reports relating to COVID-19 vaccination up until May 18th, 2023. We initially identified 678 studies and, after screening for our inclusion criteria, included 44 papers that contained 325 autopsy cases and one necropsy case. Three physicians independently reviewed all deaths and determined whether COVID-19 vaccination was the direct cause or contributed significantly to death.

Findings: The most implicated organ system in COVID-19 vaccine-associated death was the cardiovascular system (53%), followed by the hematological system (17%), the respiratory system (8%) and multiple organ systems (7%). Three or more organ systems were affected in 21 cases. The mean time from vaccination to death was 14.3 days. Most deaths occurred within a week from last vaccine administration. A total of 240 deaths (73.9%) were independently adjudicated as directly due to or significantly contributed to by COVID-19 vaccination.

Interpretation: The consistency seen among cases in this review with known COVID-19 vaccine adverse events, their mechanisms and related excess death, coupled with autopsy confirmation and physician-led death adjudication, suggests there is a high likelihood of a causal link between COVID-19 vaccines and death in most cases. Further urgent investigation is required for the purpose of clarifying our findings.

The full study does not appear to have been saved in the Internet Archive, but can be read here.

Without further detail from the Preprints with the Lancet staff who removed the paper it is hard to know what substance the claim that the conclusions are not supported by the methodology really has. A number of the authors of the paper are at the top of their fields so it is hard to imagine that the methodology of their review was really so poor that it warranted removal at initial screening rather than being subject to full critical appraisal. It smacks instead of raw censorship of a paper that failed to toe the official line. Keep in mind that the CDC has not yet acknowledged a single death being caused by the Covid mRNA vaccines. Autopsy evidence demonstrating otherwise is clearly not what the U.S. public health establishment wants to hear.

Dr. Clare Craig, a pathologist and co-Chair of the HART pandemic advisory group, says that in her view the approach taken in the study is sound. She told the Daily Sceptic:

The VAERS system [of vaccine adverse event reporting] is designed to alert to potential harms without necessarily being the best way of measuring the extent of those harms.

Quantifying the impact of deaths can be done by looking at overall mortality rates in a country.

However, this is imperfect as a deficit of deaths would be expected after a period of excess deaths, making the accuracy of any baseline dubious.

An alternative approach of auditing such deaths through autopsy is sound.

There may be a bias [in the study] towards reporting the autopsies of deaths where there was evidence of causation and the likelihood of causation might be exaggerated by that bias. For example, 19 of the 325 deaths were due to vaccine-induced immune thrombocytopenia and thrombosis (VITT) but these reports may be overrepresented because of the regulators’ willingness to acknowledge such deaths.

Nevertheless, it is important that attempts are made to quantify the risk of harm and censorship of these attempts, rather than open scientific critique, does nothing to help reassure people.

Dr. Harvey Risch, one of the study’s authors, told the Daily Sceptic he deems it “pure Government-directed censorship, even after the Missouri v. Biden injunction”.

“Meanwhile, my colleagues are studying what they call ‘Long Vax‘, which is vaccine-caused damage. But of course that is a rare, rare, rare outcome, except that they seem not to be having any problem finding such individuals to enroll in their study,” he added.

Stop Press: Co-author Dr. Peter McCullough has defended the study in an interview with the Epoch Times, saying the project was approved through the University of Michigan’s School of Public Health, and the team used a standard scientific evaluation methodology known as the Preferred Reporting Items for Systematic Reviews and Meta-Analyses to evaluate studies for inclusion. He added that before removal, the study was experiencing “hundreds of reviews per minute” and is now on the Zenodo preprint server and currently under review at another high-level journal.