THE serious-adverse-event signal found in the Pfizer and Moderna mRNA Covid-19 vaccine trials has been in the peer-reviewed literature for nearly four years. Mainstream media outlets, on the rare occasions they address it, have treated it not as evidence to be weighed but as misinformation to be managed; dismissed on the authority of experts without relevant expertise, or simply ignored. A recent BBC Radio 4 broadcast is a near-textbook example.
The broadcast aired on Everything Is Fake and Nobody Cares, a BBC Radio 4 series hosted by Jamie Bartlett, whose stated purpose is to ask why, in so much of modern life, fakery is no longer punished but rewarded. It is a reasonable question. The most direct answer the series has produced to date appears inside one of its own episodes.
In the episode in question, Bartlett devoted his broadcast to Dr Aseem Malhotra and covid vaccine safety. He aired a specific claim about a peer-reviewed paper I led, published in the journal Vaccine in September 2022. To evaluate Dr Malhotra’s on-air statements, Bartlett brought in Dr Vicky Male, a reproductive immunologist at Imperial College London. Dr Male told listeners that the authors of the paper had been ‘specifically told to make it clear this paper should not be used’ to support the kinds of claims Dr Malhotra was making.
That statement is not true. No one told us that. The paper does not contain such an instruction. I am one of its authors; I have the peer review correspondence; I know what the journal asked of us and what it did not. Anyone could have checked this in five minutes by reading the paper, which runs to eight pages and is open-access online. Jamie Bartlett did not check.
On the basis of an unchecked false claim about a scientific paper, Bartlett told his audience that Dr Malhotra was spreading false information – on a podcast whose central premise is that modern life now rewards exactly this kind of thing.
Whether that reflected wilful dishonesty or plain incompetence, I cannot say. The case that follows lays out what happened in enough detail for readers to decide for themselves. Both possibilities reflect poorly on a national broadcaster. Only one would be excusable.
I. What the Paper Says, and What Dr Male Said It Says
The most consequential of Dr Male’s on-air claims was the one I opened with: that the authors were ‘specifically told to make it clear this paper should not be used to make the kinds of claims Dr Malhotra is making’, and that Dr Malhotra’s statement ‘is not actually correct. The paper doesn’t show that that’s true’.
Told by whom? Dr Male did not say. Scientific papers pass through three groups of people who could, in principle, issue such an instruction: peer-reviewers, journal editors, and in some fields regulators or sponsoring agencies. None of them told us any such thing. The peer review correspondence for our paper is not private. We deposited it publicly alongside our adjudication records and study data at a Zenodo archive, and the paper’s data-availability statement directs readers there. Anyone can read the reviewers’ comments. They contain substantive methodological questions and no such instruction. The editors communicated no such instruction before, during, or after review. There were no sponsoring agencies, because the paper was carried out with no grant funding at all. There was, in short, no one who told us any such thing, because no such exchange took place.
What does the paper actually say?
The closest sentence to the claim Dr Male described – and this is the one critics occasionally misread – is a standard scope statement from the introduction: ‘Our study was not designed to evaluate the overall harm-benefit of vaccination programs so far. To put our safety results in context, we conducted a simple comparison of harms with benefits to illustrate the need for formal harm-benefit analyses of the vaccines that are stratified according to risk of serious COVID-19 outcomes.’ That is a description of what the paper did and did not analyse. It is not a disavowal of the paper’s findings. Every careful research paper contains a sentence like it.
What the paper actually concluded, in its own words, is that the findings ‘raise concerns that mRNA vaccines are associated with more harm than initially estimated at the time of emergency authorisation,’ and that formal harm-benefit analyses stratified by risk of serious covid outcomes are needed.
Section 3.4 of the paper, titled ‘Harm-benefit considerations,’ quantifies that ratio directly. In the Pfizer trial, the excess risk of serious AESIs was 10.1 per 10,000 vaccinated, against a covid hospitalisation reduction of 2.3 per 10,000, a harm-to-benefit ratio of roughly 4.4 to 1. In the Moderna trial, the excess risk was 15.1 per 10,000 against a hospitalisation reduction of 6.4 per 10,000, a ratio of roughly 2.4 to 1.
Dr Malhotra’s on-air statement that a trial participant was 2 to 4 times more likely to suffer serious harm from the vaccine than to be hospitalised with covid was, if anything, a conservative rendering of what the paper reports. The Pfizer ratio sits just above the top of the range he stated; the Moderna ratio sits near the bottom. Both numbers appear in the paper’s own harm-benefit section. Dr Male’s statement that the paper ‘doesn’t show that that’s true’ is directly contradicted by the paper itself.
II. The Four Methodology Objections
Dr Male made four additional methodological criticisms of the paper. Each is answerable on the record.
This section can be read in the original article here.
III. The Journalist Who Needed a Doctor
Dr Male is a respected scientist. Her research on natural killer cells in pregnancy and the uterine immune environment is substantial, and her published work in reproductive immunology speaks for itself. In the BBC segment, she did not claim expertise in clinical trial methodology or evidence-based medicine, and for all I know she was offering informal responses to a journalist’s questions — something any academic would do if a BBC reporter called. I do not fault her for the errors in what she said about our paper. If a journalist asked me to interpret a molecular immunology study on NK cell signalling pathways in the decidua, I would get things wrong too, and I would deserve the same grace I am extending here.
My issue is with the journalist.
The BBC is the broadcaster UK audiences consistently rank among their most trusted sources for news. It is not a fringe outlet, and a failure of basic journalistic practice there is not a fringe problem. This is the same institution whose Director General and Head of News resigned in late 2025 after the corporation misleadingly edited a speech by Donald Trump – a failure its own reporter acknowledges, on tape, inside this very episode.
Jamie Bartlett told his audience, more than once, that much of what Dr Malhotra said sounded reasonable, but that he himself was not a doctor and could not evaluate the clinical evidence being cited. He said he needed to find an expert who could help him sort through it. That framing – I am the humble generalist, I need a specialist to guide me – is a legitimate journalistic move when the specialist actually has relevant expertise.
Dr Male is an immunologist who studies NK cells in pregnancy. She is not an epidemiologist, a biostatistician, a pharmacologist, or a clinical trialist. She does not hold a medical degree and does not treat patients. She has no published record in the interpretation of randomised controlled trials, harm-benefit analysis, or vaccine safety signal detection. Dr Malhotra, whatever one thinks of his public positions, is a consultant cardiologist who treats patients and is the author of a widely cited BMJ editorial on evidence-based medicine. He has spent over a decade writing and lecturing on the interpretation of clinical trial evidence for public audiences – in fact, exactly the skill set Bartlett said he was looking for.
Bartlett chose to present Dr Male to his audience as the expert who could adjudicate Dr Malhotra’s claims about a clinical trial reanalysis. That was not a neutral editorial decision.
What followed was worse. By the end of the segment, the same reporter who had opened by confessing he was unqualified to evaluate the evidence had graduated to confidently declaring that Dr Malhotra’s claims were not true, that he was unsure why Dr Malhotra held such views, and that the audience should regard them with deep suspicion.
The journey from ‘I’m not a doctor and I can’t evaluate this’ to ‘I can now tell you this is false’ was accomplished entirely by outsourcing the evaluation to someone who lacked the relevant expertise to perform it and then treating that person’s answers as settled fact.
Dr Male’s most consequential claim on the segment was the one at the top of this piece: that the authors were ‘specifically told’ not to use the paper the way Dr Malhotra was using it. You do not need a medical degree or a PhD in epidemiology to check whether a published paper contains a specific sentence. You need to be able to read. The paper is eight pages long, open-access, and was the centrepiece of Bartlett’s own segment.
A reporter who built an entire broadcast around a peer-reviewed study, and who took the time to record cheap shots about how Dr Malhotra was ‘bombarding’ him with data and telling stories that are ‘just more exciting’, could not be bothered to read the paper himself and verify whether Dr Male’s most important claim about it was true. It was not. The host of a podcast about why fakery is no longer punished had, in his own broadcast, produced a specimen of exactly that phenomenon. On the basis of that unchecked claim, he told his audience that Dr Malhotra was spreading false information.
One more failure of basic journalism is worth identifying. During the segment, Dr Male stated that she does not receive pharmaceutical industry funding. Bartlett accepted this at face value and used it to frame Dr Malhotra’s concerns about financial conflicts as conspiratorial thinking. Two minutes of searching would have complicated the picture. Dr Male’s publicly declared research funders include the Wellcome Trust and the UK Medical Research Council.
The Wellcome Trust was founded from the estate of Sir Henry Wellcome, the pharmaceutical magnate who built the company that became GlaxoSmithKline; from 1936 to 1995 the Trust was the sole or majority owner of that pharmaceutical company, and its current £37.6billion endowment derives from that origin. The UK Medical Research Council describes ‘alignment with industry’ on its own website as central to its strategy, with formal partnerships with AstraZeneca, GSK, Janssen, Lilly, Pfizer, Takeda, and UCB, and more than £100million in industry contributions to MRC-funded research since 2010.
It is entirely possible that Dr Male has never examined the provenance of her grant funding, and I do not fault her for that – most researchers do not. But the journalist who spent time on air suggesting that Dr Malhotra was peddling conspiracy theories about pharmaceutical influence could have determined, with a single Google search, that the expert he had chosen to adjudicate that very question receives her salary support from organisations founded by, or formally partnered with, the pharmaceutical industry. He did not perform the most basic job of a journalist: to fact-check his source. Instead, he had a recording of a denial, used it as a sound bite, and moved on to the next cheap shot.
I cannot determine from the evidence available to me whether Jamie Bartlett knew any of this and broadcast his claim anyway, or whether he simply failed to do the work. The case for either reading is in what he aired.
IV. The Filter
There is a second, uglier layer to the claim that the authors ‘were told’ anything. After our paper was published, Vaccine published two Commentaries critical of our findings, one in 2023, another in 2024. In both cases, the journal declined to share those critiques with me or my co-authors in advance, and declined to invite us to respond, a courtesy that is standard scholarly practice, and that one of the editors had promised in writing. In January 2025, we submitted a short response letter on our own initiative. The editor-in-chief rejected it without peer review.
A scientific journal willing to publish criticism of a paper it had peer-reviewed and accepted, and then unwilling to publish the authors’ response to that criticism, is the opposite of how scholarly exchange works. None of my co-authors had ever encountered it before, and we have looked.
The same pattern reaches beyond the journal. Our paper was labelled ‘misinformation’ on social platforms after publication – a label that, to my knowledge, has never been applied to any peer-reviewed study reporting favourable vaccine outcomes, however methodologically thin.
Dr Male, through her commentary on the BBC, does not appear to realise that any of this is happening. That is itself part of the problem she is describing: an expert confident in the consensus because she cannot see the filter that produced it.
Conclusion
The paper I led still stands. Its findings have not been refuted; they have been disputed, and the dispute has been handled by a scientific journal in a manner that none of us had ever encountered before. Our finding is straightforward: in the pivotal phase III trials of the mRNA Covid-19 vaccines, serious adverse events of special interest occurred more often in the vaccinated group than in the placebo group, at a rate that exceeded the reduction in Covid-19 hospitalisations within the trial window. That finding has implications for how the vaccines should be used going forward, particularly in populations at lower baseline risk of serious Covid-19.
The evidence would be settled quickly if Pfizer, Moderna, and the FDA released the individual participant data. Until then, the public is entitled to a more honest discussion than the one broadcast on the BBC. Dr Male is welcome to disagree with my conclusions. She is not entitled to tell listeners that the paper says something it does not, and neither the BBC nor Jamie Bartlett is entitled to build a narrative of false information on the back of a claim they did not bother to verify.
The paper is in the public record. The journal that published it is in the public record. The journal’s subsequent refusal to publish our response is, now, also in the public record. Readers are intelligent adults. They can weigh the evidence themselves – which is, after all, the only reason peer-reviewed science gets written down in the first place.
What the BBC broadcast illustrates – whether one reporter’s wilful dishonesty, one reporter’s incompetence, or both – fits a pattern that has been in place for nearly four years: mainstream coverage of covid vaccine safety outsourced to experts who were not asked to read the evidence, and the evidence that remains labelled ‘misinformation’. The public has been entitled to a more careful discussion from the start. Readers are welcome to decide for themselves whether that is what they have been given.
Jamie Bartlett’s podcast is called Everything is Fake and Nobody Cares. He is half right.
This article was published in Brownstone Institute on April 27, 2026, and is republished by kind permission.
