A major new autopsy report has found that three people who died unexpectedly at home with no pre-existing disease shortly after COVID vaccination were likely killed by the vaccine. A further two deaths were found to be possibly due to the vaccine.
The report, published in Clinical Research in Cardiology, the official journal of the German Cardiac Society, detailed autopsies carried out at Heidelberg University Hospital in 2021. Led by Thomas Longerich and Peter Schirmacher, it found that in five deaths that occurred within a week of the first or second dose of vaccination with Pfizer or Moderna, inflammation of the heart tissue due to an autoimmune response triggered by the vaccine had likely or possibly caused the death.
In total the report looked at 35 autopsies carried out at the University of Heidelberg in people who died within 20 days of COVID vaccination, of which 10 were deemed on examination to be due to a pre-existing illness and not the vaccine. For the remaining 20, the report did not rule out the vaccine as a cause of death, which Dr. Schirmacher has confirmed to me is intentional as the autopsy results were inconclusive. Almost all of the remaining cases were of a cardiovascular cause, as indicated in the table below from the supplementary materials, where 21 of the 30 deaths are attributed to a cardiovascular cause. One of these is attributed to blood clots (VITT) from AstraZeneca vaccination (the report was looking specifically at post-vaccine myocarditis deaths), leaving 20 from other cardiovascular causes.
For the five deaths in the main report attributed as likely or possibly due to the vaccines, the authors state:
All cases lacked significant coronary heart disease, acute or chronic manifestations of ischaemic heart disease, manifestations of cardiomyopathy or other signs of a pre-existing, clinically relevant heart disease.
This indicates that the authors limited themselves to deaths where there was no “pre-existing, clinically relevant heart disease,” making the report very conservative in which deaths it was willing to pin on the vaccines.
Dr. Schirmacher told me:
We included only cases, in which the constellation was unequivocally clear and no other cause of death was demonstrable despite all efforts. We cannot rule out vaccine effects in the other cases, but here we had an alternative potential cause of death (e.g. myocardial infarction, pulmonary embolism). If there is severe ischemic cardiomyopathy it is almost impossible to rule out myocarditis effects or definitively rule in inflammatory alterations as due to vaccination. These cases were not included.
We did not aim to include or find every case but the characteristics of definitive, unequivocal cases beyond any doubt. Only by this way you can establish the typical characteristics; otherwise less strict criteria may lead to ‘contamination’ of the collective; it is absolutely plausible that by these criteria we may have missed further cases but the intention of our study was never quantitative or extrapolation and there are numerous positive and negative bias. But we wanted to establish the fact not the size.
It is of course very possible that the vaccines also cause death where there is an underlying cardiovascular condition, and indeed, that it is more likely to do so. Thus these five deaths are the minimum from these autopsy cases in which the vaccines are involved—those in which there is no other plausible explanation.
It is worth noting here that initially in 2021, when the autopsies were first carried out, Dr. Schirmacher stated that his team had concluded 30-40 percent of the deaths were due to the vaccines. These earlier estimates may give us a better indication of how many of the deaths the authors really think are attributable to the vaccines, when they are unconstrained by highly conservative assumptions (and looking at causes besides myocarditis). Note that these percentages are based on a selection of deaths that occurred shortly after vaccination, not a random sample of all deaths, so the authors rightly warn that no estimation of individual risk can be made from them.
Did the autopsies find spike protein from the vaccines present in the heart tissue? The samples from the five vaccine-attributed deaths were tested for infectious agents including SARS-CoV-2 (in one instance revealing “low viral copy numbers” of a herpes virus, which the authors deemed insufficient to explain the inflammation). However, no tests were done specifically for the virus spike protein or nucleocapsid protein, such as have been used successfully in other autopsies to aid attribution to the vaccine, so unfortunately this evidence was unavailable for these autopsies.
The autopsies in the report also only cover doses 1 and 2, not any booster doses, and only deaths within 20 days of vaccination, so the report doesn’t address directly the question of what’s been causing the elevated heart deaths since the booster rollouts from autumn 2021 or whether the vaccines can trigger cardiovascular death weeks or months later. (Other autopsies have confirmed that the spike protein can persist in the body for weeks or months after vaccination and trigger a fatal autoimmune attack on the heart.)
What the report does do, however, is establish that people who die suddenly in the days immediately following vaccination may well have died from a vaccine-related autoimmune attack on the heart. It also confirms how deadly even mild vaccine-induced myocarditis can be—and thus why studies like the one from Thailand, finding cardiovascular adverse effects in around a third of teenagers (29.2 percent) following Pfizer vaccination and subclinical heart inflammation in one in 43 (2.3 percent), and the study from Switzerland finding at least 2.8 percent with subclinical myocarditis and elevated troponin levels (indicating heart injury) across all vaccinated people, are so worrying.
The authors of the new study diplomatically write that the “reported incidence” of myocarditis after vaccination is “low” and the risks of hospitalization and death associated with COVID-19 are “stated to be greater than the recorded risk associated with COVID-19 vaccination”—notably declining to commit themselves to the official propositions that they dutifully repeat.
The fact that those who die suddenly after vaccination may have died from the hidden effects of the COVID vaccine on their heart is thus now firmly established in the medical literature. The big remaining question is how often it occurs.