A previous adviser for the Make America Healthy Again campaign, now aiming to establish a similar initiative in Europe, has stated that the public deserves an apology for Covid vaccine mandates.

In a piece published in Science, Public Health Policy and the Law, cardiologist Dr. Aseem Malhotra, along with psychologist Dr. Andrea Nazarenko, contends that informed consent, a ‘fundamental’ healthcare principle, was neglected during the Covid pandemic, which harmed trust in public health institutions.

They assert that by imposing mandates and minimizing the potential side effects of new vaccines, such as myocarditis, authorities ‘silenced truth seekers’ and undermined confidence in healthcare systems.

‘Until the most pressing questions are resolved,’ they wrote, ‘a global halt on Covid mRNA vaccines, alongside formal, clear apologies from governments and medical bodies for mandates and for stifling truth seekers, is necessary.’

‘Restoring legitimacy requires three specific commitments: complete transparency of data, independent scrutiny of evidence, and responsibility through both policy reform and public recognition of harm.’

At the national level, America’s Covid vaccine mandates, which included a rule for all employees to be vaccinated or undergo weekly testing, were not lifted until May 2023.

Some states, mostly Democrat-led, such as California, Oregon and New York, went even further and fired state employees who refused the vaccines.

There were also widespread mask mandates and lockdowns put in place across the US. Many of these policies remained in place for months, and in some states health officials have reinstated mask mandates in certain settings in response to rising viral cases.

Following the orders, trust in America’s health system declined, with 61 percent of citizens now saying they have confidence in the CDC compared to 73 percent in December 2020.

There have also been 14,800 claims for injuries people claim they suffered because of the Covid vaccines filed in the US to date, of which only 122 have resulted in a payout for compensation.

An estimated 270 million Americans received at least one dose of the Covid vaccine, with the shots estimated to have prevented more than 3.2 million deaths and 18.5 million hospitalizations. Serious adverse side effects of the inoculation are believed to be rare.

In an interview with the Daily Mail ahead of the commentary’s publication, Malhotra said: ‘In retrospect, this mandate on the general public, particularly on people at low risk like young adults, was criminal.

‘They were getting close to no benefit from the shots, while at the same time exposing themselves to serious potential harms.’

Malhotra was an adviser to Health Secretary Robert F Kennedy Jr’s MAHA Action movement, but has now joined a team of doctors working to Make Europe Healthy Again (MEHA) in order to replicate the movement in other countries. 

In the paper, titled ‘Mandates and Lack of Transparency on COVID-19 Vaccine Safety has Fuelled Distrust – An Apology to Patients is Long Overdue,’ the doctors warned of the harms linked to Covid vaccination, and called for further investigation.

‘Perhaps the most egregious failure to learn from emerging evidence concerned vaccine safety signals,’ they wrote.

‘The original trials characterized the vaccines as safe, with mostly short-term, mild-to-moderate reactions. [But] within six months of roll-out, safety signals emerged, yet policies and recommendations largely persisted.’

Older adults and those with underlying conditions were at much greater risk of hospitalization or death from Covid, compared to healthy children and younger adults who had a much lower risk of complications from the virus.

At the same time, however, the Covid vaccines were linked to myocarditis, or heart inflammation that is often mild and eases in a few days, but in rare cases can be fatal in younger individuals.

This raised concerns over whether the risks of vaccinating young adults and children against Covid outweighed the potential benefits.

The authors added: ‘It is understandable that, in the early days of the pandemic, decisions were made under uncertainty, guided by the best evidence available at the time. However, such justification cannot extend indefinitely. 

‘Once new evidence emerged and challenged initial assumptions about the benefits and risks, the ethical obligation was to reassess policy accordingly.’

Dr Mattias Desmet, a clinical psychologist at the University of Ghent, Belgium, who was not an author on the paper, told the scientists in a press release that their paper described the ‘true tragedy’ that emerged during the Covid pandemic.

‘Society has placed its fate in the hands of a science that is no longer a science,’ he said, ‘a science that lost all sense of truth.’