Saturday, December 20, 2025

FDA Concedes with Expanded Myocarditis Warning

Dr. Peter McCullough’s Senate Testimony Exposes the Full Scope of COVID-19 Vaccine Heart Damage and Death

“When a product causes death, that demands a black box warning — immediately.”

That was the clear and urgent message from Dr. Peter McCullough, testifying before the Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee this week at a hearing titled: The Corruption of Science and Federal Health Agencies: How Health Officials Downplayed and Hid Myocarditis and Other Adverse Events Associated with the COVID-19 Vaccines.

Dr. McCullough presented data from both his clinical experience and the peer-reviewed literature, exposing the widespread risks of COVID-19 mRNA injections — particularly myocarditis in young men and fatal vaccine outcomes confirmed by autopsy.

“I’ve examined thousands of patients with this problem,” he told the Senate. “Before the pandemic, I had seen just two cases in my entire career.”

Just one day before the hearing, likely for preemptive damage control purposes, the FDA quietly updated its myocarditis warning on Pfizer and Moderna’s COVID-19 vaccines, expanding the risk category to males aged 16 to 25 and citing an incidence of 8 cases per million doses for the 2023–2024 formulations. Unfortunately, no mention of death was added — despite robust, peer-reviewed autopsy evidence confirming fatal vaccine-induced myocarditis.

Dr. McCullough referenced multiple such cases, including the tragic findings of Gill et al, who documented two teenage boys (ages 16 and 17) found dead at home just days after receiving the Pfizer vaccine. Autopsies confirmed unequivocal myocarditis as the cause of death.

He also cited the largest COVID-19 vaccine autopsy study to-date by Hulscher et al, showing that 73.9% of post-vaccine deaths were due to the COVID-19 vaccine — a number that dwarfs the FDA's current acknowledgment.

“They still don't have the word death in the package insert,” McCullough said. “And so Americans are not fairly informed.”

In support of his position, Dr. McCullough cited three peer-reviewed reviews by Mead et al, which collectively contain nearly 1,000 scientific references:

“The risks of COVID-19 vaccination clearly outweigh any theoretical benefits.”

  1. COVID-19 Modified mRNA “Vaccines”: Lessons Learned from Clinical Trials, Mass Vaccination, and the Bio-Pharmaceutical Complex, Part 1

  2. COVID-19 Modified mRNA “Vaccines”: Lessons Learned from Clinical Trials, Mass Vaccination, and the Bio-Pharmaceutical Complex, Part 2

  3. Myocarditis after SARS-CoV-2 infection and COVID-19 vaccination: Epidemiology, outcomes, and new perspectives

In direct response to claims made by Senator Richard Blumenthal during the hearing that COVID-19 vaccines saved millions of lives, Dr. McCullough was unequivocal:

“I don’t want America to be fooled by this hearing today thinking that the vaccines saved lives — because they didn’t.”

Dr. McCullough’s testimony was clear, data-driven, and difficult to ignore.
He made the case that public health agencies minimized known harms, failed to act on early warning signs, and still have not provided the public with full transparency.

Nicolas Hulscher, MPH

CDC Sued for 72-Dose Childhood Vaccine Schedule

CDC accused of running an illegal and unconstitutional hyper-vaccination program — never once tested for cumulative safety.

CDC Sued for Pushing Illegal 72-Dose Childhood Vaccine Schedule

Filed by Dr. Paul Thomas, Dr. Kenneth P. Stoller, and Stand for Health Freedom, the lawsuit accuses the CDC of recommending 72+ vaccine doses for American children without ever testing the cumulative schedule for safety.

Both doctors previously paid a heavy price for questioning the hyper-vaccination program:

  • Dr. Thomas had his license suspended five days after publishing a vaccinated vs. unvaccinated study.

  • Dr. Stoller lost his license for granting exemptions based on genetic vulnerabilities.

What the Lawsuit Alleges

  • No safety testing: Neither the CDC nor FDA has ever studied the long-term, combined effects of the full childhood schedule — despite two decades of warnings from the Institute of Medicine (2002, 2013).

  • 27 years of silence: By law, HHS must file biennial reports to Congress on vaccine safety efforts. Not a single report has been issued since 1998.

  • Constitutional violations: The suit charges the CDC with violating the First Amendment (silencing dissenting doctors), the Fifth Amendment (due process & bodily integrity), and the Administrative Procedure Act (arbitrary and capricious rulemaking).

What Plaintiffs Seek

  • Reclassify all childhood vaccines to Category B — shifting to shared decision-making, which would make medical exemptions far easier to obtain.

  • Require rigorous safety studies comparing fully vaccinated vs. unvaccinated children before any return to a mandated schedule.

  • End retaliation against doctors — protecting physicians who issue exemptions based on individualized medical judgment.


If successful, this lawsuit wouldn’t just expose the unlawful CDC hyper-vaccination program — it would mark a major victory for families seeking vaccine exemptions and for physicians fighting to practice real individualized medicine.

Here’s a video from Dr. Stoller’s YouTube channel that breaks down exactly what this lawsuit is about — the CDC’s rigid exemption policy, the lack of cumulative safety testing, and why the case could change everything for parents and doctors.

Photos of Bill Gates with Mysterious Young Women

Gates had always been a low-life womanizer...

New Photos of Bill Gates with Mysterious Young Women Emerge from Epstein Files

Microsoft co-founder Bill Gates has once again been swept into the widening scandal surrounding child trafficker Jeffrey Epstein.

The House Oversight Committee has just released a new tranche of images from Epstein’s estate that appear to contradict years of efforts by the billionaire to downplay his relationship with the disgraced financier.

The latest batch of photos, part of an ongoing disclosure process overseen by Congress, includes undated images of Gates posing with two mysterious young women whose faces have been redacted.

Another image shows a framed photo of Gates displayed on the wall of Epstein’s private “Pedophile Island” residence, raising fresh questions about how close the two men actually were.

Bill Gates was also seen in a framed picture inside Epstein’s mansion on his private island (lower left).

Earlier this week, additional photos revealed Gates standing alongside Andrew Mountbatten-Windsor, formerly Prince Andrew.

Gates has repeatedly claimed his interactions with Epstein were limited to “several dinners,” but the growing volume of photographic evidence is prompting renewed scrutiny of those assertions.

The timing has only intensified public interest.

The White House has been racing to redact hundreds of thousands of Epstein-related documents before Friday’s legal deadline requires their release.

The files will potentially expose the most detailed look yet at nearly two decades of federal investigations into Epstein’s exploitation of young women and underage girls.

Gates’s associations with Epstein first drew global attention in 2019, when the New York Times reported the tech mogul met Epstein “after Epstein was convicted of sex crimes.”

A 2023 Wall Street Journal investigation further alleged Epstein attempted to leverage an alleged affair involving Gates and a Russian bridge player in 2017, a claim Gates has not addressed in detail.

Gates’s ex-wife, Melinda, has publicly said she ended the marriage partly because of his ties to Epstein.

She called Epstein “abhorrent” and “evil personified.”

Despite that background, Gates has continued to insist his contact with Epstein was minimal and motivated by philanthropic ambitions.

His explanation, “I had dinner with him, and that’s all,” is under renewed pressure as more images emerge showing Gates in settings that appear to extend beyond business meetings.

In one photo released December 12, a younger Gates is seen smiling next to a man believed to be Epstein’s longtime pilot, Larry Visoski, standing beside Epstein’s jet.

The image contrasts sharply with Gates’ 2023 statement to ABC Australia, where he dismissed the entire relationship as limited to a handful of meals.

Gates has repeatedly called his involvement with Epstein a mistake.

“In retrospect, I was foolish to spend any time with him,” he told the Wall Street Journal earlier this year.

“So yes, I think I was quite stupid.”

His spokesperson has maintained that Epstein attempted to “leverage a past relationship,” adding:

“Mr. Gates never had any financial dealings with Epstein.

“As Bill has said before, it was a mistake to have ever met him.”

The newest tranche of Epstein estate photos includes far more than Gates.

Images show Epstein surrounded by groups of women; photographs of a woman whose body was inscribed with quotes from Vladimir Nabokov’s novel Lolita; and social gatherings featuring high-profile figures, including director Woody Allen, businessman Thomas Pritzker, former Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Barak, and linguist Noam Chomsky.

None of those individuals is implicated in Epstein’s crimes, however.

Several photos depict Epstein’s infamous Boeing 727, nicknamed the “Lolita Express,” which has previously been associated with travel by numerous prominent figures, including Clinton and ex-Prince Andrew, according to released flight logs.

Other disturbing images feature passports from multiple countries, including Ukraine, Russia, Lithuania, and South Africa, with identifying information redacted.

Investigators say these documents may have belonged to Epstein’s trafficking victims.

This is consistent with testimony that Ghislaine Maxwell regularly seized passports from girls taken to Epstein’s island.

Epstein’s own U.S. passport, issued in 2019, was also displayed.

It contains a notice stating the bearer “is a registered sex offender who was convicted of a sex offence against a minor.”

The growing evidence trove, now tens of thousands of images and documents, is renewing pressure on public officials and former associates who have long attempted to distance themselves from Epstein.

Democrats have selectively released 68 photos so far, with more expected as federal agencies prepare for the legally mandated document dump.

With Gates appearing yet again in newly surfaced material, questions surrounding the true extent of his relationship with Epstein, and the accuracy of his past statements, are certain to intensify.

Tuesday, December 16, 2025

mRNA-based COVID-19 vaccines can cause myocarditis

The great unraveling continues. If anything, it is accelerating. Earlier this week we reviewed (in a special edition!) the astonishing Atlantic article admitting babies died from the covid shots— right in the headline. On Thursday, Stanford Medicine News ran a similar but unrelated story headlined, “Stanford Medicine study shows why mRNA-based COVID-19 vaccines can cause myocarditis.


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The study was titled, “Inhibition of CXCL10 and IFN-γ ameliorates myocarditis in preclinical models of SARS-CoV-2 mRNA vaccination.” It features a whopping 16 authors, all members of Stanford’s cardiology institute. It was funded, in large part, by the National Institutes of Health.

In other words, this is undeniably “gold standard” science.

Unsurprisingly, the study starts with the regurgitated slogan that must always be included for publication in a respectable journal: “The highly effective SARS-CoV-2 mRNA vaccines were essential for limiting the COVID-19 pandemic.” That was the first and last time it praised the jabs.

The dense, technical paper identified a potential and plausible biological pathway between mRNA vaccination and myocarditis. It starts with a potential immune overreaction to the presence of foreign proteins, including in this case the lipid nanoparticles, transfected cells, and the spike protein produced by them.

An immune system overreaction can then damage the heart muscle, sometimes leading to myocarditis, which is a kind of injurious inflammation. Even asymptomatic myocarditis can cause permanent scarring in the heart, which can lead to very serious problems years later.

That’s why some doctors say “there is no such thing as mild myocarditis.” The heart is kind of important. Mild myocarditis is like mild brain damage. After all, what are a few neurons here or there, between pharma friends?


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💉 Which brings us to the study’s first major takeaway. The Stanford researchers’ conclusions weren’t limited to spike proteins. The authors were careful, concise, and cautiously stayed in their lane, but the obvious implication was that all mRNA vaccines —not just covid shots— carry the same risk. Since they didn’t test any, we don’t know whether the risk varies between types of mRNA shots; it could be even worse for other types of mRNA vaccines.

It is worth noting that, so far, only covid mRNA vaccines have been injected into large, diverse human populations at sufficient scale to reveal rare or delayed adverse immune effects. Other types of mRNA vaccines are mired in small clinical trials and lack comparable exposure data.

In other words, this study is bad news for the entire mRNA platform, not just the covid shots. Until now, the “consensus group” believed that the lipid nanoparticles (tiny globs of artificial fat carrying the mRNA payload) were immunologically neutral, and can safely travel around the body without notice or harm. But this study found that the platform itself could trigger an immune response —sometimes a very bad one— independent of the spike protein and even before many cells had been productively transfected.

Even the UK Telegraph picked up on this point, proving that corporate media occasionally stumbles over a truth nugget:


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Imagine that. But the next takeaway was even more significant.


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💉 From time to time over the last few years, several strong papers have been published in various places finding problems with the jabs. But this one is categorically different, because it comes down from the tippy-top of the credentialed-class mountain. No one can wave away a peer-reviewed Stanford study with 16 institutional authors. So the publication of this study is, like the Atlantic article, more of a permission structure than any revolutionary scientific discovery.

It’s a green light: we can talk about covid jab harms now.

Which is not to say this study failed to break any new ground. As far as I know, it’s the first study to describe all three parts of an identified injury pathway: (1) a concrete mechanism of harm (a cytokine loop), (2) an organ-specific injury (the heart), and (3) confirmation of the mechanism through blockability (using neutralizing antibodies or an anti-inflammatory supplement).

Curiously, all the work described in the study was completed in 2023. That’s a long runway to publication in mid-December 2025. There is no smoking gun, but it appears the publication of this study was delayed until now. Which raises the question: why now?

As I conjectured before, my best guess is the drug cartel has finally given up on pushing the covid shots, and maybe on the whole mRNA platform. But that only shifts the question one step backwards: In other words, what is now making them give up on the shots?

Which brings us to the next remarkable development.

💉 Yesterday, CNN ran an exclusive story headlined, “FDA intends to put its most serious warning on Covid vaccines, sources say.” It’s the dreaded “black box” warning, which the FDA reserves for the most dangerous types of drugs. “The plan shocked outside experts,” CNN reported, “who said there was no basis for the warning.” Well. There’s no basis for ‘experts.’ But I digress.


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A black box warning is the FDA’s nuclear option. It’s the strongest safety label the agency can place on any drug or vaccine, reserved for risks that are serious, potentially irreversible, or life-threatening. The warning is literally boxed in black ink at the top of the drug label so it cannot be overlooked, skimmed, or buried down in the fine print.

Black box warnings are not suggestions, footnotes, or talking points. They are how the FDA formally announces: this risk matters. Black boxes are rare, reputationally toxic, and legally consequential. Once applied, they signal to doctors, hospitals, insurers, and courts that the risk is “material” as a matter of law, not opinion.

Once a black box exists, the ground rules permanently change. Even the most enthusiastic, guideline-faithful physician cannot realistically ignore it without stepping into legal quicksand. The warning must be disclosed to patients as part of informed consent; failing to do so is no longer a judgment call but a liability problem. “Following APA guidance” stops working as a shield, because FDA labeling outranks press releases and reassurance campaigns.


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Hospitals’ risk management officers will mandate documentation, insurers will demand compliance, software systems will prompt patient disclosures, and plaintiffs’ lawyers will staple the warning onto every complaint. Doctors may still recommend— but they can’t minimize, pressure, or pretend there’s nothing serious to discuss. A black box doesn’t ban a product; it forces patients to face true risks.

And once that bell has rung, it never unrings.

💉 It’s not a done deal. The story was based on “two people familiar with the agency’s plans,” which could be a couple of psychics, for all we know. And, even assuming they were legit FDA leakers, CNN said, “the plan has not been finalized and may still change.” So.

But even the story itself hurts the jab mission. “What’s happening now is death by a thousand cuts,” said a “former federal health official,” who remained anonymous because “they were not authorized to share information with a reporter.” Was it leaked by foes or friendlies?

Either way, the leak was designed to raise a small storm of controversy. The article rounded up a baker’s dozen of ‘experts’ who enthusiastically criticized the FDA’s alleged future move, which has not yet happened, and may never happen. We shall overlook these premature doomcryers.

But diabolical jab doctor, former vaccine committee member, and pharma shill Paul Offit told a podcast host this week that “myocarditis was a very small price to pay. People need to have realistic expectations; you’re going to learn as you go.” Behold the grandfatherly banality of evil.


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CLIP: Dr. Paul Offit confirms war criminal status (1:02).

How about that warm-spirited, scientific nuance? “We’ll learn about the risks together, as we go!” Now they tell us. Back when they were coercing people to take the shots —jab or job!— they weren’t nearly so nuanced. And, “it was a small price to pay,” Offit quite generously declared. Yes, but who paid the price? Do the people who paid the piper also agree how small the price was?

Easy for him to say.

One thing we know for sure is that Paul Offit didn’t pay the price. It’s not his heart. Just the opposite. It’s well known that Paul made millions off his rotavirus vaccine, which he sold to Merck. He currently hogs a Merck-endowed chair at Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia (ironically, ‘CHOP’), runs the school’s endowed Vaccine Education Center, and mints more money with grants related to vaccine development.

It’s pretty rich that he’s talking about the “price” that everyday people who aren’t compensated for injuries have to pay.

It is literally impossible to find someone more conflicted than Paul Offit. Why anyone listens to him at all is beyond my comprehension. Well, I know why they promote him, but enabling evil is just as bad as what Offit is doing.

If the FDA does black-box the covid shots (as it should), even pharma shills like Dr. Offit will have to tread very carefully. The FDA establishes the standard of care, and if doctors like Offit advise patients to defy it, the docs can become personally liable. (Which, by the way, is the same reason so few good doctors defied CDC/FDA guidelines during the pandemic.)

Here’s the thing: as CNN’s article showed, the FDA leaks like a rusty sieve. Assuming pharma also has its sources inside the FDA, which seems pretty safe to assume, then they all know what’s coming. Maybe that’s why they’ve suddenly become so much more forthcoming about the shots. By the time the FDA finally does something— it will be ‘old news.

All in all, it’s difficult to avoid the conclusion that Democrats’ long, failed experiment in coercive public health is finally, at long last, reaching a shuddering stop. As we’ve previously discussed, once the public finally grasps the horrifying extent of the fraud that was perpetrated upon us, it will crush into powder the last remaining shards of trust in the institutions. There’s no going back now.

COVID-19 vaccines can cause myocarditis : Stanford study

A new study implicates a pair of substances secreted by immune cells in inducing myocarditis among mRNA-based COVID-19 vaccine recipients — and proposes a strategy to mitigate this effect.

By Bruce Goldman

Dec 10, 2025

Stanford Medicine investigators have unearthed the biological process by which mRNA-based vaccines for COVID-19 can cause heart damage in some young men and adolescents — and they’ve shown a possible route to reducing its likelihood.

Using advanced but now common lab technologies, along with published data from vaccinated individuals, the researchers identified a two-step sequence in which these vaccines activate a certain type of immune cell, in turn riling up another type of immune cell. The resulting inflammatory activity directly injures heart muscle cells, while triggering further inflammatory damage.

The mRNA vaccines for COVID-19, which have now been administered several billion times, have been heavily scrutinized for safety and have been shown to be extremely safe, said Joseph Wu, MD, PhD, the director of the Stanford Cardiovascular Institute.

“The mRNA vaccines have done a tremendous job mitigating the COVID pandemic,” said Wu, the Simon H. Stertzer, MD, Professor and a professor of medicine and of radiology. “Without these vaccines, more people would have gotten sick, more people would have had severe effects and more people would have died.”

mRNA vaccines are viewed as a breakthrough because they can be produced quickly enough to keep up with sudden microbial strain changes and they can be rapidly adapted to fight widely divergent types of pathogens. But, as with all vaccines, not everyone who gets the shot experiences a purely benign reaction.

One rare but real risk of the mRNA-based COVID-19 vaccines is myocarditis, or inflammation of heart tissue. Symptoms — chest pain, shortness of breath, fever and palpitations — appear in the absence of any viral infection. And they happen quickly: within one to three days after a shot. Most of those affected have high blood levels of a substance called cardiac troponin, a well-established clinical indicator of heart-muscle injury. (Cardiac troponin is normally found exclusively in the heart muscle. When found circulating in blood, it indicates damage to heart muscle cells.)


Vaccine-associated myocarditis occurs in about one in every 140,000 vaccinees after a first dose and rises to one in 32,000 after a second dose. For reasons that aren’t clear, incidence peaks among male vaccinees age 30 or below, at one in 16,750 vaccinees.

Fortunately, most of these cases end well, Wu said, with full heart function retained or restored.  Recovery is typically swift.

“It’s not a heart attack in the traditional sense,” he said. “There’s no blockage of blood vessels as found in most common heart attacks. When symptoms are mild and the inflammation hasn’t caused structural damage to the heart, we just observe these patients to make sure they recover.”

However, Wu noted, if the inflammation is severe the resulting heart injury can be quite debilitating, leading to hospitalizations; ICU admissions for critically ill patients; and deaths, albeit rarely.

“But COVID’s worse,” he added. A case of COVID-19 is about 10 times as likely to induce myocarditis as an mRNA-based COVID-19 vaccination, Wu said. That’s in addition to all the other trouble it causes.

Wu shares senior authorship of a study describing his team’s findings, published Dec. 10 in Science Translational Medicine, with former Stanford Medicine postdoctoral scholar Masataka Nishiga, MD, PhD, now an assistant professor at The Ohio State University. The study’s lead author is current postdoctoral scholar Xu Cao, PhD.

“Medical scientists are quite aware that COVID itself can cause myocarditis,” Wu said. “To a lesser extent, so can the mRNA vaccines. The question is, why?”

Suspects identified

To find out, he and his colleagues first analyzed data from blood draws of individuals vaccinated for COVID-19, some of whom developed myocarditis. Comparing those who did with those who didn’t, they noticed high levels of a couple of proteins in the blood of vaccinees who wound up with myocarditis.

Medical scientists are quite aware that COVID itself can cause myocarditis. To a lesser extent, so can the mRNA vaccines. The question is, why?”

“Two proteins, named CXCL10 and IFN-gamma, popped up. We think these two are the major drivers of myocarditis,” Wu said. They operate like a tag team.

CXCL10 and IFN-gamma both belong to a class of proteins called cytokines: signaling substances that immune cells secrete to carry on chemical conversations with one another.

Hoping to listen in on these communications, the scientists generated human immune cells called macrophages — fierce first-responder cells of the immune system — in a dish and incubated them with mRNA vaccines.

The macrophages responded by pumping out various cytokines but, most notably, pronounced amounts of CXCL10. They also otherwise generally mimicked the vaccine responses of macrophages reported in humans, as shown by comparison with published data from vaccinated individuals.

When the scientists further supplied the dish with an additional kind of immune cell — T cells, roving sentinels that can recognize and mount immune attacks on specific pathogens but can also incite general arousal of the immune system — or even when they merely steeped T cells in the solution in which vaccine-administered macrophages had bathed, they saw a marked uptick in the T cells’ output of IFN-gamma. But T cells incubated with mRNA vaccine in the absence of macrophages or their bathwater produced only standard amounts of IFN-gamma. These results showed that macrophages are the chief source of CXCL10 and that T cells are the chief source of IFN-gamma in response to mRNA vaccination.

Tag-teaming

But did the two cytokines, together, contribute directly to cardiac injury? The researchers vaccinated young male mice, then found heightened levels of cardiac troponin, the widely used clinical marker of heart muscle damage.

The investigators also noticed infiltration of macrophages and another frontline take-no-prisoners immune-cell type, neutrophils — short-lived first responders that live to die in glorious battle (typically with bacterial or fungal pathogens) and are the main component of pus — into the mice’s cardiac tissue. This also occurs in post-vaccination myocarditis patients.

This macrophage and neutrophil infiltration into the heart — which comes at a cost, as these shoot-first-and-ask-questions-later warrior immune cells often unload friendly fire, causing collateral damage to healthy tissue, including heart muscle — could be minimized by blocking CXCL10 and IFN-gamma activity.

Also seen in the mice’s hearts were increased populations of cell-surface molecules that snag macrophages, neutrophils and other white-blood-cell types, causing them to adhere to endothelial cells, which line all blood vessels including those in the heart.

So, yes, CXCL10 and IFN-gamma did contribute directly to cardiac injury in these mice. And blocking them largely preserved the immune response to the vaccination while lowering levels of cardiac troponin induced by vaccination.

Wu’s lab excels at a technology involving the transformation of human skin cells or blood cells into blank cells that can then be guided to differentiate into cardiomyocytes, macrophages and endothelial cells and to coalesce into spherical structures that mimic the heart’s rhythmic contractions.

The researchers treated these “cardiac spheroids” with CXCL10- and IFN-gamma-enriched bathwater from vaccine-stimulated macrophages and T cells, respectively. They witnessed a significant increase in markers of cardiac stress, rescued by inhibitors of the two cytokines.

The cardiac spheroids’ squeezing capacity, beating rate and other measures of healthy heart function were all impaired but, again, partially restored by the cytokine inhibitors.

Saved by a soybean

Wu had a hunch that a common dietary supplement could help prevent such damage. Given higher myocarditis rates among males and estrogen’s known anti-inflammatory properties, he revisited a compound he’d studied a few years earlier.

In a 2022 paper published in Cell, Wu’s team had identified genistein, a mild estrogen-like substance derived from soybeans, as having anti-inflammatory activity and the ability to counter marijuana-induced damage to blood vessels and heart tissue.

“Genistein is only weakly absorbed when taken orally,” Wu said. “Nobody ever overdosed on tofu.”

Wu and his colleagues conducted a series of experiments closely paralleling those described above, pre-treating cells, cardiac spheres and mice (the latter by oral administration of large quantities) with genistein. Doing this prevented much of the deleterious effects of mRNA vaccines or the CXCL10/IFN-gamma combo to heart cells and tissue.

The genistein Wu and his associates used was purer and more concentrated than the dietary supplement found in health food stores.

“It’s reasonable to believe that the mRNA-vaccine-induced inflammatory response may extend to other organs,” Wu said. “We and others have seen some evidence of this in lung, liver and kidney. It’s possible that genistein may also reverse these changes.”

Elevated inflammatory cytokine signaling could be a class effect of mRNA vaccines. Notably, IFN-gamma signaling is a fundamental defense mechanism against foreign DNA and RNA molecules, including viral nucleic acids, Wu said.

“Your body needs these cytokines to ward off viruses. It’s essential to immune response but can become toxic in large amounts,” he said. IFN-gamma secreted in large amounts, however lofty its purpose, can trigger myocarditis-like symptoms and degradation of structural heart muscle proteins.

That risk probably extends beyond mRNA-based COVID-19 vaccines.

“Other vaccines can cause myocarditis and inflammatory problems, but the symptoms tend to be more diffuse,” Wu said. “Plus, mRNA-based COVID-19 vaccines’ risks have received intense public scrutiny and media coverage. If you get chest pains from a COVID vaccine you go to the hospital to get checked out, and if the serum troponin is positive, then you get diagnosed with myocarditis. If you get achy muscles or joints from a flu vaccine, you just blow it off.”

The study was funded by the National Institutes of Health (grants R01 HL113006, R01 HL141371, R01 HL141851, R01 HL163680 and R01 HL176822) and the Gootter-Jensen Foundation.

About Stanford Medicine

Stanford Medicine is an integrated academic health system comprising the Stanford School of Medicine and adult and pediatric health care delivery systems. Together, they harness the full potential of biomedicine through collaborative research, education and clinical care for patients. For more information, please visit med.stanford.edu