Covid vaccine claims at the Reform UK conference: fact checked

A cardiologist called Dr Aseem Malhotra was in the news this weekend after he suggested in a speech at the Reform UK party conference that Covid vaccines may have been linked to cancer in the Royal Family.

While this claim has been widely covered, Dr Malhotra, whom we have fact checked before, also made a number of other claims in his speech on Saturday.

Here we look at some of what he said:

“[Professor Dalgleish] thinks it’s highly likely that the Covid vaccines have been a factor—a significant factor—in the cancer of members of the Royal Family.”

This claim refers to alleged comments by an oncologist, Professor Angus Dalgleish, to Dr Malhotra. (The name used by Dr Malhotra in his speech wasn’t entirely clear, but he’s since confirmed this is who he meant to refer to).

We have attempted to confirm whether Professor Dalgleish did say this, and will update the article if we hear back.

Obviously we cannot check the details of specific people’s medical history, but experts say there is no credible evidence of a link between Covid vaccines and cancer, and we’ve seen no evidence the vaccines were a factor with recent high-profile cases of cancer in the Royal Family.

We’ve often fact checked false and misleading claims about a supposed link between the Covid vaccines and cancer.

Cancer Research UK told the Guardian: “There is no good evidence of a link between the Covid-19 vaccine and cancer risk. The vaccine is a safe and effective way to protect against the infection and prevent serious symptoms.”

Speaking to the Science Media Centre, Brian Ferguson, professor of viral immunology at the University of Cambridge, said: “Evidence that mRNA vaccines cause cancer is simply untrue…. There is no credible evidence that these vaccines disrupt tumour suppressors or drive any kind of process (biochemical or otherwise) that results in cancer. It is particularly crass to try to link this pseudoscience to the unfortunate incidents of cancer in the Royal Family.”

Professor Anne Mills, director of the Medical Research Council Toxicology Unit at the University of Cambridge, said: “There are no credible data for the cancer claims.”

“We’re talking about one of the most lucrative products in the history of medicine [the Covid vaccine] which is unsafe and defective [unclear].”

It is not completely clear what Dr Malhotra meant to say at the very end of this comment. He may have said “defective”, or he may have meant to say “ineffective”. In any case, he clearly said that the Covid vaccines are “unsafe”. This is not correct, according to regulators and other experts.

The NHS says all Covid vaccines in use in the UK have met “strict standards” of effectiveness, as well as safety, while the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention says that clinical trials have shown Covid vaccines are “safe and effective, especially against severe illness, hospitalization, and death”. This is well supported by many pieces of research.

Serious side effects from Covid vaccination do occur on rare occasions. The Office for National Statistics (ONS) data shows that, in England, 63 deaths involving Covid vaccines were registered up to July 2023. But analysis from the UK Health Security Agency found that the vaccines prevented 127,500 deaths in England up to 24 September 2021.

“Pfizer. In the summer of 2021… we knew that the [Covid vaccine] wasn’t stopping infection or transmission.”

This is potentially misleading. While the Covid vaccine did not stop every single person from getting infected at all, it was found at the time to be effective against infection and transmission.

A UK Health Security Agency vaccine surveillance report, published in September 2021, cited estimates that the Pfizer vaccine was 80% effective against infection with the Delta variant. It also said: "Uninfected individuals cannot transmit; therefore, the vaccines are also effective at preventing transmission."

Conditions for vaccination against Covid have changed significantly since 2021, with new variants of the virus emerging, new versions of the vaccines being developed, and the vaccination programme now focusing on the most vulnerable people.

The latest report from the Joint Committee on Vaccination and Immunisation notes that the current vaccines in recent use for vulnerable people “provide limited protection against mild infection and no evident protection against transmission of SARS-CoV-2 from one individual to another”, but this was not the case overall in 2021.

“I spoke to the chairman of the British Medical Association in December 2021, and I told him what was going on, and he said, ‘Aseem, nobody appears to have critically appraised the evidence as well as you have’, in terms of his colleagues in health policy and senior people. He said: ‘Most of my colleagues are getting their information on the Covid vaccine from the BBC.’”

We have no way of directly verifying what was said in this exchange in 2021, so we cannot say how accurate this claim is. But the chair of the British Medical Association (BMA) at that time, Dr Chaand Nagpaul, disputes it.

Dr Nagpaul told us in a statement through the BMA that the comments attributed to him were “inaccurate”, adding: “I definitely did not say that my senior medical colleagues were getting information about the Covid vaccine from the BBC.

“On the contrary, I specifically recall advising Dr Malhotra that the BMA and the senior medical profession was guided by and relied on data and information from Public Health England, the World Health Organisation, and the JCVI. The BMA also has a public health committee which has experts who were providing additional expertise regarding Covid and the vaccine to the Association…

“Dr Malhotra also told me he had reviewed the Pfizer research data and I recall advising him that the BMA was guided by public health experts whose opinions differed from his.”

Full Fact approached Dr Malhotra for comment. He referred us to a journalist who he said would help answer our questions, but at the time of writing we had not yet heard back.