Editor’s Note: On June 3, the British Medical Journal Public Health published the most definitive study yet conducted on the COVID-19 pandemic, concluding that flawed measures like vaccines and lockdowns resulted in 3,098,456 “excess deaths” — those not caused by the virus itself — between January 1, 2020 and December 31, 2022, in 47 Western countries. 

This is unprecedented and raises serious concerns,” the authors observed, explaining how the “phase III randomized clinical trials of mRNA COVID-19 vaccines showed that the Pfizer trial had a 36% higher risk of serious adverse events in the vaccine group.” 

The “serious adverse events,” as defined by the study, either lead to death, are life-threatening, require prolonged inpatient hospitalization, cause persistent/significant disability/incapacity, concern a congenital anomaly/ birth defect, or include a medically important event. 

The authors traced the tidal wave of cardiovascular and autoimmune diseases, hemorrhages, gastrointestinal events, thromboses, myocarditis, pericarditis, encephalitis, immune thrombotic thrombocytopenia, intracranial hemorrhage, diffuse thrombosis, pulmonary embolism, immune thrombocytopenia, and disseminated intravascular coagulation that the world has seen over the past four years directly to the jab.

The research also faulted the lockdowns as a major cause of excess deaths, concluding that “excess mortality has remained high in the Western World for three consecutive years, despite the implementation of COVID-19 containment measures and COVID-19 vaccines.” 

While that information is dire enough, it also involves an element of spiritual abuse — and there is plenty of it to go around. While Stream contributor Jules Gomes focuses here on Pope Francis’s actions during the pandemic, journalist Megan Basham has executed a deep dive on the role evangelical leaders played to push the vaccines as well. See her forthcoming book Shepherds for Sale: How Evangelical Leaders Traded the Truth for a Leftist Agenda (Broadside, July 2024).

Big Pharma’s Caiaphas: Pope Francis

No pope in history has proselytized so passionately to promote a commercial product as Pope Francis, much less an experimental drug whose entire existence depends on aborted babies being cannibalized for parts. (See sidebar.) In his memoir Life: My Story Through History (HarperOne, March 2024), Pope Francis, who preached the four gospels according to Pfizer, BioNTech, Astra Zeneca, and Moderna, sneered at “anti-vaxxers” —  including some bishops who “came close to death” for their “suicidal act of denial.”

“It is an ethical option, because you risk your health, your life, but you also risk the lives of others,” Francis told Italian television TG5 accusing the doubting Thomases of a “suicidal denialism” even as world-renowned virologists and immunologists were warning of the dangers of the vaccine.

To make matters murkier, Francis held two secret meetings with Pfizer CEO Albert Bourla at the height of the pandemic. He shamelessly signed an exclusive contract with the Viagra-maker, buying the jab for Vatican residents, employees, and their families. It’s worth noting that in 2009, Pfizer paid $2.3 billion in what was then the largest health care fraud settlement in the history of the U.S. Department of Justice, arising from the illegal promotion of certain drugs.

Vatican Defies the Nuremburg Convention Meant to Stop Mengele-Style Experiments

In February 2021, in defiance of the Nuremberg Convention and Catholic teaching on workers’ rights, the Vatican issued a decree legally mandating the jab and threatening to fire Catholic Church employees if they refused it.

The decree was issued one month after the Council of Europe passed Resolution 2361 (2021) ordering governments to ensure “that citizens are informed that the vaccination is NOT mandatory.” Francis even flouted a ruling by his own doctrinal watchdog, the Congregation for the Defense of the Faith, which clarified in December 2020 that “vaccination is not, as a rule, a moral obligation and that, therefore, it must be voluntary.” Meanwhile in June 2021, a trailblazing study published in the journal Vaccines was already warning that the COVID jab was killing two people for every three deaths it prevented.

I cited the study to Dr. Ramin Parsa-Parsi, top gun in the German Medical Association, and to Dr. Frank Ulrich Montgomery, chair of the World Medical Association, at a conference organized by the Pontifical Academy for Life to condemn “vaccine hesitancy” in July 2021.

I had emailed the peer-reviewed paper to them two weeks earlier to give them a chance to read it. However, Parsa-Parsi dismissed it, saying the jabs were “highly effective” and could “save millions of lives.”

I asked the scientists why they persisted in “derogatory name-calling” by using the label “anti-vaxxer” in “scientific discourse.” Montgomery admitted that is “not a scientific word but it is a political word because we have the problem that for ideological reasons there are people who will simply fight against vaccination, against science and against better knowledge.”

Shortly after my interview, the prestigious scientific journal was forced by political pressure to retract the paper.

Misquoting Scripture

Under Francis, the Pontifical Council for Life canonized the vaccine crusade, even inviting Rabbi Avraham Steinberg — whose fanatical views on the jab Jewish scholars and fellow-rabbis had condemned as “extremely misleading” and “hateful” — to deliver a “biblical reflection” at a Vatican conference promoting the jab. 

The rabbi compared intentionally unvaccinated people to “murderers” and argued that they should be judged in a “criminal” light “in the sphere of damages/torts.”

In an op-ed for Israeli daily Arutz Sheva, the rabbi, who heads the editorial board of the Talmudic Encyclopedia, maintained it is permissible to force vaccine refusers “to be vaccinated against their will or to punish them for their refusal, as a consequence of the criminal aspect of their refusal.”

In June 2022, the Vatican minted a silver coin celebrating the useless jabbing of children, as part of Francis’s efforts to promote vaccination as a “moral obligation.” Meanwhile, Catholic bishops’ conferences around the world kept using Jesus’s command to “love your neighbor” as a proof-text to guilt-trip Catholics into taking the jab. “To love one another, as Jesus said, get vaccinated, get boosted,” Justin Welby, archbishop of Canterbury, bleated in unison.

The BMJ Public Health paper is the most extensive study of its kind providing hard numbers of vaccine fatalities, but it isn’t the first. The world’s leading medical specialists in a variety of disciplines and other medical journals have already delivered a devastating verdict: The vaccine itself was responsible for millions of deaths worldwide. None of this has promoted the faintest twinge of regret on the part of Pope Francis or his acolytes, let alone an apology and appeal to hold Big Pharma and bullying governments accountable. 

Dr. Jules Gomes, (BA, BD, MTh, PhD), has a doctorate in biblical studies from the University of Cambridge. Currently a Vatican-accredited journalist based in Rome, he is the author of five books and several academic articles. Gomes lectured at Catholic and Protestant seminaries and universities and was canon theologian and artistic director at Liverpool Cathedral.