(The Defender)—The COVID-19 vaccines carry a much higher risk of blood clots in the brain compared with other vaccines, according to a new study by Dr. Peter McCullough and colleagues.
The researchers looked at reports in the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s (CDC) Vaccine Adverse Event Reporting System (VAERS) from January 1990 through December 2023.
They counted the number of cerebral thromboembolism events — as in, blood clots of the brain’s veins or arteries — reported in people who received a COVID-19 shot compared with those who received a flu shot or other vaccines.
Blood clots that block blood flow to the brain account for roughly 87% of all strokes, according to the American Stroke Association, a division of the American Heart Association.
McCullough — a cardiologist with over 1,000 publications and over 685 citations in the National Library of Medicine — told The Defender the study showed “an unacceptable risk of catastrophic thrombotic injuries to the brain” in individuals who took one or more COVID-19 shots.
McCullough summarized the study’s results on Substack:
“Compared to influenza vaccines given over 34 years, COVID-19 vaccines in 36 months of use had over 1000-fold increased risk of most blood clot events, and compared to all vaccines combined administered over 34 years, this risk remained at over 200-times greater with COVID-19 vaccination.”
Prior research has suggested that the spike protein in both the SARS-CoV-2 virus and the COVID-19 vaccine can cause serious blood clotting, McCullough and his co-authors noted in their report.
Blood clots in the brain are difficult to treat, McCullough told The Defender, and “oftentimes leave patients with devastating disabilities.”
“This and other sources of data,” he added, “support calls to remove all COVID-19 vaccines from public use.”
The study — co-authored with Claire Rogers, Dr. James Thorp and Kirstin Cosgrove — is under peer review and available online as a preprint.
Women especially at risk
For the study, McCullough and his co-authors used 12 search terms to find VAERS reports of adverse events related to blood clots in the brain: cavernous sinus thrombosis, cerebral artery thrombosis, cerebral infarction, cerebral thrombosis, cerebral venous sinus thrombosis, cerebral venous thrombosis, embolic cerebral infarction, ischaemic cerebral infarction, sigmoid sinus thrombosis, superior sagittal sinus thrombosis, thrombotic cerebral infarction and transverse sinus thrombosis.
In the three years since the COVID-19 vaccine rollout, they found 5,137 reports of a brain blood clot event in those who received one or more COVID-19 shots.
Meanwhile, VAERS data showed only 52 reports since 1990 of a brain blood clot event following a flu vaccine and 282 since 1990 following all other vaccinations, they said.
The actual number of events may be higher due to underreporting in VAERS, they said, for several reasons.
First, CDC staff may have “tremendous difficulty” in processing the reports due to an overwhelming increase in VAERS reports since the COVID-19 vaccine rollout.
Also, clinicians may not have the necessary awareness and knowledge to recognize injuries as being vaccine-related and thus may not report them in VAERS.
Moreover, they added, “The VAERS database is well known for its difficulty in entering events, making it even more challenging for healthcare workers to submit each event with limited time in a hospital or clinic setting.”
The authors said their findings are especially concerning for women of reproductive age — who are particularly at risk for certain blood clotting events in the brain, such as cerebral venous thrombosis.
The American Heart Association said in a Jan. 29 review article that roughly two-thirds of all cerebral venous thrombosis cases occurred in women of reproductive age.
Given this reality, the study’s authors called for “an immediate global moratorium on the use of COVID-19 vaccines … with an absolute contraindication in women of reproductive age.”
CDC: no plan to change COVID vaccine recommendations
The Defender asked the CDC if it planned to alter its COVID-19 vaccination recommendations in light of McCullough and his co-authors’ findings.
A CDC spokesperson told The Defender, the “CDC does not comment on findings or claims by individuals or organizations outside of CDC. Current CDC recommendations can be found here.”
The CDC has found the COVID-19 vaccines to be safe and effective, the spokesperson said. “The CDC continues to encourage Americans to get vaccinated, as the COVID-19 vaccination continues to be the best way to protect against serious illness.”
When asked specifically about the risks of COVID-19 vaccination for women of reproductive age, the CDC spokesperson directed The Defender to the CDC’s webpage COVID-19 Vaccines While Pregnant or Breastfeeding, which states that the vaccines are safe and effective.
Two Storms, One Harvest
Every food crisis in living memory has been a one-shock event. The 2008 price spike was a commodity bubble. The 2020 shortages were a logistics failure. The 2022 grain scare was a war on one exporter’s ports. Each time, the system bent, adjusted, and recovered, and each time the experts assured us afterward that global markets are simply too big and too diversified to fail.
What nobody in Washington seems eager to discuss is that 2026 is shaping up to be something the modern food system has never actually faced. Two independent shocks, one climatic and one geopolitical, are converging on the same harvest cycle at the same time. Not sequentially. Simultaneously.
Start with the weather. The Pacific Ocean is currently building toward what forecasters now openly call a record event. NOAA’s Climate Prediction Center puts the odds of at least a strong El Niño near 88 percent, with roughly two in three odds it reaches “very strong” status, the tier reserved for perhaps three or four events in the entire satellite era. Every major global model now projects a median peak in Super El Niño territory, and most of them project it exceeding the 2015-16 event, which until now held the modern record. Sea surface anomalies were already brushing the super threshold in mid-July, months before these events normally peak. The atmosphere has already shifted into El Niño mode, and the event is forecast to crest in late fall and early winter.
This is not about “climate change.” It’s about the standard cycles of weather, and the cycle we’re currently in is one that has likely devastated societies in the past. We’re better prepared as a society today, but not all Americans are equally prepared.
Serious households have started doing the quiet math on their own. Grocery bills tell part of the story, and the forecast maps tell the rest, which is why long-term food storage has moved from fringe hobby to mainstream line item in the family budget, with established suppliers like Heaven’s Harvest seeing demand from people who five years ago would have rolled their eyes at the idea. That instinct is not paranoia. It is pattern recognition, and the pattern is worth walking through carefully.
Editor’s Note: Heaven’s Harvest IS a sponsor, but the warnings of this article are real and would be written even if we didn’t have a survival food sponsor. With that said, those who take advantage of what they offer can use promo code “Patriot” for 15% off.
The Fertilizer Clock Is Already Running
While the Pacific warms, the second shock has been unfolding in the Strait of Hormuz. The conflict with Iran turned the world’s most important energy chokepoint into a contested waterway, and the consequences reach far beyond the gas pump. Roughly a third of global fertilizer trade moves through Hormuz, and the disruption sent urea prices up 86 percent year over year by March, with a 53 percent jump in a single month.
The World Bank projects energy prices rising about 24 percent in 2026 and fertilizer about 31 percent. By its own accounting, fertilizer prices ran 35 percent higher in the first five months of this year than the same period last year.
Here is the mechanism the nightly news will not explain. Fertilizer is not a grocery item. It is a time-delayed input. The nitrogen a farmer in Iowa or Punjab could not afford to apply this spring does not show up as a problem this spring. It shows up as a thinner harvest six to twelve months later.
The World Bank’s own food security brief concedes that the effects of reduced applications earlier this season “are likely to become visible only later in harvest outcomes.” Translate that from institutional language into plain English and it means this. The damage is already done, it is already in the ground, and we are simply waiting for it to arrive on the shelf.
Now check the calendar. Six to twelve months from the spring planting season lands us squarely in late 2026 and early 2027. Which is precisely when the strongest El Niño in the instrumental record is forecast to peak, bringing its signature droughts to Southeast Asia, Australia, southern Africa, northern Brazil, and South Asia, the very regions that grow the world’s rice, sugar, and oilseeds.
The World Bank warns openly that a strong El Niño “could disrupt multiple crop belts simultaneously” on top of the conflict-driven input costs. Their baseline projection assumes the Middle East disruptions ease by autumn. What in the last two years of Middle East history suggests that assumption is safe?
The System Has No Slack Left
The comfortable answer is that global markets always adjust. But adjustment requires slack, and the slack is gone. Global cereal production is expected to decline from last year’s records even before El Niño does its work. The UN World Food Programme, hardly a den of right-wing preppers, is calling this the most significant disruption to its supply chains since Covid and the invasion of Ukraine, and its supply chain director put the stakes bluntly.
Today’s supply chain challenges are tomorrow’s hunger crisis.
There is also a political dimension that markets cannot price. When food gets scarce, governments do not behave like economists. They behave like politicians. Export bans, hoarding mandates, and panic buying at the national level turned the modest rice shortfall of 2008 into a global crisis, and analysts are already warning that import-dependent nations are the first dominoes.
The 2015-16 Super El Niño, a far weaker event than what is now forecast, threw tens of millions into food stress across Africa and Asia. This one is projected to be stronger, and it arrives with fertilizer already rationed by price and shipping lanes already contested by missiles.
What Joseph Knew
Scripture does not treat preparation for lean years as faithlessness. It treats it as wisdom delivered in advance to those willing to act on it.
Behold, there come seven years of great plenty throughout all the land of Egypt: And there shall arise after them seven years of famine; and all the plenty shall be forgotten in the land of Egypt.
Joseph did not respond to that warning with a hashtag or a committee. He stored grain during the years of abundance, and when the famine came, Egypt stood while its neighbors begged. The lesson is not that famine is certain. It is that the time to prepare is precisely when preparation still looks optional.
Nobody who filled a pantry in a year of plenty has ever regretted it, and nobody standing in an empty aisle has ever been glad he waited for certainty.
None of this calls for panic, and panic is the enemy of sound judgment anyway. It calls for the same unglamorous prudence our grandparents considered ordinary. Keep some cash margin, know your local growers, and put real food in deep storage while it is cheap and available, because the entire arc of this story is that cheap and available is a closing window.
Families looking for a straightforward place to start can visit Heaven’s Harvest and use promo code Patriot for 15 percent off long-term storable food. The forecasts may yet soften, the strait may yet reopen, and we should pray they do. But hope is a fine thing to hold and a foolish thing to eat.
