Dr. McCullough: Senator Murphy Joins “Premature Stroke Club” After Covid Shot

Dr. Peter McCullough, a prominent doctor in the medical freedom movement, noted that the stroke that Senator Chris Murphy (D-Conn.) suffered this past weekend is part of a concerning pattern among senators who’ve received the Covid-19 vaccine.

On Monday, McCullough published a Substack post titled “Senator Chris Murphy Joins US Senate Premature Stroke Club after COVID-19 Vaccination.” McCullough points to strokes suffered by Senators John Fetterman (D-Penn.), Ben Ray Luján (D-N.M.), and Chris Van Hollen (D-Md.), since 2022, as evidence of his premise. Van Hollen was 63, while the others were less than 53 years old.

Alarming Numbers

Four strokes among a small subset of lawmakers — all of them under 65 — is alarming. As McCullough points out, “So 4/45 (8.9%) of the Democratic Caucus has suffered a premature stroke within a few years of their COVID-19 vaccine.” He adds that “mRNA and other COVID-19 vaccines are associated with stroke because the spike protein produced from the shots causes vascular injury, promotes blood clots, and can trigger atrial fibrillation.”

The average rate among the general population for premature strokes, says McCullough, is “way less than one percent.” The CDC cites the stroke rate between 2.7 percent and 2.9 percent from 2011 to 2022, with the 65-plus age group making a larger portion of those incidences. The stroke rate among people between 18 and 44, however, is about 0.9 percent.

“People in their 50s should not be having strokes,” McCullough recently said during an appearance on a podcast. Murphy, 53, had a stroke while watching his son’s hockey game, according to reports. He was eventually transferred to Johns Hopkins, and is recovering well.

Interestingly, Senator Murphy made national headlines just a couple days before he suffered his stroke. He was speaking on a panel about a classified briefing he and other senators had recently received about U.S. plans to strike Iran after the midterm elections. He called the plan “insane,” and said it it would “set off a new cycle of escalation.”

Antibody Test

McCullough says a Covid vaccine-related stroke can happen within a few days, or even years, after injection. He explained how he determines if a stroke could be related to the vaccine or not. If a quantitative anti-spike protein antibody test shows a level under 1,000 U/mL, McCullough interprets this to mean the stroke was not caused by the shot. “But if it’s more than 1,000, I would lay odds that the spike protein is playing a role in the genesis of the stroke,” he added. “Because the spike protein damages blood vessels in the brain. It’s been found in the brain.… the mRNA is in the brain.”

McCulough didn’t mention the strokes two federal representatives over 65 experienced since 2021. In 2024, Representative Steny Hoyer (D-Md.) suffered a mild ischemic stroke. Hoyer took the shot in December 2020, yet he was much older than the senators McCullough mentions in his Substack post. Hoyer was 85, so his stroke wouldn’t be considered premature. And Representative Dwight Evans (D-Penn.) was 70 when he had a minor stroke in 2024. Evans had also been vaccinated. Both are in the high-risk age group, as opposed to the four senators McCullough focuses on.

By comparison, only two federal legislators are known to have experienced strokes in the five-year period before 2021 (the year the Covid-19 vaccine was rolled out nationwide). They were Representatives Grace Napolitano (D-Calif.) in 2016 and Rob Bishop (R-Utah) in 2020. Napolitano was 79 and Bishop was 69.

Clinical Trials

McCullough added links to two studies on mRNA vaccination. One of those, broken into two parts, is titled “COVID-19 Modified mRNA Vaccines: Lessons Learned from Clinical Trials, Mass Vaccination, and the Bio-Pharmaceutical Complex.”

In Part I, the authors, which include McCullough, say proper trials on adverse effects of the mRNA Covid-19 vaccines were never carried out. “Following authorization of the modmRNA [modified mRNA] products for global distribution, problems with the methods and execution of the trials have emerged,” the authors write. “The usual safety testing protocols and toxicology requirements were bypassed. Many key trial findings were either misreported or omitted entirely from published trial reports. By implication, the secondary estimates of excess morbidity and mortality in both trials must be deemed underestimates.”

Since then, more information has come out. And that information suggests “a substantial degree of modmRNA-related harms than was initially reported.” The authors added:

Confidential Pfizer documents had revealed 1.6 million adverse events by August 2022. A third were serious injuries to cardiovascular, neurological, thrombotic, immunological, and reproductive systems, along with an alarming increase in cancers. Moreover, well-designed studies have shown that repeated modmRNA injections cause immune dysfunction, thereby potentially contributing to heightened susceptibility to SARS-CoV-2 infections and increased risks of COVID-19.

The abstract finishes with the recommendation of a “global moratorium on the modmRNA products until proper safety and toxicological studies are conducted.”

No Proper Dose

In Part II, the authors say one of the many problems with the Covid-19 vaccine is that there is no way to determine what a proper dose should be. From the paper:

The COVID-19 modmRNA injectable products introduce a unique set of biological challenges to the human body with the potential to induce an extensive range of adverse, crippling, and life-threatening effects. Based on the fact that there is no current method to quantify host (cell-based) spike protein production in vivo following injection with these prodrugs, there is no standard “dose”. This is in part due to differences in spike protein production output, which depends on cell metabolism and transfection efficiency. It is therefore difficult to predict adverse event profiles on an individual basis.

McCullough is among the nation’s most published cardiologists and epidemiologists. He began warning about the mRNA shot as soon as the government began its rollout. In April 2021, he told The New American in an interview that the Covid shot was killing large numbers of people. McCullough has developed his own treatment plan for Covid-19, as well as a protocol for spike-protein detoxification.