(The Defender)—Nearly 10% of people in Japan who reported having myocarditis or pericarditis after receiving an mRNA COVID-19 vaccine died from the condition within 64 days after they received the vaccine, a new peer-reviewed study found. Fatality rates were highest among men under 30.
However, the study authors downplayed the finding by reporting that “overall outcomes were good,” according to Dr. Peter McCullough — a cardiologist and author of more than 1,000 publications — who analyzed the study on his Substack.
“In the COVID-19 crisis,” McCullough said, “we have learned to look at the data and the analyses ourselves because there are usually very important results downplayed by the authors — this time it is vaccine myopericarditis mortality.”
McCullough combined the numbers from the study’s results for myocarditis and pericarditis cases to show that 97 of the 1,014 (9.6%) myopericarditis cases were fatal.
Myopericarditis is an umbrella term for myocarditis, inflammation of the heart, and pericarditis, inflammation of the tissue surrounding the heart.
“A 9.6% case fatality rate for a vaccine side effect largely in young healthy men is astronomical and clinically unacceptable,” he said.
McCullough criticized the authors’ conclusion that “overall outcomes were good.”
“This can never be the conclusion when the case fatality rate was 97/1014 cases with followup out to 64 days after the shot,” he said.
The study authors extracted data from April 2004 to December 2023 in the Japanese Adverse Drug Event Report (JADER) — a large database for public reporting of adverse events — among people ages 12 and up who experienced myocarditis or pericarditis after getting an mRNA COVID-19 shot.
Among 759 reports of vaccine-induced myocarditis and 255 reports of pericarditis, 84 (11%) and 13 (5%) individuals died within 64 days of an mRNA COVID-19 shot, respectively.
The study, which is in press, was available online early this month in the Journal of Infection and Chemotherapy.
The Defender reached out to the study’s corresponding author — Kazuaki Taguchi, Ph.D., with the Faculty of Pharmacy at Keio University in Tokyo — for comment about the team’s conclusions but did not receive a response by the deadline.
Japanese males under 30 ‘should promptly seek medical assistance’
Taguchi and his co-authors said they undertook the study to clarify the association between mRNA vaccines and myocarditis/pericarditis.
They concluded that in the Japanese population, COVID-19 mRNA vaccination was “significantly associated with the onset of myocarditis/pericarditis.” They noted that influencing factors included being under 30 years old and male.
Japanese males under 30 should “promptly seek medical assistance for inspection and treatment upon experiencing chest symptoms after vaccination,” they wrote.
For the study, the authors first looked at adverse event reports to determine how soon after an mRNA vaccination people reported the onset of myocarditis or pericarditis.
The majority of cases occurred within a week of getting the vaccine. They noted that prior studies found a similar trend.
“Considering the results of the present study and previous reports,” they wrote, “it is necessary to pay particular attention to the onset of myocarditis and pericarditis within 7 days after SARS-CoV-2 mRNA vaccination.”
The authors then analyzed the outcome of the myocarditis and pericarditis cases — such as full recovery, remission, ongoing or increased symptoms, or death.
Among the cases they analyzed, half of the people who reported getting pericarditis and nearly half (47%) of those who reported getting myocarditis recovered, they said.
Another 37% and 31% of pericarditis cases and myocarditis cases, respectively, reported being in “remission.”
They noted a “severe outcome” or “non-recovery” — but not death — occurred in 8% (20) of the pericarditis cases and 11% (80) of the myocarditis cases. As noted earlier, death occurred in 11% of the myocarditis cases and 5% of the pericarditis cases.
The authors appeared to not investigate the amount of time between onset and outcome. Also, because they examined myopericarditis cases that occurred between one and 64 days after vaccination, their study didn’t report on changes in outcome — such as improvement or worsening in symptoms — that happened more than 64 days post-vaccination.
The Japanese study received no funding from any government agency, for-profit or nonprofit group.
‘These data are just the tip of the iceberg’
According to McCullough, “These data are just the tip of the iceberg,” as prior studies suggest the risk of heart damage goes up roughly 2.5% with each successive booster and that half of myopericarditis cases may be subclinical, meaning asymptomatic.
The Japanese study looked only at the reports from symptomatic myopericarditis cases.
Taguchi and his co-authors said they couldn’t analyze the relationship between the number of vaccinations and the risk of myocarditis/pericarditis “due to the difficulty in determining the timing of the dose.” They called for more research.
McCullough said the Japanese data may not accurately show all cardiac harm caused by mRNA COVID-19 vaccines because some subclinical myopericarditis cases may only manifest later on — beyond the study’s 64-day window of inquiry — as cardiomyopathy, heart failure or sudden death.
Cardiomyopathy is a disease of the heart muscle that causes the heart to have a harder time pumping blood to the rest of the body, which can lead to symptoms of heart failure, according to the Mayo Clinic.
CDC fails to mention risk of death from vaccine-induced myopericarditis
McCullough pointed out that the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s (CDC) official guidance to U.S. healthcare practitioners regarding myopericarditis in teens and young adults after receipt of a COVID-19 vaccine fails to mention that the condition can be fatal.
The CDC’s Clinical Considerations website states:
“The severity of myocarditis and pericarditis cases can vary; most patients with myocarditis after mRNA COVID-19 vaccination have experienced resolution of symptoms by hospital discharge.”
McCullough said, “Hospitalization is a concerning outcome for any young person after taking a vaccine that should be safe and have a meaningful health benefit.”
The CDC’s Myocarditis and Pericarditis After mRNA COVID-19 Vaccination website similarly neglects to mention that the condition can be fatal.
The Defender asked the CDC if it plans to update the website by notifying the public about the risk of fatality but did not receive a response by the deadline.
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.
