A researcher who says she discovered that Covid vaccines could seriously injure the heart claims she was silenced during the pandemic, only to be vindicated more than four years later.
Dr Jessica Rose, a Canadian researcher and expert in immunology from Memorial University of Newfoundland, said her 2021 study exposing a connection between Covid vaccines and myocarditis was mysteriously withdrawn just three weeks after it was published by the journal
Current Problems in Cardiology without explanation.
Myocarditis is a dangerous inflammation of the heart that can cause chest pain, shortness of breath, fatigue, irregular heartbeat, and swelling in the legs. In severe cases, it can lead to heart failure, blood clots, stroke, or sudden death.
Using information from a government-run database to track vaccine side effects, Rose found a significant increase in heart damage weeks after people received the Covid vaccine.
Specifically, myocarditis diagnosis rates were 19 times higher among boys between 12 and 15 years old, just eight weeks after the vaccines were administered. Overall, six people died of myocarditis, including two children, after receiving the jab.
Rose told the
Daily Mail she believed the withdrawal was an act of censorship, noting that her work was removed and publicly discredited just five days before she testified at a vaccine safety hearing held by the US Food and Drug Administration on October 26, 2021.
'Anything that goes against the narrative of 'safe and effective' in the context of those products was heavily censored. That's what this was about,' the Canadian researcher alleged. There was absolutely no reason given by the editor or publisher for the withdrawal.'
Now, researchers at Stanford Medicine have released similar findings in a new study, published in December 2025, which found that Covid mRNA vaccines can lead to myocarditis.
'I deserve an apology for this,' Rose declared on X after the report by Stanford Medicine.
She compared the actions of controversial fact-checking organizations to a 'cartel' protecting certain narratives, allegedly influenced by money from pharmaceutical companies.
She claimed she and other Covid vaccine researchers were still being harassed for identifying risk factors.
A spokesperson for
Current Problems in Cardiology's publisher, Elsevier, told
Daily Mail that the removal of the study was 'in line with our standard policies.'
'This article has been withdrawn at the request of the author(s) and/or editor. The publisher apologizes for any inconvenience this may cause,' the spokesperson added.
Rose has denied ever requesting that her work be removed and accused multiple websites, including PubPeer, of targeting scientific papers that question the official narrative of Covid vaccines being completely safe for use.
She called it unfair 'post-peer review' attacks driven by groups who want to silence dissenting research, rather than genuine efforts to improve science.
The 2025 Stanford study, which examined blood samples, cell tests, mice, and human heart models grown in labs, also found that mRNA Covid vaccines, especially the Pfizer and Moderna jabs, created a risk of triggering myocarditis, with young men suffering symptoms as soon as three days after vaccination.
Both Rose and Stanford Medicine have accused PubPeer of making false accusations against scientists, which has influenced various journals to withdraw scientific papers without verified proof of a mistake in the research.
In November, a team at Stanford Medicine also alleged that the majority of PubPeer's accusations against the university's Südhof neuroscience research lab have come from four commentators
who have no formal scientific background or training.
Thomas Südhof, a neuroscientist and Nobel Prize winner, and his lab team wrote in a statement:
'Regrettably, PubPeer and other social media sites are non-transparent, censor responses, 'flag' as many papers as possible to force corrections and retractions, and use anonymous commentators.'
'PubPeer critics levelled unfounded accusations that 'flag' papers even though there are no errors,' the Stanford team claimed. 'These false allegations may have led to unwarranted paper retractions that destroy valuable data and promising careers.'
In a statement to the
Daily Mail, PubPeer denied any claims that its team sought to censor certain fields of scientific or medical study.
'Those accusations are ridiculous. We provide a platform for scientific discussion, we don't make arguments one way or another,' a spokesperson said.
During the pandemic, Rose co-authored the research paper entitled 'A Report on Myocarditis Adverse Events in the US Vaccine Adverse Events Reporting System (VAERS) in Association with COVID-19 Injectable Biological Products.'
VAERS allows doctors, patients, and others to report possible side effects after receiving all types of vaccinations, including the Covid jabs.
It's designed to spot early 'safety signals,' patterns that might show a problem and need more investigation.
Rose, who also has a PhD in computational biology, and her co-author, Peter McCullough, a US cardiologist from Baylor University in Texas, found that myocarditis risk was higher after the second Covid vaccine dose, but did not determine the cause.
'This was alarming to me because if this is showing up in this pharmacovigilance database, is it showing up in others around the world? Is it showing up clinically?' the study author explained.
'It was exactly what VAERS is designed to do, which is detect safety signals for further analysis... It was functioning perfectly, and the signal was there. It was emergent. It was obvious.'
While the exact cause of the inflammation wasn't found in 2021, the new study by Stanford revealed that mRNA vaccines, like the Covid jab, trigger a specific immune overreaction in some people.
After the shot, researchers found certain immune cells released two chemicals, CXCL10 and IFN-γ, that worked together to inflame and damage heart muscle cells.
However, the Stanford team cautioned that patients were still 10 times more likely to develop myocarditis from being infected with Covid than they were from taking the vaccination.
Joseph Wu, MD, PhD, the director of the Stanford Cardiovascular Institute, added that: 'COVID's worse. Without these vaccines, more people would have gotten sick, more people would have had severe effects and more people would have died.'
After Rose's paper was officially peer-reviewed and published on September 30, 2021, the researcher said she was notified it was being removed from public view just before her scheduled appearance at the FDA's Vaccines and Related Biological Products Advisory Committee (VRBPAC) meeting.
Rose said neither she nor her co-author requested the study be taken down, and no claims of fraud, plagiarism, or factual errors were made against the research.
The VRBPAC meeting was an all-day session where independent experts reviewed Pfizer's data on its lower-dose Covid-19 vaccine for children between five and 11 years old.
Despite Rose voicing her concerns and revealing her research, 17 experts voted unanimously to recommend emergency use authorization for Covid vaccines among young children.
Rose revealed that
no one from the FDA, CDC, or Biden Administration directly contacted her to challenge the findings on myocarditis before the study was removed.
Rose noted that she's
continuing her research into Covid vaccine injuries and risk factors, and has already had a new paper peer-reviewed and published in the journal Autoimmunity on unsafe levels of DNA material in the jabs.