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In a recent survey of 269 embalmers across four major countries and three continents, more than 70% reported finding strange fibrous white blood clots in significant percentages of corpses in 2023 — clots they were not finding pre-pandemic.
A similar survey conducted in late 2022 revealed that 66% of embalmers began finding the unusual clots in mid-2021, suggesting a temporal link to the rollout of COVID-19 vaccines, which began earlier that year.
In an exclusive interview with The Defender, the creator of the surveys, former Air Force Major Thomas Haviland, said he conceived of the project after he watched the documentary, “Died Suddenly,” where embalmers reported observing unprecedented fibrous masses clogging arteries.
Richard Hirschman, one of the embalmers featured in the documentary, also spoke with The Defender.
“In my first 20 years of experience, I’d never seen clots like these. And we’re seeing them in arteries as well as veins,” Hirschman said.
Democrats, Republicans, Liberals, far left or right, white or black, male or female, rich or poor, this is what I am seeing coming out of the circulatory system during the embalming process since early 2021. In the prior 20 years I don’t recall ever seeing this before. Something… pic.twitter.com/wUNqs2UNXF
— Richard Hirschman (@r_hirschman) August 11, 2023
Commenting on his survey results, Haviland said, “I know correlation is not necessarily causation, but man, there’s an awful lot of correlation going on here.”
On Jan. 9, Haviland sent his survey results to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), the U.S. Food Food and Drug Administration (FDA) and the National Institutes of Health. He has not yet received a response.
Haviland lost his lucrative defense contracting job in 2021 for refusing the mandated vaccine. He then set out to verify the claims of unusual clots by surveying embalmers globally on what they were witnessing in their work so he could quantify how widespread this phenomenon had become.
Haviland to Air Force general: ‘Shame on you’
Haviland served 20 years in the U.S. Air Force before spending 16 years working as an electrical engineer for a defense contractor at Wright-Patterson Air Force Base in Ohio.
With a passion for data analysis rooted in his math and engineering training, Haviland helped develop sophisticated aircraft, including the F-16 fighter jet, F-22 Raptor and F-117 stealth fighter.
However, his long military career came to an abrupt halt in October 2021 when he refused to take the mandated COVID-19 vaccine in compliance with federal requirements issued for military, government employees and federal contractors.
Haviland was concerned about the lack of safety and efficacy data on the experimental vaccine. He researched the topic widely, but could not find much official information in the U.S. media or on the CDC website.
However, he found a September 2021 technical briefing (see Table 5) from Public Health England (PHE) showing hundreds of thousands of breakthrough COVID-19 cases recorded among the fully vaccinated, undermining claims that vaccines would prevent transmission.
“The case fatality rate [CFR] [in the PHE document] for the unvaccinated was more than 3.6 times lower than the CFR for the fully vaccinated,” he said.
After the final deadline to comply with the vaccine mandate arrived, Haviland sent the Air Force general an email saying, “Shame on you for not standing up for our right to decide for ourselves whether or not to get injected with an experimental drug.”
In a defiant last stand, Haviland copied the email to the base’s 30,000 personnel.
Thirty minutes later — just as he anticipated — his employer called to say he was fired.
“In a way it was a blessing, right?” Haviland said. He was 61 at the time and drawing an Air Force major’s retirement salary, and his wife, 10 years younger, still worked.
“So we were able to make it financially, and I was able to make that stand,” Haviland said, adding that leaving his role provided space to pursue critical investigations like the embalmer survey.
‘Embalmers actually want to tell you what they’re seeing’
To validate the reports systematically and ensure privacy, Haviland crafted a 12-question survey using the SurveyMonkey platform to collect embalmer input anonymously.
The questionnaire asked respondents to specify what types of blood clots they were observing, when the anomalies began appearing, the estimated percentage of bodies exhibiting the fibrous masses and the ages of the deceased.
To maximize participation, Haviland leveraged extensive funeral director professional networks. He sent emails with embedded survey links to the presidents of 50 state and national organizations asking them to disseminate the questionnaire to their hundreds of member funeral homes.
Simultaneously, Haviland directly emailed more than 1,700 individual funeral home addresses obtained through web searches, targeting major metro areas across the 30 most populous U.S. states and funeral directors in Canada, the U.K. and Australia.
This two-pronged outreach strategy aimed to encourage anonymous survey-taking without employer pressure, he said.
To avoid introducing bias, neither the survey solicitation letter nor the survey itself referenced COVID-19 or vaccines.
“I tried to do it as unbiasedly as possible,” Haviland said. “I sent the survey to as many ‘blue states’ like California, Illinois, New York and Massachusetts as I did ‘red states’ like Ohio, Texas and Florida.”
“If anything, my survey might be biased slightly ‘blue,’” he said, because most of the funeral homes he solicited were located in major cities like Los Angeles, Toronto, London and Sydney, which he said “usually lean ‘blue.’”
Haviland encountered hesitancy during survey distribution, initially garnering only 14 responses. Suspecting many funeral directors were restricting participation to avoid backlash, Haviland directly contacted state association leaders.
After speaking with the Pennsylvania Funeral Directors Association to ensure they circulated his questionnaire, embalmers from the state suddenly uploaded 126 responses in two days.
“It tells me that embalmers actually want to tell you what they’re seeing in the embalming room, if they feel like they have permission” from their immediate supervisor or the state funeral director association, Haviland said.
Hirschman told The Defender that some of the reticence may have been due to social taboos around speaking of the dead.
“It was hard for me, even in the beginning, to speak out because we’re taught in mortuary school that the things we see in the embalming room are kind of sacred,” Hirschman said.
Though most associations declined participation in Haviland’s survey, the grassroots outreach strategy eventually yielded more responses.
“There’s suppression going on at the upper levels,” Haviland said, pointing to examples from the president of the funeral directors’ associations in Canada and the U.K., who simply told him they were not going to participate.
20% of embalmers flagged increased infant deaths relative to 2019
The 2022 and 2023 embalmer surveys demonstrate largely consistent findings of strange blood-clotting phenomena beginning in the middle of 2021 and continuing through today.
In Haviland’s 2023 survey polling 269 embalmers globally, more than 70% reported seeing white fibrous clots in an average of 20% of corpses.
Hirschman said he began seeing clots early in 2021, and to this day continues to see them in about half of the bodies he embalms. “The older the person is, the more I see.”
Nearly 80% of survey respondents indicated microclotting in about 25% of cadavers on average as demonstrated by “coffee grounds”-like material in blood drainage. Some embalmers saw these clots in a much higher percentage of corpses.
This is an example of dirty blood and coffee grounds. pic.twitter.com/HJOvxBlZkr
— Richard Hirschman (@r_hirschman) January 21, 2024
Microclotting was seen very rarely (less than 5%) in corpses prior to the COVID-19 or the COVID-19 vaccines, according to survey respondents.
Embalmers reported an overall increase in all types of clotting in all age groups — but especially ages 36 and up — echoing real-world data from insurance industry trends showing increased death benefit payouts for younger people, Haviland said.
“I’ve been an embalmer for 23 years, and in my first 20 years of experience, I’d never seen clots like these,” Hirschman said.
Additionally, around 20% of embalmers flagged increased infant deaths relative to 2019, about a 25% increase according to respondents who noted the trend.
“I can tell you that I’ve seen an increase in fetal demise, seeing babies, premature babies,” Hirschman said. “I’ve also seen a number of people that are dying of cancers in a very short period of time.”
Haviland’s survey included an optional field for adding comments. Here is a small selection of what different embalmers wrote:
“I have seen a larger increase in these large fibrous clots since the COVID vaccine has come out.”
“Almost all nursing/assisted living people, that were vaccinated showed these clots, blackened fingertips, blackened toes, blotchy skin.”
“The structures being removed from my perspective seem impossible for the human body to create in and of themselves; also, I attempted to stain and observe under a microscope ‘blood’ from one of the structures that do not absorb stain as is characteristic of blood.”
“In 2022 our firm had more infant deaths than we have ever had. In 2023 I noticed more white fibrous clots than I had ever seen, mostly in elderly.”
“I rarely have a body without clotting nowadays. Most of the little ones are not embalmed, especially fetal demise. Just about every embalmer and funeral director I know is concerned about the clotting issues. They feel as though it is linked to the experimental vaccine that many of them took themselves.”
“It was noted that those who were considered healthy still provided these clots and the age frame was higher in those ages 50 through early 60’s. I am grateful a study is being done on this as it seems a mystery why this is happening all of a sudden with no change of chemicals, technique, or timeline when embalmings are done soon after death (less than 5 hours).”
“I have observed all sorts of different blood clots in the past few years … One particular clot in fact concerns me … It is stringy with ganglia, almost resembling an octopus or squid in appearance. A solid grape fibrous structure with tendrils or strings branching out from different directions.”
“I think the most of all the questions asked were the highest in 2020 to 2022. And all infant/miscarriages were 100% cremation. With any of these clots, they can appear in a deceased that has been dead for 20min, which makes it so odd.”
“As an embalmer for over 20 years, these types of clots have always existed. This topic is politically inclined in my opinion. COVID is real, the vaccine necessary. This all needs to stop.”
Perspectives on timing, causation of clots
Most of the embalmers Haviland surveyed and interviewed insisted the clotting abnormalities were developing before death rather than postmortem, citing instances of clots in bodies arriving shortly after passing.
“The embalmers that I’m in contact with insist that it’s happening pre-death but there’s been some controversy about that,” Haviland said. “Some embalmers have said, ‘Yeah, the clot’s formed, but we think it’s happening just after death.’”
“The body cools postmortem and the blood starts to coagulate and then things start to separate out,” Haviland explained.
But the embalmers he spoke with told him they thought the clotting had to be happening before death because they were finding the huge white fibrous clots in corpses that were only an hour or two old and still warm.
“There’s no way they could have formed in just the one or two hours when the body was still warm,” Haviland said.
Hirschman said he has seen a fibrous clot that was removed from a living person, but that he has also seen additional formation of material from blood in an ECMO (a machine that oxygenates blood outside the body) tube post-mortem. The body he was preparing had a clot running the length of the leg.
Hirschman surmised that clot-forming material caused by vaccines could be circulating in the liquid form in blood until some as-yet-unknown process triggers it to solidify into the hardened form found by embalmers.
Hirschman said scientists he is in touch with are working on developing diagnostic tests to determine what’s in the blood causing the clots. “There’s got to be a way they can test if people have this floating around in their body,” he said.
Dr. Ryan Cole, a clinical pathologist with his own diagnostic lab, in a recent interview clarified the difference between clots that form while a person is alive and those that form after death.
“[In] postmortem clots … you can see almost a layering pattern and can tell that the clotting happened as the body was cooling and all those proteins were congealing,” Cole said. “It’s almost looking like rings of a tree.”
But that same deposition pattern is not found in clots that form while a patient is alive, Cole said, such as the fibrous clots reported by embalmers.
“One can analyze and distinguish that difference,” Cole said. “They were in the patient pre-mortem and these patients died with these clots in them.”
Critics of the “Died Suddenly” documentary primarily repeat the truism that “correlation is not causation,” claiming that those who are trying to link the clots to the vaccine rollout are anti-vaxxers, or saying the SARS-CoV-2 virus could be the culprit.
But longtime funeral industry professionals who spoke with Haviland correlate the appearance of the fibrous clots with the rollout of the COVID-19 vaccinations rather than the virus itself.
“They’re not qualified, obviously, to say why or how the clots are forming,” said Haviland. “But they can tell you when they’ve seen something that they’ve never seen before … and the explosion of the clotting took place for them starting in 2021 after the jabs rolled out.”
Theories on how fibrous clots form
Haviland emphasized that the mRNA vaccine’s spike protein has been found in organs and tissues all over the body and, in some instances, as long as six months after the shot.
Dr. Peter McCullough reported clotting in patients with no previous family history or personal history of clotting as long as two years after the shots.
Haviland shared a theory that vaccine-induced spike proteins damage endothelium — a single layer of cells throughout the body separating tissues from circulating blood — triggering blood clotting responses or, through rupturing, allowing material into the bloodstream that results in clotting.
Dr. Lewis Coleman, an anesthesiologist and author of “50 Years Lost in Medical Advance,” who shared his theory on white lung syndrome with The Defender, said the mRNA’s spike protein disrupts the vascular endothelium, resulting in the “leakage” of tissue factor from connective tissues, fat, muscle and organ tissues into the bloodstream.
Through several complex interactions, this leakage alters the way thrombin, soluble fibrin and insoluble fibrin (all clotting factors) are generated and increases the risk of myocardial infarction, stroke and thrombosis (clotting), according to Coleman.
Vaccine-induced clotting has been linked to the COVID-19 vaccines in numerous studies and anecdotal reports.
Haviland said, “These white fibrous clots seem to be comprised of fibrin platelets and what’s called amyloid protein, which is basically a fancy term for a misshaped, misfolded protein, that then becomes hard for our body to break down.”
Cole asserted the clots are related to the mRNA vaccines, the spike protein and the DNA contamination that “codes for a very sticky protein,” adding, “It’s an amyloid-type protein, not a traditional amyloid.”
Cole credited Resia Pretorius Ph.D., a researcher from Stellenbosch University in South Africa and Professor Douglas Kell from the University of Liverpool, U.K., who showed how the spike protein can cause proteins to clump together in the blood in the absence of platelets.
A low platelet count or thrombocytopenia is another well-documented side effect of the COVID-19 mRNA vaccine.
Cole said:
“We know that spike protein can induce clotting pathways. It can induce unusual clumps of proteins and sugars and proteins and sugars. Almost silk-like patterns of interlaced, intertwining blood agents that you and I have circulating right now. They need to be there. They all have a role and a function.
“But when there’s a pileup on the interstate, they all get blocked up behind that pileup. And that’s what we’re seeing with these clots. These unusual amyloids — fibrin that’s hard to break down — [we’re] finding these a long period of time after they should have been broken down.”
‘It’s hard to find a problem if you don’t go looking’
If it can be substantiated that the COVID-19 vaccines are instigating this blood clot crisis, Haviland urged halting the mass vaccination campaign immediately until experts definitively rule out the dangers.
“I think it would be wise at this point to pull all the vials off the shelves to make sure that nobody is given these shots anymore,” he said, adding,
Haviland supports policy changes cementing the right to informed consent and preventing coercion to take vaccines or medications of any kind.
Broader hopes for Haviland center on transparency reforms and overcoming institutional resistance to confronting evidence of vaccine harms.
“It’s hard to find a problem if you don’t go looking,” Haviland said.
Amid credibility concerns surrounding health authorities, public awareness provides the last line of defense, according to Haviland. He said:
“If our Congress doesn’t do anything, if our regulatory agencies like the FDA and the CDC keep quiet about this and Big Pharma continues to push out mRNA-based products using lipid nanoparticle technology in the future, there’s only one last line of defense left — that’s us, the citizen.”
“The good news is, most Americans have actually stopped taking the jabs,” he said. “So Americans are waking up.”
