(The Defender) 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
