Why Roy Butler Still Matters

Tomorrow, June 4th - Marcus de Brun will learn his IMC fate

Jun 03, 2026

It’s hard to fathom how the Irish Medical Council can recover from the devastation wreaked upon it by the beleaguered ‘covid questioning’ doctors called before it to date.

Dr Michael McConville’s savaging of his inquiry last week has been perhaps the most dramatic.

Despite all that’s happened, the IMC’s Fitness to Practise committee gathers tomorrow in Dublin (Talbot Hotel Stillorgan, 9am) to deliver its verdict upon Dr Marcus de Brun.

De Brun signalled an early warning of what was coming in April 2020, by resigning from the same council that has conducted the inquiry against him.

The IMC should be warned however, that in the face of its bizarre and blinkered approach, truth will not back down.

Roy Butler’s inquest made headline news across Irish media in September 2024. The young football star (23) from Waterford died five days after receiving the Janssen ‘clot shot’ in August 2021.

It is worth noting that the legal standard for Irish doctors facing allegations of professional misconduct is the criminal standard, beyond reasonable doubt, which is a 95% surety or higher.

By comparison, the legal standard applied to inquest proceedings, including Roy Butlers’, was the balance of probabilities, with a surety threshold of 51%.

In a chapter for his upcoming book Scandemic Ireland Dr Mick McConville has written a forensic analysis of Roy Butler’s inquest. He has given this chapter the title ‘On the Balance of Probabilities.’

In his research, Dr McConville relied heavily on the information reported on this Substack detailing Roy Butler’s story. The coverage here began in 2022, with news that Roy’s inquest was being delayed because pharma giant Johnson and Johnson was withholding information sought by the coroner. Behind the scenes, this Substack has been actively investigating Roy’s case since the day of his funeral, when the PR company responsible for media communications for Ireland’s Health Products Regulatory Authority (HPRA) made a fatal mistake in its dealings with me personally.

I do not use the word ‘fatal’ lightly. Roy Butler’s family know its meaning all too well.

In the emotional fall out that followed the coroner’s findings at inquest, readers and commentators seized upon the word ‘baffled,’ casting judgement upon the various professions involved. But judgements don’t solve mysteries.

In his analysis of the inquest Dr McConville applies clinical precision alongside medical and scientific methodologies to illustrate how Roy’s post-mortem result can not be true.

I have selected the following excerpts to demonstrate why.

At the top of the chapter, McConville states:

“This analysis is not a criticism of the coroner personally. It was an unenviable task.”

Spontaneous haemorrhage?

There are two strands to Dr McConville’s analysis, medical and legal. We will deal first with the medical evidence, in particular, the evidence heard at inquest that Roy’s catastrophic brain bleed was ‘spontaneous.’

The final day of inquest evidence heard from Assistance State Pathologist Dr Margaret Bolster, who described Roy’s death as ‘baffling’. She said a direct link to the Janssen vaccine could not be ruled out.

McConville argues that given his early symptoms (what McConville describes as prodomal) Roy’s haemorrhage could not have been spontaneous.

He writes:

“The Cork City Coroner’s Court returned a narrative verdict. The vaccine, the court concluded, had not been shown on the balance of probabilities to have caused Roy’s death. This conclusion is not supported by mathematical analysis, established medical evidence, or the legal precedent the coroner cited in reaching it.
“Before examining causation, we need to examine the diagnosis itself. ‘Spontaneous intracerebral haemorrhage’ is a clinical classification with a specific medical meaning: a sudden, non-traumatic brain bleed occurring without warning, in the absence of prodromal (early) symptoms.

“The word ‘spontaneous’ is not a synonym for ‘unexplained.’ It carries a precise implication — that the event arose acutely, without a preceding illness.
“Roy Butler had a five-day prodrome of escalating headache, fever, and malaise, documented in real time, which he and those around him attributed to the vaccine. The neurosurgeon who testified at the inquest described signs consistent with elevated intracranial pressure. A prodromal syndrome of this nature is structurally incompatible with the diagnosis of spontaneous ICH. Spontaneous haemorrhages do not announce themselves for over five days.
“They arrive without warning.”

Roy received the ‘one shot’ Janssen Covid vaccine on August 12 2021 at Mulligans Pharmacy in Waterford.

“He looked a bit shook after coming back from the vaccine centre,” Roy’s father Martin Butler told Coroner Philip Comyn.

Over the next four days, Roy sent texts to six different individuals telling them he wasn’t feeling well since taking the shot.

“I’m f*cked after the vaccine,” Roy told his brother Aaron in a text conversation on August 15th. Aaron was concerned that Roy was ‘putting on a brave face’ so as not to cause his parents concern.

“I’m not dying, I’m just not well,” Roy sent in another text to his brother.

In another text message, Roy said he was sweating and groggy, he had a headache, a sore neck and a sore jaw.

“The vaccine has me shook,” he texted a friend.

Raised D-Dimer

Roy’s raised D-dimer results, according to Dr McConville is ‘the single most important objective clinical finding.’

He writes:

“For a general reader, understanding why the elevated D-dimer is the most important single finding in Roy Butler’s case requires a brief explanation of what it actually measures — because the inquest itself got this wrong.
“D-dimer is not a test for deep vein thrombosis, as it was characterised at the inquest. That description confuses a test with one of its applications. D-dimer is a fibrin degradation product — a molecular fragment produced whenever a blood clot forms anywhere in the body and is subsequently broken down. It is, in effect, the chemical footprint of an active clotting process.
“When D-dimer is elevated, it indicates that the body is forming and dissolving clots at present within the vascular system.
“In Roy Butler’s case, one laboratory finding does something no other piece of evidence in the inquest could do: it provides objective, measurable, contemporaneous proof of an active pathological process occurring inside his body during the days between his vaccination and his death. It is not a symptom he reported. It is not a clinical observation subject to interpretation. It is a number on a laboratory printout, generated by his own biochemistry, indicating that his coagulation system was in an active, abnormal state.
“Here is why this matters so profoundly in context:
“In a healthy 23-year-old at rest, D-dimer should be effectively undetectable. There is no physiological reason for a fit young man with no injury, no surgery, no infection, and no known clotting disorder to have elevated D-dimer. The finding is, in isolation, already anomalous and already demands explanation.
“In the context of Janssen vaccination, elevated D-dimer is a cardinal marker of vaccine-induced immunothrombotic disease. It reflects exactly what the mechanistic evidence predicts: the innate immune and endothelial activation cascade triggered by the adenoviral vector and spike protein produces a systemic procoagulant state — thrombin generation, fibrin formation, microthrombus deposition across the vascular bed — which the body simultaneously attempts to dissolve, generating D-dimer as the measurable by-product. This process does not require anti-PF4 antibodies. It does not require thrombocytopenia. It does not require a visible clot on imaging. It requires only that the coagulation cascade has been pathologically activated, which is precisely what the D-dimer confirmed.
“The elevated D-dimer also directly contradicts the spontaneous intracerebral hemorrhage (ICH) hypothesis. Classical spontaneous intracerebral haemorrhage — the hypertensive small vessel rupture, the ruptured AVM, the amyloid angiopathy bleed — does not cause systemic D-dimer elevation as a preceding or accompanying feature. A focal vascular rupture produces a local haematoma; it does not activate the entire coagulation system. If Roy’s SICH were truly spontaneous and structurally caused, his D-dimer should have been normal before the bleed and only mildly elevated after it as a consequence of the haemorrhage itself — not elevated during the prodromal days, not elevated in a pattern consistent with a preceding systemic coagulopathy.
“The D-dimer finding, therefore, accomplishes something the rest of the clinical evidence cannot do alone: it physically places a vaccine-consistent pathological process inside Roy Butler’s body during the days between vaccination and death. It transforms the temporal association from a statistical argument into a biological one. It is the bridge between the vaccine as an event and the haemorrhage as an outcome.”

McConville cites the legal standard applied at inquests and examines the case of Best v Wellcome Foundation Ltd, a 1994 Irish Supreme Court judgement involving the DTP vaccine (diphtheria, tetanus and polio), which the Coroner cited in his verdict.

In offering his verdict, the Coroner described the principle established in Best V Wellcome Ireland Ltd as ‘noteworthy.’ The case revealed ‘evidence that clearly identified a particular batch of vaccine given to the Plaintiff in that case was both excessively high in potency and toxicity and that these two features in that Vaccine were, as are a matter of scientific proof, linked to the injuries suffered by the Plaintiff in that action.’

Here is the relevant section of the Coroner’s verdict:

Below is Dr McConville’s argument, which begins with temporal connection (Roy died five days after the Jannsen shot) and widens to include the absense of any alternative cause.

“The coroner cited Best v Wellcome Foundation Ltd in reaching his conclusion. His reading of that case inverts its logic.
“In Best, the Supreme Court was confronted with conflicting expert opinion on whether a pertussis vaccine could cause the plaintiff’s encephalopathy. The Court, per Finlay CJ, held that it was ‘not possible for a court to take upon itself the role of a determining scientific authority resolving disputes between distinguished scientists.’ The function of the court was ‘to apply common sense and a careful understanding of the logic and likelihood of events.’
“The original trial judge had rejected the claim solely because temporal proximity had not been proved. The Supreme Court resolved that in the plaintiff’s favour: close temporal proximity between vaccine administration and onset of symptoms was sufficient to infer causality, once the pathology was established and no alternative explanation was identified.
“Best proceeded on a binary: either the encephalopathy was a naturally occurring pathology, or it was vaccine-related, and resolved it using three pillars: the child’s initial good health, the close temporal relationship, and the absence of an alternative cause.
“Roy Butler’s case satisfies every element:
Known product adverse effect: ICH documented in Janssen’s own pharmacovigilance data
Good preceding health: healthy, active young man with no identifiable risk factors
Close temporal onset: symptoms beginning on the day of vaccination, fatal haemorrhage on day four
No alternative cause: the pathologist could not identify one after 20,000 autopsies
“The coroner used Best to raise the evidential bar. The Supreme Court used it to lower the standard, to justify inferential causation from circumstances, without requiring complete mechanistic proof. Consistently applying Best to Roy Butler’s case makes a finding of vaccine causation not merely permissible but, on the evidence presented, effectively compelled.”

Dr McConville concludes:

“The probability that Roy Butler’s SICH was a random background event occurring by coincidence within five days of vaccination is approximately 1 in 3 million. The vaccine-proximate rate of ICH following Janssen vaccination, derived from the manufacturer’s own undisclosed data, is approximately 1 in 125,000 to 250,000 doses.
“The clinical picture, prodrome, D-dimer, no alternative cause, day-four collapse, is consistent with vaccine causation and inconsistent with spontaneous haemorrhage. The legal precedent cited by the coroner supports inferential causation from temporal proximity in precisely these circumstances.
“A verdict of medical misadventure was not merely available on this evidence. It was demanded by it.”

The Butler family continue to seek justice for Roy.

Marcus de Brun’s decision is due at 9am tomorrow, June 4 at the Talbot Hotel, Stillorgan, Co Dublin.