Tens of Thousands of Lives Could Have Been Saved if Research on COVID Treatments Hadn’t Been Suppressed, Doctors and Economists Say
Since the first days of the declared coronavirus pandemic, doctors faithful to their Hippocratic Oath have been searching for — and identifying — effective COVID-19 treatments.
In mid-November, Dr. Peter McCullough, vice chief of internal medicine at Baylor University Medical Center, and three other experts outlined safe and available treatments for the Senate’s influential Homeland Security & Governmental Affairs Committee.
University of Wisconsin critical care specialist Dr. Pierre Kory followed up with more discussion of viable COVID treatments at a Dec. 8 appearance before the same committee.
However, as Children’s Health Defense Chairman Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. observed during a March 2021 conversation with McCullough, “we’ve seen this very strange conflict … that many of those treatments that could save lives, instead of being promoted and investigated and studied by the health authorities, are instead being sabotaged and made … inaccessible.”
The government’s “near complete” lack of guidance and research on treatment options — “apart from vaccines” — is, according to Kory, “unconscionable.”
The tragic fallout of this government strategy is now becoming apparent. In a recent working paper analyzing the determinants of COVID-19 fatalities, the authors — Michigan State University economics professor Mark Skidmore and co-author Hideki Toya — estimated “if the U.S. had made [hydroxychloroquine] widely available early on, 80,000 to 100,000 lives could have been saved.”
McCullough had already reached similar conclusions when he told senators in November the U.S. “could have saved half of the lives lost” if COVID treatment protocols had not been squelched.
By March, McCullough had revised his estimate upward, asserting that “as many as 85% of COVID deaths could have been prevented through early treatment.”
Paving the way for Emergency Use Authorization
As early as March and April 2020, doctors began communicating — with cautious optimism — their experiences using interventions with years or decades of safe use behind them, including the promising repurposing of well-known drugs (for example, hydroxychloroquine, the inhaled steroid budesonide and ivermectin) as well as positive results from judicious use of supplements and therapies such as vitamin C, vitamin D, vitamin B1 (thiamine), zinc, iodine and nebulized hydrogen peroxide. They also noted that some of these interventions functioned equally well as prophylaxis.
For example, a new review of randomized controlled trial evidence for ivermectin and COVID-19, published by Kory and co-authors in the American Journal of Therapeutics, points to “large, statistically significant reductions” in deaths as well as improvements in clinical recovery. The results, say these authors, clearly indicate that “an oral agent effective in all phases of COVID-19 has been identified.”
According to Kory, government agencies that refuse to recommend ivermectin as a treatment option “are not keeping up with the data,” which “have done nothing but deepen and become more consistent.”
Pushing back, some judges have ordered hospitals to give ivermectin to COVID patients who have exhausted the few treatment options that government agencies are willing to endorse. In one such case, an 80-year-old woman made a “complete turnaround” in less than 48 hours.
As for hydroxychloroquine, the database of COVID-19 hydroxychloroquine studies now numbers nearly 300. These studies consistently show positive effects with early treatment and appropriate dosing.
There are many indications that micronutrient deficiencies — including deficiencies of vitamin D and vitamin B1 — may make some individuals vulnerable to COVID and its complications.
In February, Brazilian doctors reported “immediate neurologic improvement” and “accelerated ventilatory weaning” in patients who had COVID-19-related neurological complications after they received safe and low-cost intravenous B1 treatment.
Writer Bill Sardi has suggested that cases diagnosed as COVID-19 could, in fact, be beriberi (vitamin B1 deficiency). Vitamin B1 controls the autonomic nervous system, affecting functions such as breathing, heartbeat and digestion.
Sardi explains that many aspects of modern living — “over-consumption of sugars, alcohol, coffee and tea and medicines like the anti-diabetic drug metformin” — can help induce B1 deficiencies or block the critical vitamin’s absorption. He has also hypothesized that increased consumption of these items during COVID lockdowns could explain what has come to be known as “long COVID.”
More blood on their hands?
Under the law, the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) is not allowed to award Emergency Use Authorization (EUA) status to vaccines or other unapproved medical products unless the agency determines “there are no adequate, approved and available alternatives.”
The availability of treatment options clearly rebutted the contention of vaccines being the only way forward. Nevertheless, FDA made — in quick succession — the EUA decisions that enabled the rollout of the Pfizer, Moderna and Janssen (Johnson & Johnson) COVID injections just a few weeks after McCullough’s Senate testimony and a few days after Kory gave his testimony.
The consequences of this myopic and quite possibly criminal suppression of COVID treatments are not limited to the deaths that could have been averted through appropriate treatment. Many of the individuals who have accepted COVID vaccines might have made a different decision had they known about and had access to the promising and affordable COVID treatments identified by McCullough, Kory and other ethical physicians.
Instead, 4,178 individuals have died following COVID vaccination (as of May 3), and reports of injuries are flooding in from all over the nation and the world — highlighting serious problems such as blood clots, Guillain-Barré syndrome, heart inflammation and neurological disorders.
Some people are not unreasonably comparing COVID vaccination to Russian roulette.
Former Health and Human Services (HHS) COVID advisor Dr. Paul Alexander recently expressed major concern about giving children the experimental shots, describing the lopsided risk-benefit calculus. In addition to children’s “almost zero risk of [COVID] infection,” Alexander pointedly called attention to the fact that vaccine manufacturers have complete immunity from legal liability for COVID-vaccine-related deaths and injuries.
Alarmingly, the FDA ignored Alexander’s concerns and has just amended its authorization of the Pfizer vaccine to permit its emergency use with children as young as 12, notwithstanding the growing number of injuries being reported in older teens.
For example, a 17-year-old high school athlete in Utah was hospitalized with blood clots in the brain following his first Pfizer injection. Another high school student, afflicted with seizures and blood clots after receiving the Johnson & Johnson vaccine, has already incurred healthcare costs of over half a million dollars.
Doubling down
Under the guise of “consumer protection” and “false marketing,” the government appears to be doubling down on its suppression of non-vaccine approaches to COVID.
For example, under the disingenuously named “COVID-19 Consumer Protection Act” — part of the 2021 Consolidated Appropriations Act signed into law by then-President Trump in late December — the U.S. Department of Justice began actively pursuing enforcement actions against healthcare providers who encourage use of supplements such as zinc and vitamin D to treat or prevent COVID.
Given that these and other micronutrients have been uncontroversially recommended for years for influenza, the common cold and other respiratory infections, the motives for the clampdown cannot be taken at face value.
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