The Barbershop: Dennis Byrne, Proprietor
Why is Fauci blocking safe and effective therapeutics in favor of Big Pharma’s less effective and costly drug?
Fauci belatedly and finally in August directs our attention to the possibility of a therapeutic drug to “knock out” Covid-19 when safe, effective, and inexpensive treatments are available.
The answer might be shaping up to be the Pandemic’s biggest scandal.
When a rash, allergy, cough or other illness strikes, you expect a doctor to prescribe a medication, don’t you?
Not so with Covid-19
The stunning and baffling fact is that for more than two years doctors have had almost no approved treatment or therapeutics to battle the infection. Only one–repeat, only one–treatment has been approved by the FDA to fight Covid-19 once it has infected you. And that approval is highly questionable.
Compare that to the number of vaccines that have been developed and administered that are designed to prevent the infection. (Vaccines, it turns out, don’t actually prevent the transmission of Covid-19, but reduce the seriousness of the disease.)
Why have clinicians–the physicians who are on the front lines actually treating Covid patient–left to wander in the wildness? Why have they been left to try this and that combination, to mix this or that cocktail to alleviate the symptoms or quash the disease?
And when they do come up with an effective treatment it’s either ignored or attacked as ineffective or even dangerous?
Remdesivir is the only drug recommended for Covid-19 treatment by the federal/industrial health complex run by Anthony Fauci in his long-time and highly paid role as director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases.
Despite Fauci’s and others’ assurances that Remdesivir is safe and effective, there’s this: “The ‘very, very bad look’ of remdesivir…The Food and Drug Administration held no advisory meeting on antiviral, and the European Union signed contract without knowing of failed trial the first FDA-approved COVID-19 drug.” Some quotes:
At best, one large, well-designed study found Remdesivir modestly reduced the time to recover from COVID-19 in hospitalized patients with severe illness. A few smaller studies found no impact of treatment on the disease whatsoever. Then, on 15 October—in this month’s decidedly unfavorable news for Gilead—the fourth and largest controlled study delivered what some believed was a coup de grâce: The World Health Organization’s (WHO’s) Solidarity trial showed that remdesivir does not reduce mortality or the time COVID-19 patients take to recover…
“This is a very, very bad look for the FDA, and the dealings between Gilead and EU make it another layer of badness,” says Eric Topol, a cardiologist at the Scripps Research Translational Institute who objected to remdesivir’s FDA approval.
Yes, the vaccines, if administered before you get Covid-19, reduce the disease’s seriousness, making it more likely you’ll stay out of the hospital and less likely you’ll die. But what about after you catch Covid-19? Where is the long , or even short list, of therapeutics that treat it?
Well, the health/industrial complex assures us that plenty of studies are underway to come up with an approved therapeutic. In other words, delay, delay, delay. Clearly not the same aggressive search that was conducted for a vaccine.
The paucity of therapeutics and the FDA’s endorsement of the sketchy Remdesivir (the World Health Organization has pointedly not recommended it) may turn out to be one of the worst blunders of the pandemic. Especially when recommendations made by clinicians themselves have been met with abject opposition by the Faucists.
Take, For instance, hydroxychloroquine–a solution that instantly became taboo when former President Donald Trump and some conservative commentators suggested that it might be safe and effective.
“…every study of outpatient use of one drug, hydroxychloroquine, with or without accompanying agents, has shown substantial benefit in reducing risks of hospitalization and mortality.”
Here’s a portion of what Harvey A. Risch, MD, PhD Professor of Epidemiology, Yale School of Public Health, told Congress about hydroxychloroquine’s safety after those-who-must-be-obeyed called it dangerous:
So what did I find about hydroxychloroquine in early use among high-risk outpatients? The first thing is that hydroxychloroquine is exceedingly safe. Common sense tells us this, that a medication safely used for 65 years by hundreds of millions of people in tens of billions of doses worldwide, prescribed without routine screening EKGs, given to adults, children, pregnant women and nursing mothers, must be safe when used in the initial viral-replication phase of an illness that is similar at that point to colds or flu. In fact, a study by researchers at the University of Oxford showed that in 14 large international medical-records databases of older rheumatoid arthritis patients, no significant differences were seen in all-cause mortality for patients who did or did not use hydroxychloroquine. The Oxford investigators also looked at cardiac arrhythmias and found no increase for hydroxychloroquine users. This was in more than 900,000 hydroxychloroquine users. This is examined at length in my paper in the American Journal of Epidemiology in May. Now, the FDA posted a warning on July 1 on its website about hydroxychloroquine used in outpatients…
As for its effectiveness, he said:
As I have said on many occasions, the evidence for benefit of hydroxychloroquine used early in high-risk outpatients is extremely strong, and the evidence against harm is also equally strong. This body of evidence dramatically outweighs the risk/benefit evidence for remdesivir, monoclonal antibodies or the difficult to use bamlanivimab that the FDA has approved for emergency use authorizations while denying the emergency use authorization for hydroxychloroquine. This egregious double standard for hydroxychloroquine needs to be overturned immediately and its emergency use authorization application approved. This is how we will get on the road to early outpatient treatment and the major curtailment of mortality….
What I have observed is that while there have been positive reports about a number of drugs, every study of outpatient use of one drug, hydroxychloroquine, with or without accompanying agents, has shown substantial benefit in reducing risks of hospitalization and mortality.
As with most other drugs, acceptance of hydroxychloroquine is not universal. Some studies recommend against it. In some other nations, it is used.
Yet Faucists continue to condemn it. No middle ground, No acknowledgment that it might be useful? Why? While hydroxychloroquine doesn’t appear on the short list of recommended treatments, Remdesivir does. Puzzling, to say the least.
As far as I know, Fauci is not a clinician, someone who actually treats the sick and who first hand sees the patient’s agony first hand. Fauci is the master of sitting behind a desk and shuffling around selected studies that support his extreme lockdown, masking, vaccination and other destructive policies.
Maybe we need another study: Why is Fauci so determined to peddle Remdesivir? Does Fauci has a conflict of interest in pushing Remdesivir, to the benefit of Big Pharma. Is he in league with Big Pharma? Especially when solutions like hydroxychloroquine are inexpensive, readily available, safe and effective? Why has he spent so many billions he controls through federal health agencies on the unlikely holy grail of finding something that would supposedly wipe out the disease to the near-exclusion of therapeutics?
Big Media is unlikely to ask. So it will be up to Republicans when they hopefully take over Congress and the White House.
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