Note: Dr. Orient is executive director of the Association of American Physicians and Surgeons, AAPS.
The exciting medical lesson that we should learn is that viral diseases are treatable.
The political lessons are that the government takeover of health care persists long after the 15-days-to-flatten-the-curve emergency is over, and that the medical technocracy is disastrous to both health and freedom. It is blocking the use of the methods used in countries that have had a 75% lower mortality rate.
Doctors have been telling their patients for decades: You have a virus, antibiotics don’t help, just “tough it out.”
With COVID-19, most doctors are telling patients to go home, isolate themselves, possibly report on their contacts and go to the emergency room if they are otherwise sick enough to be admitted to hospital (extremely sick, these days). If asked, most doctors will refuse point blank to prescribe the antimalarial drug hydroxychloroquine (HCQ). They “know” it doesn’t work, based on the authorities’ pronouncements, even if they have zero experience themselves.
There is no home treatment that is recommended by the World Health Organization (WHO), the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), the Food and Drug Administration (FDA), the Infectious Diseases Society of America (IDSA), the American Medical Association (AMA), or your managed care plan.
In their view, “following The Science” means denying treatment. Doctors who defy this diktat may get fired, like Dr. Simone Gold, founder of America’s Frontline Doctors, or face an investigation and possible delicensure by government agencies.
FDA Commissioner Stephen Hahn states that physicians have the legal right to prescribe approved drugs for off-label uses. HCQ has been approved since 1955 and has been safely used by hundreds of millions of patients for malaria, lupus and rheumatoid arthritis. It will probably never be approved specifically for COVID-19. It generally takes years and costs millions to add an official indication. Who will go through that just so they can advertise a cheap, off-patent drug for an additional use? At least 20% of prescriptions are off-label – but HCQ for COVID-19 is the only one that could subject a physician or pharmacy to the threat of a professional death sentence.
Epidemiologist Harvey Risch of Yale University estimates that 100,000 people may have lost their lives needlessly because of governmental agencies obstructing the use of HCQ.
The pretext for government prohibitions is always to protect public safety. Former AMA President Patrice Harris, M.D., in response to President Donald Trump’s question “What have you got to lose?” said “possibly your life.” Millions of Americans are terrified of the threatened heart effects, which are exceedingly rare – in fact, HCQ probably protects the heart.
But what is really being protected is the medical technocracy, the medical-industrial-regulatory complex, dominated by bureaucrats inside important agencies such as the CDC, which have deep ties to extremely profitable industries.
The technocracy is heavily invested in vaccines and expensive drugs like remdesivir and monoclonal antibodies developed through advanced biotechnology. While waiting for miraculous advances, patients are dying. And many more may suffer long-term chronic illness that might have been prevented by early treatment.
Moreover, the country’s economy and freedom are dying as health authorities hold people hostage to results of their constant PCR testing that may be wildly inaccurate.
What if the authorities’ cherished dogmas about viral diseases in general are wrong?
In studying the response of COVID-19 to HCQ, Dr. Lee Merritt found that this treatment was not a new idea. Many scientific papers have been written in the past 40 years about the antiviral effects of many antimicrobials – antimalarials, antiparasitics such as ivermectin, and antibiotics such as azithromycin – on a number of viruses. “Like Rip Van Winkle, I suddenly awoke, after decades, to a completely new medical reality,” Dr. Merritt writes.
During the deadly “Spanish flu” pandemic in 1918-1920, patients were successfully treated with injections of quinine, a precursor to HCQ. How many people die of influenza every year because of failure to follow up on this lead?
We are also learning that the risk of COVID-19 is strongly correlated with vitamin D and zinc deficiency – although Big Tech censors may keep you from learning of this by calling it “harmful misinformation.”
There are many promising approaches to COVID-19 and other viral diseases, aside from Fauci’s favorite – Gilead’s remdesivir – and Bill Gates’ genetically engineered vaccines. You probably haven’t seen them in the media.
Let us hope that the shock of COVID-19 and the freedom-crushing response will awaken Americans to the danger of trusting our lives and liberty to the government-anointed experts of the medical-industrial-regulatory complex. If the remnant of independent physicians and institutions is destroyed with single payer or “Medicare for All,” we will have a COVID-19-like regime without end.