The Mystery Of Why Some Public Health Officials Withhold HCQ Despite Proven Safety/Efficacy

Public Health Officials Are Withholding Life-Saving Safe Treatments for Covid

Paul Craig Roberts

In the article below, we have yet another expert’s affirmation of the efficacy of HCQ and a damning indictment ot those public health officials who withhold it and use the presstitutes to demonize it.  Dr. Harvey Risch is Professor of Epidemiology and Public Health at Yale University. He is an expert, and he reports known empirical evidence proving the effectiveness and safety of HCQ.  

Another expert, Dr. Kamran Abbasi, executive editor of the British Medical Journal and editor of the Journal of the Royal Society of Medicine, has this to say:

“Science is being suppressed for political and financial gain. Covid-19 has unleashed state corruption on a grand scale, and it is harmful to public health. Politicians and industry are responsible for this opportunistic embezzlement. So too are scientists and health experts. The pandemic has revealed how the medical-political complex can be manipulated in an emergency—a time when it is even more important to safeguard science.

“The UK’s pandemic response relies too heavily on scientists and other government appointees with worrying competing interests, including shareholdings in companies that manufacture covid-19 diagnostic tests, treatments, and vaccines. Government appointees are able to ignore or cherry pick science—another form of misuse—and indulge in anti-competitive practices that favour their own products and those of friends and associates.”

You can read his statement in its entirety near the end of the article below:

Epidemiologist At Yale Provides Testimony On Hydroxychloroquine For Treating COVID-19

By Arjun Walia 

We are living in a day in age where social media “fact-checkers” are patrolling the internet calling into question information, science, opinion and testimony from countless amounts of doctors and scientists, as well as independent media outlets who source this information, simply because it opposes the information that we are getting from the World Health Organization(WHO) for example, or other government health authorities. One great example to illustrate this point is Hydroxychloroquine (HCQ), a drug, according to many, that can help treat COVID-19 patients.

This idea has been a common theme throughout the pandemic, which begs the question, if it’s true, why wasn’t the drug administered and made available for doctors to use and treat COVID patients during this pandemic? Why was it ridiculed by mainstream media and why did Facebook fact-checkers claim that Hydroxychloroquine was not useful, and possibly dangerous? Facebook fact checker Health Feedback, for example, states that there is no evidence that hydroxychloroquine can cure or prevent COVID-19.

Recent testimony from Dr. Harvey Risch, MD, PhD, Yale Professor of Epidemiology and Public Health is one of many, who in my opinion seem to represent a large majority, says otherwise. He provided an evidence based presentation for safe early outpatient HCQ treatment for high-risk Covid-19 patients to reduce hospitalizations and mortality.

“In May of this year I observed that results of studies of a drug suggested to treat Covid, hydroxychloroquine, were being misrepresented by what I thought at the time was sloppy reporting. We have heard from Dr. McCullough how Covid disease progresses in phases, from viral replication, to florid pneumonia to multi-organ attack. Viral replication is an outpatient condition, but the pneumonia that fills the lungs with immune-system debris is hospitalizable and potentially life-threatening. We have also heard how each phase, each pathologic aspect of the disease, has to have its own specific treatments that apply to its own biologic mechanisms. Thus, I was frankly astounded that studies of hospital treatments were being represented as applying to outpatients, in violation of what I learned in medical school about how to treat patients.

“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, but the FDA has had no systematic evidence in outpatients and erroneously extrapolated from hospital inpatients to outpatients.

“About studies of hydroxychloroquine early use in high-risk outpatients, every one of them, and there are now seven studies, has shown significant benefit: 636 outpatients in São Paulo, Brazil; 199 clinic patients in Marseille, France; 717 patients across a large HMO network in Brazil; 226 nursing-home patients in Marseille; 1,247 outpatients in New Jersey; 100 long-term care institution patients in Andorra (between France and Spain); and 7,892 patients across Saudi Arabia. All these studies pertain to the early treatment of high-risk outpatients—and all showed about 50 percent or greater reductions in hospitalization or death. The Saudi study was a national study and showed 5-fold reduction in mortality for hydroxychloroquine plus zinc vs zinc alone. Not a single fatal cardiac arrhythmia was reported among these thousands of patients attributable to the hydroxychloroquine. These are the non-randomized but controlled trials that have been published.

Now we also know that all of the outpatient randomized controlled trials this year also together show statistically significant benefit. 

“We have spent the last six months with formal government policies and warnings against early outpatient treatment, with large government investments in vaccines and expensive new treatments yet to be proven and almost no support of inexpensive but useful medications, and a quarter of a million Americans have died from this mismanaged approach. Even with newly promising vaccines, we have almost no information about how they will perform in older and high-risk patients, in whom respiratory virus vaccines are known to have weak efficacy; it will be a number of months before they become widely available; and we don’t know how long vaccine immunity will last, or even if the vaccines will work for the newly increasing mutant strains of the virus. 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. Thank you.”  https://www.hsgac.senate.gov/imo/media/doc/Testimony-Risch-2020-11-19.pdf 

Why This Is Important: The thoughts shared above have been a common theme throughout this pandemic. For example, Dr. Anthony Cardillo, an ER specialist and the CEO of Mend Urgent Care, has been prescribing the zinc and hydroxychloroquine combination on patients experiencing severe symptoms associated with COVID-19. In an interview with KABC-TV, Cardillo stated:

Every patient I’ve prescribed it to has been very, very ill and within 8 to 12 hours, they were basically symptom-free…So, clinically I am seeing a resolution…We have to be cautious and mindful that we don’t prescribe it for patients who have COVID who are well, he said. “It should be reserved for people who are really sick, in hospital or at home very sick, who need that medication. Otherwise we’re going to blow through our supply for patients that take it regularly for other disease processes.”

According to Cardillo, it’s the combination of zinc and hydroxychloroquine that does the job. “[Hydroxychloroquine] opens the zinc channel” allowing the zinc to enter the cell, which then “blocks the replication of cellular machinery.”

This was also hinted to by the testimony from the Yale professor.

Dr. Vladimir Zelenko, a board-certified family practitioner in New York, said in a video interview that a cocktail of Hydroxychloroquine, Zinc Sulfate and Azithromycin are showing phenomenal results with 900 coronavirus patients treated.(source)

These are just a few examples out of many. The issue is that these opinions and this type of evidence and testimony was blocked and censored by various social media outlets, and deemed “fake news.”

Over the last few months, I have seen academic articles and op-eds by professors retracted or labeled “fake news” by social media platforms. Often, no explanation is provided. I am concerned about this heavy-handedness and, at times, outright censorship. –  Vinay Prasad, MD, MPH

This has also recently been emphasized by Dr. Kamran Abbasi, executive editor of the prestigious British Medical Journal, editor of the Bulletin of the World Health Organization, and a consultant editor for PLOS Medicine. He is editor of the Journal of the Royal Society of Medicine and JRSM Open. He recently published a piece in the BMJ, titled “Covid-19: politicisation, “corruption,” and suppression of science.”

Science is being suppressed for political and financial gain. Covid-19 has unleashed state corruption on a grand scale, and it is harmful to public health. Politicians and industry are responsible for this opportunistic embezzlement. So too are scientists and health experts. The pandemic has revealed how the medical-political complex can be manipulated in an emergency—a time when it is even more important to safeguard science.

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