…by focusing almost exclusively on masking, social distancing, and vaccinations and ignoring what sick people could do at home to avoid hospitalization.
The COVID-19 pandemic is unprecedented in many ways, but in other ways it is just like any other illness. Yet in addressing this illness, public health authorities have inexplicably departed from standard medical norms. The critical error here, as described by Peter McCullough, MD, is that early, at-home treatment for sick patients with COVID-19 was not only completely ignored, but information describing what patients and doctors could do was actively suppressed. This represents a massive failure in the public health establishment that has cost thousands of lives.
It is an astounding truth that no information is provided to patients receiving a positive COVID test about how they can proactively manage their health. The guidelines from the National Institutes of Health are essentially to stay at home, self-isolate, wash your hands, and wait until you need to go to the hospital. But as Dr. McCullough points out, at that point it is already too late. An Italian study shows that patients admitted to the hospital who need oxygen had a 12 percent mortality rate; patients who needed a ventilator had a 24 percent mortality rate.
Why are health authorities waiting for patients to become so sick that 12 to 24 percent are going to die? Can nothing be done to avoid these outcomes? Can we imagine a situation in which a patient given a cancer diagnosis is told to go home and wait until they’re so sick they need to go to the hospital?
The fact is that COVID illness can be managed in the early phases at home in many cases. Dr. McCullough released the first paper of the pandemic describing a multi-drug approach for early, at-home treatment to slow viral replication (using zinc and antimalarial drugs), address the cytokine storm (using immunomodulators like colchicine), and to prevent thrombosis, or clotting events (using antiplatelet and anticoagulant medications). These therapies address the three main stages of COVID-19 disease progression. Studies that utilized this approach showed an 85 percent reduction in mortality. If a treatment protocol was shown to reduce cancer mortality by 85 percent, it would be national news and the researchers would receive a Nobel Prize.
Why aren’t these results being shouted from the rooftops by every doctor and public health authority in the country? Because none of these drugs are FDA-approved for the treatment of COVID-19. In fact the government agencies in some cases warn patients off of these treatments. Doctors who spoke about them were censored and had their medical licenses threatened. Meanwhile, in other countries, it is standard practice to distribute at-home treatment kits to their populations that include these types of medicines.
That at-home, early treatment of COVID-19 has been downplayed, even silenced, is a travesty. In a pandemic situation, it is lunacy for government agencies to insist that we adhere to the drug approval model, which essentially says that, for a treatment to be recognized, you need two trials on a single drug targeted at a single outcome that demonstrate efficacy. But as Dr. McCullough points out, there aren’t randomized controlled trials (RCTs) for everything doctors do, and in a pandemic situation we can’t wait for those trials, either. If this was the standard, he argues, we wouldn’t be able to treat HIV, which isn’t responsive to just one drug. The same goes for cancer; no doctor would say that one drug can address cancer. Doctors routinely use drugs in combination with each other—not even strep throat is treated with a single drug.
Medicine is a science and an art, requiring doctors to make judgments. Rather than being told to wait for a week at home for COVID disease to hospitalize or kill patients, judgments can be made based on available evidence to use a combination of medicines that can plausibly help patients—as we would do for someone who gets pneumonia, or a child with asthma, or a patient with any other illness.
Similarly, an antimalarial, or a blood thinner, or an anti-inflammatory to address the cytokine storm in COVID-19, may not be efficacious if studied in isolation. But that is what the FDA drug model demands: does one drug, by itself, improve mortality? If not, you better shut up about it or face sanctions from the government and possibly your state medical board.
All of this underlines how broken the healthcare system in this country is. Big Pharma and their government cronies want mandatory vaccines, not cheap, off-patent drugs, as the answer to COVID because vaccines will make the most money. Why spend the exorbitant sums on clinical trials for off-patent medicines for COVID when the patent protection wouldn’t be as strong, the market exclusivity period is shorter than for new drugs, and the potential pool of patients is substantially smaller than for vaccines, since everyone, sick or not, gets the vaccine while only those who are sick would receive a drug for COVID?
We’ve discussed supplement protocols for COVID treatment and prevention previously, including the use of vitamin D, vitamin C, zinc, quercetin, and melatonin. The Frontline COVID-19 Critical Care Alliance, in addition to these aforementioned supplements, also recommends the prophylactic use of ivermectin and mouthwash.
Until this situation is fixed, we will continue to pay exorbitant prices for worse health outcomes. One solution is for Congress to allow the free flow of information about supplements and allow these products to cite peer-reviewed studies describing their benefits.
Action Alert! Write to Congress in support of our legislation to allow the free flow of information about supplements. Please send your message immediately.
