A highly prestigious medical journal has published an article suggesting wider use of remdesivir, a highly toxic, ineffective, expensive drug for COVID-19. Action Alert!
The study was published in the New England Journal of Medicine, and shows results suggesting that remdesivir, the drug heralded by Dr. Anthony Fauci as the “new standard of care” for COVID in April 2020, can be effectively used in non-hospitalized COVID patients. It has also been picked up and disseminated by the media. It may not be long until organizations like the American Medical Association (AMA) amend their COVID-19 treatment guidelines to recommend wider use of remdesivir as one of the only FDA approved treatments for COVID. It is par for the course that a toxic drug like remdesivir is pushed by doctors and the government, while information on safe, inexpensive supplements is ruthlessly censored and suppressed.
Remdesivir received an emergency use authorization in May 2020 and full FDA approval in October 2020 despite modest effectiveness—and that’s putting it kindly. It was also approved under dubious circumstances chronicled in Robert Kennedy Jr.’s book, The Real Anthony Fauci. Despite insisting on randomized, placebo-controlled clinical trials before hydroxychloroquine or ivermectin could be recommended for COVID, Dr. Fauci gave the OK to remdesivir following trials in which the control group did not receive a real placebo. When the drug was shown to reduce COVID mortality by just 3.6 percent, Dr. Fauci’s National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Disease decided to judge the drug instead on how long it took surviving patients to recover: remdesivir patients recovered in 10 days, while placebo patients recovered in 15 days. Judging from the very modest reduction in mortality compared to placebo, it’s no surprise the government needed another metric to demonstrate success. Yet, according to Kennedy’s book, even this was fraudulent: almost twice as many remdesivir subjects in the trial as placebo subjects had to be readmitted to the hospital after discharge, suggesting that the improved recovery time could be due to patients being discharged too early.
Subsequently, a World Health Organization study on remdesivir including 11,000 people found the drug did not prevent COVID deaths. Another study found that the drug offered no clinical benefit to hospitalized COVID patients and was associated with increased hospital stays.
So remdesivir’s efficacy is highly questionable, what about its safety? The drug has been associated with a wide array of nasty side effects, including: respiratory toxicity, cardiovascular toxicity (hypertension, atrial fibrillation, cardiac arrest), nephrotoxicity (acute kidney injury, renal impairments), and gastrointestinal symptoms, to name a few. In earlier trials when the drug was tested against Ebola, subjects taking remdesivir had lethal side effects including multiple organ failure, and septic shock, with 54 percent of the remdesivir group dying, the highest mortality rate among the four experimental drugs.
The fact that any medical professionals could even be considering using this drug more widely is a testament to how broken our medical system is. We’ve written before about the off-patent drugs that have demonstrated incredible effectiveness against COVID-19, not to mention the scores of readily available supplements that show great promise for treating and preventing COVID. But because these medicines don’t make anyone any money, the government throttles our access. Meanwhile, remdesivir costs $3,120 per patient. Congress is getting in on it too: as we told you last year, some in Congress are working on policy that would result in restricted consumer access to supplements.
This policy would require supplement companies to comply with a “master filing” requirement that would allow the FDA to create a list of all the supplements on the market. When this list is coupled with the FDA’s “new supplement” guidance, this master filing policy represents a dire threat to your supplement access. Many supplements currently on the market could actually be considered “new supplements” by the FDA and thus targets for elimination if they don’t comply with the FDA’s rules, which are akin to a pre-approval system for drugs. Experts have estimated that the FDA’s overreaching “new supplement” policies threaten as many as 41,700 supplements (you can read more about the problems with this policy here). We also wrote recently about the FDA’s threat to NAC, another supplement that has demonstrated great promise for COVID. If the FDA has a list of all supplements on the market, its job of targeting NAC products, or products that don’t comply with the agency’s onerous “new supplement” guidance, is that much easier.
We must preserve our right to use natural medicines to optimize our health and prevent illness, otherwise we will only have dangerous, expensive medicines like remdesivir as healthcare options.
Action Alert! Write to Congress, opposing “mandatory filing” for dietary supplements. Please send your message immediately.
