by Debra Heine

 

It turns out that the anti-malaria drug former president Trump famously touted in March of 2020 as a promising treatment for COVID-19, would indeed have been a “game changer” if only it had been widely used.

Use of Hydroxychloroquine to treat the coronavirus can increase survival rates by over 100 percent, according to a new study.

“Scientists found that, when ventilated patients with a severe version of COVID were given high doses of hydroxychloroquine with zinc, their survival rates could increase dramatically,” the Daily Mail reported.

The authors of the new report say: “We found that when the cumulative doses of two drugs, HCQ and AZM, were above a certain level, patients had a survival rate 2.9 times the other patients.”

By using causal analysis and considering of weight-adjusted cumulative dose, we prove the combined therapy, >3 g HCQ and > 1g AZM greatly increases survival in Covid patients on IMV and that HCQ cumulative dose > 80 mg/kg works substantially better.

The study was conducted by Saint Barnabas Medical Center in New Jersey on 255 patients, and published on May 31 on the medical site medRxiv.

Contra Trump’s repeated endorsements of Hydroxychloroquine, Dr. Anthony Fauci, a member of the president’s coronavirus task force at the time, downplayed the drug’s potential, maintaining that more data was needed to prove its efficacy.

Health care providers were given a green light to use Hydroxychloroquine in March of 2020 through the emergency use authorization, but tens of millions of doses of the drug were put in limbo last June after the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) revoked the emergency use authorization. Even though the drug had been safely used for decades, FDA bureaucrats deemed the drug too risky to treat COVID-19, and likely ineffective to boot.

After Fauci said HCQ needed further study, Trump was roundly condemned in the media for hailing an “unproven drug.”

Making matters worse, a Nevada man died after drinking fish tank cleaner as a COVID treatment a few days after Trump first touted hydroxychloroquine. A media firestorm ensued blaming Trump for the bad results, and two Democrat governors temporarily restricted the use of Hydroxychloroquine to treat patients with COVID-19.

Throughout the rest of 2020, social media platforms like Facebook and Twitter censored users who promoted the drug as an effective treatment against COVID.

An intense anti-Hydroxychloroquine narrative pushed by the media resulted in the drug becoming an unpopular choice for American doctors.

Regardless, many brave doctors went on the record to describe the success they were having treating COVID patients with Hydroxychloroquine.

Investigative reporter Sharyl Attkisson posited in a May 2020 episode of Full Measure that money and politics were behind the intense anti-Hydroxychloroquine bias. Attkisson spoke with cardiologist Dr. William O’Neill, a medical director at the Henry Ford Health System in Detroit, Michigan, where both remdesivir and hydroxychloroquine were being studied.

O’Neill told Attkisson that the media’s attempts to “disprove and discredit” hydroxychloroquine had been “very harmful.”

“I think those of us that are actually involved in the scientific endeavor feel that there is some value to it and it has to be tested,” he said at the time. Like the many other doctors who’d used it, O’Neill said that he’s seen improvement in every coronavirus patient to whom he had prescribed the drug.

The newer drug Remdesivir, on the other hand, left him cold.

“There’s a lot of hype for the drug,” he said. “I saw the original new England Journal article study and I saw the Lancet study and to me it’s just like a big Ho Hum. I just don’t see a big benefit to it,” O’Neill told Attkisson.

Doctors who spoke out in favor of Hydroxychloroquine were dismissed as quacks by the medical establishment.

“‘America’s Frontline Doctors’ may be real doctors, but experts say they don’t know what they’re talking about,” sneered reporters Ryan W. Miller, and Joel Shannon in a piece for USA Today Explains.

It’s hard to describe how intense the anti-Hydroxychloroquine hatred became among Democrats, but State Rep. Karen Whitset’s story gives one an idea.

Whitset, a Democrat from Detroit, Michigan, credited hydroxychloroquine for saving her life after she took it out of desperation and was cured. Whitset, who had been stricken with a serious case of COVID for weeks, thanked President Trump —even as the corporate media continued to criticize him for touting an “unproven” drug—saying she would not have asked for it unless he had brought it up.

A few weeks later, Michigan Democrats unanimously censored Whitset, saying she broke protocol by meeting with President Trump and Vice President Mike Pence during an April 14 meeting of COVID-19 survivors.

Despite the obvious anti-Hydroxychloroquine bias of the medical establishment in the United States, an international poll in April of 2020 found that doctors around the world preferred using the drug to treat patients with the coronavirus.

During the March 19 news briefing at the White House in which Trump had first endorsed Hydroxychloroquine, he had stressed that the drug had been around for awhile, therefore, its safety had already been tested.

“So we know that if things don’t go as planned, it’s not going to kill anybody,” the president told reporters. “It’s shown very, very encouraging early results,” he added. “We’re going to be able to make that drug available almost immediately.”

Trump would go on to ask again and again, “What do we have to lose?”

Over a year later, we have an answer to that question.

“I had 60 million tablets of HCQ that Tony Fauci and @cc [sic] wouldn’t allow the American public to use because of their Hydroxy Hysteria,” tweeted former Trump advisor Peter Navarro on Thursday. “Blood on @JohnBerman @cnn and Saint Fauci’s hands. More than 50,000 Americans would be alive today,” he added.

Navarro, who had been tasked with helping to distribute the pills, also blasted the FDA’s decision in June of 2020.

“This is a Deep State blindside by bureaucrats who hate the administration they work for more than they’re concerned about saving American lives,” Navarro fumed in an interview with the New York Times. 

Some medical experts have estimated that as many as 100,000 lives could potentially have been saved if Hydroxychloroquine had been widely used in 2020.

“In a recent working paper analyzing the determinants of COVID-19 fatalities, the authors—Michigan State University economics professor Mark Skidmore and co-author Hideki Toya—estimated ‘if the U.S. had made [hydroxychloroquine] widely available early on, 80,000 to 100,000 lives could have been saved,’” said Dr. Pierre Kory, a critical care specialist at the University of Wisconsin.

During the height of the anti-Hydroxychloroquine hysteria, an Ohio state lawmaker said that she wanted to see President Trump prosecuted in the international court for crimes against humanity because of his continuous promotion of the drug.

“I can’t take it anymore. I’ve been to The Hague. I’m making a referral for crimes against humanity tomorrow,” Rep. Tavia Galonski tweeted. “Today’s press conference was the last straw,” Galonski added. “I know the need for a prosecution referral when I see one.”

Galonski was roundly mocked for her intemperate tweet, but her idea of reporting government officials to the Hague for “crimes against humanity” is an intriguing one.

The International Criminal Court describes crimes against humanity, in part, as “intentionally causing great suffering, or serious injury to body or to mental or physical health.”

Depriving a country of the use of an effective treatment against a deadly disease for political purposes would seem to fit that bill.

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Debra Heine reports for American Greatness.
Photo “Hydroxychloroquine tablets” by Whispyhistory CC 4.0.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

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