“Something has gone off the rails” in the world’s approach to the novel coronavirus pandemic, with health authorities in the U.S. and abroad suppressing safe, cheap and effective treatments while promoting experimental vaccines that have received only emergency use authorization, contends Dr. Peter McCullough.
McCullough, a renowned cardiologist who testified to the U.S. Senate last fall on COVID-19 treatments, pointed out in a lengthy interview with Tucker Carlson’s Fox Nation show “Tucker Carlson Today” that the National Institutes of Health issued a guideline recommending physicians not treat COVID-19 until a patient needs oxygen.
“This document will go down in history as the most nihilistic medical guidance as Americans are suffering,” said McCullough, the vice chief of internal medicine at Baylor University Medical Center in Dallas.
Asked to explain why such guidance would be issued, McCullough said it could be “fear driven,” but it’s not in his “moral DNA” to “let people die with no treatment.”
Around the world, physicians are finding success using treatments such as hydroxychloroquine and ivermectin, but there is no regulatory support in the United States for treating COVID-19 at all, as there would be for any other disease, he said.
In November, McCullough was among the physicians who in Senate testimony decried the politicization hydroxychloroquine, invermectin and other treatments.
McCullough has 600 peer-reviewed publications to his name. Many have appeared in top-tier journals such as the New England Journal of Medicine, Journal of the American Medical Association and The Lancet. He is the president of the Cardiorenal Society of America, the co-editor of Reviews in Cardiovascular Medicine and associate editor of the American Journal of Cardiology and Cardiorenal Medicine. He has led monitoring safety boards in major drug trials.
“I have seen things in the last year that I cannot explain as a doctor,” he told Carlson. “Why are other doctors not helping, with a simple [treatment] these patients avoid hospitalization and death?”
He noted three cases in which families have had to go to court to force physicians to administer the common antiparasitic drug ivermectin. In each case, the court sided with the family and the patient survived.
See the interview:
‘We did the work authorities failed to do’
Meanwhile, a new peer-reviewed study published by the American Journal of Therapeutics concludes that ivermectin can end the COVID-19 pandemic. Reviewed by a team that includes three top U.S. government senior scientists, the research finds the drug significantly reduces the risk of contracting COVID-19 when used regularly.
In February, a study published in the U.S. journal Frontiers of Pharmacology found ivermectin reduces COVID-19 infections, hospitalizations and deaths by about 75%. In more than 30 trials around the world, the drug causes “repeated, consistent, large magnitude improvements in clinical outcomes’ at all stages of the disease,” according to the study.
The latest study was led by the Front Line COVID-19 Critical Care Alliance, or FLCCC, a group of medical and scientific experts who are researching and promoting drugs such as ivermectin and hydroxycloroquine as an effective prophylaxis and treatment for COVID-19.
“We did the work that the medical authorities failed to do, we conducted the most comprehensive review of the available data on ivermectin,” said Pierre Kory, president and chief medical officer of the FLCCC.
“We applied the gold standard to qualify the data reviewed before concluding that ivermectin can end this pandemic.”
Paul E. Marik, founding member of the FLCCC and chief of pulmonary and critical Care Medicine at Eastern Virginia Medical School, noted the drug has been approved for use and has been effective around the world in places such as South Africa, Zimbabwe, Slovakia, the Czech Republic, Mexico and India.
The study shows ivermectin distribution campaigns have led to “rapid population-wide decreases in morbidity and mortality”.
“We are calling on regional public health authorities and medical professionals around the world to demand that ivermectin be included in their standard of care right away so we can end this pandemic once and for all,” Marik said.
‘A treatable problem’
In the interview with Carlson, McCullough noted ivermectin and hydroxychloroquine have been shown to be safe while vaccines developed in record-time are being distributed under emergency use authorization.
McCullough clarified that he’s not against vaccines, noting the COVID-19 vaccines can complement the treatments he recommends.
“But this idea of scrubbing early treatment in favor of keeping the population in fear in order to potentially accept mass vaccination, I think has done a disservice,” he said.
“The pressure to suppress any hope of treatment is extraordinary.”
McCullough said the “great gamble of the COVID vaccine program is “putting all of our eggs in one basket.”
“If we’re going to put out a vaccine, and we’re going to say we’re going to vaccinate the world, we had better be hawks on safety,” he said.
Carlson asked McCullough to explain the single-minded focus on the vaccines.
“That question is best asked to those who are not treating people with these drugs,” he said.
“Maybe it’s all driven by fear, but we are not treating something that is a treatable problem early,” he said. “We have protocols for treating everything in America.”
‘Something is up’
McCullough said that YouTube’s ban of a video in which he presented various treatment options for COVID-19 led to him being invited to testify before the U.S. Senate last November.
At that time, he said there was a groundswell of people who began saying, “Hey something is up, there is an incredible suppression of early treatment in the medical literature.”
Carlson responded: “That is so dark, it’s hard to believe that it’s real. But of all people, you would know.”
The Fox host asked why physicians, public health officials and politicians would try to suppress information about the treatment of a disease they claim they want to prevent.
“I testified in the Senate we have seen things we cannot imagine in medicine,” he said.
The Lancet, the eminent British medical journal, for example, published “a fake paper that came from a fake database that implied that hydroxychloroquine hurt people in the hospital.”
The Lancet later retracted the paper, with no apologies, saying they simply could not verify the findings. But the damage had been done.
The paper, McCullough said, influenced Food and Drug Administration staffers who wrote an FDA warning stating hydroxychloroquine causes harm and doctors shouldn’t administer it.
Doctors all over the country who were prescribing hydroxychloroquine to help their patients had their licenses threatened, he noted.
‘False narrative that you can get the infection twice’
McCullough pointed out that the FDA, because of safety concerns and cost-benefit analysis, excluded people from the vaccine trials who had recovered from COVID-19 and had antibodies, along with pregnant women and women of child-bearing potential.
“That’s a huge group of exclusions, he said. “That’s a giant part of the health care workforce.”
McCullough asked: “So if they weren’t eligible for the randomized trials, and the FDA and the sponsors thought maybe there was a problem with safety, or they had no chance of benefit, and only a small chance of these safety events exclude them, why would they electively go into an investigational program now?”
He insisted it’s a “false narrative that you can get the infection twice.”
After 17 years, people who had the first SARS virus are still immune, and that virus is about 80% the same as the current SARS virus. And of the 111 million people in the world believed to have had COVID-19, there have been only about 100 cases of claimed reinfection.
But in nearly every case of claimed reinfection, McCullough said, it’s turned out to be a misintrepretation of a PCR test, which commonly delivers false positives.
“They know you can’t get it again,” he said of authorities. “They’re not going to have [the previously infected] in a clinical trial and have the clinical trial to go to null.”
McCullough said pregnant women and others excluded from the trials should not get a COVID-19 vaccine.
“We never let anything pathogenic into a woman’s body whose pregnant,” he said.
All of the vaccines produce a viral spike protein that is pathogenic and can cause blood clotting and damage blood vessels, he explained.
Further, there is no information on safety and efficacy for those excluded groups.
McCullough reacted to calls for mandatory vaccination.
He noted the FDA and CDC state that the vaccines are voluntary, advising people to consult with their physicians.
But many universities and colleges are requiring vaccination for students returning in the fall.
McCullough said “letters are coming in from concerned parents all over,” and the first thing he encourages is getting a copy of the policy and the exemptions.
Some institutions haven’t even written a policy yet, he noted.
Significantly, McCullough emphasized that people have been vaccinated historically to protect the individual, not to protect another person, “because the individual takes on the risk.”
Carlson interjected that he heard a doctor on CNN, as well as Barack Obama, say people who don’t get vaccinated are selfish, because it’s about protecting society.
McCullough explained that that’s not the policy in the middle of an active pandemic.
It’s different in the case of an eradicated disease such as smallpox, he said. But in the middle of an active pandemic, the purpose of vaccination is to protect the vulnerable people who could die of the disease.
Noting the risk the vaccines pose to COVID-recovered people, he said a clinical diagonosis of COVID-19 should be enough to confirm immunity.
“I hope some rational thinking comes down in America to say, Listen, proof of having COVID or proof of being a survivor recovered will be good enough,” he said.
“Because, otherwise, this is getting out of control,” referring to the call for so-called “vaccine passports.”
He said that if people who are vaccinated are to get “green passports,” people who have recovered from COVID should get “g0ld ones,” because their immunity is certain, whereas the vaccines are not perfect.
“The COVID-recovered cannot give or receive the infection,” he said. “We’ve got to get to that important conclusion.”
Carlson wondered why that fact isn’t widely known.
“There is an overwhelming cloud of fear and false narrative,” McCullough explained.
People say: “Oh, there are studies out of Denmark where there were some ambient antibodies here and people got COVID here. You must be able to get reinfected.”
But those are “little red-herring cases.”
“I said, Look at your nursing homes, is grandma going in the ICU over and over again? No. Does it seem like everybody gets it one time? Yes.
There’s a lack of common sense. we just have to use our clinical common sense. The immunity is robust, complete and durable. Let’s move in.”
Via Wnd
