The case for Hydroxy Chloroquine (HCQ) and Ivermectin (IM)

The case for HY-DROXY-CHLORO-QUINE (HCQ) and IVER-MECTIN (IM)


February 23, 2021 (LifeSiteNews) — adapted by

CJ Visser

PART ONE
In part one we show how medical trials designed to test HCQ appear to have been manipulated in a direction which was bound to produce negative results.

The UK has had the undignified triumph of having one of the world’s highest death rates. Some see the solution in continuing lockdowns, more testing and ultimately the vaccine. We argue that the solution lies in medical treatments, such as Hy-droxy-chloro-quine (HCQ) or Ivermectin (IM) rather than in vaccination. Vaccination has not had sufficient animal trials to prove its safety, yet. HCQ, on the other hand, with repeated proof of effectiveness during several trials, was ruled out as a potential treatment for Covid19 quite early on. This is despite the fact that, when used correctly, it is a highly efficacious treatment. Had HCQ been readily available as a prophylactic or early stage treatment we would need neither lockdowns nor vaccinations and dramatically fewer people would have died. However this didn’t happen. Here we intend to explore why. Then on Dec 8th, 2020, Dr. Pierre Kory testified to Senate Committee about IM as another great potential treatment for Covid 19. Dr. Kory believes that IM will become to Covid and other viruses what Penicillin became to infections caused by bacteria. His website https://flccc.net explains the data they have used and the great results obtained. Yet days after Dr. Kory’s testimony his videos were removed from social media!


HCQ in itself had repeatedly been found to be an effective treatment for Covid19. Didier Raoult was one of the earliest to discover its usefulness. He treated over 1000 patients with Azithromycin and HCQ and almost 99% recovered. Other studies found its efficacy was increased when Zinc was added into the protocol; there were fewer fatalities and patients were discharged home earlier. Harvey Risch, a Yale professor conducted a meta-analysis showing the key role it could play in an outpatient setting. This was recently confirmed by McCullough who showed how when started earlier it may reduce the progression of disease, prevent hospitalization, and is associated with reduced mortality. Most recently Zelenko has written on the dramatic improvements HCQ can bring about in a nebulised form. A group of scientists and PhD researchers put together a ‘living review’, a database of all the papers on HCQ which can be viewed here: https://c19study.com. They suggest that had it been used over 1,344,703 lives could have been saved.

Safety was also never an issue when used correctly. It had been used for 65 years by hundreds of millions of people in tens of billions of doses, prescribed without routine screening and given to adults, children, pregnant women and nursing mothers. It is derived from the bark of the cinchona tree, which has been used for hundreds or thousands of years to treat Malaria.

How did cheap, safe, and highly effective drugs, come to be seen as a potentially fatal medication, which you could lose your license for prescribing, your credibility for advocating and every time someone tried to talk about it, they would be banned, humiliated or described as ‘fake news’.

How did this happen? And more ominously, why? The globalist World Health Organization (WHO) lead the battle.

1. Abandoning multiple independent small trials in favor of a single, biased trial

The stage was set when the WHO’s Director General, Dr Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, with an obvious globalist agenda, at a media briefing (18th March 2020) made it clear that the controlled trials which had produced the initial findings were going to be overridden by the WHO’s far more expensively produced results:

“Multiple small trials with different methodologies may not give us the clear, strong evidence we need about which treatments help to save lives. WHO and its partners are therefore organizing a study in many countries in which some of these untested treatments are compared with each other. This large, international study is designed to generate the robust data we need, to show which treatments are the most effective. We have called this study the SOLIDARITY trial.”

The idea that multiple small trials are not able to generate strong evidence is false. The Cochrane Library Consortium, the gold standard in the research world, examined tens of thousands of comparisons between randomized trials and their non-randomized counterparts and found the two types of studies arrived at virtually identical conclusions. In fact, in science meta-analysis control tests are preferred over a massive single trial.

2. Giving HCQ at the wrong time

But WHO appeared determined to control the narrative and set up a $108 million dollar study with 12,000 patients at 500 hospital sites across 30 countries. They trialled HCQ on 954 late stage patients. 64% of these were already on oxygen or ventilation.

Using this study they were able to achieve very different results.

To understand how, you need to know Covid 19 has three stages: A) viral replication which can develop into B) florid pneumonia and then C) multi-organ attack. HCQ tackles early-stage viral replication rather than late stage inflammation which requires a different approach. It is most valuable as an outpatient treatment preventing Covid19 developing to a later stage. Thus testing only patients in the late stage will give HCQ negative results!

By giving HCQ to late-stage patients SOLIDARITY was setting up a trial which would be bound to have negative results for the effectiveness of HCQ.

3. Giving HCQ using a toxic dosage

However, more egregious was the dosage. While HCQ is very safe when used correctly, like Paracetamol it has a narrow toxic to therapeutic margin. In 1979 the WHO calculated that 1.5 -2 g of the “base” drug could be a potentially fatal dose. In the SOLIDARITY trial patients were administered a dosage of 2.4 g (equivalent of 1.9 base) in the first 24 hours or 9.6 g in total over ten days, i.e. an overdose that could turn out toxic.

The only ‘safety’ information collected during the trial was whether patients required oxygen, required a ventilator, or died. This effectively masked the adverse effects of the drugs tested, obscuring whether mortality was due to drug toxicity as opposed to death due to Covid 19.

This toxic dosage was quickly identified by India’s official medical research agency, the Indian Council of Medical Research. They wrote to the WHO to alert them to the fact they were using doses 4 times higher than in India. Dr. Soumya Swaminathan, the WHO’s chief scientist and previous head of the Indian medical research agency should have been able to identify this herself. A previous trial in Brazil in March-April with a slightly higher dosage (12 g in ten days) had been stopped prematurely due to excess deaths and is currently being investigated. But the SOLIDARITY trial’s HCQ arm was only permanently stopped after one of the authors of this blog post, on finding out these doses, threatened them with a manslaughter charge. Was there a connection? You can decide.

A similar strategy in the fight against HCQ was the Oxford based RECOVERY (Randomised Evaluation of Covid-19 thERapY) clinical trials run by two Professors from the University of Oxford – Peter Horby and Martin Landray. This was a large British multi-centre clinical trial of the sort generally believed to yield the most reliable evidence.

It also used 2400 mg of HCQ in the first 24 hours for treatment of already very ill, hospitalized Covid-19 patients, a potentially lethal dose.

Horby and Landry presented a number of arguments to reassure that the dosages were not toxic, not all of which stood up to further investigation. For example, they suggested that as no extra deaths had occurred in the first couple of days when the dosage was highest this was evidence that the dose was not fatal. They ignored the crucial fact that HCQ has a particularly long half-life, and cumulative dosing was the more relevant measure.

The online newspaper FranceSoir concluded from their extremely detailed investigation of RECOVERY that many patients died of toxic overdoses of HCQ rather than Covid 19.

While the HCQ arm has been shut down, doctors are strongly encouraged to enrol all COVID19 patients onto the RECOVERY trial. In fact they recently recruited over just over 10,000 patients in January alone. They are also maintaining the same minimalist approach towards safety which we saw earlier on: “trials are being run as simply as they can to reduce the burden on the NHS”.

As Chair of the New and Emerging Respiratory Virus Threats Advisory Group (NERVTAG) and a committee member of The Scientific Advisory Group for Emergencies (SAGE), Peter Horby is an extremely influential man. Could it be that a wealthy globalist’s way of dosing patents could be accepted not because it is better science, but simply because of his influence?

4. Fake News Published

A third mysterious event in pushing HCQ out of the picture was the publication in the Lancet, among the world’s oldest and best-known general medical journals, of a large international observational study based on 96 000 Covid cases (15,000 of whom received a Chloroquine drug) which appeared to show that HCQ and Chloroquine were of no benefit and caused considerable harm. The flaws in the study were so blatant that one of us (at LifeSiteNews) critiqued it on the day it was published. Within days 146 researchers wrote to the British Medical Journal with concerns about its methodology and data integrity. It took two weeks for the Lancet to retract the study but by then the damage was done. You can read about it here: https://www.theguardian.com/world/2020/jun/04/covid-19-lancet-retracts-paper-that-halted-hydroxychloroquine-trials

Thus trials designed to test HCQ appear to have been manipulated in a direction which was bound to give negative results regarding the drug’s effectiveness.

PART TWO
In part one it is showed how the trials designed to test HCQ appear to have been manipulated in a direction which was bound to produce negative results. In part two we look at the influence of these studies.

Large studies have a significant impact on medical knowledge even where they are seriously misleading. They are more likely to be published and to shape meta-analyses. The fraudulent Lancet study mentioned in part one is still extensively cited, even though the study was retracted.

But in the case of HCQ there has been a determination to influence the way that the drug was viewed and used throughout the world in fundamental ways.

1. WHO pressured bodies to stop prescribing HCQ

Firstly, the WHO put pressure on governments and professional bodies to stop doctors prescribing HCQ. Belgium, France, Italy were just some of the countries which banned its use for treatment of Covid-19. The Jakarta Post/Reuters reported on May 27 that WHO had instructed Indonesia’s health ministry to suspend the use of HCQ for treatment of Covid-19. Indonesia, the world’s 4th most populous country, had been using the drug early for all cases, independent of severity, with good results. Fortunately, Indonesia refused to comply.

Similarly, Costa Rica, which had a particularly low fatality rate, and was said to be the only country in Central America using HCQ for early treatment, considered stopping HCQ as a result of pronouncements by the WHO.

The clamp down in the use of HCQ in Switzerland created a natural experiment. For about two weeks after HCQ use was halted, death rates approximately tripled, for about 15 days. Then, after its use was allowed again, two weeks later death rates from Covid fell back to their baseline. But this did not receive the attention which it deserved.

2. FDA changed its mind about HCQ

The US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) at first issued an Emergency Use Authorization for Chloroquine drugs, and then suspended this. Each of these moves served to restrict use of the drug in different ways.

3. Outpatient studies were suspended

Large outpatient studies were also suspended in response to these studies.

For example, COPCOV, a large global clinical trial which aimed to enrol 40,000 healthcare workers in an outpatient setting, appears to have been temporarily halted after recruiting 226 participants. Investigators involved in the study argue that HCQ had the potential to save tens of thousands of lives. They attributed this suspension of COPCOV to ‘the fraudulent data [in the Lancet-published, later retracted study], unjustified extrapolation and exaggerated safety concerns’.

Similarly, another trial described as ‘The largest and most systematic outpatient trial leveraged by the US National Institutes of Health’ which planned to include an estimated 2000 outpatients with early Covid-19 was stopped for good after only 20 had been enrolled in a month.

This was particularly damaging to the potential use of HCQ, as it is in an outpatient context that it has its most valuable role to play.

And so the systematic exclusion of HCQ from the COVID19 medical landscape progressed.

4. Medical encyclopedia advised restriction of use

The most-consulted US medical encyclopedia, UptoDate, advised physicians to restrict HCQ to only clinical trials, citing the US Food and Drug Administration (FDA).

5. Drug manufacturing company starts acting as surveillance mechanism

The French pharmaceutical company Sanofi announced it would no longer supply the drug for use with Covid, and cancelled its clinical trials including one for outpatients, which should have been a key area of research.

Sanofi also began acting like a regulator, writing to health professionals in Australia to remind them that HCQ was not approved for use outside a clinical trial. Sanofi also started collecting information on all off-label use of HCQ in New Zealand and Australia, providing mechanisms for people to make anonymous reports.

If anyone should wonder why Sanofi, a drug manufacturing company, should become a surveillance/ enforcement mechanism to frighten medical providers from using the drug for COVID19, it is worth noting that Sanofi, partnering with the pharmaceutical company GlaxoSmithKline plc (GSK), subsequently received a potential 2.1 billion dollars from the US government for 100 million doses of coronavirus vaccine. Perhaps that is where the answer lies- money talks.

6. HCQ factory burnt down

And in what appeared to be a strange war against HCQ, in Taiwan, a country which fared remarkably well in the battle against Covid19, a factory essential to the production of HCQ was burnt down.

7. Negative publicity

The barrage of negative publicity which the studies on HCQ precipitated, influenced what was published. When publishing empirical research, it is easier to publish positive findings. But when it came to HCQ there was a bias towards publishing negative results. Studies from North America were almost four times more likely to report negative results than studies from the rest of the world combined.

Richard Smith, former editor-in-chief of the British Medical Journal (BMJ) helps us understand why: ‘Medical Journals are an extension of the marketing arm of pharmaceutical companies,’. He was backed up by Richard Horton: ‘Journals have devolved into information laundering operations for the pharmaceutical industry’.

Richard Horton was the editor in chief when the Lancet published the fraudulent research on HCQ. He should know.

The treatment of HCQ by social media companies provided a study on the operation of ‘fake news’. YouTube CEO Susan Wojcicki said: ‘YouTube will ban any content containing medical advice that contradicts the World Health Organisation (WHO) coronavirus recommendations’. While this sounds reasonable on the face of it, the fact remains that the WHO’s pronouncements were not reliable. When those with power (like both the WHO and YouTube) control the narrative it is more difficult to decipher the truth.

8. Targeting doctors who promote HCQ and IM

An example of this censorship occurred when a group calling themselves “America’s Frontline Doctors” gave a press conference and livestream talks about the Covid-19 pandemic and the need for physicians to be able to prescribe HCQ freely. While the media sparsely attended the press conference, the livestream got millions of views. Within hours, their livestream was banned by Google, YouTube, FaceBook and Twitter. While they can be found again on YouTube, they have been subject to character assassinations, and accused of having a political agenda. It is hard to see what they gain from exposing themselves to criticism and public humiliation except the knowledge that they have done their best to save other people’s lives.

There was a pattern of targeting doctors who spoke out in favour of HCQ. Professor Didier Raoult, an authoritative microbiologist and one of the world’s most published scientists, wrote the original paper which put HCQ on the map. As a result, he was subject to a significant level of attack. For example, when the New York Times Magazine did a feature on him, what they ultimately produced was a detailed hit piece. In the US, Raoult is now considered an unreliable crank.

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

We showed how HCQ trials, designed to produce negative results, influenced strategies in the treatment of Covid-19.

PART THREE

In part one we looked at how trials of HCQ appeared to have been designed to achieve negative results. In part two we looked at how these trials influenced strategies in the treatment of COVID19. In part three we consider why HCQ was subject to such an unprecedented attack.

1. Initially there may have been political motivations

As it was the year of the US elections there was no shortage of people ready to criticise Trump’s poor handling of the pandemic. Firstly, he was attacked for downplaying the severity of it and then for his over-enthusiastic embracing of a potential cure. This was seen to be a risky strategy which could (and did) lead some people to self-medicate. As a result, Trump’s approach elicited a strong negative reaction from some members of the medical profession.

However, it also seems possible that had Trump been able to successfully promote HCQ this would have transformed him into a hero. And there were many forces which wanted the President out.

Even before the WHO got to work on SOLIDARITY, President Trump had, on the basis of findings from smaller clinical trials, obtained free drug donations for the Strategic National Stockpile of HCQ and Chloroquine, which were made available for distribution to state governments. By the end of May pharmaceutical companies had donated more than 150 million doses, enough to fully treat more than 15 million people as part of their efforts for the ‘prevention and treatment of the coronavirus outbreak’.

However, Rick Bright, an Obama appointed official, personally opposed widespread distribution of the donated HCQ and Chloroquine, by insisting that it be registered for Emergency Use Authorization only (EUA). This greatly restricted its usage to only hospitalised patients, while preventing distribution to the outpatients with early disease in whom it would be expected to do the most good. This was not necessary as it was a properly licensed drug. This usage particularly discriminated against elderly residents in nursing homes who would no longer be able to access it as a prophylactic (preventive medicine) treatment.

This was a charade to confuse doctors. The US FDA participated in the charade, issuing advice that use of the drug required a level of monitoring that could only be accomplished in a hospital. So, even though doctors could legally prescribe it off-label, they became aware that if they did so, they would likely be sued for malpractice if something went wrong.

However clumsily some may feel that Trump articulated his plan, it would have been able to save thousands of lives.

2. The gigantic influence of pharmaceutical giants

But perhaps more pertinently the fingerprints of big pharma were all over the decisions made.

One of the earliest studies initiated in response to Trump’s plan found that patients receiving HCQ were more likely to die than those receiving regular care. However it was soon acknowledged that this was due to the severe stage of illness, and the fact that those in the group who received the drug were much sicker than those who did not. As the study noted, ‘HCQ, with or without Azithromycin, was more likely to be prescribed to patients with more severe disease…Thus, as expected, increased mortality was observed in patients treated with HCQ both with and without Azithromycin’. The study was not peer reviewed, nor did it include Azithromycin and Zinc although previous studies suggested this combination produced the best outcome. One could argue that the trial appeared to be designed to ensure that HCQ would come out badly.

One of the co-authors had been involved with Gilead – a research-based biopharmaceutical company focusing on the discovery, development, and commercialization of innovative medicines – which was producing Remdesivir, a competing Covid19 drug.

Perhaps more telling are the various links with vaccine producers. In fact, it is the pro-globalist Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation (BMGF), the byword for vaccines, who were the experts when determining the doses of HCQ. It was they who had developed a model of Chloroquine penetration into tissues for Malaria. At the expert working group they explained that they would have a post-exposure prophylaxis clinical trial protocol for HCQ in the coming week, but we have not been able to find this.

Either way the BMGF were influential. At the first meeting where the WHO working group discussed the potential role of HCQ in the treatment of Covid19 5/25 (20%) of the meeting’s participants were from BMGF. When it came to decisions about the dosage for the disastrous SOLIDARITY trials a representative from the foundation was one of only four participants involved (25%).

Similarly, BMGF heavily funded the RECOVERY trial.

As advocates of vaccination conflicts of interest were inevitable. But if the dosage decided on for the HCQ trials was a mistake it has cost us very dearly and served BMGF very well.

Big Pharma are extremely heavily invested in the UK public health decision-making system from the top down. In the light of what we already know it would appear that their financial interest in vaccine production takes priority over a desire to save individual lives.

For example, many might wonder why Neil Ferguson, with his poor record of disease modelling, might be allowed to be so influential. But as someone who consistently over-predicts the scale of danger and is Acting Director of the Vaccine Impact Modelling Group, (funded by BMGF and GAVI, The Vaccine Alliance) he could undoubtedly play a useful role.

The British Government is also the largest funder of GAVI. The links between big pharma, the WHO and our health strategies have been documented in detail. When a floundering UK government is so heavily invested in a vaccine industry the potential financial gain from a successful vaccine roll out, rather than health and wellbeing of the people, is shaping everything which the government chooses to do.

When looking at public health decisions it becomes apparent that these have been shaped by big pharma in a way which will inevitably lead to vaccines. PCR testing (the test detects the presence of a virus if you are infected at the time of the test) has been used to artificially ramp up the rate of infections, lockdowns have destroyed the economy, and potential cures such as HCQ (and maybe more recently Ivermectin) appear to have been strategically removed. As a result, we are pushed into a corner from which vaccines appear to be the only escape.

In part three we showed how political motives (perhaps) and globalist pharmaceutical interests (for sure) caused an unprecedented attack on HCQ.

What can we learn from this sorry saga of HCQ?

The WHO and other national health agencies, universities and charities have conducted large clinical trials which appear to have been designed so HCQ and its cousin Chloroquine would fail to show benefit in the treatment of Covid-19, perhaps to advantage much more expensive competitors and vaccines in development. In so doing, these agencies and charities have de facto conspired to increase the number of deaths in these trials. In so doing, they have deprived billions of people from potentially benefiting from a safe and inexpensive drug, when used properly, during a major pandemic. This might contribute to prolongation of the pandemic, massive economic losses and many increased cases and deaths.

Big pharma does not work in our interests. Some of those involved in this scandal appear to be financially motivated and these motivations shape policy decisions in ways which, certainly in the case of Covid19, are ultimately destructive of human health. Furthermore, their own agenda, boosted further by the globalist community who funds them, wittingly or not, shapes the decisions and outputs of those further downstream.

We need some form of deregulation where as individuals we have greater control over our own health decisions. The risks involved are unlikely to be greater than the risks involved in entrusting ourselves to those who are influenced by financial interests when they make decisions about public health. Their recent track record speaks for itself.

Arbiters of ‘fake news’, wittingly or not, act as advocates for those with the funding and clout to produce the reports, studies and trials which make their case. While there is a great deal of fiction on the internet, fact checkers themselves do not have the authority to determine the ‘truth’ and in fact were recently pulled up for their censorship of a post about HCQ. In the case of HCQ (and more recently IM) anonymous fact checkers claim more authority for the results of large clinical trials which can produce seriously misleading information. And omission can be just as big a crime as commission. By omitting YouTube videos of Dr. Kory, for example, patients that could have reached out to a helping hand are hurt and may die.

By preventing the off-label use of HCQ for early stage Covid19 huge numbers of the elderly and those with co-morbidities, with men disproportionately represented among them, have already died. This is genocide by default.

The good news is that with all the true data available for all to see, the NIH, an agency of the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, has upgraded their belief in IM from “not effective” to “neutral”. This is a step in the right direction. Countries such as Slovakia, Macedonia, South-Africa, Zimbabwe and Belize, together with states in northern India and Mexico, have accepted IM as an effective treatment against Covid19.

In this strange war against anti-Covid drugs one must question who is behind it. It is a war against you and me. It all plays out pushed by the globalists for their own agenda. At best they are attacking the effectiveness of drugs to push their own agenda of vaccination. It is clear that this global strategy works in their favour- giving them more control and more money. At worst they not only get more control and money, they are preparing us for what is to come (according to Biblical predictions). If they can condition the world into feeling forced to take vaccines – and this is not to say that vaccination is wrong – the world will become accustomed to such control. People will yield more and more rights. Privacy will fade away. Aiming a reader at your forehead or hand is now normal. Eventually receiving the mark of the Beast sometime in the future (Rev 13- The Bible), which will also be a mass injection of a microchip of sorts, will be the norm rather than the exception.

LifeSiteNews has produced an extensive COVID-19 vaccines resources page.  View it here:https://lifefacts.lifesitenews.com/covid-19/