Author’s note: Last week, Sen. Ron Johnson (R. Wis.), the chairman of the Senate Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations, released a majority staff interim report titled “Failure to Warn: How Federal Health Agencies Downplayed the Risk of Myocarditis and Other Adverse Events Following COVID-19 Vaccination.” The report focuses on government records obtained by Sen. Johnson that “contain evidence of the Biden administration’s efforts to downplay and delay warning the public about the risks of myocarditis [a type of heart inflammation] associated with the mRNA COVID-19 vaccines.”
To those who believe that our government exists to serve and protect our best interests, the report’s cited evidence and conclusions may be shocking. But to those of us who have followed the government’s response to the COVID pandemic, the report contains no surprises.
What follows is the first in a multipart analysis of how the federal government, the legacy media, and the pharmaceutical industry responded to the spread of COVID.
The COVID pandemic was and remains one of the largest involuntary wealth transfers in history. Which is why, in trying to get to the bottom of what was done in the name of saving us from the ravages of the virus, it is best to “follow the money.” For in the law, as in life, the money trail will inevitably lead to the truth.
Recall that as the COVID virus spread throughout our panicked nation, our government and its associated medical authorities instructed us to shelter in place. (RELATED: Dr. Fauci Doubles Down)
“15 days to flatten the curve” of infections turned into a total lockdown of society that lasted for seemingly endless months. For the first time in history, an entire population was quarantined to supposedly prevent the spread of disease, as opposed to all previous epidemics and pandemics, where only the sick were kept isolated.
Schools, offices, and businesses, large and small, were closed. Jobs and livelihoods disappeared, and many were forced to rely on government assistance for survival. (RELATED: Never Forget What They Did to Us Five Years Ago)
To the extent that the spread of COVID may have posed a medical emergency, the lockdown only exacerbated the pandemic’s dire consequences and harm to the nation.
In April 2020, the National Institutes of Health (NIH) issued guidelines recommending that hospitalized COVID patients receive oxygen therapy and that those who were in acute respiratory distress should be intubated and placed on mechanical ventilators.
But it quickly became clear that those measures were, by and large, ineffective and that the ventilators were, in many cases, damaging patients’ lungs. Consequently, despite adherence to the NIH’s guidelines, the death toll continued to mount.
In June 2020, citing a purported lack of efficacy and potential cardiac risks, the NIH explicitly warned against the use of Hydroxychloroquine (HCQ) for the treatment of COVID.
The Efficacy of HCQ
But this curious official warning was issued despite the fact that courageous and committed physicians were using HCQ to successfully treat COVID patients. As you will see, in doing so, they risked their medical licenses, hospital privileges, and livelihoods.
Most prominent among these brave pioneers was the late Dr. Vladimir (Zev) Zelenko, a humble self-described “country doctor,” who used a combination of HCQ, zinc sulfate, and azithromycin to cure his COVID patients. The key to his regimen was to administer his HCQ “cocktail” promptly after the onset of symptoms and before COVID damaged the patient’s lungs and hospitalization was required.
By repurposing inexpensive existing drugs with known safety profiles, Zelenko’s treatment protocol cost approximately $20 and proved to be overwhelmingly successful with no fatalities or hospitalizations among his large patient cohort.
On March 23, 2020, Zelenko wrote an open letter to the Israeli Ministry of Health urging adoption of his protocol. His letter stated that he and his team had used the combination of HCQ, azithromycin, and zinc sulfate to successfully treat 500 high-risk COVID patients and had “ZERO deaths, ZERO hospitalizations, and ZERO intubations [ventilator uses]” and “no serious negative side effects.”
He concluded his letter as follows:
In sum, my urgent recommendation is to initiate treatment in the outpatient setting as soon as possible in accordance with the above. Based on my direct experience, it prevents acute respiratory distress syndrome (ARDS), prevents the need for hospitalization and saves lives. [Emphasis added.]
Other physicians across the nation also used variations of Zelenko’s protocol with equal success.
For example, early in the pandemic, Dr. Stephen Smith, a preeminent infectious disease expert, appeared on the Laura Ingraham Show. Dr. Smith is a 1989 graduate of the Yale University School of Medicine who did postdoctoral training at, among other medical establishments, the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID) in Bethesda, Maryland, which was then under the directorship of Dr. Anthony Fauci. From 1992 to 1995, Dr. Smith was a Medical Staff Fellow in Infectious Diseases at the NIAID. From 1995 to 1996, he was a “Post-Doc” in the Molecular Virology Section, Laboratory of Molecular Microbiology, at the NIAID.
He and his colleagues at the Smith Center for Infectious Diseases in East Orange, New Jersey, were treating COVID patients. In his interview, he said that none of their patients who had been treated with HCQ and azithromycin had to be put on a ventilator.
He pronounced the combination of HCQ and azithromycin to be an “absolute game changer” and added that “this regimen works.” He then closed with this stunning declaration: “I think this is the beginning of the end of the pandemic. I’m very serious.”
Similarly, on May 27, 2020, the American Journal of Epidemiology published “Early Outpatient Treatment of Symptomatic, High-Risk Covid-19 Patients that Should be Ramped-Up Immediately as Key to the Pandemic Crisis,” by Dr. Harvey A. Risch of the Yale School of Public Health. Here, in relevant part, is the abstract:
Hydroxychloroquine+azithromycin has been widely misrepresented in both clinical reports and public media…. Early outpatient illness is very different than later hospitalized florid disease and the treatments differ. Evidence about use of hydroxychloroquine alone, or of hydroxychloroquine+azithromycin in inpatients, is irrelevant concerning efficacy of the pair in early high-risk outpatient disease. Five studies, including two controlled clinical trials, have demonstrated significant major outpatient treatment efficacy. Hydroxychloroquine+azithromycin has been used as standard-of-care in more than 300,000 older adults with multicomorbidities, with estimated proportion diagnosed with cardiac arrhythmias attributable to the medications 47/100,000 users, of which estimated mortality is <20 percent, 9/100,000 users, compared to the 10,000 Americans now dying each week. These medications need to be widely available and promoted immediately for physicians to prescribe. (Emphasis added.)
Despite all of this and similar reports from physicians across America and around the world, the FDA and Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) officially embargoed the supply of HCQ in the Strategic National Stockpile and limited the dispensing of it to use in clinical trials and the treatment of hospitalized patients. This, despite all of the clinical evidence that, to actually work, HCQ had to be administered before COVID patients had deteriorated to the point where hospitalization was necessary.
Consequently, on June 2, 2020, the Association of American Physicians and Surgeons (AAPS) filed a complaint in federal court seeking declaratory and injunctive relief to compel the FDA and HHS to release approximately 150 million doses of hydroxychloroquine (HCQ) for use by prescribing physicians.
When the AAPS filed its complaint, it issued the following statement:
Today, June 2, 2020, the Association of American Physicians & Surgeons (AAPS) filed a lawsuit, AAPS v. FDA, against the Food and Drug Administration to end its arbitrary interference with the use of hydroxychloroquine (HCQ), which President Trump and other world leaders have taken as a prophylaxis against COVID-19.
Two million doses of HCQ are being sent by the Trump Administration to Brazil to help medical workers there safeguard themselves against the spread of the virus. But at the same time the FDA continues to block Americans’ access to this medication.
HCQ has been approved as safe by the FDA for 65 years, and the CDC states on its website that “CDC has no limits on the use of hydroxychloroquine for the prevention of malaria.”
More than 150 million doses have been donated to the strategic national stockpile controlled by the federal government, but unjustified FDA restrictions limit its use to only hospitalized patients for whom a clinical study is unavailable. Hospitals are even returning HCQ to the stockpile because they are not able to use it effectively.
“It is shocking that medical workers in Brazil will have access to HCQ as a prophylaxis while Americans are blocked by the FDA from accessing the same medication for the same use,” observes AAPS Executive Director Jane Orient, M.D.
“There is no legal or factual basis for the FDA to limit use of HCQ,” states AAPS General Counsel Andrew Schlafly. “The FDA’s restrictions on HCQ for Americans are completely indefensible in court.”
In its complaint, the AAPS cited the successful use of HCQ by China, India, South Korea, Costa Rica, the United Arab Emirates, and Turkey for their “effective early treatment of COVID-19, and for [their] use as a prophylaxis for the disease.”
For example, it cited a study in India, where HCQ was widely used as a prophylaxis, which concluded that “The pivotal finding of our [India’s] study was the noteworthy benefits of HCQ prophylaxis. .… [T]he National Task Force for COVID-19 in India recommended once a week maintenance dose.”
In addition, the AAPS complaint referenced “more than 25 articles since 1982 published in peer-reviewed medical journals [that] have reported on the safety of HCQ, and these articles are included in the PubMed database as maintained by the United States National Library of Medicine at the National Institutes of Health.”
The AAPS cited a May 29, 2020, BBC News report (“Coronavirus: How Turkey took control of Covid-19 emergency”), which quoted Turkey’s “Chief doctor Nurettin Yiyit” asserting that it was critical to use HCQ early in the disease process. “Other countries are using this drug too late,” he said, “especially the United States. We only use it at the beginning. We have no hesitation about this drug. We believe it’s effective because we get the results.”
The complaint also referenced the announcement by Nayib Bukele, president of El Salvador, that he and “most of the world’s leaders” were taking HCQ as a prophylaxis against COVID. “I use it as a prophylaxis. President Trump uses it as a prophylaxis. Most of the world’s leaders use it as a prophylaxis.”
Nevertheless, a week after the AAPS filed its complaint, the FDA officially advised that “it is no longer reasonable to believe that oral formulations of HCQ and CQ [chloroquine] may be effective in treating COVID-19, nor is it reasonable to believe that the known and potential benefits of these products outweigh their known and potential risks.”
And with that, the FDA kept in place the embargo on the Strategic National Stockpile’s supply of HCQ. And physicians wishing to prescribe the drug on an outpatient basis continued to face opposition from and censure by various state medical and pharmaceutical boards who were emulating the FDA’s position concerning the efficacy and safety of HCQ.
So it was that, instead of welcoming an inexpensive and quickly scalable resolution of the pandemic, our government, its associated medical authorities, and the legacy media derided and ostracized HCQ’s advocates as crackpots and charlatans and dismissed and misrepresented HCQ as ineffective and dangerous.
Similarly, during one of President Trump’s daily COVID press briefings, he remarked that he had taken HCQ prophylactically. The astonished and skeptical reporters immediately began peppering him with questions about the advisability and risks of taking HCQ.
That day, as on many others, Trump shared the podium with his chief medical advisor, Dr. Anthony Fauci. When the reporters asked Fauci if he would ever take HCQ, he responded that he would do so only as part of a controlled clinical study.
The media trumpeted Fauci’s answer as implying that taking HCQ was risky and dangerous.
Fox News host Neil Cavuto warned viewers, “If you are in a risky population here, and you are taking this [HCQ] as a preventative treatment … it will kill you. I cannot stress enough. This will kill you.”
Then two days later, Joy Behar, co-host of The View, criticized Pennsylvania Congressman Mike Kelly for taking HCQ, saying, “I can’t believe anybody with a brain would take that stuff.”
And so on.
All of this despite the fact that, as noted above, HCQ is one of the most widely prescribed and safest drugs in history. It has a better safety profile than aspirin and has been used to safely treat lupus and as an antimalarial agent around the world. For years, it was handed out like Pez to our troops in Vietnam and elsewhere. At no time were serious negative side effects reported.
Government and Mainstream Media’s Efforts to Discredit Alternative COVID Treatments
But, in addition to HCQ, the government-led media disinformation campaign extended to ivermectin as well.
Ivermectin is an antiparasitic drug that was originally used to treat animals but has been approved for human use since 1987. For decades, it has been on the World Health Organization’s List of Essential Medicines due to its efficacy, safety, and low cost.
Nevertheless, on March 5, 2021, the FDA issued a consumer warning titled “Why You Should Not Use Ivermectin to Treat or Prevent COVID-19.” According to the FDA, ivermectin was approved for human use only for specific parasitic infections and for topical treatment of head lice and rosacea. It warned that there was “insufficient data” from well-controlled studies to support its use for COVID and that taking large doses of ivermectin, especially in its veterinary formulation, could cause serious harm, including nausea, vomiting, seizures, coma, and death.
On August 21, 2021, the FDA escalated its warning with this mocking viral tweet: “You are not a horse. You are not a cow. Seriously y’all. Stop it.”
That same month, the CDC issued a Health Alert Network Advisory warning that ivermectin was not authorized or approved for the treatment of COVID and that unspecified clinical trials had not demonstrated consistent benefits. The CDC attributed the increase in ivermectin prescriptions to “misinformation” about its COVID efficacy.
But contrary to these official warnings, Fox News reported that a growing number of physicians were reporting dramatic success in treating COVID patients with ivermectin.
This prompted MSNBC’s Rachel Maddow, tracking the FDA’s warnings, to dismiss the drug as “horse deworming medication” and to warn of the risks of its veterinary formulation and a purported lack of evidence of its efficacy.
The ivermectin controversy came to a head in September 2021, when podcaster Joe Rogan announced via Instagram that he had tested positive for COVID and was taking ivermectin as part of a treatment regimen.
That same day, CNN covered Rogan’s announcement with a report by anchor Erin Burnett featuring a chyron stating “Joe Rogan says he has COVID, taking livestock drug despite warnings.” Burnett described ivermectin as “a drug used for livestock” and cited the FDA’s warnings against its use for COVID. This was followed by another segment showing anchor Anderson Cooper referring to ivermectin as “something more often used to deworm horses.”
NBC reported that Rogan was taking ivermectin, “a drug typically used on livestock that health experts have urged the public to avoid.”
The Washington Post described ivermectin as a treatment “promoted by conservative media figures” but warned against by the FDA, noting “huge spikes” in poison control calls by those taking the drug.
CBS reported that Rogan was taking “an anti-parasite drug that health officials have repeatedly warned should not be used to prevent or treat COVID-19.” The report emphasized the FDA and CDC’s opposition to treatment with ivermectin and the uptick in poison control calls related to ivermectin misuse.
On October 13, 2021, CNN’s Don Lemon described ivermectin as “a drug that is commonly used as a horse dewormer.” Appearing with Lemon was a purported medical expert who criticized Rogan’s treatment regimen as a “crazy jumble of folk remedies and internet-prescribed drugs” and asserted flatly that ivermectin “doesn’t work” against COVID.
There were many more similar media reports, all of which followed the lead of the FDA and CDC in condemning the use of ivermectin to treat COVID.
But lost in the media scrum was the fact that Rogan, like so many others, had quickly recovered after taking ivermectin. And, in fact, many well-credentialed and qualified physicians were using ivermectin to successfully treat COVID.
Take, for example, Dr. Pierre Kory, cofounder of the Front Line COVID-19 Critical Care Alliance (FLCCC), a non-profit organization of critical care specialists who pooled their expertise and real-world clinical experience to craft evidence-based protocols for COVID prevention and treatment.
In December 2020, Dr. Kory testified before the Senate Homeland Security Committee that, based on the collective research and hands-on clinical experience of FLCCC’s members, ivermectin had proven to be a “miracle drug” that dramatically reduced mortality in hospitalized COVID patients. He added that broader use of ivermectin could “end the pandemic.”
So what was going on? Why were the government healthcare authorities and the media so hell bent on condemning, discouraging, and precluding the use of HCQ and ivermectin?
The reason comes down to three words: Emergency Use Authorization.
Let me explain.
Emergency Use Authorization and the COVID Vaccine
With the nation in lockdown and the virus spreading, the federal government tasked the pharmaceutical industry with producing COVID vaccines through Operation Warp Speed, a public-private partnership launched in May 2020. The Department of Health and Human Services (HHS), the Department of Defense, and other agencies provided the funding and so-called “regulatory support.” The goal was to deliver 300 million vaccine doses by early 2021.
The government provided billions in funding to drug companies to support research, clinical trials, and manufacturing.
Now, ordinarily, the elapsed time between the start and finish of clinical trials for new drugs under the FDA’s approval process averages in the range of six to 11 years. This process is mandatory before a new drug can be marketed in the United States.
But, during a public health emergency, the FDA can permit the use of so-called experimental drugs (aka Investigational New Drugs) which have not been fully tested when no safe and effective alternative prophylaxis or treatment of the disease in question is available. The FDA calls this procedure an Emergency Use Authorization.
So it was that the FDA issued Emergency Use Authorizations to Pfizer/BioNTech, Moderna, Johnson & Johnson, AstraZeneca, and other drug companies to market and distribute their vaccines.
With the pharmaceutical industry poised to reap untold billions in profits from the sale and distribution of their experimental vaccines, the safety and efficacy of using ivermectin and HCQ to either protect against or treat COVID cases had to be discredited, condemned, and — for all intents and purposes — prohibited. In other words, for the FDA to issue the Emergency Use Authorizations, the fiction had to be conjured and believed that there was no existing effective prophylaxis or treatment of COVID. And that was the reason for the jihad against the use of safe, effective, inexpensive, and readily available HCQ and ivermectin to prevent and cure COVID infections.
So, with the FDA’s Emergency Use Authorizations in place, the stage was set for the mass inoculation of America with experimental vaccines.
And what followed will be the subject of my next article.
George Parry is a former federal and state prosecutor. He blogs at knowledgeisgood.net.
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