COVID-19, Culture & Society, Current Events, Featured, Op-eds, Politics, What's New

COVID-19: Speaking Up in Black and White

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These days more and more apparently intelligent people seem to upspeak. That’s the irritating “Valley Girl” inflection where every sentence sounds like a question. Don’t these people trust their own thoughts and words? 

Perhaps upspeakers’ brains are fried after being fed a steady diet of DEI, ESG, and BIPOC. For the uninitiated, these initials stand for “Diversity, Equity and Inclusion”, a corporate stock/investment rating based on Environmental awareness, Social justice and (right-minded) Governance to enhance the lives of “Black, Indigenous, People of Color.” “Privilege” gets the full word. White people must “check their privilege at the door” and shut up under the current era of Stalinesque cancel culture.

Black American slaves used to have some version of Simon Legree as their master. Now the woke white liberals have assumed that role. Even President Biden views BIPOCs as helpless morons whom only the government can rescue.

Of course, little BIPOCs are the perfect unsuspecting targets. Despite parental objections, new school curricula include Marxist inspired critical race theory that teaches children to hate others based on skin color. Instead of learning the 3 Rs, kindergarteners are encouraged to explore their gender identity and question the family structure. The latest data show that only 35 percent of 4th graders are proficient in reading and 41 percent are proficient in math. Instead of learning the necessary skills to race to the top of the ladder of success, they have the tools to win the victim triathlon. The prize: dependency on government resources.

COVID-19 added a new ingredient to the melting pot. Brown-skinned Americans fare more poorly with COVID than whites. Some reasons are sociological, such as crowded living conditions, working in service jobs that cannot be done from home, and inconsistent access to health care. Some reasons may be physiological. Studies have shown racial differences in the body’s ACE-2 receptors. These receptors help control inflammation, especially in cells lining the blood vessels. These are the sites where the “spike” protein of the SARS-Co-V-2 virus (that causes COVID-19) enter and infect healthy cells throughout the body. Notably, there may be more ACE-2 receptors in patients with hypertension, diabetes and coronary artery disease—conditions plaguing black Americans. Moreover, people with brown skin have lower levels of Vitamin D, a factor in the risk of contracting a SARS-Co-V-2 infection and the severity of COVID-19. 

Knowing the higher risk, the DEI folks should have launched an education campaign informing BIPOCs about non-prescription supplements like quercetin, zinc, and vitamin D, as well as prophylaxis or early treatment with inexpensive medications (hydroxychloroquine, ivermectin, and fluvoxamine, among others) that can significantly reduce symptoms and prevent hospitalizations and deaths.

Instead, the public health gurus waited for vaccines. The guise of “vaccine equity” drew attention away from legitimate concerns about the shots. Despite the increased susceptibility to COVID-19, black Americans remain skeptical of the shot. Folks still remembered the instances where the underserved were “helped” by the government. The 1932 Tuskegee syphilis study denied a group of black men treatment for 40 years. Without informed consent, an experimental measles vaccine was administered to babies starting in 1987. After too many African and Haitian children deaths to ignore, the program was halted.

Able to read, BIPOCs learned about the serious side effects that include sometimes fatal blood clots, facial paralysis, possible menstrual problems, heart inflammation, among others. They wondered why the less effective Johnson & Johnson vaccine was sent to underserved neighborhoods. They wondered why the government had to offer $116 million in prizes, trucks, and customized firearms to encourage people to get the shot. They wondered why the government was going door to door to find BIPOCs to whom to give shots. 

In order to swoop in to the rescue, the government-pharmaceutical complex could not allow the 34 million Americans who have had documented COVID-19 or a SARS-CoV-2 infection to depend on their natural immunity. Like a virus escaping from a lab or jumping from a pangolin to infect humans, the government control expanded from BIPOCs to privileged white folks.

What are we to do about the tension between addressing real health disparities and recognizing that racial disparities are used as a cover for manipulating society? Together we rip off the mask of benevolence. As ethical physicians, we pledge to treat all individuals with dignity and respect. We will explain the risks and benefits of their options and let patients decide. As active citizens, we demand prophylaxis, treatments of our choice, and the freedom to choose to receive or decline the shot. We take advantage of the law. A number of courts have been on the patient’s side.

Save yourself. Be bold. Speak up. 

COVID-19, Guest Column, Politics, What's New

Costly Tradeoff with the Wait for the Vaccine Pandemic Strategy

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by Joel S. Hirschhorn

Americans and most of the global population for over a year have been consumed with fear, sacrifices and concerns about the COVID-19 pandemic. But few people have understood or been given a chance to support or reject what is best seen as the wait for the vaccine pandemic strategy.

Hidden from public view was a most substantial tradeoff between doing what was feasible to save lives of most people infected by COVID starting in the early months of the pandemic versus placing priority on waiting for COVID vaccines to be the pandemic salvation. This tradeoff violated key principles and ethics of medicine, and also undermined American democracy. Many nations followed what the US did.

Here is the most important aspect of this strategy. This tradeoff happened despite an enormous amount of data from the US and other nations that pioneering clinicians had found successful early home/outpatient COVID treatments. These were true cures, because they stopped the viral infection in its first viral replication stage. The treatment kept patients with symptoms out of the hospital.

So, another aspect of the tradeoff was that by not supporting early home/outpatient treatment hospitals became crushed by COVID victims that had passed through the first stage into greatly worse symptoms in the second and third stages of the infection. Enormous pain, suffering, deaths and costs were the inevitable consequence of not pushing early home/outpatient treatment and, instead, waiting for COVID vaccines.

Details and data on the considerable positive data on these treatments have been given in my book Pandemic Blunder. A pro-treatment article noted that two leading physicians used ivermectin to treat themselves when they got infected with COVID. One good source of data on early treatment should be promoted for public use.

Despite what many physicians and medical researchers concluded were treatments that cured COVID, others even today have negative views about the two most cheap generic medicines used in many treatment protocols and cocktails, namely hydroxychloroquine and ivermectin.

Data on the treatment success first started to be made public in March 2020, mostly by Dr, V. Zelenko, a frontline community physician in New York.  A number of other clinicians followed through the early months of the pandemic and, even today, keep using both generics with remarkable success. But the mainstream and corporate social media have stubbornly refused to view the treatment “solution” in a positive way. The biggest reason for this refusal to truly follow the science is that under the leadership of Dr. Fauci both NIH and FDA issued guidance blocking wide use of both generics. These actions essentially killed wide use of COVID treatment for the general public as well as health care workers. What happened instead?

Behind the scenes the leading federal officials at NIH, FDA and CDC decided to execute the wait for vaccine strategy and successfully convinced President Trump and his White House pandemic task force to pump billions of dollars into Operation Warp Speed in April 2020.

Dr. Peter McCullough made this important point: “All efforts on treatment were dropped. Warp Speed went full tilt for vaccine development, and there was a silencing of any information on treatment.” He has said that 85 percent of COVID deaths can be prevented with treatment. Back in November 2020, he said “we can prevent hospitalization and death,” and spoke of a crime against humanity because of negative views on early home treatment.

What is critically important to recognize is that out of the current 600,000 COVID deaths in the US over 500,000 could have been prevented with the treatment approach. Globally over 3 million lives could have been saved. This view of preventable deaths was an important conclusion in Pandemic Blunder based on clinical evidence.

Here too, big media has refused to acknowledge what so many experts have said about the enormous missed opportunity to save lives.

In my opinion, any physician who also has a negative view of the treatments based on hydroxychloroquine or ivermectin has either not spent sufficient time examining available data or has fallen victim to the propaganda and disinformation unleashed by big media. The record is clear.  Both generics have many decades of safe use and are fully FDA approved. The websites of three organizations should be used by physicians to access good information on early treatments: Front Line COVID-19 Critical Care Alliance. America’s Frontline Doctors and the Association of American Physicians and Surgeons.  People can get hydroxychloroquine or ivermectin through these groups.

Now we are in the COVID vaccine stage with all vaccines being used correctly categorized as experimental.  They are not fully FDA approved but are used under an emergency use designation. Every day in the US and many other countries, there is an endless flow of accounts of vaccine-related deaths and serious negative health impacts. Two websites are good sources of information on vaccine-related impacts: Health Impact News and The COVID Blog that are largely ignored by big media.

Dr. Peter McCullough has recently said that “if this were any other vaccine it would have been pulled from the market by now for safety reasons.” “Based on the safety data now, I can no longer recommend it.  There are over 4,000 dead Americans, there are over 10,000 in Europe that die on days one, two and three after the vaccine,” said McCullough.

This is the reality for the COVID vaccines: As of May 7, there have been 192,954 adverse-event reports associated with COVID vaccines reported to the CDC’s Vaccine Adverse Event Reporting System [VAERS], including 4,057 deaths.  Previous studies, including one from Harvard University, estimate that only 1 to 10 percent of all vaccine-related ill effects get reported to VAERS. In other words, there are probably more people dying from the COVID vaccines than has been reported. Importantly, as to informed consent, people receiving the vaccine are not told about the CDC data, nor are they knowledgeable about serious health impacts globally.

For comparison: There are 20 to 30 deaths reported every year to VAERS related to the flu shot.  That’s with 195 million receiving flu shots, far more than COVID fully vaccinated people to this point.

Dr. Marty Makary, a truth-telling Johns Hopkins physician, has made the point that “natural immunity works” and it is wrong to vilify those who don’t want the vaccine because they have already recovered from the virus. “There is more data on natural immunity than there is on vaccinated immunity, because natural immunity has been around longer,” he emphasized. “We’ve got to start respecting people who choose not to get the vaccine instead of demonizing them,” Makary said. A professor at the renowned Johns Hopkins School of Medicine recently has said that about 150 million Americans have natural immunity.

In the Fauci wait for the vaccine strategy, access to generics like hydroxychloroquine and ivermectin had to be choked. The federal stockpile of hydroxychloroquine was not used. The pandemic had to boil and create consumer demand for vaccines, even as enormous numbers of people worldwide died unnecessarily. Fauci and other federal doctors failed their oath to first do no harm, meaning their responsibility to act quickly to treat their patients and avoid hospitalization and possible death.

What was the real driving force for the wait for the vaccine strategy?

The most logical explanation is to follow the money.

Lives lost were necessary to ensure that trillions of dollars would eventually be made by big drug companies – a classic case of profits over people. The pandemic was seen as a marketing bonanza for big drug companies, a global financial opportunity of epic historic proportions. Here is what the public needs to understand: Public health was sacrificed at the altar of corporate greed.

The most charitable interpretation of the strategy is that vaccine proponents envisioned a life-saving pandemic solution eventually.

The key question is whether the majority of Americans would have ever supported the Fauci strategy if they knew about the true costs of trading treatments for vaccines.

Dr. Joel S. Hirschhorn worked on health issues for decades. As a full professor at the University of Wisconsin, Madison, he directed a medical research program between the colleges of engineering and medicine. As a senior official at the Congressional Office of Technology Assessment and the National Governors Association, he directed major studies on health-related subjects; he testified at over 50 US Senate and House hearings and authored hundreds of articles and op-ed articles in major newspapers. He has served as an executive volunteer at a major hospital for more than 10 years. He is a member of the Association of American Physicians and Surgeons, and America’s Frontline Doctors.  His newest book is Pandemic Blunder.

COVID-19, Culture & Society, Current Events, Featured, Op-eds, Politics, Uncategorized, What's New

The New Wasteland: COVID-19’s Shameful Legacy

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Discarded surgical masks strewn along the sidewalk aptly represent COVID-19’s lasting legacy. The federal medical bureaucracy’s response to the pandemic has resulted in a wasteland of lost economic and educational opportunities, psychologically damaged children, terminally lonely nursing home residents, and lives lost to suicide, illicit drug overdoses, and missed diagnoses. 

Thanks to the lockdowns, 140,104 businesses were temporarily closed and 97,966 were permanently closed by September 2020 according to a Yelp survey. Significantly, more than half of these were local small businesses—and small businesses employ nearly half of all American workers. Predictably, the workers who were most affected were not the professionals pulling in a paycheck while working from home. They were the working-class folks whose jobs the bureaucrats considered non-essential.

The disruption of children’s education and socialization will haunt us for years to come in terms of earning potential and mental health. The central planners punished children for months although the mortality in children from COVID-19 is roughly equivalent to that of influenza year to year. Moreover, CDC data shows that attending school or child care was not associated with having positive SARS-CoV-2 test results. 

So why were children barred from attending school? To protect Grandma. Even if children were found to be transmitters of disease—they haven’t been, a sensible alternative to depriving all students of a proper education and social life would have been to ask children whether elders lived in their homes. If so, that group could have been provided with educational accommodations. But the way of bureaucracy is all or none with no room for individual considerations.

Typical of blanket decrees, the most vulnerable fared the worst. Thirty percent of parents from low-income homes reported that their children never logged on to the computer for virtual schooling. And almost half of special needs children received no support. Worse yet, insurance claims for pediatric mental health visits as well as teen overdoses doubled in March and April 2020 compared to the same period in 2019.  

Adults fell prey to the dangers of lockdowns. There was an increase in alcohol sales, use of prescription anti-anxiety medications, and domestic violence, Additionally, the National Highway Traffic Safety Administrationreported a 24 percent increase in traffic deaths in 2020. Almost two-thirds of the seriously or fatally injured tested positive for alcohol, marijuana, or opioids. According to the CDC, the 12 months ending May 2020 had the highest number of U.S. overdose deaths ever recorded in a 12-month period (more than 81,000). This increase was mainly due to illicitly obtained fentanyl. 

Anyone who isn’t hidden away in an ivory tower could predict that isolated people deprived indefinitely of their livelihoods, recreational outlets, and family relationships would sink into depression. The CDC reportedin late June, that 40 percent of U.S. adults surveyed were struggling with mental health or substance abuse. And 11% say they seriously considered suicide. These unintended consequences were foreseeable yet Americans were subjected to social isolation in the face of no evidence that lockdowns were a useful COVID mitigation strategy. Ironically, according to CDC data, “masking”, a symbol of our isolation, has made no difference in COVID infections.

With the media’s help, the public health gurus waged a campaign of fear to keep us in line while we waited for Dr. Fauci’s solution: vaccines. One of the medical bureaucracy’s biggest (intentional) missteps was the failure to support early treatment of COVID. They told us to stay home until we couldn’t breathe. Of course, at that point the virus has overwhelmed the body. The scientific elite maligned study after study and thousands of clinical successes with early treatment with hydroxychloroquine and ivermectin in favor of unproven high priced drugs. Despite the CDC and FDA previously acknowledging the 60-year safety record of hydroxychloroquine, it miraculously became harmful in 2020. 

It is as if the medical bureaucrats are making up the ever-changing rules as they go along. They claimed they were “following the science.” Why haven’t we heard from these politically driven experts as hundreds of illegal migrants are released into the United States without COVID tests while U.S. citizens are being fined for not wearing useless masks?

Shameless non-clinician bureaucrats have stolen our lives, stolen the smiles from children’s faces, and bullied a segment of the population into paralyzing fear. Those hiding behind masks (including our precious children) no longer see people as people, but as 170-pound nests of germs and certain death.

Dr. Fauci remains the highest paid federal government employee, and Dr. Birx has moved on to her private air purifier consulting job. Meanwhile, we are left in the wasteland with their legacy: boarded up shops; needless lost lives; and the death of common sense, scientific discourse, and medical freedom that we may never regain. And why?