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

Using COVID Fear to Divide and Rule

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In the 1960s anti-war activists adopted songs like the Eve of Destruction and For What It’s Worth as their anthems. Disenchanted youth feared that the world was on the verge of collapse; we were nearing the end of days. Concurrently, the civil rights activists were singing the hopeful “We Shall Overcome.” (Black folks singing an upbeat and emboldening song written by a white guy would be frowned upon today.) Both groups were buoyed by the blessing of free speech. Their voices were heard. Attempts at silencing them only made their voices louder and more widespread. Even people on the sidelines began to pay attention. 

The war ended, civil rights moved forward, and life went on. People wanted not to sing the same note, but harmony. Even Rodney King, whose 1991 beating was a lightning rod for riots against police brutality pleaded, “can we all get along?” Yes, we can. People have no appetite for or energy to waste on hating for sport. We have the freedom and sensibility to disagree and work toward peaceful coexistence—when we are free from government propaganda and media manipulation.

However, the political class thrives on discord. Since circa 360 B.C., the “divide and rule” concept was on the books. Philip II of Macedon, Alexander the Great’s father knew that with division comes weakness. The Greek rulers were able to keep the various cultural and ethnic groups in check by keeping them in a constant state of conflict. The factions are so busy bickering and jockeying for favored status that they fail to see their government’s main objective is to stay in power, not to empower the populace. 

Enter pandemic, stage left. Politicians have used COVID not as an enemy, but an ally. After driving us to be preoccupied with our fear of COVID, the government is working its magic. Mask up and lock down! Why? Where’s the data? Don’t ask. Just comply. Now instead of the ancient emperors installing local overlords, the powerful have frightened people into spying on neighbors to root out maskless faces and those who dare cultivate their friendships.

Mixed messages keep us off guard. Amidst calls for national unity, a Public Broadcasting (paid with our tax dollars) Service attorney suggests locking up Trump voters and putting their children in re-education camps. And America’s sweetheart and former national news anchor, Katie Couric, recommended deprogramming Trump supporters.

Teachers’ unions keep their members out of classrooms while children are not getting sick from COVID, but are becoming emotionally unglued. According to the CDC, beginning in April 2020, children’s mental health visits to the emergency room increased by 24 percent in ages 5 to 11 and 31 percent in ages 12 to 17.

The same people calling for removing Washington and Lincoln’s names from schools because they were not “woke” enough are witnesses to the black and brown students falling behind their white counterparts due to long-distance learning. 

The triple-masked Dr. Anthony “there’s no reason to be walking around with a mask,” Fauci continues to recommend that we do nothing for early symptoms of COVID-19, even though by now we understand the process of how COVID-19 makes people sick. For months, physicians have been speaking out about their success with early treatment of COVID with inexpensive, readily accessible existing medications based on science. Their recommendations have been largely ignored in favor of big pharma’s expensive drugs and vaccines. Waiting months for completion of mass vaccination does not help those who are currently ill. Worse yet, some have accused these doctors of experimenting on patients. However, our Hippocratic Oath compels us to treat patients with available, safe medicines rather than sit idly by and watch them die. (I would argue it is safer to repurpose drugs that have been around for 50 years than use a vaccine that has only been tested for several months.) 

Vigorous open debate—not re-education camps—is the answer to dealing with difficult issues. A difference of opinion does not merit name-calling or having scientific senate testimony removed from public view by YouTube as “misinformation.” 

Fomenting societal conflict as a means of control used to be done in secret. With complicit media, in plain sight the power brokers have used COVID their advantage. Physicians are added to the list of divided tribes: Fauci’s good soldiers versus the medical-political exiles (AKA resourceful thinkers without conflicts of interest or financial ties to big pharma).

Like the 60s song says, “It starts when you’re always afraid. Step out of line, the man come and take you away.” 

COVID-19, Current Events, Guest Column, Uncategorized, What's New

Covid-19: Disease Hitting a Brick Wall in Mexico City

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Jane M. Orient, MD January 27, 2021

COVID-19: Disease Hitting a Brick Wall in Mexico City

What will you do if you get COVID while waiting in line for the vaccine, or even after?

If you are in Mexico City, you will be treated with ivermectin. As of Dec 29, this long-established drug has been used in COVID-positive patients, and soon thereafter death rates started to plummet, as the graphic shows. By Jan 22, about 50,000 doses had been delivered.

Mexico City is following the example of the state of Chiapas, which saw cases drop by two-thirds after it started using ivermectin on Aug 1, as Dr. Pierre Kory told the U.S. Senate Committee on Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs on Dec 8. 

It is too soon to see whether vaccinations decrease the rate of COVID hospitalizations or deaths. In the U.S., these are still rising, and the official policy on early treatment is still therapeutic nihilism. The National Institutes of Health (NIH) did update its long-standing recommendation against ivermectin to “neutral.” It considers the evidence from 39 trials, all favorable, to be insufficient.

We are already seeing adverse side effects from the vaccine. Some 151 deaths shortly following (but not necessarily caused by) the vaccine have been reported to the Vaccine Adverse Events Reporting System (VAERS). A nurse who cares for nursing home residents describes deterioration in his patients’ mobility and cognition after their second dose.

Between Dec 14 and Dec 18, about 272,001 doses of the Pfizer/BioNTech vaccine were administered and 3,150 “Health Impact Events” were recorded (1.1%). The CDC’s definition of Health Impact Events is “unable to perform normal daily activities, unable to work, required care from doctor or health care professional.” It is not known how serious or long-lasting the events were. When people receive the vaccine, they will receive information on signing up for the V-safe program.

It is not known whether the vaccine would prevent or ameliorate the disease if taken after exposure. It is also not known whether vaccinated persons can transmit disease, according to the Robert Koch Institute. Vaccinated persons can be treated if they get COVID.

Head-to-head comparisons between long-term results of early treatment versus vaccination are not being done. 

For some vulnerable populations, such as prison inmates, it is too late for vaccination. In one Arizona prison, more than half the inmates tested positive for COVID-19 in early December. AAPS has a asked Arizona governor Doug Ducey to facilitate making ivermectin available in prisons and other high-risk settings. 

        For further information, see:

·         A Home-Based Guide to COVID Treatment

·         c19protocols.com.

If you would like to discuss these issues, contact me at janeorientmd@gmail.com or (520) 323-3110.

Jane M. Orient, M.D., Executive Director

 Association of American Physicians and Surgeons

COVID-19, Current Events, Featured, Health Policy, Medical Ethics, Op-eds, What's New

COVID-19: Black Americans Need Action, Not Navel-gazing

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On Martin Luther King, Jr.’s holiday, I’m reminded that Rev. King was not only a thinker but a man of action. 

While today’s social justice omphaloskeptics are pondering white privilege, Marxist critical race theory, and “the intersectionality of health equity,” COVID-19 is busy killing black and brown Americans.

Black Americans continue to get infected and die from COVID-19 at rates more than 1.5 times their share of the population. Hispanic and Native Americans face similar disparities. Black Americans are twice as likely to be hospitalized as whites. Moreover, when admitted to the hospital, people from racial and ethnic minority groups were in worse shape than their white counterparts. Consequently, they were more likely to die. 

No need to worry, President-elect Biden has promised a racial disparities task force in response to COVID. Gee, 35 years ago, the Health and Human Services’ seminal Heckler Report on health disparities found that minorities had a lower life expectancy and a higher death rate from heart disease and diabetes, among other things. Just what we need: another task force to ruminate about disparities.

It is well known that black Americans have persistently higher rates of hypertension compared to whites. Indeed, 75 percent of black people in the United States develop high blood pressure by the age 55 compared to 55 percent of white men and 40 percent of white women. To make matters worse, fewer black than white Americans have their blood pressure controlled. Additionally, black American adults are 60 percent more likely than non-Hispanic white adults to have diabetes as well as more complications, such as amputations and kidney failure. 

Early in the COVID journey, clinicians found that hypertension and obesity were key predictors of COVID mortality. Not surprisingly, black patients hospitalized with COVID-19 were more likely to have high blood pressure and diabetes compared with all other racial and ethnic groups combined. And the obesehospitalized patients were more likely to die. Further, people with darker skin—63 percent of Hispanic people and 82 percent of black people have low vitamin D levels. And vitamin D may lessen the severity of COVID disease.

In one study, compared with other racial groups, black people were less likely to have been tested for COVID prior to being seen at the hospital. The researchers noted that the key advantage to earlier diagnosis is the decrease in community spread. The study fails to acknowledge that early diagnosis would lead to early treatment. Why? The party line is that there is no early treatment. Not true. Early treatment works.

Given the severity of the COVID illness in black Americans, one gets the feeling that withholding treatment is a familiar tune. In the disgraceful 40-year Tuskegee experiment, treatment was withheld from black men so scientists could learn the natural history of the disease. The control group continued to receive placebos, despite the fact that penicillin became the recommended treatment for syphilis several years into the experiment. Praise the Lord for randomized controlled studies.

Do Dr. Fauci and his pharma cronies care about black folks? (He didn’t seem to care about the AIDS patients). He exhorts about the need for controlled studies and dismisses vast clinical experience. But as Tom Frieden, former director of the CDC noted, “waiting for more data is often an implicit decision not to act, or to act on the basis of past practice rather than on the best available evidence.” 

Nations with plenty of black and brown folks, such as Cuba, India, Algeria, and Costa Rica are achieving lower overall death rates with early treatment with hydroxychloroquine, an antimalarial drug with an over 50-year safety record. Other countries are using ivermectin, a safe antiparasitic used to treat scabies. Perhaps because these drugs are inexpensive as compared to the new expensive potential wonder drugs and the cost of ICU care, poorer countries were eager to try something that worked, rather than wait for a piece of pie in the sky. 

Repurposing of FDA-approved drugs that have been used safely on millions of patients is not new. Amazingly, a combination of an antibiotic (doxycycline), a diabetes drug (metformin), a treatment for intestinal worms (mebendazole), and the cholesterol-lowering statin, Lipitor was found to extend the survival of people with glioblastoma, a type of brain cancer! The authors of the innovative study noted that “it is well recognized that high-cost randomized controlled trials may not be an economically viable option for studying patent-expired off-label drugs. In some cases, randomized trials could also be considered as ethically controversial.” Money talks, helping patients walks.

While hand-wringing over the tragic COVID patient deaths, the “chosen ones” silence discussion about preventive and early treatment. Senate hearings on the subject were ignored, even mocked. There’s no need for early treatment with safe medications because the (experimental) vaccine has arrived.Meanwhile people continue to needlessly die.

Let’s not repeat Tuskegee. When there is a low risk and reasonable likelihood of helping, let the patient and doctor choose between doing nothing or actively treating. Positive clinical results and the morality of life and death matter more than crowing about scientific purity.

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

Censorship Kills

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Election irregularities, Chinese spies seducing a congressman, and the shocking revelation that “Dr.” Jill Biden was not a real doctor briefly let us turn our attention away from COVID-19. Unfortunately, COVID is still here and has made it to Antarctica. COVID continues to directly or indirectly hasten deaths. Along with the arrival of two much anticipated vaccines is a new active variant. The effects of both remain to be seen.

For months we’ve heard that COVID is not like the flu. It is a different animal. It may leave the infected person with long term aftereffects. Given the potential problems, the FDA, CDC, NIH, HHS and the alphabet health agencies should be advocating for early pharmacological treatment and prevention. Instead, we are told to wash our hands, wear masks—which may or may not help—and to stay away from one another. Indeed, as California’s Health and Human Services Secretary admitted, the state’s order banning outdoor dining and closing playgrounds was “not a comment on the relative safety” of the activity but a tactic for keeping people at home. 

Stay home — although 66 percent of new coronavirus hospitalizations in New York were in people who had not routinely left their homes. Stay inside — although there are studies echoing observations during the 1918 flu pandemic finding that people who went outside had better outcomes. A recent Spanish studyshowed that 80 percent of patients with COVID had low levels of vitamin D. Another study found that people with adequate vitamin D levels had a 51 percent lower risk of dying from COVID. People at risk for vitamin D deficiency include those who have dark skin, are elderly or overweight, or stay indoors. Interestingly, these groups are particularly hit hard by COVID.

Simply put, an ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure. Any risk of taking proper doses of vitamins and minerals is dwarfed by the risks associated with COVID. Useful vitamins and minerals include zinc (inhibits viral replication), vitamin D3 and vitamin C, and quercetin (to help drive zinc into the cells). Additionally, melatonin, a hormone found naturally in the body that regulates our sleep cycle, also has significant anti-inflammatory, antioxidant, and mitochondrial protective effects.

What are we to do if we get ill from COVID? While the numinous Dr. Fauci says we urgently need early treatments, existing effective treatments are largely ignored, discouraged, or even prohibited. The party line recommends doing nothing for symptoms of fever, coughing, or breathing problems other than rest, stay home, drink fluids, and monitor. The threshold for calling the doctor is appalling: coughing up blood, trouble breathing, chest pain, confusion, severe drowsiness, or “a blue tint to your lips or face.” Wait until you turn blue?! 

I have a better idea. Don’t just curl up in bed. Call the doctor right away and request pharmacological treatment, backed by evidence. Sadly, most potential patients are unaware of early treatment because Facebook, Twitter, and Google, the de facto arm of government communication, block the information or permanently delete the accounts of physicians who advocate for safe, effective treatments. 

They argue that the use of well-known medications is “off-label,” that is, prescribing a drug for a different condition or dose than the FDA had approved. According to the Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality, 20 percent of all prescriptions in the United States are for off-label use. This is often done when the “doctor has seen evidence that a certain drug works well for an off-label use.” For example, using a diuretic to treat acne or a chemotherapy agent as a preferred alternative to surgery for an ectopic pregnancy. Billions of doses of [censored] and [censored] have been safely used for over 50 years. Repurposing anti-parasitics as antivirals certainly is not out of the realm of medical innovation.

Sitting at my Apple computer that could have been built by Uighurs in Communist re-education camps, I received another email from someone lamenting that he was blocked from social media. No, it wasn’t for child porn (like the former political consultant right-hand man of congressperson Barbara Lee), but for advocating early treatment of COVID-19. These “cancelled” physicians are not receiving $37 million innovation grants, but are saving patients’ lives for a few dollars a treatment. 

The COVID horse is out of the barn. We need to tame it. Let’s start by educating patients, influencers, and policymakers about early treatment with [censored] and preventive measures such as [censored] and the proven uselessness, arbitrariness, and social and economic costs of [censored] that serve to make “poor people poorer” and erode trust in public health officials.

We silently watched as a shameless Nancy Pelosi played games with COVID financial relief legislation hoping to influence an election. Physicians and patients must not stand on the sidelines while political vultures feast on the carcasses of terminally lonely and depressed, drug overdosed, or financially ruined Americans.

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

Expert Is a Four-letter Word

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The Earth is flat and the sun revolves around the Earth. Settled science. 

Liberal icon Supreme Court Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes legitimized the science of eugenics when he ruled that the interest of “public welfare” outweighed the interest of individuals in their bodily integrity. Science intersects with public policy.

Scientific journals have published at least 75,000 peer-reviewed papers since the SARS-CoV-2 pandemic started. Some studies had significant design flaws, and many results are contradictory. Nonetheless, experts have stolen our lives, stolen the smiles from children’s faces, and bullied a segment of the population into paralyzing fear. Why? Because someone, somewhere was “following the science.” Which science? Only the science that comports with a particular political agenda? 

The misinformation began with the dire prediction of one of the world’s foremost disease modelers, epidemiologist Dr. Neil M. Ferguson of the Imperial College of London Covid-19 Response Team. He warned that unless the government did something, the pandemic could kill 2.2 million people in the United States. 

Accordingly, channeling Communist China, in March the experts recommended lockdowns to “flatten the curve” of infections. However, a July multi-country analysis revealed that the data “did not support a definitive judgment on the effectiveness” of lockdowns, among other public health interventions. A recent 14-day study involving carefully monitored masked and quarantined U.S. Marine recruits found that the virus can circulate even with the strictest non-pharmaceutical measures. SARS-CoV-2 tests became positive in 2 percent of the recruits. 

Mandatory mask wearing is another contentious non-pharmaceutical mitigating measure. Our most vocal expert, Dr. Anthony Fauci, told us we didn’t need masks in March 2020. Similarly, in April 2020, WHO reported that “the wide use of masks by healthy people in the community setting is not supported by current evidence.” But in June, based on “observational evidence,” The World Health Organization (WHO) recommended wearing masks to prevent the infected wearer from transmitting the virus to others and/or to protect the wearer against infection. 

A long awaited “gold standard” randomized controlled trial with 6,000 participants found that wearing a mask offered no statistically significant benefit: after one month, about 2 percent of the mask wearers and the non-mask wearers tested positive. 

Evidence aside, masks are likely here to stay. Everyone is begging for a “COVID for Dummies” solution. Masks fit the bill: they are highly visible and they tell the world you are a diligent, caring human being.

Realistically, there is no magic prevention bullet. Until we attain community immunity, treatment is the key to keeping COVID at bay. Unfortunately, the focus in the U.S. has been on the treatment of hospitalized patients. After limited research, in April 2020 Dr. Fauci declared that the newly minted drug, remdesivir at $3,000 per treatment was the “standard of care.” A few short months later, WHO issued a conditional recommendation against the use of remdesivir in hospitalized patients, regardless of disease severity, “as there is currently no evidence” that remdesivir improved survival. 

In many cases treatment in the hospital is too little, too late. Early outpatient treatment has been largely ignored by the U.S. media and medical establishment despite good results across the world. For example, in 4 months, Honduras went from a fatality rate of 14.5 percent to 2.66 percent because of its early treatment regimen, “Catracho”: colchicine, anti-inflammatories, tocilizumab, ivermectin, blood thinners, and hydroxychloroquine.

Sadly, an expert politician, Senator Gary Peters, squandered his opportunity to learn from clinicians and professors about several effective outpatient early treatments with inexpensive generic medications at the November 19, 2020, Hearing on Early Outpatient Treatment: An Essential Part of a COVID-19 Solution. Peters spent his time parroting political talking points about “misinformation” and “disinformation” from treating physicians and shifted the conversation to vaccines as “The Answer.” Ironically, his expert had never treated a single COVID patient. The $1,636,714 in donations Peters received from the health care and pharmaceutical industry adds a layer of “show me the money” to what should have been an informed debate. 

Our politicians and experts have flaunted the science upon which they rely to impose authoritarian measures on the little people. True believers would not put multiple families at risk by breaking quarantine to visit their married mistress, going to hairdressers maskless, walking through an airport maskless, having $350 per plate maskless indoor dinners with lobbyists, or attending a baseball game maskless with folks from different households. Worse yet, pre-election basement Joe Biden displayed photos socializing with his extended family while many had their Thanksgiving dinner for one. 

Early treatment provides an alternative to lockdowns and unproven vaccines. Experts’ behavior demonstrates their disdain for the lumpen proletariat. They are not interested in our health but in our acquiescence to deprivation and loss of control over our own lives. Dr. Fauci finally blurted out the core of the matter: “it’s time to do what you’re told.” 

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