THE COURAGE TO FACE COVID-19

Until the advent of COVID-19, Peter McCullough was a respected physician with prestigious positions as a professor of medicine, editor-in-chief or senior associate editor of three major academic journals, and author of over 600 peer-reviewed papers, principally on cardiovascular medicine. Not any more. And his crime? He was a leading voice in using and promoting early treatment protocols for COVID-19, which he also successfully applied to himself and his wife. He was also the lead author of a paper published in the American Journal of Medicine in August 2020 based on his successful protocol that had prevented 85% of hospitalisations and deaths. Similar results were reported by other frontline physicians who were actually treating patients. This group represented practical experimentation and clinical judgement up against academic medical authority that denigrated first hydroxychloroquine, then ivermectin. The logic behind what turned into an orchestrated campaign was that emergency use authorisation for experimental vaccines could not be granted if safe and effective treatments already existed, using such repurposed drugs. Hence the imperative of ostensibly showing that these drugs were neither effective nor safe – which in fact they are, taken at the right time and in the right dose, as many clinical studies have shown.

The first prominent casualty of the campaign against early treatment was Prof Didier Raoult, a world-famous microbiologist and author of over 2,300 papers. Instead of following up his initial promising studies, the pharma-dominated French medical establishment dismissed his work and eventually managed to oust him from his hospital position. Ironically, he had been following up initial work by the Chinese, and summed up his approach by saying ‘we test, it works, we prescribe.’ The key point made by all frontline physicians is that early treatment saves lives at a time when official advice was to go home and hope that the condition did not become more serious. However, all the planning scenarios for epidemic preparedness (including Event 201 from October 2019) were focused entirely on the rapid development of vaccines and the use of expensive anti-viral drugs. The narrative of the book highlights the politicisation of hydroxychloroquine through the support of Trump, such that frontline physicians and organisations like the American Association of Physicians and Surgeons are marginalised as right-wing when they are in fact clinically based; the AAPS protocol can be downloaded from their website. Party divisions remain strong drivers of opinions about COVID-19 in the US in this highly charged information war. The book explains how Dr Rick Bright, the director of BARDA (Biomedical Advanced Research and Development Authority) thwarted the executive order by President Trump by limiting the availability of hydroxychloroquine to hospitalised patients, for whom it was already too late. Such actions in suppressing early treatment arguably led to thousands of unnecessary deaths, which would normally be considered a form of criminal negligence.

As well as giving testimonies at state and federal level, Dr McCullough took part in hearings convened by Senator Ron Johnson, again in a highly politicised context. His opponent at the hearing Senator Peters supported the FDA and CDC recommendations to ‘follow the science’ rather than irresponsibly give Americans ‘a false sense of security by promoting untested on unproven outpatient remedies.’ He adopted the same position at a follow-up hearing, accusing the expert witnesses of promoting discredited treatments when they were in fact exercising their professional judgement and competence rather than giving up on early treatment. McCullough’s prominence began to get him into serious trouble, including with his own hospital authorities. His daughter suggested after the publication of the August 2020 paper that he make a video explaining the protocol in simple terms. After more than 1 million views, it was taken down within a few days as misinformation ‘violating community guidelines.’ The hospital insisted on complete adherence to CDC and FDA recommendations, with professional censure to back it up. Other hospitals used legal actions to prevent patients from being prescribed ivermectin at the request of their families. In January 2021, McCullough was terminated by his hospital, as also happened to Dr Paul Marik, Dr Pierre Kory and others. Worse still, the hospital filed a lawsuit, while ad hominem attacks appeared on the Internet calling him ‘a quack, discredited, debunked, liar, and a grifter.’ This was accompanied by professional ostracism even by old friends, and at the end of 2021 Medscape nominated him as one of the worst physicians of the year who had disgraced the profession. All this is a perfect example of scapegoating and demonisation.

More recently, McCullough has turned his attention to reports of adverse effects from the vaccines, based on the official data, but such scientific work is crudely labelled as anti-vaxx conspiracy theory in spite of results being published in peer reviewed journals – here is a recent paper on innate immune suppression by mRNA vaccines authored with Dr Stephanie Seneff, who recently spoke about the toxic effects of glyphosate: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC9012513/. The larger picture here, as I have maintained in other reviews, is the dominance of a pharmaceutical approach to health at the expense of more natural ways of supporting the immune system – this in turn is related to our industrial agricultural and food systems run by branches of the same corporations and supported by the likes of the Gates and Rockefeller Foundations with their almost exclusive focus on the development of vaccines rather than on other aspects of public health. McCullough and others have my view demonstrated one of the finest of human qualities and one that is in short supply, namely moral courage - and at huge personal cost. One can only hope that his stance is eventually vindicated and that we can formulate a more balanced, less divisive and less financially driven approach to public health.