07/16/2020 / By Isabelle Z.
If you only listened to the mainstream media, you might believe that hydroxychloroquine as a COVID-19 treatment was a joke. “That’s the one that President Trump supported,” you’d think, “but they found out it’s too dangerous.” After a slew of negative news stories based on questionable studies, many stopped considering it a viable treatment.
However, in the time since the media successfully got people to discount hydroxychloroquine, several studies have emerged showing that it is, in fact, a solid treatment. In fact, the first six days of July saw the release of six positive clinical studies of hydroxychloroquine. Three of these came from the US, with the remainder coming from India, Brazil and Portugal.
All of the studies showed that, when given early in the course of the disease, hydroxychloroquine, whether administered alone or with azithromycin and zinc, can reduce hospitalizations and deaths without causing serious heart problems or other side effects.
For example, a study from the Henry Ford Health System in Michigan reported a 50% reduction in death rate when the drug was used early in patients who had been hospitalized with COVID-19. In response, Henry Ford physicians, ethicists and researchers filed an urgent application with the FDA to grant it a new Emergency Use Authorization for using hydroxychloroquine on patients early in the disease.
Researchers from Dallas’s Baylor Scott & White Heart and Vascular Institute issued a letter of their own supporting the Henry Ford EUA application based on the encouraging outcomes of their own clinical study using hydroxychloroquine as a prophylactic in their medical workers. That study showed no adverse cardiac outcomes from using a weekly regimen of the drug as a prophylaxis, something that flies in the face of the media’s assertion that the drug poses heart dangers.
The concept of prophylactic benefits from the drug can be useful not just for medical workers but also for those in many other roles keeping the country going, including law enforcement officers, food processing workers, behavioral health professionals, dentists, grocery store workers, distribution center workers, factory workers and truck drivers.
Meanwhile, a primary care outpatient study carried out by Dr. Vladimir Zelenko that treated early outpatients with hydroxychloroquine, zinc, and azithromycin found an impressive 80 percent decrease in deaths.
Of course, these studies are not being reported in the mainstream media, which seems far more interested in promoting the profitable but far less effective Remdesivir on behalf of their Big Pharma sponsors.
Hydroxychloroquine was approved more than 65 years ago to treat malaria and is widely used for conditions like rheumatoid arthritis and lupus. Hundreds of millions of patients around the world have used it safely for many years, and dozens of countries are currently using it to treat COVID-19 patients.
If it is given within the first five days of symptoms, studies have shown that it can block the virus’s entry into cells and stop viral replication. Again, the key is to administer it early, which is why those studies that involved giving it to patients when they had already become critically ill did not get such great results.
Many doctors have expressed concerns about political interference with the ability of doctors to prescribe this FDA-approved medication to patients in a way that they deem medically appropriate. Some doctors are facing potential investigations by the medical boards of their states for prescribing the drug to patients, and some state pharmacy boards have been telling pharmacists not to dispense the drug for this purpose.
At a time when we are seeing more than 3.3 million total cases of coronavirus in the U.S. and deaths exceeding 135,000, it’s clear that there is the potential to save a lot of lives by giving people access to a treatment that has already been proven to be effective and safe. The body of evidence demonstrating this continues to grow, and it’s completely irresponsible for the media and regulators to ignore this potential game-changer.
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Tagged Under: Big Pharma, breakthrough, CDC, coronavirus, covid-19, cures, FDA, hcq, hydroxychloroquine, infections, outbreak, pandemic, President Trump, saving lives, studies, treatments
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