In April, Dr. Vladimir (Zev) Zelenko, M.D., an upstate New York physician and early HCQ adopter, reproduced Dr. Didier Raoult’s “startling successes” by dramatically reducing expected mortalities among 800 patients Zelenko treated with the HCQ cocktail.29
By late April of 2020, US doctors were widely prescribing HCQ to patients and family members, reporting outstanding results, and taking it themselves prophylactically.
In May 2020, Dr. Harvey Risch, M.D., Ph.D. published the most comprehensive study, to date, on HCQ’s efficacy against COVID. Risch is Yale University’s super-eminent Professor of Epidemiology, an illustrious world authority on the analysis of aggregate clinical data. Dr. Risch concluded that evidence is unequivocal for early and safe use of the HCQ cocktail. Dr. Risch published his work—a meta-analysis reviewing five outpatient studies—in affiliation with the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health in the American Journal of Epidemiology, under the urgent title, “Early Outpatient Treatment of Symptomatic, High-Risk COVID-19 Patients that Should be Ramped-Up Immediately as Key to Pandemic Crisis.”30
He further demonstrated, with specificity, how HCQ’s critics—largely funded by Bill Gates and Dr. Tony Fauci31—had misinterpreted, misstated, and misreported negative results by employing faulty protocols, most of which showed HCQ efficacy administered without zinc and Zithromax which were known to be helpful. But their main trick for ensuring the protocols failed was to wait until late in the disease process before administering HCQ—when it is known to be ineffective. Dr. Risch noted that evidence against HCQ used late in the course of the disease is irrelevant. While acknowledging that Dr. Didier Raoult’s powerful French studies favoring HCQ efficacy were not randomized, Risch argued that the results were, nevertheless, so stunning as to far outweigh that deficit: “The first study of HCQ + AZ [ . . . ] showed a 50-fold benefit of HCQ + AZ vs. standard of care . . . This is such an enormous difference that it cannot be ignored despite lack of randomization.”32 Risch has pointed out that the supposed need for randomized placebo-controlled trials is a shibboleth. In 2014 the Cochrane Collaboration proved in a landmark meta-analysis of 10,000 studies, that observational studies of the kind produced by Didier Raoult are equal in predictive ability to randomized placebo-controlled trials.33 Furthermore, Risch observed that it is highly unethical to deny patients promising medications during a pandemic—particularly those which, like HCQ, have long-standing safety records.
So, against all that I’ve shared here, Dr. Fauci offered up one answer: hydroxychloroquine should not be used because we don’t understand the mechanism it uses to defeat COVID—another shibboleth transparently invoked to defeat common sense. Regulators do not understand the mechanism of action of many drugs, but they nonetheless license those that are effective and safe. The fact is that we know more about how HCQ beats COVID than we know about the actions of many other medicines, including—notably—Dr. Fauci’s darlings, mRNA vaccines and remdesivir.
Furthermore, an August 2020 paper from Baylor University by Dr. Peter McCullough et al. described mechanisms by which the components of the “HCQ cocktail” exert antiviral effects.34 McCullough shows that the efficacy of the HCQ cocktail is based on the pharmacology of the hydroxychloroquine ionophore acting as the “gun” and zinc as the “bullet,” while azithromycin potentiates the antiviral effect.
An even more expansive September 30, 2020 meta-review summarizes more recent research, concluding that ALL the studies on early administration of HCQ within a week following infection demonstrate efficacy, while studies of HCQ administered later in the illness show mixed results.35
In March, 2020 Nature published a paper demonstrating the specific mechanisms in tissue culture by which chloroquine stops viral reproduction.36
In April, 2020, a team of Chinese scientists published a preprint of a 62-patient placebo-controlled trial of hydroxychloroquine, resulting in demonstrably improved time to recovery and less progression to severe disease in the treated group.37
In May, 2020, a Chinese expert consensus group recommended doctors use chloroquine routinely for mild, moderate, and severe cases of COVID-19 pneumonia.38
A national study in Finland in May 2021 showed a 5x efficacy.39 And national studies in Canada and Saudi Arabia showed 3x efficacy.40
I’ll stop gilding the lily here and ask the reader: Was hydroxychloroquine some crazy baseless idea, or ought regulators to have honestly investigated it as a potential remedy during a raging pandemic?
Pharma’s War on HCQ
The prospect of an existing therapeutic drug (with an expired patent) that could outperform any vaccine in the war against COVID posed a momentous threat to the pharmaceutical cartel. Among the features pharma companies most detest is low cost, and HCQ is about $10 per course.41 Compare that to more than $3000 per course for Dr. Fauci’s beloved remdesivir.42
No surprise, pharmaceutical interests launched their multinational preemptive crusade to restrict and discredit HCQ starting way back in January 2020, months before the WHO declared a pandemic and even longer before President Trump’s controversial March 19 endorsement. On January 13, when rumors of Wuhan flu COVID-19 began to circulate, the French government took the bizarre, inexplicable, unprecedented, and highly suspicious step of reassigning HCQ from an over-the-counter to a prescription medicine.43 Without citing any studies, French health officials quietly changed the status of HCQ to “List II poisonous substance” and banned its over-the-counter sales.44 This absolutely remarkable coincidence repeated itself a few weeks later when Canadian health officials did the exact same thing, quietly removing the drug from pharmacy shelves.45