In July, Gates endorsed censorship of HCQ recommendations after a video touting its efficacy against coronavirus accumulated tens of millions of views.80 Gates called the video “outrageous,” and praised Facebook and YouTube for hastily removing it. He nevertheless complained “You can’t find it directly on those services, but everybody’s sending the link around because it’s still out there on the internet.”81 This, Gates told Yahoo News, revealed a persistent shortcoming of the platforms. “Their ability to stop things before they become widespread, they probably should have improved that,” Gates scolded.
Asked by Bloomberg News in mid-August about how the Trump White House had promoted HCQ “despite its repeatedly being shown to be ineffective and, in fact, to cause heart problems in some patients,” Gates happily responded: “This is an age of science, but sometimes it doesn’t feel that way. In the test tube, hydroxychloroquine looked good. On the other hand, there are lots of good therapeutic drugs coming that are proven to work without the severe side effects.”82 Gates went on to promote Gilead’s remdesivir as the best alternative, despite its lackluster track record compared to HCQ. He didn’t mention having a large stake in Gilead,83 which stood to make billions if Dr. Fauci was able to run remdesivir through the regulatory traps.
Obsequious reporters consistently encouraged Gates to portray himself as an objective expert, and Gates used that interview to discredit HCQ, and also me. His Bloomberg questioner opened the door with a typical softball: “For years, people have said if anti-vaxxers had lived through a pandemic, the way their grandparents did, they’d think differently.” Gates replied: “The two times I’ve been to the White House [since 2016], I was told I had to go listen to anti-vaxxers like Robert Kennedy, Jr. So, yes, it’s ironic that people are questioning vaccines and we’re actually having to say, ‘Oh, my God, how else can you get out of a tragic pandemic?’”84
If he had only asked me, I could have told him!
Lancetgate
It remains an enduring mystery just which powerful figure(s) caused the world’s two most prestigious scientific journals, The Lancet and the New England Journal of Medicine (NEJM), to publish overtly fraudulent studies from a nonexistent database owned by a previously unknown company. Anthony Fauci and the vaccine cartel celebrated the Lancet and NEJM papers on May 22, 2020 as the final nail in hydroxychloroquine’s coffin.85,86
Both studies in these respected publications relied on data from the Surgisphere Corporation, an obscure Illinois-based “medical education” company that claimed to somehow control an extraordinary global database boasting access to medical information from 96,000 patients in more than 600 hospitals.87 Founded in 2008, this sketchy enterprise had eleven employees, including a middling science fiction writer and a porn star/events hostess. Surgisphere claimed to have analyzed data from six continents and hundreds of hospitals that had treated patients with HCQ or CQ in real time. Someone persuaded the Lancet and the New England Journal of Medicine to publish two Surgisphere studies in separate articles on May 1 and 22. Like the other Gates-supported studies, the Lancet article portrayed HCQ as ineffective and dangerous. The Lancet study said that the Surgisphere data proved that HCQ increased cardiac mortality in COVID-19 patients. Based on this study, the FDA withdrew its EUA recommendation on June 15, 2020,88 the WHO and UK suspended their hydroxychloroquine clinical trials on May 25.89 Each resumed briefly, then stopped for good in June declaring HCQ unhelpful.90 Three European nations immediately banned use of HCQ, and others followed within weeks.91
That would normally have been the end of it, if not for the 200 independent scientists who quickly exposed the Lancet and NEJM studies as shockingly clumsy con jobs.92 The Surgisphere datasets that formed the foundation of the studies were so ridiculously erroneous that they could only have been a rank invention. To cite only one of many discrepancies, the number of reported deaths among patients taking hydroxychloroquine in one Australian hospital exceeded the total number of deaths for the entire country. An international brouhaha quickly revealed that the Surgisphere database did not exist, and soon enough, Surgisphere itself vanished from the Internet. The University of Utah terminated the faculty appointment of one of the article’s authors, Amit Patel. Surgisphere’s founder, Sapan S. Desai, disappeared from his job at a Chicago hospital.
Even the New York Times reported that “More than 100 scientists and clinicians have questioned the authenticity” of the database, as well as the study’s integrity.93 Despite the barrage of astonished criticism, the Lancet held firm for two weeks before relenting to the remonstrances. Finally, three of the four Lancet coauthors requested the paper be retracted. Both The Lancet and NEJM finally withdrew their studies in shame. Somebody at the very pinnacle of the medical cartel had twisted arms, kicked groins, and stoved in kneecaps to force these periodicals to abandon their policies, shred their ethics, and spend down their centuries of hard-won credibility in a desperate bid to torpedo HCQ. To date, neither the authors nor the journals have explained who induced them to coauthor and publish the most momentous fraud in the history of scientific publishing.
The headline of a comprehensive exposé in The Guardian expressed the global shock among the scientific community at the rank corruption by scientific publishing’s most formidable pillars: “The Lancet has made one of the biggest retractions in modern history. How could this happen?”94 The Guardian writers openly accused The Lancet of promoting fraud: “The sheer number and magnitude of the things that went wrong or missing are too enormous to attribute to mere incompetence.” The Guardian commented, “What’s incredible is that the editors of these esteemed journals still have a job—that is how utterly incredible the supposed data underlying the studies was.”
The capacity of their Pharma overlords to strong-arm the world’s top two medical journals, the NEJM and The Lancet, into condoning deadly research95,96 and to simultaneously publish blatantly fraudulent articles in the middle of a pandemic, attests to the cartel’s breathtaking power and ruthlessness. It is no longer controversial to acknowledge that drug makers rigorously control medical publishing and that The Lancet, NEJM, and JAMA are utterly corrupted instruments of Pharma. The Lancet editor, Richard Horton, confirms, “Journals have devolved into information laundering operations for the pharmaceutical industry.”97 Dr. Marcia Angell, who served as an NEJM editor for 20 years, says journals are “primarily a marketing machine.”98 Pharma, she says, has co-opted “every institution that might stand in its way.”99,100
Cracking Down on HCQ to Keep Case Fatalities High