Did Dismissals of Safe Outpatient Drugs Cause Needless COVID Deaths? 

Dissenting doctors say, “Yes.”

For the first nine months of the COVID-19 pandemic, there were no officially approved outpatient treatments for combating the disease. The medical establishment expressed extreme caution regarding such treatments, and these warnings were amplified by major media hostile to President Trump, as when he touted the anti-malaria medicine hydroxychloroquine.

Although an estimated 12 percent to 38 percent of prescriptions are written for FDA-approved drugs used “off-label” (including Botox and Viagra), Dr. Anthony Fauci, director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, declared early on that providers should dispense only medicines proven to be safe and effective for COVID patients through “randomized, placebo-controlled trials.” These can take months or years to conduct, often at great cost.

Some governments and independent practitioners considered that standard a recipe for inaction that meant likely death for untold numbers of victims. These medical dissenters instead treated COVID-19 as physicians have long responded to newly emerging infectious diseases: by administering designer cocktails of cheap, safe, and readily available agents—in this case including hydroxychloroquine, antibiotics, aspirin, and vitamins—that had proved effective in treating similar illnesses or showed promise due to mechanisms of action.

RealClearInvestigations spoke or corresponded with 12 such advocates for early outpatient treatment globally—from California, Texas and Honduras to France, Israel, and India. These physicians used their clinical experience to make educated guesses about what combinations of drugs might work. Few used the same cocktail, but all insisted the treatments proved most effective when administered as early as possible.By Clayton Fox

February 1, 2022

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