“As COVID ravages our elderly population, another epidemic stemming from China is slamming our young adults.
Newly released data shows that the leading killer of Americans aged 18 to 45 is fentanyl overdoses, with nearly 79,000 people in the age range dying of them between 2020 and 2021.
“Families Against Fentanyl,” an opioid awareness organization, analyzed the data from U.S. government sources and found 37,208 died in 2020 and 41,587 died in 2021. Comparatively, data says COVID-19 killed more than 53,000 in the demographic in the same time period.
Fentanyl overdoses reportedly surpassed suicide, COVID-19, and car accidents as the leading cause of death for the demographic.
“This is a national emergency. America’s young adults — thousands of unsuspecting Americans — are being poisoned,” the founder of Families Against Fentanyl, James Rauh, said according to Fox News. “It is widely known that illicit fentanyl is driving the massive spike in drug-related deaths. A new approach to this catastrophe is needed.”
And it is not just the intentional users at risk, either. The Drug Enforcement Agency (DEA) is now issuing an urgent warning that Mexican cartels are now selling counterfeit opioid pills laced with fentanyl. The compound is 50 times more potent than heroin, and the move makes the nation’s illegal drug supply more deadly.
Federal authorities say they are encountering more pills passing for medications such as oxycodone that contain fentanyl. They have seized more than 20 million fake pills this year, the vast majority containing fentanyl, the Drug Enforcement Administration said Thursday.
“The supply of these pills is going up exponentially,” said Joseph Palamar, an associate professor and drug epidemiologist at New York University Langone Health. “They are easy to transport and difficult to track. Pills are the ultimate fake out. You can fake out your parents, your friends, your partner, law enforcement.”
The mass production of such pills by Mexican cartels has escalated the threat, according to the DEA. Pill-related deaths are particularly common in the western U.S., a Centers for Disease Control and Prevention report said Tuesday. Fentanyl appears to be gaining ground there after surfacing mainly in eastern states for years.
Finally, here is a stark reminder it is not just the drug abusers who are dying from fentanyl. A Milwaukee mother is accused of the death of her 15-month-old child in July after his sippy cup tested positive for the compound.”
“Last week, I began pondering why a spate of articles from progressive publications questioning the need for pandemic policies they have cherished for nearly two years.
The New York Times brought up a salient and critical point I noted back in early 2020 about the need for enhanced ventilation
The influx of such analyses makes sense: Biden is reportedly eyeing a pandemic exit strategy.
… Biden and his team have all but ruled out new lockdowns, and behind the scenes, administration officials have been debating how to shift public attention from the total number of cases — which appear likely to surge, even if many are mild — toward the number of severe infections that are overloading health systems and causing interruptions to normal life.
Some of Biden’s advisers are encouraging the administration to begin discussing publicly how to live alongside a virus that shows no signs of disappearing, a potentially stark shift in messaging for a White House that once touted “freedom from the virus.”
Steering public attention away from the total number of infections and toward serious cases only — as some Biden advisers have encouraged — could prove a challenge after nearly two years of intense focus on the pandemic’s every up and down. It is a part of a growing conundrum that Biden faces as the Covid-19 pandemic refuses to abate.
“We’re getting to the point now where … it’s about severity,” said Xavier Becerra, the secretary of the Department of Health and Human Services, in a meeting with reporters this week. “It’s not about cases. It’s about severity.”
Along with many other biosafety professionals, I have often cited the need to focus on the infection fatality rate. While it is difficult to calculate with COVID19, as many asymptomatic people and deaths should be attributed to another cause are listed as COVID19 fatalities, it is reasonable to assume that in the worst case, it is on par with severe flu.
There are also other signs that the pandemic panic that has been imposed upon us is about to subside. The Wall Street Journal just published a piece entitled “The Fickle Science of Lockdowns.”
In it, authors Phillip W. Magness and Peter C. Earle of the American Institute for Economic Research assert that “experts foresaw before COVID that the current pandemic-response strategy would fail,” but “the authorities embraced it anyway.” They reviewed the lessons learned from the Spanish Flu and the Imperial College model used to press for lockdowns and came to a scathing conclusion.
…[L]ockdown stringency is a poor predictor of Covid-related mortality. Our examination of the 50 U.S. states and 26 countries found no discernible pattern connecting the two—a basic expectation if lockdowns performed as “the science” often insists.
So why did public-health authorities abandon their opposition to lockdowns? Why did they rush to embrace the untested claims of flawed epidemiological modeling? One answer appears in the Johns Hopkins study from 2019: “Some NPIs, such as travel restrictions and quarantine, might be pursued for social or political purposes by political leaders, rather than pursued because of public health evidence.”
Yes. There were elections to win and Trump to smear…so sacrifices had to be made.
The Atlantic continued its recent trend of pandemic policy questioning by publishing a piece that analyzed the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s assertion that schools without mask mandates have triple the risk of COVID outbreaks. It appears that that claim is based on poor science.
How did research with so many obvious flaws make its way through all the layers of internal technical review? And why was it promoted so aggressively by the agency’s director? I reached out to Walensky’s office to ask about the study, noting its evident limitations and outlier result. How, if at all, does this research figure into the agency’s continuing guidance for schools around the country? The CDC did not respond to my inquiries.
With Biden in the White House, the CDC has promised to “follow the science” in its COVID policies. Yet the circumstances around the Arizona study seem to show the opposite. Dubious research has been cited after the fact, without transparency, in support of existing agency guidance. “Research requires trust and the ability to verify work,” Ketcham, the ASU public-health economist, told me. “That’s the heart of science. The saddest part of this is the erosion of trust.””
———-
If you’re trusting Biden or the CDC, you need some self reflection time.
“Scuffles break out at anti-lockdown protest in Parliament Square as thousands of protestors opposed to vaccine passports and Plan B rules clash with police while ministers consider more restrictions
Hundreds of anti-vaccine demonstrators congregated around Whitehall, Downing Street and Westminster
A group called Together Declaration claimed responsibility for Saturday’s protest against vaccine passports
Some of the demonstrators were involved in scuffles with police officers, who reported ‘minor injuries’
Dutch Prime Minister Mark Rutte will announce Dutch lockdown during a press conference at 7pm tonight”
The clowns at the AP criticized it when DeSantis suggested it months ago.
Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis, who has been criticized for opposing mask mandates, is now touting a COVID-19 antibody treatment in which a top donor's company has invested millions of dollars. DeSantis has been promoting the treatment as virus cases spike. https://t.co/0TwgYlONVh
Marc Elias, who ran the destructive Russia collusion lie operation in 2016, says the quiet part out loud — decreasing the security and safeguards for elections is Democrats' "best hope" for winning future elections. https://t.co/pCnNpyLOaS
Oh I don't believe I ever wrote that about your efforts against election security. But I believe I mentioned that you were sanctioned by the 5th Circuit for your dishonesty. https://t.co/TyFeZyfRV3
Marc Elias was just reminding me to remind you to purchase my best-selling book. His role in running not just the Russia collusion hoax that so damaged the country in 2016, but also the chaos and confusion of 2020's election administration is covered well. https://t.co/kiT5wagJWr
"We can't win if we institute the most basic and elementary and common-sense election integrity measures! We can't win if people have to prove they are who they say they are."? Really? Why is that?
That Democrats and media are working so hard against common-sense voting integrity efforts (such as proof of ID!) is shady and suspicious and does more to obliterate confidence in their recent wins and methods of winning than anything any GOP official has said.
“This week, the District of Columbia filed a lawsuit against the Proud Boys and the Oath Keepers organizations, as well as 31 individually-named defendants, alleging that they “worked together to plot, publicize, recruit for, and finance [a] planned attack” on the Capitol on Jan. 6.
The purpose of the suit is obvious enough – the D.C. Attorney General wants to shut down two organizations who he accuses of promoting domestic terrorism, and he plans to do it by bankrupting them.
This is not a novel strategy – it’s one that was popularized by the Southern Poverty Law Center in the 1980s when they began filing civil suits for monetary damages against the Ku Klux Klan on behalf of victims of Klan violence.
Karl Racine – D.C.’s Attorney General – was undoubtedly inspired by a jury’s award last month of $25 million in punitive damages to nine victims who were injured during the “Unite the Right” rally in Charlottesville in 2017 . That case raised similar claims, and the defendants there included five organizations, each of whom were found liable for $1 million.
But D.C.’s lawsuit against the Proud Boys and Oath Keepers has added a new and disturbing twist – it was brought by the government.
The lawsuit should be dismissed for a variety of reasons, but most of all because the District of Columbia lacked standing to bring it in the first place.”
—–
“All but one of the individual defendants in this action are being criminally prosecuted for their actions at the Capitol on Jan. 6 (the one exception being Enrique Tarrio, the Proud Boys national Chairman, who was arrested on Jan. 4, and therefore was not at the Capitol on Jan. 6 – I wrote about his case here).
The civil complaint – all 84 mind-numbing pages of it –merely regurgitates the criminal allegations against each of them, strings them together, and asserts in a vague and generalized way that these defendants must have been acting in concert. There are no coherent facts from which a conspiracy among the all of the defendants – including between the national organizations of the Proud Boys and Oath Keepers – can reasonably be inferred.
That shouldn’t come as a surprise – after all, the FBI has admitted that it has not found much evidence that anyone coordinated the Capitol Hill riot.
Because the law favors quality over quantity, the complaint’s conclusory allegations of conspiracy are legally insufficient.”
—–
“Conclusion
While blue state Attorneys General certainly have used civil lawsuits to attack their political opponents – just take a look at New York State Attorney General Letitia James’ action against the NRA – they traditionally have done so under their statutory authority to regulate charities and police fraud.
This lawsuit breaks new ground.
However distasteful the rhetoric and behavior of the Proud Boys and Oath Keepers may be, the D.C. government here, in order to put those organizations out of existence, has brought civil claims for monetary damages against them that it is not empowered by statute or common law to enforce.
And such an unrestrained government is a danger to us all.”
“For the first nine months of the COVID-19 pandemic, there were no officially approved outpatient treatments for combating the disease. From March 2020, when the virus first emerged in the United States, until that November, when the Food and Drug Administration authorized emergency use of monoclonal antibodies, health authorities advised that the infected do little but quarantine themselves, drink plenty of fluids and rest unless hospitalization was necessary.
During those chaotic final months of Donald Trump’s presidency, the medical establishment expressed extreme caution regarding outpatient treatments for the virus, and these warnings were amplified by major media hostile to the president, for example when he touted the anti-malaria medicine hydroxychloroquine.
Although an estimated 12% to 38% 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, and often at great cost.
Given the time involved, 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 proven effective in treating similar illnesses or otherwise demonstrated theoretical promise due to mechanisms of action.
Dr. Brian Tyson, a primary care physician and former hospital intensivist in Imperial County, Calif., who has championed outpatient treatment, explained the calculation: “If I’m wrong with the treatment I’m giving, people are still going to die. If I’m right, how many lives have we saved? How many can be saved? Why are we erring on the side of death instead of treatment?”
RealClearInvestigations spoke or corresponded with 12 such advocates for early outpatient treatment globally — from California, Texas and Honduras to France, Israel and India. Their track record appears to challenge the prevailing official clinical guidance under which more than 500,000 Americans, among nearly 3 million globally, died from the pandemic in its first year ending March 2021. These physicians used their years of clinical experience to make educated guesses about what combinations of drugs might work. Few used the same cocktail; there is no consensus about which drugs worked best, though some were adamant about the benefits of specific agents; but all insisted the treatments proved most effective when administered as early as possible in the course of illness. Although the efficacy of the cocktails has not been verified in clinical trials – which could rigorously account for myriad factors including the age, weight, gender, medical history and level of illness of patients – all report that their improvised efforts improved care without doing harm.
The dissenters became proactive early on, among them:
Dr. George Fareed, an Imperial, Calif.-based former National Institutes of Health virology researcher and Harvard Medical School grad who with his primary care colleague, Dr. Tyson, reports an early outpatient treatment track record of 7,000 COVID patients with only seven deaths.
Dr. Fernando Valerio, a former Dartmouth trainee who came to national prominence in Honduras for pioneering inpatient and outpatient protocols eventually implemented nationwide. As one of only four intensive-care doctors in San Pedro Sula, a city of 1.2 million, he quickly ruled out a hospitalization-heavy approach as impractical. Instead, he prodded the government to send medical providers door-to-door in virus hotspots to distribute at-home drug kits. And Honduras’ mortality rate declined markedly – to roughly half that of the United States at current count.
Dr. Darrell DeMello in Mumbai, India, who has treated patients, including employees of some of the world’s largest multinational firms, with a drug regimen similar to Dr. Fareed’s, and with similar results. Out of an estimated 7,500 patients, he reports, he has lost 16.
Their work raises hard questions about what the responsible practice of medicine should look like when there are no approved medical treatments in the face of likely widespread death. Could there have been more and earlier life-saving innovation before the pharmaceutical industry’s remarkable development much later of vaccines and novel therapeutics? Is trying something better than doing nothing until lengthy clinical trials are completed? Or, especially when the risks of “fake news” and its viral spread are high, do the demands of providing authoritatively endorsed treatments override all?
Researchers knew fairly early in the pandemic that COVID infections progressed through several stages marked by specific symptoms treatable with a slew of safe, FDA-approved medications.
For example, it was known in March 2020 that the illness progressed from a viral phase to massive inflammation across the body. Anti-inflammatory drugs – such as colchicine, the choice of Dr. DeMello in Mumbai – could have been administered at clinicians’ discretion.
By June 2020 it was known that COVID could cause major blood clotting. The blood thinner Plavix, another choice of Dr. DeMello, is commonly used to prevent and treat clotting. As Dr. Tyson explained, if patients are “showing inflammatory changes, let’s use an anti-inflammatory. We see people getting clots, dying of coronary artery clogs, let’s use a blood thinner.”
Authorities have been slow to accept this “if, then” approach. Many medical leaders have seemingly interpreted the Hippocratic dictum of “first, do no harm” as a call to wait for explicit guidance from regulatory agencies. But they were not wholly blind to or dismissive of the idea of developing early treatment regimens, including repurposed drugs, to prevent the disease’s progression in infected patients – at least in theory.”
“”We could have prevented this tragedy for $1. Dexamethasone, 5 cents. Ivermectin, 1 cent. Colchicine, 50 cents. Aspirin, 100 pills for four bucks,” he said. “If we had given people aspirin, ivermectin, colchicine, and if they get complicated, a little dexamethasone, we could have saved the world with one dollar.””
Wandering Views 
Thank Biden and Democrats.
Their open border policies is what led to this.
“Fentanyl Now Leading Cause of Death in Americans Aged 18-45
DEA warning that Mexican drug cartels are flooding US with fentanyl-laced counterfeit pills.”
While Dems pretend there is no problem…..
https://legalinsurrection.com/2021/12/fentanyl-now-leading-cause-of-death-in-americans-aged-18-45/
“As COVID ravages our elderly population, another epidemic stemming from China is slamming our young adults.
Newly released data shows that the leading killer of Americans aged 18 to 45 is fentanyl overdoses, with nearly 79,000 people in the age range dying of them between 2020 and 2021.
“Families Against Fentanyl,” an opioid awareness organization, analyzed the data from U.S. government sources and found 37,208 died in 2020 and 41,587 died in 2021. Comparatively, data says COVID-19 killed more than 53,000 in the demographic in the same time period.
Fentanyl overdoses reportedly surpassed suicide, COVID-19, and car accidents as the leading cause of death for the demographic.
“This is a national emergency. America’s young adults — thousands of unsuspecting Americans — are being poisoned,” the founder of Families Against Fentanyl, James Rauh, said according to Fox News. “It is widely known that illicit fentanyl is driving the massive spike in drug-related deaths. A new approach to this catastrophe is needed.”
And it is not just the intentional users at risk, either. The Drug Enforcement Agency (DEA) is now issuing an urgent warning that Mexican cartels are now selling counterfeit opioid pills laced with fentanyl. The compound is 50 times more potent than heroin, and the move makes the nation’s illegal drug supply more deadly.
Federal authorities say they are encountering more pills passing for medications such as oxycodone that contain fentanyl. They have seized more than 20 million fake pills this year, the vast majority containing fentanyl, the Drug Enforcement Administration said Thursday.
“The supply of these pills is going up exponentially,” said Joseph Palamar, an associate professor and drug epidemiologist at New York University Langone Health. “They are easy to transport and difficult to track. Pills are the ultimate fake out. You can fake out your parents, your friends, your partner, law enforcement.”
The mass production of such pills by Mexican cartels has escalated the threat, according to the DEA. Pill-related deaths are particularly common in the western U.S., a Centers for Disease Control and Prevention report said Tuesday. Fentanyl appears to be gaining ground there after surfacing mainly in eastern states for years.
Finally, here is a stark reminder it is not just the drug abusers who are dying from fentanyl. A Milwaukee mother is accused of the death of her 15-month-old child in July after his sippy cup tested positive for the compound.”
LikeLike
He won’t stop the fentanyl, and he can’t stop Covid, despite his lies to the contrary.
“Tuesday’s Biden Covid Speech – Desperately Seeking a Pandemic Exit Strategy
But likely to double down on what hasn’t worked.”
https://legalinsurrection.com/2021/12/tuesdays-biden-covid-speech-desperately-seeking-a-pandemic-exit-strategy/
“Last week, I began pondering why a spate of articles from progressive publications questioning the need for pandemic policies they have cherished for nearly two years.
The New York Times brought up a salient and critical point I noted back in early 2020 about the need for enhanced ventilation
The influx of such analyses makes sense: Biden is reportedly eyeing a pandemic exit strategy.
… Biden and his team have all but ruled out new lockdowns, and behind the scenes, administration officials have been debating how to shift public attention from the total number of cases — which appear likely to surge, even if many are mild — toward the number of severe infections that are overloading health systems and causing interruptions to normal life.
Some of Biden’s advisers are encouraging the administration to begin discussing publicly how to live alongside a virus that shows no signs of disappearing, a potentially stark shift in messaging for a White House that once touted “freedom from the virus.”
Steering public attention away from the total number of infections and toward serious cases only — as some Biden advisers have encouraged — could prove a challenge after nearly two years of intense focus on the pandemic’s every up and down. It is a part of a growing conundrum that Biden faces as the Covid-19 pandemic refuses to abate.
“We’re getting to the point now where … it’s about severity,” said Xavier Becerra, the secretary of the Department of Health and Human Services, in a meeting with reporters this week. “It’s not about cases. It’s about severity.”
Along with many other biosafety professionals, I have often cited the need to focus on the infection fatality rate. While it is difficult to calculate with COVID19, as many asymptomatic people and deaths should be attributed to another cause are listed as COVID19 fatalities, it is reasonable to assume that in the worst case, it is on par with severe flu.
There are also other signs that the pandemic panic that has been imposed upon us is about to subside. The Wall Street Journal just published a piece entitled “The Fickle Science of Lockdowns.”
In it, authors Phillip W. Magness and Peter C. Earle of the American Institute for Economic Research assert that “experts foresaw before COVID that the current pandemic-response strategy would fail,” but “the authorities embraced it anyway.” They reviewed the lessons learned from the Spanish Flu and the Imperial College model used to press for lockdowns and came to a scathing conclusion.
…[L]ockdown stringency is a poor predictor of Covid-related mortality. Our examination of the 50 U.S. states and 26 countries found no discernible pattern connecting the two—a basic expectation if lockdowns performed as “the science” often insists.
So why did public-health authorities abandon their opposition to lockdowns? Why did they rush to embrace the untested claims of flawed epidemiological modeling? One answer appears in the Johns Hopkins study from 2019: “Some NPIs, such as travel restrictions and quarantine, might be pursued for social or political purposes by political leaders, rather than pursued because of public health evidence.”
Yes. There were elections to win and Trump to smear…so sacrifices had to be made.
The Atlantic continued its recent trend of pandemic policy questioning by publishing a piece that analyzed the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s assertion that schools without mask mandates have triple the risk of COVID outbreaks. It appears that that claim is based on poor science.
How did research with so many obvious flaws make its way through all the layers of internal technical review? And why was it promoted so aggressively by the agency’s director? I reached out to Walensky’s office to ask about the study, noting its evident limitations and outlier result. How, if at all, does this research figure into the agency’s continuing guidance for schools around the country? The CDC did not respond to my inquiries.
With Biden in the White House, the CDC has promised to “follow the science” in its COVID policies. Yet the circumstances around the Arizona study seem to show the opposite. Dubious research has been cited after the fact, without transparency, in support of existing agency guidance. “Research requires trust and the ability to verify work,” Ketcham, the ASU public-health economist, told me. “That’s the heart of science. The saddest part of this is the erosion of trust.””
———-
If you’re trusting Biden or the CDC, you need some self reflection time.
LikeLike
The British seem about done with the Covid idiocy too.
https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-10323957/London-Covid-19-protests-turn-violent.html
“Scuffles break out at anti-lockdown protest in Parliament Square as thousands of protestors opposed to vaccine passports and Plan B rules clash with police while ministers consider more restrictions
Hundreds of anti-vaccine demonstrators congregated around Whitehall, Downing Street and Westminster
A group called Together Declaration claimed responsibility for Saturday’s protest against vaccine passports
Some of the demonstrators were involved in scuffles with police officers, who reported ‘minor injuries’
Dutch Prime Minister Mark Rutte will announce Dutch lockdown during a press conference at 7pm tonight”
LikeLike
Remember, it’s only bad when Republicans say it.
———-
——–
The clowns at the AP criticized it when DeSantis suggested it months ago.
LikeLike
Mollie knows, hacks gotta hack.
———-
——–
——-
——–
LikeLike
Point and laugh time. 🙂
“D.C. Has No “Standing” For J6 Lawsuit Against Proud Boys and Oath Keepers
The D.C. government has brought civil claims for monetary damages against them that it is not empowered by statute or common law to enforce.”
https://legalinsurrection.com/2021/12/d-c-has-no-standing-for-j6-lawsuit-against-proud-boys-and-oath-keepers/
“This week, the District of Columbia filed a lawsuit against the Proud Boys and the Oath Keepers organizations, as well as 31 individually-named defendants, alleging that they “worked together to plot, publicize, recruit for, and finance [a] planned attack” on the Capitol on Jan. 6.
The purpose of the suit is obvious enough – the D.C. Attorney General wants to shut down two organizations who he accuses of promoting domestic terrorism, and he plans to do it by bankrupting them.
This is not a novel strategy – it’s one that was popularized by the Southern Poverty Law Center in the 1980s when they began filing civil suits for monetary damages against the Ku Klux Klan on behalf of victims of Klan violence.
Karl Racine – D.C.’s Attorney General – was undoubtedly inspired by a jury’s award last month of $25 million in punitive damages to nine victims who were injured during the “Unite the Right” rally in Charlottesville in 2017 . That case raised similar claims, and the defendants there included five organizations, each of whom were found liable for $1 million.
But D.C.’s lawsuit against the Proud Boys and Oath Keepers has added a new and disturbing twist – it was brought by the government.
The lawsuit should be dismissed for a variety of reasons, but most of all because the District of Columbia lacked standing to bring it in the first place.”
—–
“All but one of the individual defendants in this action are being criminally prosecuted for their actions at the Capitol on Jan. 6 (the one exception being Enrique Tarrio, the Proud Boys national Chairman, who was arrested on Jan. 4, and therefore was not at the Capitol on Jan. 6 – I wrote about his case here).
The civil complaint – all 84 mind-numbing pages of it –merely regurgitates the criminal allegations against each of them, strings them together, and asserts in a vague and generalized way that these defendants must have been acting in concert. There are no coherent facts from which a conspiracy among the all of the defendants – including between the national organizations of the Proud Boys and Oath Keepers – can reasonably be inferred.
That shouldn’t come as a surprise – after all, the FBI has admitted that it has not found much evidence that anyone coordinated the Capitol Hill riot.
Because the law favors quality over quantity, the complaint’s conclusory allegations of conspiracy are legally insufficient.”
—–
“Conclusion
While blue state Attorneys General certainly have used civil lawsuits to attack their political opponents – just take a look at New York State Attorney General Letitia James’ action against the NRA – they traditionally have done so under their statutory authority to regulate charities and police fraud.
This lawsuit breaks new ground.
However distasteful the rhetoric and behavior of the Proud Boys and Oath Keepers may be, the D.C. government here, in order to put those organizations out of existence, has brought civil claims for monetary damages against them that it is not empowered by statute or common law to enforce.
And such an unrestrained government is a danger to us all.”
LikeLike
“Did Dismissals of Safe Outpatient Drugs Cause Needless Covid Deaths? Dissenting Doctors Say Yes”
https://www.realclearinvestigations.com/articles/2021/12/21/did_dismissals_of_safe_outpatient_drugs_cause_needless_covid_deaths_dissenting_doctors_say_yes_808045.html
“For the first nine months of the COVID-19 pandemic, there were no officially approved outpatient treatments for combating the disease. From March 2020, when the virus first emerged in the United States, until that November, when the Food and Drug Administration authorized emergency use of monoclonal antibodies, health authorities advised that the infected do little but quarantine themselves, drink plenty of fluids and rest unless hospitalization was necessary.
During those chaotic final months of Donald Trump’s presidency, the medical establishment expressed extreme caution regarding outpatient treatments for the virus, and these warnings were amplified by major media hostile to the president, for example when he touted the anti-malaria medicine hydroxychloroquine.
Although an estimated 12% to 38% 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, and often at great cost.
Given the time involved, 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 proven effective in treating similar illnesses or otherwise demonstrated theoretical promise due to mechanisms of action.
Dr. Brian Tyson, a primary care physician and former hospital intensivist in Imperial County, Calif., who has championed outpatient treatment, explained the calculation: “If I’m wrong with the treatment I’m giving, people are still going to die. If I’m right, how many lives have we saved? How many can be saved? Why are we erring on the side of death instead of treatment?”
RealClearInvestigations spoke or corresponded with 12 such advocates for early outpatient treatment globally — from California, Texas and Honduras to France, Israel and India. Their track record appears to challenge the prevailing official clinical guidance under which more than 500,000 Americans, among nearly 3 million globally, died from the pandemic in its first year ending March 2021. These physicians used their years of clinical experience to make educated guesses about what combinations of drugs might work. Few used the same cocktail; there is no consensus about which drugs worked best, though some were adamant about the benefits of specific agents; but all insisted the treatments proved most effective when administered as early as possible in the course of illness. Although the efficacy of the cocktails has not been verified in clinical trials – which could rigorously account for myriad factors including the age, weight, gender, medical history and level of illness of patients – all report that their improvised efforts improved care without doing harm.
The dissenters became proactive early on, among them:
Dr. George Fareed, an Imperial, Calif.-based former National Institutes of Health virology researcher and Harvard Medical School grad who with his primary care colleague, Dr. Tyson, reports an early outpatient treatment track record of 7,000 COVID patients with only seven deaths.
Dr. Fernando Valerio, a former Dartmouth trainee who came to national prominence in Honduras for pioneering inpatient and outpatient protocols eventually implemented nationwide. As one of only four intensive-care doctors in San Pedro Sula, a city of 1.2 million, he quickly ruled out a hospitalization-heavy approach as impractical. Instead, he prodded the government to send medical providers door-to-door in virus hotspots to distribute at-home drug kits. And Honduras’ mortality rate declined markedly – to roughly half that of the United States at current count.
Dr. Darrell DeMello in Mumbai, India, who has treated patients, including employees of some of the world’s largest multinational firms, with a drug regimen similar to Dr. Fareed’s, and with similar results. Out of an estimated 7,500 patients, he reports, he has lost 16.
Their work raises hard questions about what the responsible practice of medicine should look like when there are no approved medical treatments in the face of likely widespread death. Could there have been more and earlier life-saving innovation before the pharmaceutical industry’s remarkable development much later of vaccines and novel therapeutics? Is trying something better than doing nothing until lengthy clinical trials are completed? Or, especially when the risks of “fake news” and its viral spread are high, do the demands of providing authoritatively endorsed treatments override all?
Researchers knew fairly early in the pandemic that COVID infections progressed through several stages marked by specific symptoms treatable with a slew of safe, FDA-approved medications.
For example, it was known in March 2020 that the illness progressed from a viral phase to massive inflammation across the body. Anti-inflammatory drugs – such as colchicine, the choice of Dr. DeMello in Mumbai – could have been administered at clinicians’ discretion.
By June 2020 it was known that COVID could cause major blood clotting. The blood thinner Plavix, another choice of Dr. DeMello, is commonly used to prevent and treat clotting. As Dr. Tyson explained, if patients are “showing inflammatory changes, let’s use an anti-inflammatory. We see people getting clots, dying of coronary artery clogs, let’s use a blood thinner.”
Authorities have been slow to accept this “if, then” approach. Many medical leaders have seemingly interpreted the Hippocratic dictum of “first, do no harm” as a call to wait for explicit guidance from regulatory agencies. But they were not wholly blind to or dismissive of the idea of developing early treatment regimens, including repurposed drugs, to prevent the disease’s progression in infected patients – at least in theory.”
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Read the whole thing.
“”We could have prevented this tragedy for $1. Dexamethasone, 5 cents. Ivermectin, 1 cent. Colchicine, 50 cents. Aspirin, 100 pills for four bucks,” he said. “If we had given people aspirin, ivermectin, colchicine, and if they get complicated, a little dexamethasone, we could have saved the world with one dollar.””
Yes, but Orange Man bad, soooo…..
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But no campaign donors would have made money….
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