COVID-19: A Second Opinion

Originally published on Medium 28 January 2022

If you’re going to get a second opinion, go to a doctor who actually has the courage and compassion to treat COVID as opposed to those that sit in their ivory towers or in their bureaucratic offices.

So said Senator Ron Johnson (R-WI) at the panel discussion “COVID-19: A Second Opinion” held at the Russell Senate Office Building in Washington, DC on Monday, 24 January.

The panel featured some of the nation’s top clinicians and scientists who have dissented from the mainstream narrative regarding the pandemic. But, almost as notable was the list of dignitaries who were invited but declined to attend, including CDC Director Rochelle Walensky, Acting FDA Commissioner Janet Woodcock, former NIH Director Francis Collins, former FDA Director Scott Gottlieb (who now serves on the board of Pfizer), and — last but not least — NIAID Director and Chief Medical Advisor to the President of the United States, Anthony Fauci.

The discussion was scheduled to run between 9:00 AM to noon but in fact continued long after that and included a wide range of topics, including covid vaccines, vaccine mandates, lockdowns, and masks, but it centered mainly around the suppression of safe and effective early-stage treatment for COVID-19.

Peter McCullough, former Vice Chief of Internal Medicine at Baylor University Medical Center, noted that we are two years into this pandemic, and not a single hospital in America has become a center of excellence for early treatment of COVID-19. Critical care expert Pierre Kory told the panel “We have a number of safe and effective treatments. Almost all are readily available generics.” He had especially high praise for ivermectin, declaring “That medicine had been shown literally to solve the pandemic in numerous regions of the world,” resulting in dramatic declines in the rates of hospitalizations and deaths in Mexico, Argentina, Brasil, India, and elsewhere. Ophthalmologist Richard Urso, who rose to national prominence for his advocacy of hydroxychloroquine for early-stage treatment of COVID-19, decried the therapeutic nihilism that has become the standard of care in the treatment of the covid, asking rhetorically “It’s an inflammatory disease — why would you not treat inflammation?”

PhD biomedical researcher Christina Parks noted the lack of early home treatment has hit the African-American community especially hard:

We need to have vitamin D sufficiency. We need to have hydroxychloroquine. Not only is it anti-inflammatory, but it actually modulates many of the predispositions for diabetes and hypertension that African-Americans suffer from. So regardless of the fact that it is used to prevent viral replication and things like that, it can actually modulate the predispositions. So why wouldn’t you want to give it, in order to stabilize things like blood sugar levels, in order to stabilize inflammation?

Dr. McCullough concurred, noting that COVID-19 mortality rates for African Americans is double that of the general population, and that most of the deaths occur in hospital.

Paul Marik, former chair of the Division of Pulmonary and Critical Care Medicine at Eastern Virginia Medical School, noted that the NIH guidelines endorse only low-dose dexamethasone along with Remdesevir for the treatment of COVID-19. He added that while two studies performed by the drug’s manufacturer showed it saves lives, four other high-quality other studies showed Remdesevir actually increased the risk of renal failure and death, and by contrast, twenty-five high quality studies have shown that ivermectin reduces the death rate by twenty-six percent.

Dr. Marik went on to state that hospitals receive an extra twenty percent reimbursement for patients given the drug, and that the price tag for single course of Remdesevir can approach three thousand dollars, while that for ivermectin is just pennies.

“What is happening is completely unprecedented” Dr. Marik averred. “I had to stand by and watch people die.” His refused to go on doing so, but his refusal came at a high price, exacted by a medical establishment for whom therapeutic nihilism for this condition has become received wisdom. His voice breaking, he told the audience “My hospital privileges were suspended — ignoring the fact that under my care, mortality was fifty percent of that of my colleagues.”

Dr. Parks also paid a high price, but in a different way. Her father came down with the covid, and he was being successfully treated at home. But then the oxygen machine malfunctioned, and he was taken to the hospital where they succeeded in restoring his blood oxygen levels. Unfortunately, they also took him off the anti-inflammatory medication he had been given, and his condition underwent a steep decline. He died, just three days before his daughter addressed the nation on the subject of COVID-19.

To watch the full proceedings of the panel, click here

To watch the highlights, click here