Medical Misinformation, Part 1: Hydroxychloroquine

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  • Source: UncoverDC
  • 09/19/2023

By Daniel Bobinski

Since the media-whipped-frenzy surrounding Covid-19 took over the news, an increasing number of doctors are openly stating their disagreements with the recommendations of the government’s experts, Dr. Anthony Fauci and Dr. Deborah Birx. The problem? Many of these on-the-front-line medical professionals are being ignored or mocked. Some medical professionals are even seeing their videos removed from social media platforms. The reason? Their views don't align with the prevailing narrative of the media and what I’ll call the globalist medical establishment.

Among the topics that need to be addressed when pushing back on the globalist medical establishment and their willing accomplices in the legacy media are the use of hydroxychloroquine, the negative impact of stay-home orders, and the change of focus from ‘flatten the curve’ to ‘don’t spread the disease.'

In this first installment on medical misinformation we’ll focus on the use of hydroxychloroquine.

In New York, a doctor by the name of Vladimir Zelenko has been on the front lines of the Covid-19 epidemic. Zelenko is a general practitioner in a place where 35,000 people live in one square mile. During an interview with Breitbart’s Steve Bannon on the Bannon War Room, Zelenko said, "Basically, the whole focus of the world up to this point has been to build more respirators. There's been zero emphasis on how to have a clinical intervention."

Zelenko said the standard protocol has been doctors telling their Covid-19 patients to go home, pray, drink fluids and take Tylenol. Then, if it gets too bad, "Go to the hospital and get intubated, and you have a 50 percent chance – or more – of dying."

Clearly frustrated with Anthony Fauci saying we need to do a study (on the effectiveness of hydroxychloroquine), Zelenko said, “Imagine Washington DC was being carpet-bombed. Would it make sense for Dr. Fauci to say, 'I think we need to do a study to see which bullets work the best. It may take four months, but we need to study it.' Or, would he use any bullet available to knock the planes out of the sky? We are being carpet-bombed by an invisible enemy. To wait four months – and let a few hundred thousand people die unnecessarily – I think is a crime against humanity.”

Rather than wait for a study while following the standard protocol for treating people who have Covid-19, Zelenko decided to take a different tack.

“I saw 1,450 patients,” Zelenko said. “Out of those I divided them into two groups: high risk and low risk. Low risk I did not treat, because they’re going to get better without any intervention. High risk was defined as over the age of 60 with symptoms, and under the age of 60 with symptoms but have chronic medical problems, like cancer, diabetes, high blood pressure, things like that.” He also said if anyone looked sick in his office and had difficulty breathing, he put them in the high-risk category.

Out of the 1,450 patients Zelenko saw, 405 fell into the high-risk category. “Statistically,” Zelenko said, out of that number, “you would have expected 20 dead, and a multiple of that, perhaps 30 or 40, on a respirator.”

But Zelenko’s numbers were much different: only two dead, four that were temporarily on a respirator, and five that were admitted to the hospital for pneumonia but are already home.

The key to Zelenko’s success was not waiting for test results. “I initiated treatment based on clinical suspicion, even without confirmatory testing,” he said. “I did the testing if I had the test, but I did not delay treatment for 72 hours to get the results. Those are the crucial 72 hours. If we can intervene early, we can reduce the viral load in such a way so that the compromised person’s immune system could actually clear the infection without the development of the acute respiratory distress syndrome or pneumonia.”

And the cost of Zelenko’s protocol? About 20 bucks. How does it work? Dr. Zelenko says it’s quite simple. Zinc is well known to inhibit viral replication, as it inhibits an enzyme in the cells that allows the virus to reproduce. The problem with zinc is it doesn’t get into our cells, but hydroxychloroquine opens the door and lets the zinc in. Azithromycin (an antibiotic) is also needed because when lungs are damaged by infection they become susceptible to bacterial pneumonia. The azithromycin acts like a guard by the door, so if bacteria try to get in, they get killed before they can take hold.

The negative talk about hydroxychloroquine

On April 7, NBC News published a fearmongering piece titled, Mayo Clinic cardiologist: ‘Inexcusable’ to ignore hydroxychloroquine side effects.

(Side note: I found it interesting that the article was not published in their “coronavirus” section, but rather the “nbcnews.com” >> “politics” >> “donald-trump” section of their website.)

The article cited a small, not-yet-peer-reviewed study that came out on April 3, a few days before the article was published, calling attention to a potential risk for cardiac side effects in a small percentage of the population.

When Dr. Zelenko heard about this, he went to cardiologists who specialize in the electrical systems of the heart. He said the three electrophysiologists had more than 100 years of combined experience in their specialty, and none of them had ever seen a complication from hydroxychloroquine.

The National Center for Biotechnical Information has several reports on the negative side effects of hydroxychloroquine. One, a June, 2019 paper titled Chloroquine And Hydroxychloroquine Toxicity details how 0.68% of people who take hydroxychloroquine for 5-7 years can develop partial blurred vision. A March, 2013 paper on hydroxychloroquine cardiotoxicity is essentially a case study on “only the fifth biopsy-proven case of HCQ cardiotoxicity.” This extremely rare condition appears to be correlated to older women (50+) who have pre-existing cardiac issues, chronic rheumatoid inflammation, and/or chronic kidney disease and have been taking hydroxychloroquine for more than ten years.

For the record, hydroxychloroquine has been on the Food & Drug Administration’s list of approved drugs since 1955. In 2017 it was the 128th most prescribed drug in the country with more than 5.5 million annual prescriptions. That means it gets prescribed more often than prednisolone, testosterone, morphine, lithium, hydrocortisone, cyanocobalamin (vitamin B-12) and penicillin.

On April 22, Reason magazine published a piece titled, More Evidence That Hydroxychloroquine Is Not a COVID-19 Silver Bullet. The article cites an observational retrospective “study” conducted at VA hospitals. I put “study” in quotes because the “researchers” from the Universities of Virginia and South Carolina simply compiled extant data after the fact.

In the Reason article, we are told, “"Hydroxychloroquine use with or without co-administration of azithromycin did not improve mortality or reduce the need for mechanical ventilation in hospitalized patients."

I ask the reader to recall what Dr. Zelenko said about prescribing hydroxychloroquine in those crucial first 72 hours, and not waiting until someone is on a respirator. “When someone’s on a respirator, no matter what you do, there’s going to be a 50-60% mortality rate,” Zelenko said in his interview.

Also, what these University data-compilers didn’t report was the age of the patients who died, nor any chronic medical problems (comorbidity factors) they likely had.

Why do I say this? When this VA “study” first came out it caught my eye because I happen to be a veteran with a service-connected disability. I get my annual checkups and other medical treatments at the VA hospital in my town, and whenever I go there, I see a lot of Vietnam, Korean War and World War II vets in really bad shape. Even my 88-year old Korean war veteran father, who also gets his care at that same hospital, says he always feels better about himself after visiting, because so many of the vets getting care there are barely able to get around.

Dr. Joshua Dopko is an emergency room doctor whom I interviewed on my New Book of Daniel podcast. Dopko told me that if someone is in their 80’s with chronic illnesses such as emphysema or asthma and you wait until their ready for a ventilator to give them hydroxychloroquine, you’ve waited too long.

Doctors are taking the drug

Dopko also says he knows doctors who are taking hydroxychloroquine prophylactically, and that he himself is participating in a double-blind placebo study on the drug. “I feel totally safe putting it in my body,” he says. Dopko also said to get approved for his participation in the study, he was not seen by anyone. “There was no physical exam, no EKG, nothing. I answered six or seven questions on an online questionnaire, and right after I clicked ‘submit,’ it said I was approved for the study. I received my pills the other day and I have a 66% chance that I’m currently taking hydroxychloroquine.”

Dopko said in his 17 years of being a medical doctor, he has never seen the FDA issue restrictions on a drug like they have with hydroxychloroquine. “We’ve been told we’re not supposed to prescribe hydroxychloroquine for Covid-19 unless the person is in the hospital and it’s part of a clinical trial.”

“I’ve never seen this before. Doctors prescribe drugs for off-label use all the time,” he said. “For example, Amitriptyline was approved by the FDA as an anti-depressant. But now it’s generic and doctors prescribe it all the time for neuropathic pain, sleep disturbances, and even nighttime incontinence with kids,” Dopko said. “And Neurontin was approved to be a seizure medication, but now is prescribed for neuropathic pain and for shingles. This restriction makes no sense. We should strive to preserve everyone’s life.”

Why all the medical misinformation?

President Trump suggested hydroxychloroquine could be a game changer, and to his enemies, it was "game on" to see Trump's suggestion fail. As many doctors are saying in interviews and in publications everywhere, this is the first time they’ve seen a drug that has a political party.

Dr. Zelenko, during his interview with Steve Bannon, said his protocol provides a 95% reduction in death, that France used a similar protocol and had an 88% reduction in death. He said Brazil implemented his protocol and they, too, are seeing a 95% reduction in death. “This is three continents,” he said, “Three groups of doctors who don’t know each other. But this is an election year. Anything they can do to not give Trump a victory, they’ll do.”

“It’s the epitome of evil to put politics and profits before human life,” Zelenko said. “I have zero tolerance for people who do that. They’re irrelevant to me.”

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Daniel Bobinski, M.Ed. is a certified behavioral analyst, best-selling author, columnist, corporate trainer, and keynote speaker. He’s also a veteran and a self-described Christian Libertarian who believes in the principles of free market capitalism – while standing firmly against crony capitalism.

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