Noted Yale epidemiologist, Dr. Harvey Risch, has accused White House Chinese virus task force member Dr. Anthony Fauci of perpetrating a “misinformation campaign” in opposition to the drug hydroxychloroquine (HCQ), as Dr Risch claims the medicine has shown consistently encouraging results in treating CV-19 when it is used properly.
Hydroxychloroquine has been at the heart of a drawn-out political debate since March, when President Donald Trump cited the drug as a promising possible treatment for the novel CV-19. HCQ has a long history of use by doctors to treat malaria along with other syndromes such as arthritis and lupus. The World Health Organization, which has spread the lies of the communist Chinese government about CV-19, lists it as an essential medicine. About 5 million Americans currently have prescriptions for using it.
Since Trump touted the drug, media outlets and medical officials have for several months aggressively promoted various medical trials that have determined the drug has no effect in fighting CV-19; many commentators have additionally insisted, in spite of the drug’s decades-long safe track record, that it’s too dangerous for use to cure the disease.
“There are many doctors that I’ve gotten hostile remarks about saying that all the evidence is bad for it and, in fact, that is not true at all,” Risch told Laura Ingraham on Fox’s The Ingraham Angle, adding that he thinks the drug can be used as a “prophylactic” for front-line workers, as other countries like India have done.
Risch said he believes that a “propaganda war” is being waged against the use of the drug for political purposes, not based on “medical facts.”
Fauci has been one of the many critics of the drug. Back in March, the longtime director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infection Diseases went again claims of HCQ’s effectiveness as “anecdotal” and has voiced his disbelief throughout the pandemic.
On Tuesday during an interview on “Good Morning America,” Fauci again downplayed the drug’s implied benefits, declaring that “the overwhelming prevailing clinical trials that have looked at the efficacy of hydroxychloroquine have indicated that it is not effective in [treating] CV disease.”
Yet hundreds of medical doctors actually treating patients have said that using a protocol of hydroxychloroquine, zinc, and Zithromycin for their CV-19 patients has had spectacular results. The Left are ignoring those in the field seeing results, and it’s intentional.
Risch, nevertheless, is strongly criticizing Fauci’s approach to evaluating the drug’s effectiveness, arguing that repeated trials and tests have shown that it’s decidedly effective at treating CV-19 as long as it’s administered correctly.
Risch, a professor of epidemiology and the director of Yale’s Molecular Cancer Epidemiology Laboratory, has been pushing for the drug’s use to combat the Chinese virus for months. Last week in a Newsweek op-ed he called HCQ “the key to defeating CV-19,” claiming its use — particularly when administered with one of two antibiotics and the nutritional supplement zinc — has been “shown to be highly effective” in treating high-risk CV-19 patients.
On Tuesday, Risch went even further, charging in an interview with John Solomon’s Just the News that Fauci is perpetrating a “misinformation campaign” in his opposition to using the drug.
Fauci “has been maintaining a studious position that only randomized controlled trial evidence has any value,” Risch said, “and everything else he calls anecdotal.”
Quite a few randomized controlled trials have certainly suggested that hydroxychloroquine has little to no impact in treating CV-19.
One such study, the results of which had been published last month, utilized a “randomized, double-blind, placebo-controlled trial across the United States and parts of Canada” testing whether or not the drug might work as “postexposure prophylaxis.” Although “no serious adverse reactions were reported” by those taking the drug, hydroxychloroquine “did not prevent illness compatible with CV-19 or confirmed infection” when utilized in that method.
The conclusions would appear to dispute Risch’s claims that the drug is most effective at counteracting CV-19 when used early, though the researchers themselves acknowledged the significant limitations of their own study: Just 18 percent of people classified as CV-19 sufferers in the study actually confirmed that diagnosis with a laboratory test. And we know states have been lying about how many positive test cases have been counted. “Given the small number of PCR tests,” the researchers state at one point, “it remains theoretically possible that hydroxychloroquine therapy limits proven infection.”
Two other randomized controlled studies, one published in the medical journal BMJ in May and one conducted by the U.K.’s Nuffield Health System revealed that hydroxychloroquine use “did not result in a significantly higher probability of negative conversion than the standard of care alone” and that there was “no beneficial effect of hydroxychloroquine” in the studied patient populations.
Notably, each of these studies utilized patients who had been hospitalized for CV-19 reasonably than those at the earlier stages of the illness; according to Risch, the drug is less effective under those circumstances and should be given at the earliest point possible in the illness’s progression, outside of a hospital setting.
“All we want is to show benefit under those conditions,” Risch said. “We don’t need to use this medication in the hospital because the whole point is to keep patients out of the hospital.”
Rich is a conservative, syndicated opinion writer and owner of MAGA-Chat.com. He writes about politics, culture, liberty, and faith.
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