Censoring COVID Treatments
In his November 13, 2020, editorial, Kamran Abbasi, an executive editor for BMJ, spoke out about the suppression and politicization of science: “The pandemic has revealed how the medical-political complex can be manipulated in an emergency—a time when it is even more important to safeguard science.” A stunning example is the censorship of effective, early treatment for high-risk patients with COVID-19.
Peter McCullough, MD, MPH, has repeatedly spoken out against the suppression of early treatment guidelines that would reduce the need for hospitalization. Dr. McCullough is board-certified in internal medicine, a consultant cardiologist, and an internationally recognized authority on chronic kidney disease and cardiovascular risk. Over 500 citations in the National Library of Medicine bear his name. Dr. McCullough is also Vice Chief of Medicine at Baylor University Medical Center (Dallas, Texas), principal faculty for Texas A & M University Health Sciences Center, and editor for two medical journals.
During his March 10, 2021, testimony before the Texas Senate Committee on Health and Human Services, Dr. McCullough explained that, when the pandemic began, he started searching medical literature for treatments and began using approved drugs “off-label” to help his patients recover at home: “…I refused to let a patient languish at home with no treatment and then be hospitalized when it was too late.” He also reached out to doctors in Italy and in other parts of the US. Together, this team of doctors, led by McCullough, wrote a review article that outlined a multi-faceted, sequential treatment for outpatients infected with SARS-CoV-2; “Pathophysiological Basis and Rationale for Early Outpatient Treatment of SARS-CoV-2 (COVID-19) Infection” was published online on August 8, 2020, (ResearchGate) and later appeared in the American Journal of Medicine (in print). It was the only paper on early treatment among the 50,000 papers on COVID at the time. Because of overwhelming doctor and patient interest in the paper, Dr. McCullough created a YouTube presentation to let people know that early treatment for COVID was available. When the video went viral, YouTube removed it—because “you are violating the terms of our community.”
Senator Ron Johnson then invited Dr. McCullough to give sworn testimony at the US Senate Hearing on COVID-19 Outpatient Treatment (November 19, 2020). In his testimony, Dr. McCullough explained that public health agencies were focusing on just three of the four pillars of pandemic response: contagion control, hospitalization, and vaccination. The second pillar—early home treatment to prevent hospitalizations, and deaths—was being totally ignored by US government agencies and media. He asked that the government get information about early treatment to doctors.
At the March Texas hearing, Dr. McCullough pleaded with HHS “to start listing treatments and treatment centers in Texas where patients can get help.” He said people think COVID-19 is untreatable because standard-of-care provides no guidance for home care. “Multifaceted highly targeted sequential multidrug treatment of early ambulatory high-risk SARS-CoV-2 Infection [COVID-19],” a second review published by McCullough and 58 co-authors from around the world in Reviews in Cardiovascular Medicine (December 30, 2020), provides updated information on early treatment. This paper and the earlier review are the only papers in peer-reviewed literature that tell doctors how to treat COVID outpatients; and the home treatment guide, published by Association of American Physicians and Surgeons (aapsonline.org) is the only resource for patients. In his impassioned testimony, Dr. McCullough said:
How come we didn’t have a panel of doctors assigned to put all their efforts to stop these hospitalizations? Why don’t we have doctors who actually treated patients get together in a group and every week give us an update? …We have a complete and total blank spot on treatment. It is a blanking phenomenon….This is a complete and total travesty to have a fatal disease, and not treat it.
He pointed out that no government agency nor academic medical institution focused on treating patients before they became ill enough to require hospitalization. Why? He said:
What happened at around May, it became known that the virus was going to be amenable to a vaccine. All efforts on treatment were dropped. The National Institutes of Health actually had a multi-drug program. They dropped it after 20 patients. They said, ‘we can’t find the patients’. The most disingenuous announcement of all time. And then Warp Speed went full tilt for vaccine development, and there was a silencing of any information on treatment. Any. Silencing, Scrubbed from Twitter, YouTube. You can’t get papers published on this.
Dr. McCullough said COVID is treatable, even for high-risk patients, when multi-drug treatment is started early. Two large studies (one from McKinney, Texas, and one from New York City) show that when doctors treat high-risk patients (over 50 years old with medical problems) early, using a sequenced multi-drug approach, there’s as much as an 85% reduction in hospitalization and deaths.
Why hasn’t this made the evening news?
Abbasi K. Covid-19: politicization, “corruption,” and suppression of science. BMJ. 2020;371:m4425.
McCullough Testimony begins at 15:00 minutes. Senate Hearing on COVID Outpatient Treatment. November 19, 2020. https://www.c-span.org/video/?478159-1/senate-hearing-covid-19-outpatient-treatment&vod
Peter McCullough, MD Testifies to Texas Senate HHS Committee. March 11, 2021. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QAHi3lX3oGM
Spike Proteins and Vaccine Questions
Early in the COVID-19 pandemic, researchers reported that distinctive spike proteins on the surface of the SARS-CoV-2 virus attach onto healthy cells, leading to infection. New studies indicate that the spike protein itself causes endothelial damage. A research team from Salk Institute and the University of California San Diego found that exposure to spike proteins—without the virus—disrupted ACE2 molecular signaling to mitochondria, damaging the organelles. When the researchers exposed animals to spike proteins, inflammation and damage to the lungs and vascular system occurred. This research shows that COVID-19 is actually a cardiovascular disease, according to the authors. The study, “SARS-CoV-2 Spike Protein Impairs Endothelial Function via Downregulation of ACE2,” appears in Circulation Research (April 30, 2021). This is not the only study to show that the SARS-CoV-2 spike proteins cause an inflammatory response in endothelial cells.
In October 2020, Temple University researchers showed that spike proteins damage the endothelial cells that form the blood-brain barrier. They examined postmortem brain tissue from COVID victims and found that ACE2 was expressed throughout the vascular system in the frontal cortex and was upregulated in patients with hypertension and/or dementia. Further investigation on brain endothelial cells showed that a portion of the spike protein (subunit 1) damaged endothelial barrier function. The other portion (subunit 2), which does not bind to ACE2, could also harm the blood-brain barrier. The authors wrote: “…these results are the first to show the direct impact that the SARS-CoV-2 spike protein could have on brain endothelial cells; thereby offering a plausible explanation for the neurological consequences seen in COVID-19 patients.”
For months, the spike protein was viewed merely as the means by which the damaging SARS-CoV-2 virus entered cells; the protein’s damaging effects on endothelial cells was unrecognized. Some COVID-19 vaccines—Moderna, Pfizer, J&J, and AstraZeneca—cause the body to produce spike proteins in order to incite an immune response to the virus. The Salk Institute press release states that “the virus spike proteins…behave very differently than those safely encoded by vaccines.” But they did not provide a source for that statement, nor respond to my emailed request for one.
In his December 8, 2020, comment to US Food and Drug Administration on COVID-19 vaccines, Patrick Whelan, MD, PhD, wrote: “The Pfizer/BioNTech vaccine (BNT162b2) is composed of an mRNA that produces a membrane-anchored full-length spike protein. The mouse studies suggest that an untruncated form of the S1 protein like this may cause a microvasculopathy in tissues that express much ACE2 receptor. A truncated form of S1 was much less damaging in mice.” He suggested that those who received the injection in the safety studies be assessed with cardiac MRI; “Puntmann et al (JAMA Cardiol. 2020;5:1265-1273) showed that the prospective study of 100 German patients who were recently recovered from COVID-19 revealed significant cardiac involvement on cardiac MRI scans….” MRI scans could confirm or rule out similar involvement in people who received the vaccine.
During her three-minute public comment at CDC’s Advisory Committee on Immunization Practice meeting (April 23, 2021), molecular biologist and toxicologist Janci Chunn Lindsay, PhD, pointed out that all of the gene therapy vaccines—not just Johnson and Johnson’s—are causing coagulopathy: “There have been 796 reports related to blood clotting disorders as of April 9th in the VAERS reporting system, 338 of these being due to thrombocytopenia.” She refers to a study in which spike protein incubated with human blood in vitro caused blood clot development that resisted fibrinolysis. In another study, mice with humanized ACE-2 receptors on blood platelets developed disseminated thrombosis when exposed to spike protein.
She also questioned why manufacturers have not ruled out the possibility, raised by virologist Bill Gallaher, PhD, that the vaccines could induce cross-reactive antibodies to syncytin and reproductive proteins in sperm, ova, and placenta—impairing fertility and gestational outcomes: “…there have been reports of impaired spermatogenesis and placental findings from both the natural infection, vaccinated, and syncytin knockout animal models that have similar placental pathology, implicating a syncytin-mediated role in these outcomes.”
As of April 30, 2021, 240.2 million doses of gene therapy vaccines had been administered in the US. Between December 14, 2020, and April 30, 2021, the Vaccine Adverse Event Reporting System (vaers.hhs.gov) received 157,277 reports of adverse events after receiving COVID vaccination, including 3,837 deaths (21% cardiac related) and 16,014 serious injuries, including 1,597 cases of Bell’s palsy. As JoNel Aleccia at Kaiser Health News explains, VAERS is a voluntary, passive system that reflects only a portion of adverse events. CDC is supposed to investigate VAERS reports, looking at medical records and autopsy reports. Aleccia says the FDA “scaled back a program it used successfully to track adverse events during and after the 2009 H1N1 influenza pandemic, and the agency is still ramping up its replacement….” The program, Post-Licensure Rapid Immunization Safety Monitoring (PRISM) network, has been repurposed for drug safety and is not being used to track COVID-19 vaccines. A new system, Biologics Effectiveness and Safety System (BEST) monitors Medicare recipients for 15 pre-specified adverse events.
In an interview with investigative journalist Kristina Borjesson, Peter McCullough, MD, MPH, said there is something very wrong at the agency level when these injections are being recommended to pregnant women, those under 17 years old, and those who recovered from COVID-19 and have natural immunity; all of these populations were excluded from the original safety studies. He said that, normally, if 50-60 deaths occur within 30 days of receiving a drug, the drug is pulled. Meanwhile, thousands of deaths have been reported after receiving these vaccines, and agencies continue to push them for everyone. Dr. McCullough does recommend COVID vaccination for his high-risk patients who are unlikely to survive actual infection. However, he does not advocate vaccination for those who already had the infection or for people under 50—especially children, who have an extremely low risk of dying from the infection.
Borjesson K. Interview with Peter McCullough, MD. The Whistleblower Newsroom. April 16, 2021.
Buzhdygan TP, et al. The SARS-CoV-2 spike protein alters barrier function in 2D static and 3D microfluidic in-vitro models of the human blood-brain barrier. Neurobiology of Disease. 2020; 146:105131.
Margulis J. Halt Covid Vaccine, Prominent Scientist Tells CDC. April 29, 2021. Jennifermargulis.net.
Redshaw M. Reported Vaccine Injuries Continue to Climb, Pfizer Seeks Full Approval for COVID Vaccine. Children’s Health Defense. May 7, 2021.
Salk Institute. The Novel Coronavirus’ Spike Protein Plays an Additional Key Role in Illness (press release) April 30, 2021.
Temple University Health System. SARS-CoV-2 spike proteins disrupt the blood-brain barrier, new research shows (press release). October 29, 2020.
Whelan P. RE: Notice of Meeting; Establishment of a Public Docket; Request for Comments related to consideration of vaccines against SARS-CoV-2. December 8, 2020. Document ID: FDA-2020-N-1898-0246.
Downsides of Face Masks?
A 2021 BMJ Open systematic review, led by Mina Bakhit, looked at research on the downsides of face masks. For their review, the researchers screened 5471 articles and included 37 randomized controlled trials and observational studies that compared face mask use to any active intervention or to a control; 11 of the studies were meta-analyzed. “Most trials have focused on face masks protecting the wearer, rather than others in the community,” the authors wrote, “are often low powered, and include confounding factors resulting in the current evidence for the efficacy of face masks being less than adequate.”
The negative effects of mask use were not reported in most studies. Difficulty breathing, facial irritation or discomfort, headache, and warmth were among the adverse effects reported. Interference with communication and difficulty recognizing people were other problems. Mask contamination and misuse were also issues. Most of the studies were done in the hospital with healthcare workers; “…as hospital workers are accustomed to wearing masks, the conclusions may not be fully generalizable to the community.”
The authors say, “Any new research on face masks should assess and report the harms and downsides, including behavioural issues (ie, risk compensation behaviour) and the psychological impact of mandated face mask wear.”
Bakhit M, et al Downsides of face masks and possible mitigation strategies: a systematic review and meta-analysis. BMJ Open. 2021;11:e044364.
Jule Klotter
