I beg to differ about your stance that HCQ and Ivermectin are not effective drugs for Covid treatment.
Have you had a chance to look at the Senate Homeland Security Hearings for Early Covid Treatment back in November and December of 2020?
Since then Dr. George Fareed and Dr. Mike Tyson have written a book about their treatment success with Covid patients. The key component is Early Treatment.
Hard to find but Uttar Pradesh enlisted a rigorous program in conjunction with the WHO to fight Covid there. 70,000 health workers went door to door, village to village. They tested and handed out “first aid kits”. WHO acknowledges this. What they sadly failed to mention were the ingredients in the kits. Ivermectin, Doxycycline, Vitamin D, C, paracetamol, pulse oximeter, thermometer, masks.
A country with a population of 220,000,000 people with a 7% vaccination rate at the time eliminated Covid. FACT.
Mexico City early on used Ivermectin with great success for treating Covid. That program was discontinued.
The greatest crime by far during this pandemic has been the withholding, censorship, disparagement of safe generic drugs for early Covid treatment.
Which has resulted in untold thousands of needless deaths.
Vinay, good job on this. I think it would be great for you to have RFK Jr on your podcast and give him an opportunity to explain himself on the topic of vaccines and early treatments.
The problem is not "does early treatment work"? This argument is likely to go on and on (just like masks). It's hard to refute "You didn't use the intervention properly".
The issue here is that regulatory agencies took the licence away from doctors who wanted to try and see if early intervention with these drugs could help. I don't know of any other circumstance this occurred.
Certainly their argument that early treatment might discourage people from accepting vaccines is a straw man. Vaccines don't prevent you giving someone else the virus or stop you getting it. They might reduce the severity of your illness (but then again might make you very sick).
There was no need to punish doctors for trying early treatment (unless your motive was to maximise pharma profits)
I'd like to challenge you on your claims regarding HCQ and ivermectin. There has been a great deal of fraud in the analysis of these two drugs for COVID. I imagine this is hard to believe, but perhaps after all the false claims and illogical public health measures taken during the pandemic, you can have an open mind regarding what I have to say.
Three of the largest HCQ clinical trials were designed to fail. Together, the 3 trials gave HCQ to 2,549 hospitalized patients, who were nearly half of all those entered in late treatment trials of HCQ. These were the Solidarity, Recovery, and REMAP (Higgins et al.) trials. Using death as the endpoint, all 3 had considerably higher death rates in the HCQ group than in the standard care group.
Why was this? Because the patients were given excessive, dangerous doses of HCQ, doses that have never been considered therapeutic for any condition. Interestingly, all 3 trials cited above used the identical HCQ doses and dosing schedule.
The dose was 800 mg at T=0, then 400 mg each at 6, 12, and 18 hours, then 400 mg every 12 hours for a total 10 days of treatment.
Please look up this dose and see if you think it was safe, particularly when all the REMAP patients were in the ICU, and there was no dosage adjustment for weight or comorbidities.
In case you still are unconvinced, a study in Brazil of excessive doses of chloroquine (CQ) by Borba et al. quickly revealed it was killing patients, and the trial of high dose CQ had to be ended prematurely, as detailed in the JAMA:
Question: How safe and effective are 2 different regimens of chloroquine diphosphate in the treatment of severe coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19)?
Findings: In this phase IIb randomized clinical trial of 81 patients with COVID-19, an unplanned interim analysis recommended by an independent data safety and monitoring board found that a higher dosage of chloroquine diphosphate for 10 days was associated with more toxic effects and lethality, particularly affecting QTc interval prolongation. The limited sample size did not allow the study to show any benefit overall regarding treatment efficacy.
Meaning: The preliminary findings from the CloroCovid-19 trial suggest that higher dosage of chloroquine should not be recommended for the treatment of severe COVID-19, especially among patients also receiving azithromycin and oseltamivir, because of safety concerns regarding QTc interval prolongation and increased lethality.
When you remove these 3 HCQ trials from a meta-analysis of HCQ (+/- CQ) you find the medication was very beneficial. Leaving them in, still some meta-analyses find efficacy. Here is another meta-analysis of HCQ RCTs:
While no ivermectin trials overdosed patients, there were a number of suspicious issues with the COVID ivermectin studies. A meta-analysis by Andrew Hill had its conclusions adjusted shortly before publication. This was detailed in part by Dr. Tess Lawrie and discussed in my book, “The Real Anthony Fauci.” Phil Harper did a deeper forensic dive later and identified other people who participated in changing the paper's conclusions.
There were many serious questions raised about the conduct of the Together trial, the Lopez-Medina trial, and others. There is so much more to this story, and I would be happy to share more information, or put you in touch with other doctors who have written about the frauds in detail. Finally, here is another meta-analysis for ivermectin:
Vinay, Thank you for your courage to engage with RFK Jr. As a 27 year practicing medical professional, Licensed Acupuncturist, I have seen numerous injuries to children from medical interventions. Our local community has a robust group of Doctors, Nurse Practitioners, Chiros and Acupuncturists who also have experienced the clinical reality of what the Children’s Health Defense has documented (https://childrenshealthdefense.org) It’s long overdue for the medical research establishment to address the very serious childhood medical issues related to big Pharma, Big Ag, Big Oil, etc that are exposed by the Children’s Health Defense. Bobby Jr. might be the founder and frontman of the group, but there are numerous experts who do the research. This is not a fringe group, it is a very legitimate medical/environmental organization. I would request that you engage directly with Bobby Jr and have a proper debate. I think you will find a lot of common ground that could help mainstream medicine protect children.
The problem with the RCT’s is they can be designed to fail, which is what I think might have happened in Ivermectin’s case. Big Pharma absolutely didn’t want there to be any treatments so they could sell their vaccines with an EUA. Big Government wanted a crisis without any other solution than harsh lockdowns so they could inflict more authoritarianism.
The trials on hydroxychloroquin (HQ) were mainly tested in hospitalized patients, at which point there is little live virus left in the body, and the damage is done, and death caused, by the inflammatory effects of massive numbers of dead viruses.
But since HQ is effective early in the disease by preventing viral replication in the cells of the body, testing this drug on hospitalized patients is too late. The CDC also tested mainly hospitalized patients, which is why the CDC also claimed HQ had no effect. I would like to see proper testing of HQ early in the disease, which would also have been the time that many third world doctors or doctors in other countries early in the pandemic (when there were no drugs known to help) were trying anything they thought would help their patients, and thus had good results.
Covid vacciation of the young may have been harmful, but in absolute terms, it only affected a small number of young people adversely. Moreover, that is history. A politician needs to focus on the issues of the future that affect a large number of people. That is why he is focusing on childhood vaccination--a topic dear to his heart as he is the founder of Children's Health Defense.
Excellent Vinay! You are one of the few I can count on to give a reasoned, knowledgeable opinion and show your sources. So I have 3 daughters and 2 were forced to have the jab and both had reactions. One had 6 months of joint pain and her cycle was thrown way off and very different. Where are the RCT's on young women? She had already been fully exposed to Covid and then got it bad after the shot and had to go to the emergency room due to trouble breathing. Luckily was OK. Also, I still don't understand the extremely strong reaction at first to using HCQ and Ivermectin when we had so few options. Even from you and ZDogg, when these drug profiles were so well known compared to Remdesivir.
Dr. Prasad. I hope you wade into the autism epidemic. As I understand, this is now up to about 1 kid in 60, which makes it a high priority for public health. How many hypotheses have been tested with RCT's The autism epidemic is what got RFK involved with vaccines.
RFK's correlation of the number of approved vaccines with the rise in autism is undeniable. Whether the two are linked is another matter. There are tens of thousands of parents who link vaccines in toddlers to autism simply because the autism in their kids arrived just after they vaccinated. It is very hard to prove this though. I am told the studies showing no links are not good but I have never actually seen them.
Dear Doc, I’m glad you’ve got RFK Jr on your radar! He’s a man that could clean up our broken FDA and our broken CDC if elected into office. It’s a long shot but someone has to advocate for better policies from the outside, in order to clean up the inside of these broken federal systems.
Dr Prasad, as a paying subscriber, I would love to see you interview RFK Jr because I think you misrepresented his views on vaccines and ivermectin. I also think lockdowns were an absolute failure (so too does Dr Bhattacharya).
I beg to differ about your stance that HCQ and Ivermectin are not effective drugs for Covid treatment.
Have you had a chance to look at the Senate Homeland Security Hearings for Early Covid Treatment back in November and December of 2020?
Since then Dr. George Fareed and Dr. Mike Tyson have written a book about their treatment success with Covid patients. The key component is Early Treatment.
Hard to find but Uttar Pradesh enlisted a rigorous program in conjunction with the WHO to fight Covid there. 70,000 health workers went door to door, village to village. They tested and handed out “first aid kits”. WHO acknowledges this. What they sadly failed to mention were the ingredients in the kits. Ivermectin, Doxycycline, Vitamin D, C, paracetamol, pulse oximeter, thermometer, masks.
A country with a population of 220,000,000 people with a 7% vaccination rate at the time eliminated Covid. FACT.
Mexico City early on used Ivermectin with great success for treating Covid. That program was discontinued.
The greatest crime by far during this pandemic has been the withholding, censorship, disparagement of safe generic drugs for early Covid treatment.
Which has resulted in untold thousands of needless deaths.
Vinay, good job on this. I think it would be great for you to have RFK Jr on your podcast and give him an opportunity to explain himself on the topic of vaccines and early treatments.
You would probably get a little more context of his position if you watched this speech. https://open.substack.com/pub/robertfkennedyjr/p/rfk-jr-new-hampshire-institute-politics-speech
Also, there’s more detail in his book as well.
Thanks again for your sensible content.
One claim he makes in his longer books (eg on Fauci) is that most FDA licensed vaccines are never tested against an inert placebo. Wait - what?
I found this shocking. How can you assess a product unless it’s against an actual placebo?
Far as I have researched, however, he seems correct. RCTs for vaccines typically assess vs “placebo” that is in fact another vaccine.
If correct, that’s not sound EBM.
The problem is not "does early treatment work"? This argument is likely to go on and on (just like masks). It's hard to refute "You didn't use the intervention properly".
The issue here is that regulatory agencies took the licence away from doctors who wanted to try and see if early intervention with these drugs could help. I don't know of any other circumstance this occurred.
Certainly their argument that early treatment might discourage people from accepting vaccines is a straw man. Vaccines don't prevent you giving someone else the virus or stop you getting it. They might reduce the severity of your illness (but then again might make you very sick).
There was no need to punish doctors for trying early treatment (unless your motive was to maximise pharma profits)
May 8, 2023
Dear Vinay,
I'd like to challenge you on your claims regarding HCQ and ivermectin. There has been a great deal of fraud in the analysis of these two drugs for COVID. I imagine this is hard to believe, but perhaps after all the false claims and illogical public health measures taken during the pandemic, you can have an open mind regarding what I have to say.
Three of the largest HCQ clinical trials were designed to fail. Together, the 3 trials gave HCQ to 2,549 hospitalized patients, who were nearly half of all those entered in late treatment trials of HCQ. These were the Solidarity, Recovery, and REMAP (Higgins et al.) trials. Using death as the endpoint, all 3 had considerably higher death rates in the HCQ group than in the standard care group.
Why was this? Because the patients were given excessive, dangerous doses of HCQ, doses that have never been considered therapeutic for any condition. Interestingly, all 3 trials cited above used the identical HCQ doses and dosing schedule.
The dose was 800 mg at T=0, then 400 mg each at 6, 12, and 18 hours, then 400 mg every 12 hours for a total 10 days of treatment.
Please look up this dose and see if you think it was safe, particularly when all the REMAP patients were in the ICU, and there was no dosage adjustment for weight or comorbidities.
In case you still are unconvinced, a study in Brazil of excessive doses of chloroquine (CQ) by Borba et al. quickly revealed it was killing patients, and the trial of high dose CQ had to be ended prematurely, as detailed in the JAMA:
https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jamanetworkopen/fullarticle/2765499
Question: How safe and effective are 2 different regimens of chloroquine diphosphate in the treatment of severe coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19)?
Findings: In this phase IIb randomized clinical trial of 81 patients with COVID-19, an unplanned interim analysis recommended by an independent data safety and monitoring board found that a higher dosage of chloroquine diphosphate for 10 days was associated with more toxic effects and lethality, particularly affecting QTc interval prolongation. The limited sample size did not allow the study to show any benefit overall regarding treatment efficacy.
Meaning: The preliminary findings from the CloroCovid-19 trial suggest that higher dosage of chloroquine should not be recommended for the treatment of severe COVID-19, especially among patients also receiving azithromycin and oseltamivir, because of safety concerns regarding QTc interval prolongation and increased lethality.
When you remove these 3 HCQ trials from a meta-analysis of HCQ (+/- CQ) you find the medication was very beneficial. Leaving them in, still some meta-analyses find efficacy. Here is another meta-analysis of HCQ RCTs:
https://c19hcq.org/meta.html#fig_fpr
While no ivermectin trials overdosed patients, there were a number of suspicious issues with the COVID ivermectin studies. A meta-analysis by Andrew Hill had its conclusions adjusted shortly before publication. This was detailed in part by Dr. Tess Lawrie and discussed in my book, “The Real Anthony Fauci.” Phil Harper did a deeper forensic dive later and identified other people who participated in changing the paper's conclusions.
There were many serious questions raised about the conduct of the Together trial, the Lopez-Medina trial, and others. There is so much more to this story, and I would be happy to share more information, or put you in touch with other doctors who have written about the frauds in detail. Finally, here is another meta-analysis for ivermectin:
https://c19ivm.org/meta.html#fig_fpr
Best wishes,
RFK, Jr.
Vinay, Thank you for your courage to engage with RFK Jr. As a 27 year practicing medical professional, Licensed Acupuncturist, I have seen numerous injuries to children from medical interventions. Our local community has a robust group of Doctors, Nurse Practitioners, Chiros and Acupuncturists who also have experienced the clinical reality of what the Children’s Health Defense has documented (https://childrenshealthdefense.org) It’s long overdue for the medical research establishment to address the very serious childhood medical issues related to big Pharma, Big Ag, Big Oil, etc that are exposed by the Children’s Health Defense. Bobby Jr. might be the founder and frontman of the group, but there are numerous experts who do the research. This is not a fringe group, it is a very legitimate medical/environmental organization. I would request that you engage directly with Bobby Jr and have a proper debate. I think you will find a lot of common ground that could help mainstream medicine protect children.
The problem with the RCT’s is they can be designed to fail, which is what I think might have happened in Ivermectin’s case. Big Pharma absolutely didn’t want there to be any treatments so they could sell their vaccines with an EUA. Big Government wanted a crisis without any other solution than harsh lockdowns so they could inflict more authoritarianism.
The trials on hydroxychloroquin (HQ) were mainly tested in hospitalized patients, at which point there is little live virus left in the body, and the damage is done, and death caused, by the inflammatory effects of massive numbers of dead viruses.
But since HQ is effective early in the disease by preventing viral replication in the cells of the body, testing this drug on hospitalized patients is too late. The CDC also tested mainly hospitalized patients, which is why the CDC also claimed HQ had no effect. I would like to see proper testing of HQ early in the disease, which would also have been the time that many third world doctors or doctors in other countries early in the pandemic (when there were no drugs known to help) were trying anything they thought would help their patients, and thus had good results.
You conveniently ignored the more persuasive arguments he made about the likely issues with the DTP vaccine: https://twitter.com/AbAnand9/status/1654954063014838274?t=eHv1NhrnCPHW4Lp-7lW1yw&s=19
The onus is on the vaccine mandaters to do a 5+ year RCT (e.g. DTP vs DT or TT if not saline) to prove safety as he argued correctly
Covid vacciation of the young may have been harmful, but in absolute terms, it only affected a small number of young people adversely. Moreover, that is history. A politician needs to focus on the issues of the future that affect a large number of people. That is why he is focusing on childhood vaccination--a topic dear to his heart as he is the founder of Children's Health Defense.
Excellent Vinay! You are one of the few I can count on to give a reasoned, knowledgeable opinion and show your sources. So I have 3 daughters and 2 were forced to have the jab and both had reactions. One had 6 months of joint pain and her cycle was thrown way off and very different. Where are the RCT's on young women? She had already been fully exposed to Covid and then got it bad after the shot and had to go to the emergency room due to trouble breathing. Luckily was OK. Also, I still don't understand the extremely strong reaction at first to using HCQ and Ivermectin when we had so few options. Even from you and ZDogg, when these drug profiles were so well known compared to Remdesivir.
Dr. Prasad. I hope you wade into the autism epidemic. As I understand, this is now up to about 1 kid in 60, which makes it a high priority for public health. How many hypotheses have been tested with RCT's The autism epidemic is what got RFK involved with vaccines.
RFK's correlation of the number of approved vaccines with the rise in autism is undeniable. Whether the two are linked is another matter. There are tens of thousands of parents who link vaccines in toddlers to autism simply because the autism in their kids arrived just after they vaccinated. It is very hard to prove this though. I am told the studies showing no links are not good but I have never actually seen them.
Dear Doc, I’m glad you’ve got RFK Jr on your radar! He’s a man that could clean up our broken FDA and our broken CDC if elected into office. It’s a long shot but someone has to advocate for better policies from the outside, in order to clean up the inside of these broken federal systems.
I am hoping you will respond to RFK Jr.'s response to you. It would be a shame if you didn't. Great dialog!
Dr Prasad, as a paying subscriber, I would love to see you interview RFK Jr because I think you misrepresented his views on vaccines and ivermectin. I also think lockdowns were an absolute failure (so too does Dr Bhattacharya).