One Point for my Specialty, Finally:
Why am I the “doc of last resort?” All of us ER docs are. Where do you go when no one else wants to see you for your medical issue? So there’s that.
And I do have a certain amount of pride in my specialty and the docs who practice it. Sometimes, life-saving decisions must be made in an instant, agitated patients must be soothed, and we must strike a balance between speed, competence, compassion and results. It’s not easy work and the large majority who do this work are truly caring and trying to do what’s best for the patients that they serve.
Still, over the last years, there has been much to be ashamed of in the profession which followed sheep-like the dictates of administrators and academics and agencies who had agendas other than the well-being of Covid patients. Even when they knew better … or at the very least, should have known.
And yes, perhaps it is years too late, but at least this respected and much read (within the specialty) ‘throw-away journal,’ Emergency Medicine News, allowed for a scathing review of Paxlovid to filter through and land in a prominent location in the journal: Now for Something Completely Different: Paxlovid for Long COVID. I will summarize/excerpt it for you. The original can be found here: Now for Something Completely Different: Paxlovid for Long COVID The original has many citations backing up its claims, which I am not repeating here for brevity.
I will note that I first wrote about this drug in January of 2022. At the time it was being pushed as a great drug for COVID. Here’s what I said back then, in part: The drug was released for use by the FDA without any transparency as to how they came to find it effective. The drug is a combination of nirmatrelvir and ritonavir. Ritonavir comes with a “black box warning” because of its potential for severe side effects, but without that component, the nirmatrelvir doesn’t achieve concentrations sufficient to work. Although touted as being highly effective for COVID, that was never demonstrated satisfactorily and the list of contraindications is long.
That was then. But now, finally, Dr. Matt Bivens writes more on this drug and COVID in EM News. He says: “We know two things about the antiviral elixir Paxlovid: it makes everything taste terrible … It is rapaciously priced: five times more expensive per gram than gold. Pfizer used to sell a five-day course for $530, but that was the pandemic special. Now it’s $1390.”
“The New York Times recently described Paxlovid as “stunningly effective in preventing severe illness and death,” and suggested that not embracing it continues to result in thousands of avoidable deaths. … America’s leading newspaper cited as evidence an observational study in which getting Paxlovid was associated with fewer deaths. … A more cautious review by the Cochrane collaborative found that the antivirals nirmatrelvir and ritonavir “may” prevent deaths and hospitalizations based on low certainty evidence…
That lukewarm verdict was good news for Pfizer’s marketing department. Less good was a small study … to investigate the rebound phenomenon - when COVID-19 … returns for an encore - and found that a whopping 20.8 percent of those treated with Paxlovid rebounded …”
“So far, the only randomized trial evidence that Paxlovid is “stunningly effective” … or “lifesaving” (CDC) comes from one study, EPIC-HR … That landmark publication was Pfizer-run, start to finish, an appalling conflict of interest. Pfizer would go on to sell $18.9 billion worth of Paxlovid that year.
EPIC-HR enrolled 2246 unvaccinated, high-risk, coronavirus-naive patients who started Paxlovid or placebo within five days, but then, without explanation, only analyzed those treated within three days. Paxlovid reduced hospitalizations felt to be caused by COVID-19, a troublingly subjective concept, and reduced mortality by 1.3 percent.”
Dr. Bivens goes on to say that we don’t only have this single iffy study from Pfizer. We have others. Several were backed by Pfizer but somehow never were published. They went “radio silent.”
He says: “For those keeping score, that’s one positive study, EPIC-HR against at least 17 other studies that were negative … , ongoing, or in limbo at Pfizer.
Long ago we adopted a p value of 0.05 by convention because we decided we would not be led astray if there was only a one in 20 probability that a treatment effect we saw was happening at random. But it would be irrational of a pharmaceutical company not to lead us astray when there are billions of dollars in play.
All they have to do is fund 20 studies, keep quiet about 19 of them, and trumpet the 20th in a New England Journal article and use it (along with a never-ending churn of low-quality observational data) to hammer away at The New York Times health reporter until she goes national and asks why doctors in 2024 aren’t moving more product. …
It’s as if we have learned nothing from the Tamiflu debacle. Governments were being lobbied 15 years ago to stockpile oseltamivir [Tamiflu] for pandemic preparedness. Cochrane reviewers gave the drug a cautious thumbs-up and then realized they had been duped. Most of the data on this antiviral were hiding in files at the pharmaceutical company Roche, never to be published. And this was all perfectly legal.
Cochrane launched a years-long campaign to drag additional data about Tamiflu into the public domain, exposing in the process how corrupted and broken the evidence-based medicine project had become. It’s thanks to Cochrane that we now know Tamiflu doesn’t really prevent hospitalizations or complications, but certainly does increase vomiting, diarrhea and psychiatric symptoms …
Of course, many years and many billions of dollars later, oseltamivir is still stockpiled by governments … and still recommended by the CDC. … Bureaucracies don’t have much incentive to announce it was all a screwup once they have sunk billions of your dollars into a project.
But never mind. Now there’s an exciting new indication for Paxlovid: to prevent long COVID. Yes, a medication reliably known to prolong COVID illness is now touted to prevent a prolonged COVID illness.
Two large observational studies, including one of 9500 veterans, found no signal that Paxlovid might prevent long COVID… A third found that 11.8 percent of two million Medicare patients treated with Paxlovid developed symptoms suggestive of long COVID compared with 14.5 percent among those not treated …
Do 14.5 percent of your patients develop long COVID? (Wouldn’t the economy collapse?)
Another study focused on a mere 13 people, each of whom decided that they had or might get long COVID, and put themselves on extra Paxlovid, in some cases, for up to 30 days (That’s like $8000!)
“Some experienced a meaningful reduction in symptoms, although not all benefits persisted; others experienced no effect,” the authors wrote (15 authors on a 13-patient study).
By the way, they concluded Paxlovid for long COVID merits “ongoing study.” …”
My takeaways: I would only add to this indictment, that we have seen over and over again where the very agencies tasked with protecting Americans from rapacious drug companies have themselves become rapacious co-conspirators with big pharma. And we get duped over and over again.
Dr. Bivens notes the trick of running many studies and then only publishing the single study that came out favorably. Add to that - misrepresenting studies to claim that they show more than they actually do. Another trick is deleting patients that didn’t behave like they were supposed to (they got sick but it was blamed on anything but the drug they took). Other tricks include delaying reporting of deaths, only looking at a piece of the study’s timeline to cherry-pick the only period that looked favorable, and so on.
How much money buys the FDA, the CDC and the NIH? Well we know that Moderna recently distributed about $400 million to these agencies and individuals therein. But when FOIA’d, they simply refuse to comply with divulging the details (probably because they have nothing to hide; right?). Epoch Times FOIA Ignored
Your tax money pays for the research by NIH and their partners in academia and elsewhere
Some is illegally diverted to go for gain-of-function studies overseas and at home
Your money went to create the frankenvirus that later killed some of you
Those entrusted with your money lied about it
Next they licensed the knowledge that you paid for to pharma so that “vaccines” and antivirals could be created
Your tax dollars paid for all of this and yet pharma is who made billions off of it … by selling it right back to you
Excess profits went not to the taxpayer who footed the bill for the research, but to shareholders and to our governmental agencies that extracted this from you … including to individuals who are not required (and refuse) to divulge how much money they made in the process
But you get the privilege of paying again through your insurance or cash or taxation … even if you don’t want the ‘vaccine’ or the drugs
At least if it saved your life … but alas, the studies were bogus too. The final products are often more damaging to you than they are to the virus
And finally, you are coerced and cajoled through mandates or media hype to take these drugs. Media (like the New York Times) is being bought through massive pharma spends on ‘advertising’
Fortunately, it’s only the ‘house of medicine’ that is corrupt. Government is strictly on the up-and-up in all other areas. Haha. Kidding of course. These same tactics are used to get military contracts, to rig elections, to create panic that the world will boil itself to death if we don’t surrender our autonomy and allow “experts” to dictate how we live. And on and on.
It will take a lot of effort from many brave folks to push back and reverse all of the nonsense that is plaguing every aspect of society. There is a war on our freedoms and we are currently losing. Many are still calling loudly for government to intervene even more, to please give us socialism. They are obviously totally missing the irony in their request.
Meanwhile increasing numbers of us are waking up to the enormity of it all, albeit slowly. Figure out who has been lying to you to date. Those sources are guaranteed to be run by monied interests. Don’t believe them on anything. Find sources that have been accurate in the past and return to them for reliable reporting. Be especially suspicious of any who call themselves fact-checkers or disinformation specialists. They are busy whitewashing and covering up for the rich and powerful. At least once you have identified the liars, you can be pretty certain that you should believe the opposite of what they tell you.
I should mention that now that Covid isn’t frightening people as much and isn’t as deadly as it once was, Paxlovid sales are way down. But the billions have been made already. It must be OK to now throw out a ‘limited hangout’ and admit its failings - since there is no more money to be made peddling that lousy product. So this month the New England Journal of Medicine brought out an article Nirmatrelvir for Vaccinated or Unvaccinated Adult Outpatients with Covid-19 | New England Journal of Medicine that admits that the drug really doesn’t work. I guess they are trying to re-establish their credibility. Don’t fall for it. They are from ‘team-misinformation.’ Follow the money.
In health,
DocofLastResort
Peter McCullough just added Tamiflu to the TWC "Contagion" Fear Kit
https://geoffpain.substack.com/p/fear-campaign-by-coulson-twc-now
Peter McCullough actively promotes Paxlovid in his Covid19 Protocol