NRO.

We identified only a single outbreak in an outdoor environment, which involved two cases. The first salient feature of the 318 identified outbreaks that involved three or more cases is that they all occurred in indoor environments. Although this finding was expected, its significance has not been well recognised by the community and by policy makers. Indoors is where our lives and work are in modern civilisation. The transmission of respiratory infections such as SARS-CoV-2 from the infected to the susceptible is an indoor phenomenon.

And yet governors across the country are closing parks.

The CDC failed to ensure enough PPEs were available for a pandemic.  The CDC failed to develop good models for things just like this.  The CDC failed to “war game” such an outbreak.  The CDC failed to tell the truth about all of this for many months.

The CDC continues to give false information and bad recommendations to the public.  The CDC cannot even keep the models up-to-date and correct.  The CDC begged for more money to study racism and “gun violence.”  The CDC failed to shut down experimentation on this very bug at UNC, Harvard, and in Canada, and failed to warn others about what was happening.  The CDC fails to incorporate consideration for a completely failed economy in their calculus and its cost to human lives.

The CDC cannot agree on a therapeutic, even though they recommended the very thing for treatment that’s working now, Hydroxychloroquine, back in 2005, and are now denying that this very therapeutic works.  The CDC continues to be an impediment to progress on this, not a catalyst for success.

Because the CDC is full of ne’er-do-wells, morons, rubes, hicks, rednecks, idiots and awful people.

So when I went on this rant with my daughter this afternoon, she responded: “Well, you keep calling them idiots, and I think you’re ignoring the fact that this could be the result of intentional and nefarious behavior on their part.”

That’s my daughter.  Good girl.  The apple doesn’t fall far from the tree.

At a recent post by Glenn Reynolds, one commenter wrote “I suspect when the history of this virus is written this is going to be one of the very ugly chapters – the resistance to using the HCQ drug cocktail early in the process. The number of lives it would have saved will be staggering.”  Another commenter wrote “As most know, the media/Democrat politicians/FDA want the use of the hydroxychloroquine/azithromycin/zinc combination to be restricted until late in the course of the infection, when the patient’s infection is well-advanced.  As a physician, this baffles me.  I can’t think of a single infectious condition — bacterial, fungal, or viral — where the best medical treatment is to delay the use of a anti-bacterial, anti-fungal, or anti-viral until the infection is far advanced.”

There is much more at the link.  The comments are well worth the time to study them.  Indeed, the chapter on this will be ugly, and will likely end in lawsuits, political consequences, and unnecessary deaths.  I’ve had email exchanges with trusted readers on this issue, medical professionals, who are concerned about side effects for certain morbidity indicators.  True enough, any medication must be administered by qualified personnel, but we know enough now to understand that it is a safe drug, and effective for the purpose of prophylaxis in this case.

Here are some of the links I’ve supplied on this.

Why Hydroxychloroquine Works

Another Win For Hydroxychloroquine

The Effectiveness Of Hydroxychloroquine: A Note To Dr. Zack Moore

The FDA Death Toll And Use Of Off-Label Medications

Promise In The War Against Covid-19

There is more.

Doctors Urge Earlier Use of Hydroxychloroquine

Henry Ford uses hydroxychloroquine to treat COVID-19 symptoms, says benefits outweigh risks

There is actually much more than that, but you get the point.  There is copious evidence of its effectiveness and relative safety.  My daughter (surgical and ER NP) told me this long ago.  There are certainly side effects for all medications, but of the many she has had to prescribe, this one is way down on the list of medications of concern.

But the bureaucracy still resists?  Is there no prior evidence of its effectiveness and safety?  Why yes, there is.

Chloroquine, a relatively safe, effective and cheap drug used for treating many human diseases including malaria, amoebiosis and human immunodeficiency virus is effective in inhibiting the infection and spread of SARS CoV in cell culture. The fact that the drug has significant inhibitory antiviral effect when the susceptible cells were treated either prior to or after infection suggests a possible prophylactic and therapeutic use.

This is a conclusion statement by a NIH study on Coronavirus (Covid-19 is SARs, Bat-SARs + some proteins that mimic HIV).  This study, entitled “Chloroquine is a potent inhibitor of SARS coronavirus infection and spread,” was completed and published on August 22, 2005, a study of which Dr. Fauci is certainly aware.

The truth about this effective and safe medication is far more sinister.  For political reasons, the administrative state is opposing the very prophylaxis they recommended in 2005 for this disease.

The same bureaucracy is still selling the snake oil that this virus is zoonotic.  The two videos below show, based on both genetic analysis and paper trail, this virus has an extremely low probability of being zoonotic.  This virus has been studied at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, in Canada, Harvard, and at the Wuhan institute.  Actual biological material was stolen from the study in Canada, and the Obama administration actually stopped the funding for the study (apparently too late) when they saw the supercharging of the SARs virus that the researchers were pursuing – with the same visiting collaborating Chinese researcher in all instances.

The oath to “First, do no harm” apparently means little to nothing when it comes to the comparison of hatred for Mr. Trump.  That oath will mean much more when they enter eternity.

Update: Welcome to Instapundit readers (thanks to Glenn for the link), and welcome again to WRSA readers.  To readers, I appreciate your patronage.

https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Herschel_Smith

I’ve said before that the CDC had one job, to anticipate, study, prepare for and respond in the case of infectious disease.   They … had … one … job.  So did the FDA.  They failed, and miserably so.

Unless … they don’t really consider that their job at all.  Perhaps they have a different one.  Via Bill Buppert.

“The CDC does not have a solution, but it also becomes the classic blocker to progress. Labs cannot act without a lengthy approval process from CDC and the Food and Drug Administration (FDA). These government controls violate the principle of subsidiarity (that problems should be solved at the lowest level possible). Ultimately care is provided by local hospitals, care facilities, and labs.

South Korea’s rapid testing allowed for early treatment and containment of the virus. These test kits were created in three weeks. Many labs in the US could have solved the test kit problem but were restrained by the FDA and CDC. The South Koreans offered to help us, but was the CDC listening? Evidently not.”

The monkeys in Philadelphia dragged a man off a bus for not wearing a mask.  The monkeys in Colorado arrested a man for playing with his daughter on a playground in an empty park.  The governor in Michigan prohibited – by executive order – people from visiting others in the state or travelling from one place to another.  She also banned landscaping and the purchase of garden seeds.  Kentucky on Easter means monkeys going from car to car logging license plate number of congregants who went to church, unless a federal court has something to say about it.  In the Northwest, the farmers are throwing milk onto the ground because there are no containers to ship it.

A survey shows that an overwhelming majority of doctors would prescribe Hydroxychloroquine to a family member with wuhan coronavirus, but Dr. Zack Moore, chief epidemiologist of N.C., won’t approve it for the state.  The Nevada governor won’t approve the drug for use, but was found hoarding the drug.  The regulations that stymied Trump’s response to Coronavirus are multitudinous, but of course, that’s what bureaucracies do.

And as the economy is about to collapse, most people are scared stiff to do anything but stay home and watch horrible movies on television, waiting for the vaccine to come out from the high priests of science.

As I posed at the beginning, what if it wasn’t really the job of the CDC after all to prepare America for a pandemic?  What if it’s not really the job of the FDA after all to protect the safety and health of the public?

So is everyone who does business with and enables them.  Priests of science in robes, they are, worshiping themselves.

This article, written at Medium but taken down and thus only on archive, comes to us via reader JJ.

Your red blood cells carry oxygen from your lungs to all your organs and the rest of your body. Red blood cells can do this thanks to hemoglobin, which is a protein consisting of four “hemes”. Hemes have a special kind of iron ion, which is normally quite toxic in its free form, locked away in its center with a porphyrin acting as it’s ‘container’. In this way, the iron ion can be ‘caged’ and carried around safely by the hemoglobin, but used to bind to oxygen when it gets to your lungs.

When the red blood cell gets to the alveoli, or the little sacs in your lungs where all the gas exchange happens, that special little iron ion can flip between FE2+ and FE3+ states with electron exchange and bond to some oxygen, then it goes off on its little merry way to deliver o2 elsewhere.

Here’s where COVID-19 comes in. Its glycoproteins bond to the heme, and in doing so that special and toxic oxidative iron ion is “disassociated” (released). It’s basically let out of the cage and now freely roaming around on its own. This is bad for two reasons:

Editorial comment: This is not exactly like, but similar to carboxyhemoglobin, where carbon dioxide binds to your hemoglobin, staying there unless you’re put inside a hyperbaric chamber, and thus preventing oxygen, O2, from binding to your hemoglobin.

1) Without the iron ion, hemoglobin can no longer bind to oxygen. Once all the hemoglobin is impaired, the red blood cell is essentially turned into a Freightliner truck cab with no trailer and no ability to store its cargo.. it is useless and just running around with COVID-19 virus attached to its porphyrin. All these useless trucks running around not delivering oxygen is what starts to lead to desaturation, or watching the patient’s spo2 levels drop. It is INCORRECT to assume traditional ARDS and in doing so, you’re treating the WRONG DISEASE. Think of it a lot like carbon monoxide poisoning, in which CO is bound to the hemoglobin, making it unable to carry oxygen. In those cases, ventilators aren’t treating the root cause; the patient’s lungs aren’t ‘tiring out’, they’re pumping just fine. The red blood cells just can’t carry o2, end of story. Only in this case, unlike CO poisoning in which eventually the CO can break off, the affected hemoglobin is permanently stripped of its ability to carry o2 because it has lost its iron ion. The body compensates for this lack of o2 carrying capacity and deliveries by having your kidneys release hormones like erythropoietin, which tell your bone marrow factories to ramp up production on new red blood cells with freshly made and fully functioning hemoglobin. This is the reason you find elevated hemoglobin and decreased blood oxygen saturation as one of the 3 primary indicators of whether the shit is about to hit the fan for a particular patient or not.

2) That little iron ion, along with millions of its friends released from other hemes, are now floating through your blood freely. As I mentioned before, this type of iron ion is highly reactive and causes oxidative damage. It turns out that this happens to a limited extent naturally in our bodies and we have cleanup & defense mechanisms to keep the balance. The lungs, in particular, have 3 primary defenses to maintain “iron homeostasis”, 2 of which are in the alveoli, those little sacs in your lungs we talked about earlier. The first of the two are little macrophages that roam around and scavenge up any free radicals like this oxidative iron. The second is a lining on the walls (called the epithelial surface) which has a thin layer of fluid packed with high levels of antioxidant molecules.. things like abscorbic acid (AKA Vitamin C) among others. Well, this is usually good enough for naturally occurring rogue iron ions but with COVID-19 running rampant your body is now basically like a progressive state letting out all the prisoners out of the prisons… it’s just too much iron and it begins to overwhelm your lungs’ countermeasures, and thus begins the process of pulmonary oxidative stress. This leads to damage and inflammation, which leads to all that nasty stuff and damage you see in CT scans of COVID-19 patient lungs. Ever noticed how it’s always bilateral? (both lungs at the same time) Pneumonia rarely ever does that, but COVID-19 does… EVERY. SINGLE. TIME.

Once your body is now running out of control, with all your oxygen trucks running around without any freight, and tons of this toxic form of iron floating around in your bloodstream, other defenses kick in. While your lungs are busy with all this oxidative stress they can’t handle, and your organs are being starved of o2 without their constant stream of deliveries from red blood cell’s hemoglobin, and your liver is attempting to do its best to remove the iron and store it in its ‘iron vault’. Only its getting overwhelmed too. It’s starved for oxygen and fighting a losing battle from all your hemoglobin letting its iron free, and starts crying out “help, I’m taking damage!” by releasing an enzyme called alanine aminotransferase (ALT). BOOM, there is your second of 3 primary indicators of whether the shit is about to hit the fan for a particular patient or not.

Eventually, if the patient’s immune system doesn’t fight off the virus in time before their blood oxygen saturation drops too low, ventilator or no ventilator, organs start shutting down. No fuel, no work. The only way to even try to keep them going is max oxygen, even a hyperbaric chamber if one is available on 100% oxygen at multiple atmospheres of pressure, just to give what’s left of their functioning hemoglobin a chance to carry enough o2 to the organs and keep them alive. Yeah we don’t have nearly enough of those chambers, so some fresh red blood cells with normal hemoglobin in the form of a transfusion will have to do.

The core point being, treating patients with the iron ions stripped from their hemoglobin (rendering it abnormally nonfunctional) with ventilator intubation is futile, unless you’re just hoping the patient’s immune system will work its magic in time. The root of the illness needs to be addressed.

Best case scenario? Treatment regimen early, before symptoms progress too far. Hydroxychloroquine (more on that in a minute, I promise) with Azithromicin has shown fantastic, albeit critics keep mentioning ‘anecdotal’ to describe the mountain, promise and I’ll explain why it does so well next. But forget straight-up plasma with antibodies, that might work early but if the patient is too far gone they’ll need more. They’ll need all the blood: antibodies and red blood cells. No help in sending over a detachment of ammunition to a soldier already unconscious and bleeding out on the battlefield, you need to send that ammo along with some hemoglobin-stimulant-magic so that he can wake up and fire those shots at the enemy.

All that hilariously misguided and counterproductive criticism the media piled on chloroquine (purely for political reasons) as a viable treatment will now go down as the biggest Fake News blunder to rule them all. The media actively engaged their activism to fight ‘bad orange man’ at the cost of thousands of lives. Shame on them.

How does chloroquine work? Same way as it does for malaria. You see, malaria is this little parasite that enters the red blood cells and starts eating hemoglobin as its food source. The reason chloroquine works for malaria is the same reason it works for COVID-19 — while not fully understood, it is suspected to bind to DNA and interfere with the ability to work magic on hemoglobin. The same mechanism that stops malaria from getting its hands on hemoglobin and gobbling it up seems to do the same to COVID-19 (essentially little snippets of DNA in an envelope) from binding to it. On top of that, Hydroxychloroquine (an advanced descendant of regular old chloroquine) lowers the pH which can interfere with the replication of the virus. Again, while the full details are not known, the entire premise of this potentially ‘game changing’ treatment is to prevent hemoglobin from being interfered with, whether due to malaria or COVID-19.

But don’t tell Dr. Zack Moore that he traffics in fake news with his counsel to North Carolina hospitals that they shouldn’t use hydroxychloroquine (yes, I have such a document).  I guess he cares too much about politics to be concerned about saving lives.

Via Insty, this story buries important details.

The reason this information is buried is the same reason that people like Dr. Zack Moore of North Carolina recommends against the use of hydroxychloroquine.  Trump haters would rather see people perish that prescribe live-saving medications because Trump might get the credit.

Honestly.  They think like this.  That’s how juvenile they are.

First up, a newly elected congress woman in Detroit.

LANSING – A Democratic state representative from Detroit is crediting hydroxychloroquine — and Republican President Donald Trump who touted the drug — for saving her in her battle with the coronavirus.

State Rep. Karen Whitsett, who learned Monday she has tested positive for COVID-19, said she started taking hydroxychloroquine on March 31, prescribed by her doctor, after both she and her husband sought treatment for a range of symptoms on March 18.

“It was less than two hours” before she started to feel relief, said Whitsett, who had experienced shortness of breath, swollen lymph nodes, and what felt like a sinus infection. She is still experiencing headaches, she said.

Whitsett said she was familiar with “the wonders” of hydroxychloroquine from an earlier bout with Lyme disease, but does not believe she would have thought to ask for it, or her doctor would have prescribed it, had Trump not been touting it as a possible treatment for COVID-19.

But that same thing, i.e., Trump touting it as a possible therapeutic, has caused the status quo, the ensconced bureaucracy, and doctors who live by state decrees, to pan it as needful or effective.  Queue many more doctors who think it works, via Katie Pavlich.

First, in Los Angeles:

Dr. Anthony Cardillo said he has seen very promising results when prescribing hydroxychloroquine in combination with zinc for the most severely-ill COVID-19 patients.

“Every patient I’ve prescribed it to has been very, very ill and within 8 to 12 hours, they were basically symptom-free,” Cardillo told Eyewitness News. “So clinically I am seeing a resolution.”

Cardillo is the CEO of Mend Urgent Care, which has locations in Sherman Oaks, Van Nuys and Burbank.

He said he has found it only works if combined with zinc. The drug, he said, opens a channel for the zinc to enter the cell and block virus replication.

“We have to be cautious and mindful that we don’t prescribe it for patients who have COVID who are well,” Cardillo said. “It should be reserved for people who are really sick, in the hospital or at home very sick, who need that medication. Otherwise we’re going to blow through our supply for patients that take it regularly for other disease processes.”

New York:

Dr. Mohammud Alam, an infectious disease specialist affiliated with Plainview Hospital, said 81 percent of infected covid patients he treated at three Long Island nursing homes recovered from the contagion.

“In this crisis, I realized I had to do something,” Alam said. ”I realized if this was my dad, what would I do? And I would do anything I could to help.”

Alam said he decided he could not apply the touted combination of the antimalarial hydroxychloroquine and antibiotic azithromycin because the side effects could be potentially fatal for his high-risk patients, many of whom had underlying heart issues.

So instead, Alam replaced azithromycin with another decades-old antibiotic that doesn’t pose any known risks to the heart.

New Jersey:

Dr. Stephen Smith, founder of The Smith Center for Infectious Diseases and Urban Health, said on “The Ingraham Angle” on Wednesday night that he is optimistic about the use of antimalarial medications and antibiotics to treat COVID-19 patients, calling it “a game-changer.”

Smith, who is treating 72 COVID-19 patients, said that he has been treating “everybody with hydroxychloroquine and azithromycin [an antibiotic]. We’ve been doing so for a while.”

He pointed out that not a single COVID-19 patient of his that has been on the hydroxychloroquine and azithromycin regimen for five days or more has had to be intubated.

Around the world:

An international poll of thousands of doctors rated the Trump-touted anti-malaria drug hydroxychloroquine the best treatment for the novel coronavirus.

Of the 6,227 physicians surveyed in 30 countries, 37 percent rated hydroxychloroquine the “most effective therapy” for combating the potentially deadly illness, according to the results released Thursday.

The survey, conducted by the global health care polling company Sermo, also found that 23 percent of medical professionals had prescribed the drug in the US — far less than other countries.

“Outside the US, hydroxychloroquine was equally used for diagnosed patients with mild to severe symptoms whereas in the US it was most commonly used for high risk diagnosed patients,” the survey found.

The medicine was most widely used in Spain, where 72 percent of physicians said they had prescribed it.

The doctors who reflexively revert to bureaucracy for the determination of right and wrong, and who, because of hatred for Mr. Trump, have panned it and recommended against it because they lack fifty billion controlled studies approved by the FDA, have blood on their hands in the face of this mounting evidence.

Look, I have my issues with Trump too, from bump stock bans to red flag laws.  But reflexive reversion to opposing anything he says because a doctor doesn’t happen to like him, in a time of pandemic, is the most unethical and uncaring thing I can possibly think of.

It borders on negligent homicide.  If you’re a doctor, I’m speaking to you.

I’ll also point out that the epidemiologist in my own state of North Carolina, Dr. Zack Moore, opposes it, and I have sent him two notes now on this very subject, to be ignored both times.

I’ll have my say before this is all over with, and he’ll hear me loud and clear.

Mises Institute.

The Food and Drug Administration helped turn the coronavirus from a deadly peril into a national catastrophe. Long after foreign nations had been ravaged and many cases had been detected in America, the FDA continued blocking private testing. The FDA continued forcing the nation’s most innovative firms to submit to its command-and-control approach notwithstanding the pandemic. South Korean is in a far better situation dealing with coronavirus, because its government did not preemptively cripple private testing.

One of the clearest lessons from the current pandemic is that nothing has changed at one of the nation’s most powerful regulatory agencies. The FDA is repeating the same mistakes and showing the same arrogance that I chronicled decades ago in articles for the Wall Street Journal, the American Spectator, and other publications.

Dr. David Kessler, who became FDA commissioner in 1990, quickly sought to intimidate the companies that his agency regulates. A laudatory Washington Post article concluded, “What he cannot accomplish with ordinary regulation, Kessler hopes to accomplish with fear.” Kenneth Feather of the FDA’s drug advertising surveillance branch boasted: “We want to say to these companies that you don’t know when or how we’ll strike. We want to eliminate predictability.”

Dr. Kessler’s heavy-handed tactics battered the American medical device industry—one of the nation’s export superstars. An American Electronics Association survey found that “40% [of medical device companies] reduced the number of U.S. employees because of FDA delays, 29% increased their investment in foreign operations, and 22% moved U.S. jobs overseas.” The survey also found that “57% of the firms said the FDA had applied guidance instructions retroactively to some of their submissions,” as Biomedical Market Newsletter reported.

The FDA’s stonewalling of new medical devices was sometimes politically motivated. A 1994 report by the Medical Device Manufacturers Association noted, “It is not unusual for [FDA] reviewers to express the position that excessive requests [for additional information] are made because of a concern or fear about how a particular member or members of Congress will react” to the approval of a new device. Sacrificing lives was a small price to pay for bureaucrats to avoid bothersome interrogatories from Capitol Hill.

[ … ]

Dr. Kessler did not spare the First Amendment in his grab for power, and cancer patients and other seriously ill people suffered as a result. Doctors, hospitals, and researchers often discover after FDA approval that a drug to treat one disease is also effective at treating other diseases. Drug companies have routinely publicized this news, alerting physicians to other possible ways to save lives. American Medical Association vice president Roy Schwarz estimated that “off-label” uses of drugs account for up to 60 percent of all drugs prescribed.

But in 1991 Dr. Kessler prohibited pharmaceutical companies from informing doctors of new uses for approved drugs. He announced that the FDA would enforce the ban with seizures, injunctions, and prosecutions. Though the agency never finalized its proposed regulations, it warned companies that they would face its wrath if they violated the draft proposals. Dr. Kessler, in a speech before the Drug Information Association, said: “I would urge all members of the pharmaceutical industry to take a long and hard look at their promotional practices. I do not expect companies to wait until this guidance becomes final to put their advertising and promotional houses in order.” The question of off-label treatments is becoming a key issue again as doctors search for effective treatments for the COVID-19 coronavirus.

And thus because of a bureaucrat-laden impediment to medical science, the response to Covid-19 has been slow, cumbersome, lumbering, and deadly.

An example of this might be found in a recent article on another treatment for the virus.  Before we get to that, I recalled a few days ago before seeing this next article that a doctor friend of mine who volunteered in Haiti, found that he had nothing to treat the children who had scabies.  He had to let them suffer because he was sent without medications for that.  If he had been sent with it, he could have used Ivermectin to treat Scabies in humans.

I also recalled that I had treated my dog, Heidi, with Ivermectin once for a parasite, and was warned by the Vet that it was “off-label.”  In this case, off-label meant that it was for livestock, not dogs, but that it has worked for dogs for such a long time that Vets had no problem prescribing it.

As I live and breath, I actually had a fleeting thought and wondered a few days ago whether Ivermectin might be effective at treating Coronavirus.  I figured, “You’re not a medical doctor, never even bring this up because people will think you’ve fallen off your rocker.”

Then this.

An anti-parasitic drug available throughout the world has been found to kill COVID-19 in the lab within 48 hours.

A Monash University-led study has shown a single dose of the drug Ivermectin could stop the SARS-CoV-2 virus growing in cell culture.

“We found that even a single dose could essentially remove all viral RNA (effectively removed all genetic material of the virus) by 48 hours and that even at 24 hours there was a really significant reduction in it,” Monash Biomedicine Discovery Institute’s Dr Kylie Wagstaff said on Friday.

While it’s not known how Ivermectin works on the virus, the drug likely stops the virus dampening the host cells’ ability to clear it.

The next step is for scientists to determine the correct human dosage, to make sure the level used in vitro is safe for humans.

“In times when we’re having a global pandemic and there isn’t an approved treatment, if we had a compound that was already available around the world then that might help people sooner,” Dr Wagstaff said.

“Realistically it’s going to be a while before a vaccine is broadly available.”

Before Ivermectin can be used to combat coronavirus, funding is needed to get it to pre-clinical testing and clinical trials.

Ivermectin is an FDA-approved anti-parasitic drug also shown to be effective in vitro against viruses including HIV, dengue and influenza.

But if we’re waiting for FDA approval, we could be waiting for a very long time.  The bureaucrats get their say.