“His critics argue that Dr. Fauci’s “slow the spread, flatten the curve, wait for the jab” strategy—all in support of a long-term bet on unproven vaccines—represented a profound and unprecedented departure from accepted public health practice. But most troubling were Dr. Fauci’s policies of ignoring and outright suppressing the early treatment of infected patients who were often terrified. “The Best Practices for defeating an infectious disease epidemic,” says Yale epidemiologist Harvey Risch, “dictate that you quarantine and treat the sick, protect the most vulnerable, and aggressively develop repurposed therapeutic drugs, and use early treatment protocols to avoid hospitalizations.” Risch is one of the leading global authorities in clinical treatment protocols. He is the editor of two high-gravitas journals and the author of over 350 peer-reviewed publications. Other researchers have cited those studies over 44,000 times. Risch points out a hard truth that should have informed our COVID control strategy: “Unless you are an island nation prepared to shut out the world, you can’t stop a global viral pandemic, but you can make it less deadly. Our objective should have been to devise treatments that would reduce hospitalization and death. We could have easily defanged COVID-19 so that it was less lethal than a seasonal flu. We could have done this very quickly. We could have saved hundreds of thousands of lives.” Dr. Peter McCullough concurs: “Once a highly transmissible virus like COVID has a beachhead in a population, it is inevitable that it will spread to every individual who lacks immunity. You can slow the spread, but you cannot prevent it—any more than you can prevent the tide from rising.” McCullough was an internist and cardiologist on staff at the Baylor University Medical Center and the Baylor Heart and Vascular Hospital in Dallas, Texas. His 600 peer-reviewed articles in the National Library of Medicine make McCullough the most published physician in history in the field of kidney disease related to heart disease, a lethal sequela of COVID-19. Before COVID-19, he was editor of two major journals. His recent publications include over 40 on COVID-19, including two landmark studies on critical care of the disease. His two breakthrough papers on the early treatment of COVID-19 in The American Journal of Medicine and Reviews in Cardiovascular Medicine in 2020 are, by far, the most downloaded documents on the subject. “I’ve had COVID-19 myself with pulmonary involvement,” he told me. “My wife has had it. On my wife’s side of the family, we’ve had a fatality . . . I believe I have as much or more medical authority to give my opinion as anybody in the world.” McCullough observes that, “We could have dramatically reduced COVID fatalities and hospitalizations using early treatment protocols and repurposed drugs including ivermectin and hydroxychloroquine and many, many others.” Dr. McCullough has treated some 2,000 COVID patients with these therapies. McCullough points out that hundreds of peer-reviewed studies now show that early treatment could have averted some 80 percent of deaths attributed to COVID. “The strategy from the outset should have been implementing protocols to stop hospitalizations through early treatment of Americans who tested positive for COVID but were still asymptomatic. If we had done that, we could have pushed case fatality rates below those we see with seasonal flu, and ended the bottlenecks in our hospitals. We should have rapidly deployed off-the-shelf medications with proven safety records and subjected them to rigorous risk/benefit decision-making,” McCullough continues. “Using repurposed drugs, we could have ended this pandemic by May 2020 and saved 500,000 American lives, but for Dr. Fauci’s hard-headed, tunnel vision on new vaccines and remdesivir.” Pulmonary and critical care specialist Dr. Pierre Kory agrees with McCullough’s estimate. “The efficacy of some of these drugs as prophylaxis is almost miraculous, plus early intervention in the week after exposure stops viral replication and prevents development of cytokine storm and entrance into the pulmonary phase,” says Dr. Kory. “We could have stopped the pandemic in its tracks in the spring of 2020.” Risch, McCullough, and Kory are among the large chorus of experts (including Nobel Laureate Luc Montagnier) who argue that, by treating infected patients at home during the early stages of the illness, we could have averted cataclysmic lockdowns and found medicine resources for protecting vulnerable populations while encouraging the spread of the disease in age groups with extremely low-risk, in order to achieve permanent herd immunity. They point out that natural immunity, in all known cases, is superior to vaccine-induced immunity, being both more durable (it often lasts a lifetime) and broader spectrum—meaning it provides a shield against subsequent variants. “Vaccinating citizens with natural immunity should never have been our public health policy,” says Dr. Kory. Dr. Fauci’s strategy committed hundreds of billions of societal resources on a high-risk gambit to develop novel technology vaccines, and virtually nothing toward developing repurposed medications that are effective against COVID. “That strategy kept the medical treatment on hold globally for an entire year as a readily treatable respiratory virus ravaged populations,” says Kory. “It is absolutely shocking that he recommended no outpatient care, not even Vitamin D despite the fact he takes it himself and much of the country is Vitamin D deficient.”

Dr. Kory is president of Front Line COVID-19 Critical Care Alliance, a former associate professor, and Medical Director of the Trauma and Life Support Center at the University of Wisconsin Medical School Hospital, and the Critical Care Service Chief at Aurora St. Luke’s Medical Center in Milwaukee. His milestone work on critical care ultrasonography won him the British Medical Association’s President’s Choice Award in 2015. Risch, McCullough, and Kory are also among the hundreds of scientists and physicians who express shock that Dr. Fauci made no effort to identify repurposed medicines. Says Kory, “I find it appalling that there was no consultation process with treating physicians. Medicine is about consultation. You had Birx, Fauci, and Redfield doing press conferences every day and handing down these arbitrary diktats and not one of them ever treated a COVID patient or worked in an emergency room or ICU. They knew nothing.” “As I watched the White House Task Force on T.V.,” recalls Dr. McCullough, “no one even said that hospitalizations and deaths were the bad outcome of COVID-19, and that they were going to put together a team of doctors to identify protocols and therapeutics to stop these hospitalizations and deaths.” Dr. McCullough argues that, as COVID czar, Dr. Fauci should have created an international communications network linking the world’s 11 million front-line doctors to gather real-time tips, innovative safety protocols, and to develop the best prophylactic and early treatment practices. “He should have created hotlines and dedicated websites for medical professionals to call in with treatment questions and to consult, collect, catalogue, and propagate the latest innovations for prophylaxing vulnerable and exposed individuals, and treating early infections, so as to avert hospitalizations.” Dr. Kory agrees: “The outcome we should have been trying to prevent is hospitalizations. You don’t just sit around and wait for an infected patient to become ill. Dr. Fauci’s treatment strategies all began once all these under-medicated patients were hospitalized. By that time, it was too late for many of them. It was insane. It was perverse. It was unethical.” Dr. McCullough says that Dr. Fauci should have created treatment centers for ambulatory patients and field clinics specializing in treating asymptomatic or early-stage COVID. “He should have been encouraging doctors to use satellite clinics to conduct small outpatient clinical trials to quickly identify the most effective protocols, drugs, and therapeutics.” Professor Risch concurs: “We should have deployed teams of doctors all over the world doing short-term clinical trials and testing promising drugs and reporting successful protocols. The endpoints were obvious: preventing hospitalizations and deaths.

By July 1, McCullough and his team had developed the first protocol based on signals of benefit and acceptable safety. They submitted the protocol to the American Journal of Medicine. That study, titled “The Pathophysiologic Basis and Clinical Rationale for Early Ambulatory Treatment of COVID-19,” quickly became the world’s most-downloaded paper to help doctors treat COVID-19. “It is extraordinary that Dr. Fauci never published a single treatment protocol before that,” says McCullough, “and that ‘America’s Doctor’ has never, to date, published anything on how to treat a COVID patient. It shocks the conscience that there is still no official protocol. Anyone who tries to publish a new treatment protocol will find themselves airtight blocked by the journals that are all under Fauci’s control.” The Chinese published their own early treatment protocol on March 3, 2020, using many of the same categories of prophylactic and early treatment drugs uncovered by McCullough—chloroquine (a cousin of hydroxychloroquine), antibiotics, anti-inflammatories, antihistamines, a variety of steroids, and probiotics to stabilize and fortify the immune system and apothecaries of traditional Chinese medicines, vitamins, and minerals, including a variety of compounds containing quercetin, zinc, and glutathione precursors. The Chinese made early treatment the central priority of their COVID strategy. They used intense—and intrusive—track-and-trace surveillance to identify and then immediately hospitalize and treat every COVID-infected Chinese. Early treatment helped the Chinese to end their pandemic by April 2020. “We could have done the same,” says McCullough.

Though now he is often censored, the AMA still lists Dr. McCullough’s study as the most frequently downloaded paper for 2020. The Association of American Physicians and Surgeons (AAPS) downloaded and turned McCullough’s AMA article into its official treatment guide. AAPS Director Dr. Jeremy Snavely told me in August 2021 that the Guide had 122,000 downloads: “We figure it has been seen by over a million people. It’s the only trusted guide. Our phone never stops ringing. Mostly the calls are from physicians and patients desperate for the help they cannot get from any HHS website.”

By autumn, front-line physicians had assembled a pharmacopeia of repurposed drugs, all of which were effective against COVID. By that time, more than 200 studies supported treatment with hydroxychloroquine, and 60 studies supported ivermectin. “We combined these medicines with doxycycline, azithromycin to suppress infection,” says McCullough. Another meta-analysis supported the use of prednisone and hydrocortisone and other widely available steroids to combat inflammation. Three studies supported the use of inhaled budesonide against COVID; an Oxford University study published in February 2021 demonstrated that that treatment could reduce hospitalizations by 90 percent in low-risk patients, and a publication in April 2021 showed that recovery was faster for high-risk patients, too. Furthermore, a very large study supported colchicine as an anti-inflammatory. Finally, McCullough’s growing array of physicians had observational data from late-stage treatment of hospitalized patients with full-dose aspirin and antithrombotics, including Enoxaparin, Apixaban, Rivaroxaban, Dabigatran, Edoxaban, and full-dose anticoagulation with low molecular weight heparin for blood clots. “We were able to show that doctors can work with four to six drugs in combination, supplemented by vitamins and nutraceuticals including zinc, vitamins D and C, and Quercetin. And they can guide patients at home, even the highest-risk seniors, and avoid a dreaded outcome of hospitalization and death,” said McCullough. Working with a large practice in the Plano/Frisco area north of Dallas, McCullough and his team administered this protocol to some eight hundred patients and demonstrated an 85 percent reduction in hospitalization and death. Another practice led by the legendary Dr. Vladimir Zelenko in Monroe, New York showed similar astonishing results. Independent physicians unaffiliated with the government or the universities that are so dependent on Dr. Fauci’s good favor were discovering new COVID treatments by the day. Researchers treated 738 randomly selected Brazilian COVID-19 patients with another adjuvant, fluvoxamine, identified early in the pandemic for its potential to reduce cytokine storms. Another 733 received a placebo between Jan. 20 and Aug. 6 of 2021. The researchers tracked every patient receiving fluvoxamine during the trial for 28 days and found about a 30-percent reduction in events among those receiving fluvoxamine compared to those who did not. Like almost all the other remedies, it is cheap and proven safe by long use. Fluvoxamine costs about $4 per 10-day course. Fluvoxamine has been used since the 1990s, and its safety profile is well known.

“Hydroxychloroquine and ivermectin are not necessary nor sufficient on their own—there are plenty of molecules that treat COVID,” says McCullough. “Even if hydroxychloroquine and ivermectin had become so politicized that no one wanted to allow these drugs to be used, we could use other drugs, anti-inflammatories, antihistamines, as well as anti-coagulants and actually stop the illness and again, treat it to reduce hospitalization and death.” When the pandemic started, most of the other medical practices in the Detroit area shut down, Dr. David Brownstein told me. “I had a meeting with my staff and my six partners. I told them, ‘We are going to stay open and treat COVID.’ They wanted to know how. I said, ‘We’ve been treating viral diseases here for twenty-five years. COVID can’t be any different.’ In all that time, our office had never lost a single patient to flu or flu-like illness. We treated people in their cars with oral vitamins A, C, and D, and iodine. We administered IV solution outside all winter with IV hydrogen peroxide and vitamin C. We’d have them put their butts out the car window and shot them up with intramuscular ozone. We nebulized them with hydrogen peroxide and Lugol’s iodine. We only rarely used ivermectin and hydroxychloroquine. We treated 715 patients and had ten hospitalizations and no deaths. Early treatment was the key. We weren’t allowed to talk about it. The whole medical establishment was trying to shut down early treatment and silence all the doctors who talked about successes. A whole generation of doctors just stopped practicing medicine. When we talked about it, the whole cartel came for us. I’ve been in litigation with the Medical Board for a year. When we posted videos from some of our recovered patients, they went viral. One of the videos had a million views. FTC filed a motion against us, and we had to take everything down.” In July 2020, Brownstein and his seven colleagues published a peer-reviewed article describing their stellar success with early treatment. FTC sent him a letter warning him to take it down. “No one wanted Americans to know that you didn’t have to die from COVID. It’s 100 percent treatable,” says Dr. Brownstein. “We proved it. No one had to die.” “Meanwhile,” adds Dr. Brownstein, “we’ve seen lots of really bad vaccine side effects in our patients. We’ve had seven strokes—some ending in severe paralysis. We had three cases of pulmonary embolism, two blood clots, two cases of Graves’ disease, and one death.”

Repurposed medicines, the record shows, could also have drastically reduced death among hospitalized patients. One of Dr. Kory’s cofounders of FLCCC, Houston Memorial Medical Center’s Chief Medical Officer, Dr. Joe Varon, worked 400 days in a row, seeing between 20–30 patients/day. Using ivermectin and a cocktail of anti-inflammatories, steroids, and anticoagulants since Spring 2020, Dr. Varon lowered hospital mortality among ICU COVID patients to about 4.1 percent, compared to well over 23 percent nationally. “Even in the ICUs where patients were coming in undertreated, we were able to dramatically reduce mortality,” says Dr. Kory. “Almost anything you do in the nursing homes—basically, any combination of the various components of these protocols—reduces mortalities by at least 60 percent,” McCullough told me. A 2021 paper in Medical Hypotheses supports McCullough’s claim. That study by twelve physician co-authors shows that diverse combinations of many of these and similar medications dramatically lower death rates in a variety of nursing homes. The study concludes that even the most modest early medical therapy combinations were associated with 60 percent reductions in mortality. Says Dr. McCullough, “Therapeutic nihilism was the real killer of America’s seniors.”

McCullough’s findings may be conservative. Early in the pandemic, two Spanish nursing homes simultaneously experimented with early treatment with cheap, available repurposed drugs and achieved 100 percent survival among infected residents and staff. Between March and April 2020, COVID-19 struck two elder care facilities in Yepes, Toledo, Spain. The mean age of residents in those locations was 85, and 48 percent were over 80 years old. Within three months, 100 percent of the residents at both locations had caught the virus. By the end of June, 100 percent of residents and half the workers were seropositive for COVID, meaning they had endured infection and recovered. None of them went to the hospital and none died. None had adverse drug effects. Local doctors rapidly discovered early treatment with the same sort of remedies that McCullough was championing: antihistamines, steroids, antibiotics, anti-inflammatories, aspirin, nasal washes, bronchodilators, and blood thinners. In pooled data, 28 percent of the residents in similar nursing homes in the same region over the same time period died. That study supports the experience of front-line physicians that cheap available, repurposed drugs can easily prevent hospitalizations and deaths.”

Kennedy Jr., Robert F. “The Real Anthony Fauci: Bill Gates, Big Pharma, and the Global War on Democracy and Public Health (Children’s Health Defense) (pp.74-78). Skyhorse. Edizione del Kindle.