Editor:
No, Donald, it’s not just the flu.
It could have been, if you had handled it right. If you had put Dr. Zelenko in charge of a COVID response team, had used your power under the Defense Production Act to mass-produce Hydroxychloroquine and Azithromycin, and make them available to every American.
This, administered under Dr. Zelenko’s early treatment protocol, would have made a tenfold reduction in the hospitalization and mortality rate. This would have been the equivalent of a severe flu season.
We could have stayed open, had enough ventilators for those who needed them and gone to work on the vaccine. The economy would still be booming.
Instead, you chose to hear one word, Hydroxychloroquine, assume it was a magic bullet and grandstand by trying to make it a “Hail Mary” drug for use on nearly dead patients. It did no good.
Nobody with a brain ever told you it would. HCQ is not a virucide, even combined with AZ and zinc.
It is virus birth control. Administered early, when virus loads are low, it keeps them low long enough for the patient’s immune system to mobilize and kill the virus before it can kill the patient.
No, Nancy and Chuck, HCQ is not some dangerous drug from which you need to “save the public.” It has been in safe use for many decades, both as a malaria drug and as treatment for both lupus and rheumatoid arthritis.
It is the preferred RA drug, out of many available, precisely because it has the most innocuous side effects. Your public meltdown over this drug was designed to prevent its use to save lives.
This puts you morally well below “anti-vaxers,” who at least believe the crap they are spouting.
No, Pharma, and your FDA subsidiary, you have not done us any favors by suppressing, with both threats and legal action, an early COVID treatment that was cheap, effective, fast and safe. You can now put people on ventilators, from which the vast majority graduate to wheelchairs and body bags.
In the meantime, you can look for a patentable treatment from which you can make billions.
No, medical establishment, this was not the time to adhere to medical SOP and wait for double-blind, placebo-controlled studies. This is a time for battlefield medicine, where you throw anything you have at the enemy, while working to find better weapons.
As much as government and its corporate clients screw up, why would anybody want more of it?
If we were under a Libertarian government, all of the above malefactors would likely have less power. HCQ could be freely prescribed, if not available over the counter.
Women would have freer access to RU486. In general, government would have less ability to screw up, and even shorten, our lives.
With neither Democrat nor Republican presidential candidate deserving my vote, I will be voting Libertarian for president. I will vote Republican for Congress, in the hopes of limiting Chuck and Nancy’s power.
Ken McDaniel
Rio Rancho
