What heroic stories do our enemies have to tell?

There is an immense number of people who have taken on the mission of their lives to steer people away from valid treatments during COVID-19.

Amir Arabshahi / Unsplash

From everything I have followed since the beginning of the pandemic, one thing I have already learned. The indisputable fact, to show that there has always been treatment of COVID-19, is the results of the front-line doctors who dared to treat patients infected with the virus throughout the pandemic.

There is no talk of "double-blind", "impact factor", or peer review that stands when a doctor treated hundreds or thousands of patients, had very few hospitalizations and zero or almost zero deaths. And all those who treated had similar results.

Layman or expert, faced with this data, understands the efficacy. Some, those who have bought the narrative that the treatments have never been proven, are deeply disturbed by the numbers. This only happens because everyone understands. 

Based on this, I have already told stories of some doctors and their numbers: I wrote a text about Dr Cadegiani, with 3,711 patients treated during the whole pandemic. Among them, there were only four hospitalizations, one single intubation and zero deaths. No need, of course, to give placebo to another 3,711 people, to see dozens die, just to conclude that yes, COVID-19 is a dangerous disease, right?

In another article I wrote: "Hydroxychloroquine: the world has lost the sense of risk and benefit", I talked about the results of the American doctor Brian Procter. He treated 489 infected people. Among the patients, there were only six hospitalizations and a single death, and 320 of the patients were at risk: they were over 50 years old or had at least one comorbidity. And Procter only had this single death because the patient requested care many days after the onset of symptoms.

In another article, I mentioned the American physicians George Fareed and Brian Tyson. They treated 3,962 COVID patients early and had only two hospitalizations and no deaths. Among the 413 who were already many days into their symptoms when they started treatment, the deaths were also incredibly low: only 3.

Based on this, a few months ago I sarcastically wrote the article "Don't watch 'Dallas Buyers Club'" The film, released in 2014, tells the story of AIDS. A summary? Since the mid-1980s, treatment for the disease was already available with generic, cheap, off-patent drugs. But government authorities in collusion with big pharmaceutical industries were only interested in promoting expensive, patented drugs, such as AZT, the most expensive drug in history, which killed more than it helped. To this end, the doctors who treated with the repositioned drugs were persecuted, they lost their licenses, the police persecuted them, and those who promoted the treatments only encountered barriers in their lives.

The authorities, at the time, came up with the same old "randomized trial", "peer review", "scientific proof". The studies were never good and the evidence was always insufficient, no matter how many there were. But those who were treated did not die from AIDS. And everybody, watching the movie, understood that the treatments were effective, after all, people stopped dying. 

In the article, I make all the obvious parallels with COVID-19. Today's so-called "conspiracy theorists" - the people who talk about the effectiveness of drugs like ivermectin, hydroxychloroquine, and others - actually don't talk any conspiracy theories. They only say that history is repeating itself. In fact, no one was penalized in AIDS so that history would not repeat itself. In history, epidemics are always solved by front-line doctors, not by big pharmaceutical companies.

And no one, watching the movie, remains in doubt about who are the heroes and who are the villains. And with the script in my head, and me knowing that the results of doctors with zero or almost zero deaths make everyone understand, I went back to writing about these stories and numbers. It's the beginning of a series.

Last week I wrote about Dr Raphael Furtado, who has treated 170 COVID-19 patients, had only one hospitalization and zero deaths. He was called a "science denier", a quack, among other insults. He even lost his father, a physician, to the disease, because even he didn't believe what his son was saying. On average, at least three people were supposed to have died. Dr Raphael only failed to treat more patients because he couldn't find them.

To me, the COVID-19 pandemic is the greatest story to be told since World War II. Since then, it has been the event that has generated the most terror and fear in the world, to the point of stopping it completely.

And talking to a doctor friend, a professor of medicine, about the story of Dr Furtado, a hero, I asked, "What stories do our enemies have to tell?"

We know about the power of large corporations. The pharmaceutical industry has the biggest lobby in the world, three times bigger than the oil industry. And it is certainly not the health and love lobby. The BMJ, one of the most respected scientific journals on the planet, almost two hundred years old, has even asked whether the regulatory agencies are not bought. After all, this agency and its directors, as well as many medical specialty associations, are funded by the industries. The EMA (European Medicines Agency), for example, has 89% of its income coming from the pharmaceutical industry; the WHO also receives a lot of money from them, and even more from the philanthropic foundations of mega-billionaire families who are shareholders of these same companies. 

Of course, many doctors and lay people have also decided to defend the official narrative by turning patients away from early treatment, but as voluntary work.

In the future, what honorable stories will these people have to tell their children and grandchildren? They will say something like this: "During the pandemic, every opinion I had, absolutely every opinion, helped the profits of the big pharmaceutical corporations. Nothing I said got in the way of their narrative."

And they will continue: "I gathered people to denounce and take down the social network accounts of all the doctors who told their results." And they will say, proudly, waiting for the smiles of the children: "I celebrated when these people were censored."

Posing like wise old men in front of the fireplace, they will say: "I made videos for the channel of a major university disqualifying all the studies on ivermectin. Then I assumed that I had not even read the study."

Hoping that their grandchildren will call them heroes, they will recount: "I taught on TV that it was to offend and raise your voice to anyone not wearing masks. Several people died in the streets because of the fights that started with that. It was great. Even though the effectiveness of the masks has never been proven."

Another, already with gray hairs, will tell his example to his son seeking paternal guidance: "I was a professor of evidence-based medicine, but I confused studies in prophylaxis with studies of hospitalized patients to say that safe, cheap, repositioned drugs didn't work. I was able to prevent many patients from being treated. It was great."

Another, at his son's bedtime, asking his father to tell him bedtime stories, will proudly explain about his role in the pandemic: "I didn't care when people weren't treated in hospitals because they didn't want to be inoculated with experimental genetic products. And I celebrated when Novak Djokovic, one of the greatest tennis players in history, was prevented from participating in tournaments because he refused to be vaccinated."

Another, wanting his grandson to follow his grandfather's academic career, will say: "I disqualified studies of generic drugs, cheap and without patents, such as ivermectin in Itajaí, which can only be disqualified by redoing the calculations, because the data are public, just by offending the authors. For this, it was enough for me to base myself on the lack of recommendation from regulatory agencies captured by the industries, which only recommend drugs from those who sponsor them, just like in the times of AIDS. It is very easy to side with the big pharma lobby. Even when they had 16 studies on prophylaxis and all of them were unanimously positive."

With his grandchildren bending forward, waiting to hear about his grandfather's wise performance during the historic pandemic, he will conclude: "To do all this, I had to solemnly ignore all the results of the doctors who had thousands of patients with zero deaths, and all the scientific studies. And I even called them denialists."

While our stories are worthy of the best screenplays, our enemies can build a monument to mediocrity. 

Their attitudes go awry at any important moment in history.

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