Is Big Pharma behind the great war on hydroxychloroquine? It is ever since POTUS spoke about it and how it could be a potential treatment for the invisible virus. (GreatAwakening)
submitted 4.9 hours ago by rickki6
https://www.americanthinker.co....m/blog/2020/05/is_bi
When President Trump brought up hydroxychloroquine as a promising potential treatment for COVID-19, a huge upsurge of negative political publicity followed from it. It was strange stuff, because up until then, the treatment, which had been safely used to treat malaria, lupus, and arthritis, had been seeing promising results for COVID-19, too. Yet the condemnations from all sides poured for weeks. It wasn't just the political establishment blasting it; it seemed to be the medical establishment, too. That raises questions as to whether financial interests might be involved here.
It started with the press engaging in its customary contrarianism against Trump when he called the treatment "promising." The logic was simple: If Trump liked it, then it had to be bad.
How's this for a slanted headline and report from NPR, which ran on April 10?
COVID-19 Patients Given Unproven Drug In Texas Nursing Home In 'Disconcerting' Move
Last night, the real story was obtained by Fox News host Laura Ingraham, and it's quite a different picture. It isn't out on YouTube yet, so I will describe it:
A Galveston-area doctor, Dr. Robin Armstrong, who was in charge of a nursing home, found himself in the middle of the worst health care nightmare anyone can imagine: a COVID-19 outbreak, on a home full of elderly people, and he was in charge. Odds were big they were going to die. We already know what the coronavirus did to a nursing home in Washington State, and we have subsequently learned what inserting COVID-19 patients into unwilling nursing homes in New York City did to those populations. Coronavirus + Nursing Home = Death Sentence. That was what he was looking at. In desperation, the Texas doctor decided to treat his threatened patients with hydroxychloroquine in a last-ditch effort to save them...and he called it right. Unlike those other places, his patients got well. His informed judgment saved the lives of a building full of nursing home patients, and he reported no bad side-effects such as heart problems brought on by the treatment. He would have been justified to take such risks because his treatment was triage, and the alternative was the death sentence. But there wasn't even that. His patients lived, they regained their fragile health, and there were no stacked bodies or chaotic medical scenes in his part of Texas on his watch.
That's frankly a story of heroism, and the brilliant medical man should be celebrated for the huge number of lives he saved.
Instead, all he got were trashy stories with scare headlines like NPR's, painting him as some kind of evildoer. Bad medicine, unproven treatment, everybody get scared.
No good deed goes unpunished.
The anti-HCQ hysteria spread much farther than the reflexively anti-Trump press — it went deep into the Trump-hating Democratic Party, which also condemned Trump's favorable mention of HCQ. A young black Democratic state legislator from Michigan, who said the treatment most certainly helped save her life, was vilified by her own party for giving President Trump credit for mentioning it. She said thanks, and they threatened to expel her from their party. This, despite the ugly fact that the black community was getting hit harder by the coronavirus than others and therefore stood to gain the most from the cheap and plentiful HCQ and HCQ-antibiotic treatments. For Democrats, hating Trump was a bigger priority, so if Trump liked the treatment, then it would be important to not just scream about it but keep it away from patients — even if they had to intimidate them.
The political picture was strange as hell. Who the heck should care if Trump likes a treatment or not? If you're sick, what matters is whether a treatment is going to work and whether it's going to be safe. That's all a COVID-19 patient, struggling to breathe on a ventilator, cares about, and while there were no big extended conclusive studies proving hydroxychroquine a panacea for treating the illness, there were many smaller studies out there and experiences that pointed to the drug's safety and effectiveness, with one showing a 91% effectiveness rate....
