Published: May 2024
Many health authorities promoted expensive but ineffective anti-viral drugs while ignoring or suppressing inexpensive but potentially effective repurposed drugs and supplements. Moreover, many drug trials were poorly designed or outright fraudulent.
Anti-viral drugs
During the covid pandemic, Western health authorities mainly authorized and promoted so-called anti-viral drugs, including Gilead’s Remdesivir, Merck’s Molnupiravir, Pfizer’s Paxlovid, and monoclonal antibodies produced by several companies. Western countries paid close to $100 billion for these drugs, but their performance was poor and some of their side effects were serious.
Remdesivir was first authorized and promoted in the spring of 2020, but large trials not run by the manufacturer later showed that the expensive drug had no effect on recovery time and mortality and instead caused liver and kidney damage in some patients.
Monoclonal antibodies arrived in late 2020 and early 2021. They were somewhat effective in early treatment but ineffective in already hospitalized patients (post-viral phase). In addition, monoclonal antibodies rapidly lost efficacy against new virus variants.
Merck’s Molnupiravir arrived in autumn 2021. The drug received emergency use authorization in the US and UK but independent trials later showed it performed worse than a placebo and exhibited mutagenicity, i.e. it created new virus variants in patients.
In late 2021 Pfizer’s Paxlovid received emergency use authorization in the US and Europe. Paxlovid showed significant effectiveness in unvaccinated high-risk patients, but not in standard-risk patients and vaccinated high-risk patients. However, by the time Paxlovid became available almost all high-risk patients were already vaccinated; thus, the widespread use of Paxlovid in 2022 was never warranted. Moreover, so-called infection rebounds were far more common than acknowledged.
In sum, anti-viral covid drugs authorized and promoted by health agencies were very expensive but largely ineffective and sometimes toxic or mutagenic. More generally, it remains questionable if anti-viral drugs are indicated against ubiquitous and fast-mutating respiratory viruses: even if they are effective, they cannot prevent rapid re-infections.
Covid vaccines
In a sense, covid vaccines may be seen as another type of “anti-viral drugs”. Most covid vaccines initially induced high levels of neutralizing antibodies against SARS-CoV-2 and, therefore, were able to greatly reduce the risk of severe disease and death. However, they failed to induce long-term immunity against SARS-CoV-2 and they couldn’t prevent infection and transmission.
Moreover, covid vaccine components – including lipid nano particles, modified mRNA, adenovirus vectors, the spike protein itself, as well as RNA and plasmid DNA contamination – contributed to a wide range of serious vaccine adverse events, including blood clots and heart inflammation.
Thus, covid vaccination in 2021 only made sense for senior citizens and other people at high risk of covid hospitalization or death, whereas the vaccination of young and healthy people, including pregnant women and children, was never indicated. In addition, the temporary introduction of so-called vaccination passports was never appropriate.
Repurposed drugs and supplements
In addition to novel and expensive anti-viral drugs, the effectiveness of several inexpensive repurposed drugs and supplements was studied during the covid pandemic. Among them were HCQ (a malaria drug), ivermectin (an anti-parasitic drug), zinc, and vitamin D.
HCQ
HCQ was the first drug of choice used by many doctors treating covid patients in early 2020. Troubles began when then US President Donald Trump publicly endorsed the drug in April 2020, which caused a reflexive political and media backlash.
The situation was compounded when a leading medical journal published a completely made-up study by a shady company called Surgisphere that purportedly showed HCQ was ineffective. The situation was further compounded when two supposedly negative Oxford studies using lethal overdoses of HCQ were published. The British researcher who designed both of these studies reportedly confused HCQ with another drug with a similar name.
Other HCQ studies found positive results or positive signals against severe disease and death in covid patients. However, contrary to initial assumptions, these results were not due to weak anti-viral effects of HCQ, but possibly due to known anti-platelet effects (similar to aspirin) and anti-autoimmune effects that target two of the most serious risks of severe covid.
Ivermectin
Another highly controversial repurposed covid drug was ivermectin. The ivermectin saga began with early Australian results suggesting anti-viral activity in cell culture and another dubious Surgisphere study suggesting effectiveness against covid. This was followed by numerous seemingly positive low-cost clinical studies in Asia, the Middle East and Latin America. However, many of these studies (though not all of them) later turned out to be unreliable or fraudulent.
In 2021 and 2022, several more sophisticated ivermectin studies were published. Most of these clinical studies used standard-risk patients and an anti-viral study design, while ivermectin has known immuno-modulatory and anti-asthma effects. Nevertheless, many of these ivermectin studies found positive signals against severe disease and death.
Thus, professor Edward Mills, the lead investigator of the Gates-funded Together trial, stated that “there is a clear signal that ivermectin works in COVID patients”; the renowned French Institute Pasteur found a “more favorable clinical presentation”; and even ivermectin skeptics had to acknowledge a positive signal and tried to explain it with an indirect effect.
As most HCQ and ivermectin studies used standard-risk patients in which even strong anti-viral drugs like Paxlovid couldn’t achieve statistically significant benefits, it would be very interesting to see the results of a meta-study that focuses on high-risk sub-groups (i.e. unvaccinated senior citizens prior to omicron). However, some of the large trials apparently still haven’t released their data.
Zinc and vitamin D
Two inexpensive supplements that were studied during the covid pandemic were zinc and vitamin D. Both are known to play an important role in the human immune system. Two possible applications are preventive supplementation to avoid deficiencies (especially in elderly people) and high-dosed medical administration during acute illness.
Preventive supplementation to avoid deficiencies in high-risk groups should not really be a controversial strategy and yet, with a few notable exceptions, many health authorities did not encourage it or even recommended against it during the covid pandemic.
Regarding high-dosed medical administration during acute illness, several clinical studies found positive effects against severe disease and death. The results may not yet be definitive but additional trials are certainly warranted, though often difficult to fund.
The role of health authorities
As shown above, during the covid pandemic many Western health authorities authorized and promoted expensive but ineffective anti-viral drugs while ignoring or suppressing inexpensive but potentially useful repurposed drugs and supplements. Moreover, health authorities largely ignored early outpatient treatment as a strategy to prevent hospitalizations.
This behavior by health authorities is rather difficult to explain if one assumes that public health is their only concern. In contrast, the behavior is easier to explain if one assumes that additional factors, including commercial considerations, may play a role in their decisions.
The latter perspective is supported by the fact that some health agency directors later become board members of pharmaceutical companies (examples include several former directors of the US FDA and the US CDC) or previously worked as lobbyists for the pharmaceutical industry (such as the current director of the European Medicines Agency, EMA).
In addition, some health agencies are partially funded by pharmaceutical companies, which also sponsor doctors and medical journals and run the clinical trials of their own drugs.
The role of Wikipedia
During the covid pandemic, Wikipedia performed three main tasks: first, providing data and information about ongoing developments; second, promoting official positions on various topics; and third, discrediting various skeptical individuals and organizations.
The first task was potentially useful but unpaid Wikipedia editors simply couldn’t keep up with the many fast-paced developments during the hot phase of the pandemic. Thus, Wikipedia articles about pandemic-related topics were often incomplete or unreliable.
The second task is a consequence of the fact that Wikipedia articles have to rely on “authoritative sources”. Unfortunately for Wikipedia and its readers, establishment sources got most pandemic-related questions wrong, including virus origins, virus lethality, lockdowns, face masks, school closures, ventilators, vaccines and vaccine passports.
The third task, actively discrediting skeptical individuals and organizations that challenge establishment positions, is in fact a core task of Wikipedia, especially when it comes to pharmaceutical, geopolitical and intelligence topics. During the covid pandemic, an Austrian biologist was driven into suicide by such attacks while other people lost their jobs.
In addition to PR agencies and “paid editors” working for pharmaceutical companies, by far the most important group behind such Wikipedia attacks on genuine skeptics is an obscure organization ironically calling itself “The Skeptics” (as they are skeptical of challenges to official positions).
On the Wikipedia project website of this group, one can find a “hit list” including many well-known skeptical scientists, doctors and journalists who challenged covid orthodoxy. One of the most visible members of the “Skeptics” during the covid pandemic was an Australian epidemiologist who previously promoted soft drinks and glyphosate. Another member was exposed as an FBI informant.
Conclusion
In conclusion, the covid pandemic once again illustrated that citizens often cannot simply rely on health authorities or other authorities and instead have to double-check their decisions and recommendations based on independent high-quality research and investigations.
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You have been reading:
Covid treatments in retrospect
An analysis by Swiss Policy Research
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Annex: SPR articles
- Covid treatment (July 2020 / April 2023)
- The ivermectin debate (July 2021 / April 2022)
- Covid, HCQ, and auto-immunity (July 2021)
- Molnupiravir: More studies needed (Oct. 2021)
- Remdesivir: An epidemic failure (October 2020)
- The facemask folly in retrospect (August 2021)