Early Treatment Saves Lives
In one of the most absurd moments of the pandemic, Florida’s surgeon general gave a speech explaining that we need to have less covid testing, while speaking in front of a podium informing us that “early treatment saves lives”:
So, people need to get treated early for covid to prevent deaths. And they need to stop taking so many covid tests, so they won’t know when they have covid and need to take those early treatments.
If you look into it, you’ll find that most other advocates for early treatment are just as inconsistent as this.
The bad news right now is that covid is everywhere. The natural immunity that Ladapo talked about isn’t working, people are getting reinfected. Vaccines aren’t stopping it. I even know people that are triple vaccinated and had Omicron 6 months ago and still got BA.5. Their reinfection symptoms from BA.5 were worse than their first infection.
The good news is we have a few early treatments that work for covid. Paxlovid is highly effective if taken early and it’s no longer hard to get. Ask your doctor, if you get sick. Also, check the list of interactions with other drugs to make sure it’s safe for you.
Molnupiravir also works as an anti-viral, but is a bit less effective and has a worse safety profile.
Both drugs also seem to work for late treatment. In an observational study of 40,000 patients in Hong Kong, Paxlovid was still 66% effective against death if given to hospitalized patients and Molnupiravir was 50% effective.
This is unlike hydroxychloroquine or ivermectin, where every large trial fails and then the supporters retreat to, “maybe you didn’t give it early enough”.
We approved Remdesivir, early in the pandemic, even thought it wasn’t very effective. A follow-up study found that it’s 87% effective against hospitalization or death if given early, within 7 days of the start of symptoms. If you’re at high risk of covid and can’t take Paxlovid, consider asking your doctor about outpatient Remdesivir treatment.
We also have monoclonal antibodies available as an early treatment, but they’re increasingly ineffective. Every time covid mutates, it escapes prior antibodies and these drugs work a little less. It sounds like only one drug (bebtelovimab) still works against BA.5.
If you can’t get any of these drugs, you could also consider asking your doctor about inhaled steroids (budesonide) or the anti-depressant drug fluvoxamine, which appears to have some off label effect against covid. Neither treatment is as effective as antivirals, but both have some effect against the virus.
Conspiracy theorists insisted throughout the pandemic that we don’t need vaccines for covid, we need early treatments.
You’d think that these early treatment supporters would be thrilled that we now have a few antiviral drugs that work against covid.
Steve Kirsch founded the “Covid-19 Early Treatment Fund” to research drugs to treat covid.
What’s Steve Kirsch saying, now that Paxlovid is available?
He wrote an article simply titled, “PAXLOVID and Molnupiravir: Avoid”:
He thinks you don’t need Paxlovid because ivermectin does the same thing:
The Covid virus enters the cell and commandeers the cell forcing it to produce proteins. Protease enzymes must be present for the virus to successfully complete the cycle before taking the cell over. PAXLOVID or any drug classified as a ‘Protease Inhibitor’ will inhibit or decrease the Protease enzyme interfering with the virus. Ivermectin is the most successful and proven protease inhibitor in production. Just as with Paxlovid, ivermectin decreases the protease enzyme but…the benefits of ivermectin in Covid treatment are obvious and not present in paxlovid. Additional actions of ivermectin include anti-coagulant action and anti-inflammatory actions, both observed in Covid infections. Hydroxychloroquine is also a protease inhibitor and also works against COVID.
So why PAXLOVID? Because it’s from big pharma, is less proven than other drugs in terms of safety, and was approved without input from the external committees and the public. If that doesn’t inspire confidence, then I don’t know what does.
You should ask your doctor to explain to you why the off-the-shelf protease inhibitors don’t work, while this one does. Let me know what he says.
I’ve written about this before — ivermectin is a protease inhibitor, but an incredibly weak one. It might be able to stop covid, but you’d have to eat at least 8 tubes of horse paste every day to get enough ivermectin in your system. That 12 mg pill that Steve recommends is not going to help you, and neither is hydroxychloroquine.
But don’t just trust me. Ask your doctor if horse paste is right for you.
The one big downside of Paxlovid is that in some cases it doesn’t clear the virus and people get covid rebound a few days after taking it.
Ivermectin doesn’t cause covid rebound, but that’s probably because it doesn’t kill the virus in the first place.
Steve started the pandemic trying to research early treatment and now he’s encouraging people to avoid any drug or vaccine that could actually save their lives.
Steve is also encouraging you to take your loved ones out of the hospital:
Steve Kirsch wants to kill you and your loved ones.
I don’t know why. Some people are just evil.
Don’t worry. If you die from covid, he’ll just call it a vaccine death.
Here’s Jessica Rose, blogging as “Unacceptable Jessica” about Paxlovid:
She claims the drug damages your liver:
And then she warns about some obscure aspect of drug metabolism:
Just look at that scary pie chart!
This is actually pretty important. Paxlovid interacts with a lot of other drugs. It can make other drugs you’re taking more or less effective, by changing the speed at which they get metabolized. You don’t need to get on substack to learn about this, the NIH offers a guide to these interactions and who can safely take Paxlovid.
The funny thing here is that anti-vaxxers also promote fluvoxamine.
Fluvoxamine is an anti-depressant that seems to have some off-label use against covid. It may be about 30% effective against hospitalization, it’s worth considering if you can’t get any other prescription anti-viral drugs.
Fluvoxamine can be a dangerous drug, for exactly the same reasons as Paxlovid: it interacts with a lot of other medications.
The most famous interaction with fluvoxamine is with caffeine, if you have a cup of coffee while on fluvoxamine, it will keep you awake for a couple days.
Steve Kirsch encourages all covid patients to take fluvoxamine, he briefly mentions not to drink caffeine but otherwise gives people zero warning about the other risks.
If you’re going to take fluvoxamine for covid, run any other drugs you’re taking through a drug interactions check.
Jessica earns her nickname by fearmongering about Paxlovid.
Politifact rates her concerns:
These people want you to take early treatment, just not any early treatments that work. What kind of drugs do they think you should take?
In his interview on Joe Rogan, Robert Malone claimed that we could have saved lives with Famotidine.
Famotidine is also known as Pepcid, it’s an over the counter drug to treat heartburn.
Malone claimed that early treatments could have saved 500,000 lives in America. If there were some cheap and widely available drug that was 50% effective against covid and we gave it to everyone, then that number makes sense.
The problem is, pepcid is not 50% effective against covid. Even the anonymous website c19early.com, mostly directed at promoting ivermectin to conspiracy theorists, only thinks pepcid is 15% effective.
That’s a guess from a meta-analysis of small studies, for all we know it could be 0% effective.
The other problem is that Pepcid fails miserably as a drug to build a conspiracy theory around. It’s a cheap, over the counter drug. If it actually worked to cure covid, then any podcaster could have saved 500,000 lives just by telling people about it.
Podcasters didn’t do that, they just talked endlessly about hydroxychloroquine and ivermectin.
Those drugs make for good conspiracy theories, because you can pretend they’re effective, but the government won’t let you have them.
C19early.com lists a full set of treatments for covid, both generic and prescription:
Judging from their data, no one needed ivermectin because over the counter supplement quercetin is just as effective.
Can you combine supplements to do even better? If melatonin is 50% effective against covid and vitamin A is also 50% effective, is the combination 75% effective?
Or, say you take every over the counter vitamin and supplement in this list. That should be more than 99% effective against covid, way better than ivermectin. That could have saved over a million lives in America.
Honestly, I don’t think taking vitamins is dangerous. If I get covid, I will take some reasonable dose of vitamins, a bit of zinc, maybe a low dose of aspirin. I’ll do it because there’s not much risk and there’s a chance these will help a little. But I strongly doubt that they’re 99% effective.
You’re left with one of two conclusions about the c19early website.
Either: the numbers they give are bullshit.
Or: conspiracy theorists wasted all their time and energy doing podcasts about ivermectin when they could have saved a million lives by just telling people to take vitamins.
Is there anything we could have done in America to actually save 500,000 lives?
Sure. Several things.
We could have locked down long enough for everyone to get vaccinated and for treatments to become available. Other countries did this:
We could also have given everyone early treatment with Remdesivir. Remember when Trump got covid? He was given early treatment with Regeneron’s antibodies as well as early treatment with Remdesivir. For anyone else, they waited until you were already hospitalized and Remdesivir doesn’t work as well.
The problem is, this is a $3,000 drug and it needs to be given by IV. We’d need to give it to everyone at risk, not just wait for people. So we’d need a widespread testing regime.
We could have built transfusion centers across the country and given the drug to a hundred million people. The cost and logistics of that would have far exceeded what it took to get the country vaccinated, or the cost to just give everyone an N-95 mask for a year.
There was no cheap pill that we could have given out to save everyone.
The only drug that was being promoted in 2020 was hydroxychloroquine, and it didn’t work. It failed over and over in trials. It failed in late treatment. It failed in early treatment. It failed with azithromycin. It failed with zinc.
Hydroxychloroquine would not have saved 500,000 lives in America.
Ivermectin isn’t doing much better. I’m still hesitant to rule out Ivermectin entirely, but the big randomized trial (ACTIV-6 and Together trials) haven’t shown much effect. And the drug didn’t even start to get attention until December 2020, when 300,000 Americans had already died from covid and vaccines were already available.
Even if ivermectin proves to have some small effect against covid, the main effect it had last year was that people skipped getting vaccinated because they believed in it, and many of them died.
The conclusions from substack conspiracy theorists are always the same — any drug or vaccine that’s approved by the government is bad. Any drug the government won’t let you have is good.
What would the conspiracy theorists have done, if we had made Remdesivir infusion centers? They would have said, “don’t inject that poison!”, the same way they did with the vaccines. The same way that Steve Kirsch is telling you to take your loved ones out of the hospital.
Some of them changed their minds as the evidence changed. Alexandros Marinos went from, “remdesivir isn’t proven to work” and “hospitals only used it because the government paid them to use it” to “why didn’t the government give the drug out early enough?”.
Like, after a year of conspiracy theorists saying that remdesivir destroys your kidneys, some of them are complaining that it wasn’t given out early enough?
It makes you wonder what they’d do if the government ever approved any drug they like.
What would they say if the government had recommended fluvoxamine? Maybe Unacceptable Jessica would write an article saying, “It’s addictive! It changes cytochrome metabolism! The government is trying to put your children on antidepressants!”
What would they do if the government approved ivermectin? Change their minds and tell you to take hydroxychloroquine, instead?
Peter McCullough went on Joe Rogan, pitching a conspiracy theory that hydroxychloroquine was suppressed to force people to get dangerous covid vaccines.
As he phrased it, “all roads lead to the vaccine”.
The thing is, this conspiracy is entirely backwards. What McCullough really wanted to say is that lockdowns and vaccines were unnecessary. People didn’t enjoy those interventions, so they want to hear him say why they weren’t necessary.
Without those interventions, we would have a few hundred thousand more covid deaths. McCullough can’t just come out and say, “we should have killed more people to save the economy, and given millions more people long covid”. So he needs to pretend there’s something else we could have done.
For McCullough’s conspiracy theory to be true, there has to be some cheap drug that could have saved all those lives. He needs Hydroxychloroquine to work, otherwise he’s just being an asshole saying that we should have let covid kill more people. A better summary would be:
“All conspiracies lead to hydroxychloroquine”
What’s the actual goal of these people?
It’s not about saving lives, it’s about money and it’s about politics.
Conspiracy theorists make a lot of money telling people to make poor health choices. Top substack writers pull in up to a million dollars each year.
But many have also taken a political stance.
Steve Kirsch ends a post about vaccine injuries with the following advice:
Ron Johnson, Mike Lee, and Marjorie Taylor Greene are all Republicans and all support the vaccine injured.
Please hold the Democrats accountable in November. This is really the only way this problem will be solved.
Unacceptable Jessica has a post up, asking you elect Senator Ron Johnson:
Kirsch also has a post calling for Ron Johnson’s re-election.
Robert Malone praises Ron Johnson as a “truth warrior” and calls for you to donate to his campaign.
What was Florida’s surgeon general really talking about, when we said that “early treatment saves lives” but we need to stop testing for covid?
He was saying that businesses want you back at work. They want you out spending money. They didn’t want you worrying about delta, or omicron, or testing for covid.
The same motivation lead other businesses to fund bad research on covid. JetBlue to fund a flawed study saying that covid was less deadly than the flu. A million deaths later, we know this was false, but JetBlue didn’t want to lose money during the pandemic.
The same motivation lead businesses to fund misinformation about hydroxychloroquine. America’s Frontline Doctors was funded by Tea Party Patriots, a political group funded by billionaires that wanted you out spending more money.
If these people can convince you that covid is mild, they can get you out spending. If they can convince you that a useless drug will save your life, they can make you more confident to do that. And if they can convince you that the government is pushing deadly vaccines, they might even get you to vote against your own interests.
When Omicron emerged, these people said the variant was a good thing. They called Omicron “nature’s vaccine” and promised we’d get herd immunity.
Now with BA.5, people are getting reinfected again. But that’s a good thing, right? It’s just nature’s booster shot.
“Early treatment” was never about saving lives.
It was about substack grifters making money.
It was about businesses making money.
And it was about political opposition.
