STORY AT-A-GLANCE
- From the start of the COVID pandemic, doctors were told they could not use any treatment that had not undergone randomized controlled trials. Most all clinical successes have been ignored and vehemently opposed
- The Frontline COVID-19 Critical Care Alliance (FLCCC) was among the first to publish COVID treatment guidance. They have since developed protocols for prevention, early at-home treatment, in-hospital treatment and maintenance guidance for long-haul COVID syndrome that are updated as more becomes known
- Corticosteroids can be an effective tool for reducing inflammation in general, but they appear particularly important for advanced COVID infection. Steroids should not be used early on, but can be lifesaving after you develop signs of lung dysfunction and increased oxygen requirement
- Ivermectin has antiviral and anti-inflammatory properties and is beneficial in all stages of COVID-19, from prevention to advanced illness
Other effective protocols include the AAPS protocol, Tess Laurie’s World Council for Health protocol and the America’s Frontline Doctors’ protocol
Dr. Pierre Kory is one of the leaders in the movement to provide early treatment for COVID infection. Kory is a critical care physician (ICU specialist), triple board certified in internal medicine, critical care and pulmonary medicine, and is part of the Frontline COVID-19 Critical Care Alliance (FLCCC), which was among the first to publish COVID treatment guidance.
Kory spent most of his career at the Beth Israel Medical Center in Manhattan, New York, where he helped run the intensive care unit. He also had a busy outpatient practice. About six years ago, he was recruited to the St. Luke’s Aurora Medical Center in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, where he led the critical care service. “When COVID hit, I was in a leadership position,” he says. “I resigned, because of the way they were handling the pandemic.”
“I knew there was a variety of treatments that we could use [yet] we were using nothing,” he says. Doctors were even told to not use anticoagulants, even though blood clotting was “through the roof” in many patients. “You could draw blood and actually see the blood clotting very quickly in the tubes,” he says.
Since those early days, the disease seems to have changed considerably. We don’t see the high rates of blood clotting anymore, for example, which is good news.
But for some reason, from the very start, “they were literally telling us that we needed randomized controlled trials to do anything,” Kory says, and to this day, health authorities are refusing to acknowledge any treatment protocol outside of the incredibly dangerous experimental drug remdesivir, and the experimental COVID jabs.
“People were dying, [yet] all of my ideas were getting shouted down. My superiors were showing up [to my clinical meetings] and getting me to stand down, because I was entertaining the idea that we should do this, that and the other thing, and they didn’t want anything to be done.
And so, I said, ‘I’m done.’ I resigned mid-April 2020. I then went to New York for five weeks and ran my old ICU in New York.”
The key is to use the steroids at the correct time — not too early and not too late, the “Goldilocks” window. There are no hard and fast rules for that, as each patient is different, but as a rule of thumb, do NOT use it until or unless you are seeing a significant worsening of symptoms to where breathing is getting more difficult.
Kory’s outpatient protocol includes prednisone on Day 7, 8 or 9, if you’re still going downhill. It is important to NOT use it early in the course of the illness as it will actually worsen the infection by increasing viral replication.
The suggested dosage is 1 milligram of prednisone or methylprednisolone per kilogram of bodyweight. When using methylprednisolone (Medrol) (which Kory prefers, in part because lung tissue concentrations are higher than prednisone), he divides it into two daily doses. Kory does not recommend the use of dexamethasone, as it doesn’t work as well for lung disease. Yet, most doctors in the U.S. use dexamethasone if they’re using steroids at all.
The dose may be increased depending on the severity and trajectory of the infection. “I probably will either double or triple the [dose] until I can get them stable,” he says.
“Once they’re off oxygen, then I taper off [the steroid] over about a week to 10 days, sometimes shorter. Depends how long they were on oxygen. If they were on it for a short time, I do a fast taper; if they were on oxygen for a longer time, I’ll do a slower taper. But I don’t start fully tapering until they’re off oxygen.”
One suggestion would be to call the hospital you’re thinking of using if you ever had to be admitted for COVID and ask if they have it. If not, you can ask your doctor to order it for you and bring it to the hospital, if you or a family member are admitted for COVID or sepsis. The key, of course, is having a doctor who is willing to use it. Some aren’t.
“You should’ve seen the resistance I got. At one point, I was the director of the main ICU at the University of Wisconsin and the data was so overwhelming, I said, ‘Hey, guys, can’t we just start a protocol where we just give everybody on admission IV vitamin C? What’s the downside?’
Everyone started talking about kidney stones and all of this nonsense, and we have so much data to show that doesn’t happen in acute illness, or in IV formulations … I feel like I live in a cartoon of medicine, because every time I discuss something with someone, they just don’t believe anything works. Because if it worked, they would be doing it. It’s bizarre.”
Most of our medicines are repurposed, so they’re not novel. They’re very well-known over decades, their safety profiles are well known, they tend to be generally low cost, and their mechanisms are well-known. A central medicine to all of our protocols — prevention, early treatment, hospital, and late phase like long-haul [syndrome] is ivermectin, for many reasons.”
When you look at the actions taken against ivermectin, it can only be understood that it’s threatening something big and powerful, because boy has it been attacked [even though it’s been used in] 64 controlled trials, almost every single one of them showing benefit, many of them large benefits.
Yet they distort it to make it seem like it’s controversial. It’s absurd. We know it works. We know it from in vitro, in vivo animal studies, and case series.”
One of the first case series, from the Dominican Republic, was published in June 2020. They treated 3,300 consecutive emergency room COVID patients with ivermectin. Of those, only 16 went on to be hospitalized and one died. That’s pretty profound, considering these were severely ill individuals.
Importantly though, there is a dose-response relationship to the viral load. The Delta variant has been shown to produce viral loads that are 250 times higher than Alpha, and as Delta became predominant, breakthrough cases in the prevention protocol started happening.
“I’m one of them. I got COVID while I was taking it weekly,” Kory says. “Now we’re doing it twice weekly. Is it the right dose? We’re not sure. But we’re seeing much fewer breakthroughs now on a higher dose. Could it be higher? Maybe. But, but we know it works as prevention.”
Higher doses of ivermectin are also used for treatment of Delta. In more advanced stages, the drug is useful thanks to its anti-inflammatory properties. Contrary to many other drugs, ivermectin is beneficial in all stages of the infection.
