Praise the Lord and Pass the Ivermectin

With over 1,200 daily COVID deaths for many weeks the US is on track to reach a total of one million COVID related deaths by the end of March.  A shameful record for 2022.

To think that every week over 8,000 Americans are dying, mostly in hospital ICUs is unbelievable.  But that is no excuse for the lack of serious attention by the mainstream media.  Take a moment to reflect that this is more deaths than those in the 9/11 attacks and Pearl Harbor, combined.  And it is happening every week.

The late stage problem

Hospitals have become killing machines, places where the kiss of death is a protocol following government guidelines.  Despite wide COVID vaccine use, deaths in hospitals because of late stage viral infection remain at a high level.  Difficulty in getting COVID testing quickly and often probably contributes to the high death rate.  Too many people do not get their COVID infection addressed early.  There remains too little use of monoclonal antibodies early for infected people.  So their infection progresses to serious lung and breathing problems.  That is the beginning of the end.

And it will be a long time before the new antiviral drugs from Pfizer and Merck are broadly available and there will be more information on whether they are really safe and effective for all diverse types of people.

In hospitals, patients with breathing problems and upper respiratory distress are giving medical actions that may address pain but inevitably lead to death, often after many weeks in the ICU.  They get the useless and harmful drug remdesivir, supplemental oxygen, steroids, and are intubated, put on a ventilator and usually put into a coma.  And eventually they die and become another COVID statistic.

It has been reported that the death rate for COVID patients prescribed remdesivir (26%) exceeds the fatality rate of COVID patients prescribed ivermectin, which is recorded by the Medicare database at 7.2%.  And it has documented serious side effects.

In a few successful court actions, such late stage COVID patients were given the cheap, safe generic IVM and – much to the astonishment of hospital doctors – have walked out of the hospital, completely recovered.

And there is considerable medical research literature supporting such use of IVM, principally because of its anti-inflammatory property.  As just one example, a published medical 2021 hospital study found nearly a 50% reduction in deaths for patients with severe pulmonary involvement, the typical late stage COVID death-bed patient condition.  The many doubters of IVM should pay more attention to the medical science literature.

But published medical articles are ignored by the medical and public health establishments.

To be clear, a majority of hospitalized COVID patients have diabetes, are obese or have other serious underlying medical conditions.  But though they get hospital attention, they do not all become late stage COVID patients with deadly breathing and lung problems.  And the omicron variant is known to not be like delta; it does not attack lungs in the same way.  And delta is still active and deadly.

Hospital shame

Hospitals stubbornly refuse to honor the few court decisions directing them to give death-bed late COVID stage patients a chance of surviving by administering ivermectin.  Hospitals use an army of lawyers and every dirty legal trick to overturn or delay those few court decisions that reach the sensible conclusion that there is nothing to lose by using ivermectin.

Indeed, here is the ugly truth: Hospital protocols for late stage COVID patients have nearly a one hundred percent record of failure.  Their patients suffer and then die.  Families desperate to get ivermectin used usually fail and watch their loved ones die.

This is a medical disgrace.  This is the power of corporate medicine.  This situation exemplifies the loss of medical freedom.  This is the epitome of medical tyranny.  This is a total loss of medical ethics.  This is an extreme example of doctors failing to live up to their Hippocratic Oath.  They follow hospital rules and let their patients die without trying what has a medical justification and without doing what other doctors have successfully done.

Apparently, that weekly death total is not enough to push hospitals and doctors to use what several nations have used to curb the COVID pandemic and save many millions of lives.

Hospital care arguments

Consider this paradox and hypocrisy.  Virtually all hospitals put a priority on patient centered care.  Patient-centered care focuses on the patient and the individual’s particular health care needs.  The goal of patient-centered health care is to empower patients to become active participants in their care.

Clearly, denying patient and family pleas for using ivermectin for people facing death is totally inconsistent with this philosophy and hospital commitment.

Add to all this that demanding all patients use a one-size-fits-all medical treatment or hospital protocol is also counter to personalized medicine, long the hallmark of medicine.  Doctors need the freedom to use what suits their patient rather than what the government dictates or accepting what it withholds.

Court actions to get hospitals allowing IVM use might be more successful if both patient centered care and personalized medicine arguments were presented to judges.

Conclusions

Time to let those who want to use ivermectin in an attempt to save their life get it.  It is medically and morally the right thing to do.

With now a long record of hospital protocols for late stage COVID utterly failing to save lives, how can the medical profession justify not using a generic medicine that both research and clinical results justify and explain its ability to save lives?

They cannot. Families trying to find a lawyer and a friendly court face a very, very difficult race to save their loved one stuck in the ICU just like a prisoner sentenced to death.

Is it COVID killing these people or the medical profession and their hospital employers?  Worth pondering as you keep watching mounting COVID death numbers.

Dr. Joel S. Hirschhorn, author of Pandemic Blunder and many articles and podcasts on the pandemic, worked on health issues for decades, and his Pandemic Blunder Newsletter is on Substack. As a full professor at the University of Wisconsin, Madison, he directed a medical research program between the colleges of engineering and medicine.  As a senior official at the Congressional Office of Technology Assessment and the National Governors Association, he directed major studies on health-related subjects; he testified at over 50 US Senate and House hearings and authored hundreds of articles and op-ed articles in major newspapers.  He has served as an executive volunteer at a major hospital for more than 10 years.  He is a member of the Association of American Physicians and Surgeons, and America’s Frontline Doctors.

Image via Flickr, CC BY-NC 2.0.

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