Dr. Joseph Varon on COVID Censorship and the Success of His Treatment Protocol

Dr. Joseph Varon, professor of medicine at the University of Houston, in Connecticut on Sep. 9, 2023. Patrick Mauler/The Epoch Times

A Texas doctor using ivermectin and a very successful protocol differing from ventilators and remdesivir to treat COVID-19 was censored because of his work, and he received daily death threats.

Dr. Joseph Varon is a professor of medicine at the University of Houston and a founding member of the Front Line COVID-19 Critical Care Alliance (FLCCC). He worked 715 days without a day off, treating patients with FLCCC’s protocol as there was no other doctor willing to help the patients at Houston’s United Memorial Medical Center, he said during an interview for EpochTV’s “American Thought Leaders.”

Dr. Varon said that he faced repeated censorship even though his clinic had the lowest mortality rate in the country at 4 percent, compared to 20 percent or 40 percent in different places.

FLCCC was treating patients with the MATH+ protocol, using cortisol and other drugs such as hydroxychloroquine and ivermectin, but its work was not mentioned in the national media or by other doctors.

“I truly believe a lot of people died unnecessarily because of that censorship that we had,” he said.

It was out of desperation that Dr. Varon, with his colleague and longtime friend Dr. Paul Marik and others, created the protocol and the FLCCC alliance, as they were seeing people dying and they had to find a way to treat them.

Regarding the most common drug used by hospitals for COVID, remdesivir, and the use of ventilators, Dr. Varon said that he tried some of these interventions early during COVID, but they did not work. This is the reason they became desperate and tried to find an approach that had positive results.

He said that it was reported that the mortality rate regarding people put on ventilators in New York was 88 percent, so he came up with a variety of different techniques to get his patients to breath more deeply, and that helped, he said.

At the same time, they used the MATH+ protocol with “amazing success.”

The Protocol

The first letter of the MATH+ protocol stands for the name of a cortisol agent, which “worked fine,” Dr. Varon said. “We found very early in the pandemic that COVID was a very cortisol-sensitive illness,” he added.

The letter A is for ascorbic acid, or vitamin C. The letter T is for thiamine, “a very important vitamin that has to do with a lot of the metabolic command of your body,” he said.

The next letter, H, is for heparin, a blood thinner to deal with blood clots.

The plus sign is for a variety of other agents that they will give, such as ivermectin, he said.

“It was incredible the improvement that these patients had,” he said, adding that “it was not only the MATH+ protocol, it was also good nursing care, good physician care.”

In his Houston hospital, Dr. Varon was the only doctor working in the COVID unit, he said. No other doctor wanted to come, so Dr. Varon worked for 715 continuous days there, without a single day off.

“I couldn’t get sick, I couldn’t take a day off, because nobody wanted to care for these people,” he said.

In that institution Dr. Varon was working with patients who had no resources, “people who had no papers,” he said, many of them being illegal immigrants who were afraid to go to the hospital, so they didn’t seek medical help until they were critically ill.

After COVID

The cases eventually started to drop and there were no more patients with COVID at the hospital, he said.

But the hospital recently closed because it lost its accreditation with Medicare, Dr. Varon said. It was the only hospital in the Houston metropolitan area that was using the MATH+ protocol, and it was on television “every single day,” and people all over the world went there to see what they were doing, according to Dr. Varon.

He does not know if somebody called Medicare and told them to investigate something in the hospital’s finances, but he said the staff was working very hard to try to save people.

Dr. Varon is now seeing patients in his office, and mostly treats acute COVID, long COVID, and most recently, vaccine-related injuries.

FLCCC is now focusing on prevention as well, as early in the pandemic the doctors saw that people who had the hardest time with COVID where people with low levels of vitamin D.

“Maybe it’s time to start telling people, maybe you should have enough vitamins, maybe you should have enough sun exposure,” he said, adding that the prevention mindset applies to other illnesses such as diabetes and hypertension.

Dr. Varon wrote a book, “The Adventures of a COVID Hunter,” to show people “what was going on in the COVID unit.”

Examples include stories of people who wanted to leave the hospital to be with their families for a birthday party or on Thanksgiving, and Dr. Varon did what he could to make them feel better, for example by holding the birthday party in the patient’s room at the same time it was happening in his house, with balloons and a party atmosphere.

In order to lift the staff’s spirits, the staff created a music video in the hospital. Dr. Varon said he had nurses who were often crying because they'd lost patients while others were arriving who were already in bad shape.

Support and Criticism

Dr. Varon said that they had to do things differently.

“Before all these inspectors came to my hospital, if you look at my unit, it was full of cartoons on the walls and things like that, because people needed something to lift them up,” Dr. Varon said. People were also bringing them food every day, trying to lift their spirits.

That was needed because they were also receiving bad responses from outsiders, Dr. Varon said. He was receiving death threats every day, with people saying things like “We are going to kill you, we are going to do this, you are doing this, or you came out on TV and said X, Y, or Z,“ he said. ”I mean, it was difficult.”

“One of the things I made very clear was that during the pandemic, I was going to be right in the center, not to the right, not to the left,” Dr. Varon said. “Because I can tell you there are nutcases on both sides.”

Whether he was promoting the use of ivermectin or speaking about wearing masks, Dr. Varon said there were people who would contact him and threaten him, and that his family became concerned that something bad would happen.

“There was this massive hysteria,” he said.

Dr. Varon said he doesn’t know how he made it through that period, and that many of his friends lost their medical licenses.

He went on camera many times saying he was using ivermectin because it worked, and providing the data to support his claims.

“Because you step up, people are going after you. ‘No good deed goes unpunished.’ I finally understood the meaning of that,” he said.