Authoritarianism and Censorship in the COVID Era, Part 3: A Medical Holodomor, and Two Heroes of the Healing Arts

A staff member shows packets of Nivaquine tablets containing chloroquine and Plaqueril tablets containing hydroxychloroquine at the IHU Mediterranee Infection Institute in Marseille, France, on Feb. 26, 2020. Gerard Julien/AFP via Getty Images

Commentary

This is Part 3 of a multi-part series examining Authoritarianism and Censorship in the COVID Era. Click here for Part 1 and Part 2.

Falsehood flies, and truth comes limping after it, so that when men come to be undeceived, it is too late; the jest is over, and the tale hath had its effect: like a man, who hath thought of a good repartee when the discourse is changed, or the company parted; or like a physician, who hath found out an infallible medicine, after the patient is dead.—Jonathan Swift.

New Covid Man in His Habitat

Some of us had hopes that Vaccine Pride would at least outmode our national mask fetish, but we continue to witness the absurd spectacle of Canadians exhibiting their social responsibility (or craven submission to authority) by donning masks while jogging in the park, riding their bikes, or driving alone in their cars. (Do they fear that the coronavirus molecule is incubating stealthily in their car’s ventilation system? In which case, shouldn’t cars be wearing masks too?)

Recently, while standing in one of those longer than normal supermarket lines that are another uncalculated cost of COVID prophylaxis—Canadians love standing in line, I know, and now they must be happier than ever—Mrs. P. had the temerity to call for an additional cashier, who, when she arrived, remonstrated, “We’re all in this together.” That, of course, is word-for-word the official mantra of Canada’s federal government, blared at us incessantly on billboards, buses, highway signs, and through “independent” media, whose willingness to make themselves organs of State propaganda would have been the envy of Big Brother. To hear that sentimentally manipulative slogan parroted by a co-operative serf reminds one of how easily and often in the past the masses have been led by maleficent rulers.

One would think that always “co-ah-pur-a-tin” (as the William H. Macy character pronounces his byword in the movie “Fargo”) with the authorities, always doing what they tell us to do, would make erstwhile free citizens feel ill-used and disenfranchised. But obedience confers upon the New Covid Man a sense of his own righteousness, and there’s nothing more empowering than a sense of one’s own righteousness. Totalitarian regimes have for that reason always been scrupulous to delegate their authority to the people—their only genuine gesture toward democracy—by way of block monitors, Party-approved factory foremen, and so on, who in spying on and denouncing their fellow citizens enjoy the power of life and death over them, while at the same time reassuring themselves that they are serving the greater good of mankind.

Canadians are already denouncing their neighbors for entertaining illicit guests in their homes, and store clerks almost automatically call the police if an unmasked customer enters the shop, even if he is provident enough to carry and display his legal medical exemption. In a recent replay of that dispiriting scenario at a Coquitlam, B.C., bookstore, the officer called to the scene of the crime was duly shown the text of the bylaw by a group of medically exempt shoppers, but affected to have never heard of it, before removing and arresting the bare-faced (pun intended) liars. These days the police treat you with greater deference if you smash a store’s windows and loot its shelves than if you pull your mask a centimeter below your nose while struggling to pay for your purchases through breath-befogged spectacles.

In it together? No we aren’t. Ordinary Canadians and Americans whose businesses have been bankrupted or who have lost their jobs are certainly “in it,” and deeply so. But the ruling elites—Nancy Pelosi off to the beauty salon; Gavin Newsom and friends a table at their chic local eatery; Patrick Brown at his weekly hockey scrimmage in a Brampton rink locked down to the unconnected hoi polloi; Justin Trudeau helicoptering to his cottage—merely float above it in a mandorla of imperial hauteur.

Scientific Correctness

For the hyper-obedient, the mask has become a combination of fashion statement, moral boast, and shamanic talisman. It’s also, not coincidentally, the perfect visual emblem of the muzzling of any opinion that deviates from the myriad progressive dogmas enforced by the woke theocrats who run the government, the academy, the mainstream media, and Big Tech.

Over the years, we have observed an accelerating synergy between “political correctness” and its cognate in the supposedly coldly rational, free-thinking realm of science (though students of 20th-century totalitarianism will be entirely familiar with that phenomenon). The government, media, academy, and Big Tech platforms that have been depressingly successful in diabolizing and silencing the voices of the refuseniks of progressive orthodoxy are the same agencies as have been conspiring for almost two years to deride and suppress findings by eminently qualified physicians and virologists about the Wuhan virus insofar as they wander from the narrow path of the “settled,” but oddly ever-changing, “science” serially dictated by the World Health Organization (WHO), Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, National Institutes of Health (NIH), Food and Drug Administration (FDA), Health and Human Services, American Medical Association, Royal College of Physicians and Surgeons of Canada, College of Physicians and Surgeons of Ontario, and other State-designated medical “experts.”

Since the outbreak of COVID-19, the evidence has been overwhelming that early ambulatory treatment with combinations of zinc, vitamin D, ivermectin, and hydroxychloroquine is cheap, safe, effective, and would have pre-empted innumerable hospitalizations and saved hundreds of thousands of lives in Canada and the United States alone. A multitude of double-blind randomized trials, peer-reviewed papers in respected medical journals, and, more important, real-life consulting-room results from around the world have attested to the success of early treatment with these sequenced multi-drug protocols, as have the many thousands of physicians and virologists who are members of or signatories to such professional medical organizations as the Front Line COVID-19 Critical Care Alliance (FLCCC), Canadian Covid Care Alliance, Canada Health Alliance, America’s Frontline Doctors, America’s Frontline Nurses, Canadian Frontline Nurses, the Association of American Physicians and Surgeons, Truth for Health Foundation, and the Great Barrington Declaration, to name a few. Anyone wishing to assess for him or herself the credibility of these studies and testimonies need only do a simple Google search to discover literally thousands of articles but almost nothing in the mainstream media or on the Big Tech platforms, other than smarmy dismissals resounding with apotropaic formulas such as “unscientific,” “unproven,” or “harmful disinformation.”

Physicians who have been courageous enough to develop, administer, and advocate for these life-saving therapies, such as doctors Peter McCullough, Paul Marik, Pierre Kory, Elizabeth Vliet, and Vladimir Zelenko, ought to be exalted as heroes and nominated for a Nobel Prize; instead, to quote McCullough himself, they have been cast under “a dark cloud of censorship and reprisal.”

A Tale of Two Doctors, and a Study in Censorship

The March 2021 testimony before the Texas Senate of Dr. McCullough deserves to be cited extensively if only as a study in contrasts between two “men of science,” two medical “experts,” one of whom (unlike Dr. Anthony Fauci) is actually a practising physician who has treated people suffering from COVID-19, and has every right to feel like a prophet unheard in his own land. McCullough is a board-certified internist and cardiologist, and the author of over 600 peer-reviewed papers in prestigious medical journals, over 40 dedicated to the treatment of COVID-19. In the early stages of the pandemic, McCullough saw patients who were suffering from serious heart and lung disease. By contrast to the majority of his medical colleagues who followed the guidance of the “experts,” McCullough “refused to let a patient languish at home with no treatment and then be hospitalized [14 days later] when it was too late.”

Accordingly, in conjunction with a team of dozens of doctors from Italy, India, UCLA, Emory University, and other U.S. institutions, McCullough published (on Aug. 6, 2020, in The American Journal of Medicine) a review of the literature on the most effective treatments employed to date around the world. In the course of his research, he noted that “there were 50,000 papers in the peer-reviewed literature on COVID, [but] not a single one told a doctor how to treat it.”

McCullough’s article was nonetheless widely cited, and using four slides from it, he cobbled together a YouTube video. Though that video (which went “viral,” appropriately) was based on a peer-reviewed paper in one of the world’s most-respected medical journals, YouTube peremptorily quashed it, for “violating the terms of the community.”

In his testimony, McCullough notes that a randomized, double-blind trial of over 4,000 patients by the Montreal Heart Institute using the commonplace (but apparently unheard of) anti-inflammatory drug colchicine resulted in a 44 percent reduction in mortality. Once again, the study was disappeared as completely as Hillary’s bleach-bitten emails.

Since then, there has remained “a near total block on any information about treatment” or treatment centers; no reports on local or cable news; no weekly White House panels of doctors assessing treatment options; and only recently (six months after McCullough’s testimony) has the U.S. government revealed and made available its secret repositories of monoclonal antibodies, though they have been authorized for use as a therapy by the FDA since November 2020. The NIH continues to issue guidelines on the treatment of COVID that refer exclusively to hospitalized patients.

“You get handed a diagnostic test [which] says you’re COVID positive; go home,” McCullough said. “That’s the standard of care in the United States. ... Where’s the focus on people sick right now?”

The focus, of course, was—still is—on the vaccine, which patients, abandoned to recover or not with the revolution of Fortune’s wheel, or to languish in the Tartarus of a hospital ICU, were told to await with messianic expectation:

“What’s happened in this pandemic is a world that has closed in on us. There is only one doctor whose face is on TV now. One. Not a panel. Doctors: we always work in groups, we always have different opinions. There’s not a single media doctor on TV who’s ever treated a COVID-19 patient. ... There’s not a single person in the White House task force who’s ever treated a patient. ... So what happened? ... What happened [was that] in around May it became known that the virus was going to be amenable to a vaccine. All efforts on treatment were dropped. The National Institutes of Health actually had a multi-drug program. They ... said we can’t find patients. The most disingenuous announcement of all time. And then Warp Speed went full tilt … and there was a silencing of any information on treatment. ... Scrubbed from Twitter, YouTube. Can’t get papers published on this. We can’t even get information out in our own medical literature on this.”

At the conclusion of his testimony, McCullough refers to a study he co-authored in McKinney, Texas, with a 90-plus percent success rate in treating patients over 50 with a sequenced multi-drug approach. Since his appearance before the Texas Senate, and in spite of a Soviet-style pall of censorship, McCullough’s three-stage protocol (with antivirals in the first days of infection, anti-inflammatories in the intermediate phase, and drugs to forestall thrombosis in the final stage) has been used to successfully treat thousands of patients across the United States and Canada. Published by the Association of American Physicians and Surgeons, the 26-page “Guide to Home-Based Covid Treatment“ authored by doctors McCullough, Jane Orient, and Elizabeth Vliet has the dubious distinction of having become the first example of medical samizdat in the history of the healing arts.

One of McCullough’s fellow medical dissidents, Dr. Vladimir Zelenko, has had precisely similar success, for which his rewards have included de-platforming, social mobbing, and death threats. Zelenko became persona non grata early in the pandemic for his advocacy of hydroxychloroquine. Like the equally infamous “magic elixir” (CNN’s evocative description) ivermectin, hydroxychloroquine is inexpensive, in abundant supply, and has a 40-year track record of impeccable safety (by contrast, not incidentally, to the vaccines, which are expensive—a windfall for Big Pharma—untested, and have a six-month track record of what the government euphemizes as “adverse events”).

In the eyes of the media and the medical establishment, hydroxychloroquine’s reputation as either poisonous or ineffective snake-oil, and Zelenko’s as a witch doctor, were confirmed on the evidence that President Donald Trump had been a vigorous proponent of that drug, and that Zelenko’s treatment of him therewith eventuated in a complete and immediate recovery. (This was surely a sore disappointment for the Democrats and their media allies, who, as we all recall, denounced Trump as a Nazi, and tacitly—sometimes volubly—hoped that he would succumb to COVID-19 as the just desserts for his crimes against humanity.)

In June of 2020, candidate Joe Biden called the promotion of hydroxychloroquine “totally irresponsible.” The Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee picked up on the word “irresponsible” and quickly escalated under the afflatus of the Democrats’ dedicated Muse of Doom: “It’s reckless and irresponsible for Washington Republicans and their candidates to promote a potentially lethal and scientifically discredited cure because they think it will improve their lot in the president’s eyes”; these are “dangerous, unproven theories that put [people’s] lives at risk.” Though the allegorical personification of an impartial and dispassionate Scientia, Fauci was only somewhat less partial and passionate in his dismissal of hydroxychloroquine on CNN: “The scientific data is really quite evident now about the lack of efficacy.”

The “scientific data” proving that the administration of hydroxychloroquine was “irresponsible,” “unproven,” “discredited,” “lethal,” and ineffective depended at that time on a (genuinely) discredited paper published in The Lancet, which had to be retracted within a week of its release for its reliance on potentially unreliable data and shoddy methodology. Based on data for already hospitalized patients, the study concluded that hydroxychloroquine not only failed to prevent the progression of the disease but contributed to “excess mortalities”—notwithstanding that both it and ivermectin are indicated for early outpatient intervention. Moreover, in the study, as Zelenko has observed, patients were administered several times the lethal dose of the anti-viral. By contrast to Fauci, I’m no scientist; but might that, do you think, have contributed to “excess mortalities”?

The findings of the original, thoroughly discredited—always a unidirectional word in the lexicon of the medical establishment—article in The Lancet were widely cited in the media and the “scientific” literature, culminating in the peremptory suspension of the hydroxychloroquine trial then ongoing under the WHO (whose inconstant pronouncements over the course of the pandemic, one might add, have shown themselves to be curiously congruent with the political wisdom of the Democratic National Committee). Trump’s early executive order to make hydroxychloroquine available to every American was inevitably subverted by the deep state when the Biomedical Advanced Research and Development Authority then under Dr. Rick Bright—an opponent of the drug—requested an emergency use authorization that restricted its access to hospitalized patients and prohibited it for outpatient treatment. Then, on the basis of the original Lancet article, according to Zelenko, and after its retraction, emergency use authorization was wholly withdrawn, and both the CDC and the FDA proscribed hydroxychloroquine in any setting, calling it ineffective and harmful.

As Zelenko observed in an interview he conducted in Israel on Aug. 17:

“There has been a very co-ordinated effort to suppress lifesaving information. Drugs like hydroxychloroquine and ivermectin, which are the safest medications in the history of medicine, have been suppressed, and you can’t even get them in Israel. Doctors who dare to say something that is against the narrative are being de-platformed, including world experts. Dr. Malone, for example, who developed the mRNA vaccine … was de-platformed from every media platform. Can you tell me why? And then, can you tell me why there is suppression of knowledge of [the vaccines’] side effects? ... And then tell me why there is this incredible coercion, psychological pressure, and now using force to tell people to take the shot?”

Ignoring the government’s official edicts at considerable peril, Zelenko personally treated 6,000 patients, and indirectly tens of thousands more through the doctors he instructed, with a success rate that replicated McCullough’s at about 85 percent. As he notes in his interview, given 600,000 COVID mortalities in the United States alone, his protocol could have prevented 510,000 needless hospitalizations and deaths, for which Zelenko accuses the U.S. government and its medical apparatchiks of “genocide.”

Zelenko, it should be noted, is a Jew, and both physically and temperamentally more than slightly resembles an Old Testament prophet in his fulminations against the current medical tyranny, and in his fluent evocation of the tragic history of the Jews from biblical times through the Third Reich. His invocation of such atavistic concepts as “sin” and “God” no doubt further offends the sensibilities of the “real” scientists who, as Princeton mathematician David Berlinski has observed, safeguard their own dogmas of absolute materialism and unintelligent design against heretical challenges with the zeal of the medieval Inquisition.

When Zelenko uses words such as “holocaust” or “genocide” to describe the consequences of a deliberately negligent public pandemic response, the scientific aristocracy is doubly convinced that he is cracked. But genocide seems a reasonable enough denomination when hundreds of thousands have been condemned to die as a result of a stiff-necked refusal by pharaonic rulers to allow doctors to treat their patients in the way they deem best for their resumption of health, on the basis of their own knowledge and experience, in accordance with standard practice, and with safe and available pharmacotherapies. As historians of the Holodomor have understood, genocide need not require anything as inconvenient and unpalatable as the deployment of poison gas or machine guns, but only the deliberate withdrawal by the State of the necessities of life.

It is scarcely an exaggeration to say that the history of medicine must now be bisected according to the traditional divisions B.C.E. and C.E. (where C stands for “Covid”). In the Covid Era, the Hippocratic Oath has been revised from “Do no harm” to “Do nothing until it’s too late.”

Views expressed in this article are opinions of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of The Epoch Times.