Dr. Peter McCullough concurs: “Once a highly transmissible virus like COVID has a beachhead in a population, it is inevitable that it will spread to every individual who lacks immunity. You can slow the spread, but you cannot prevent it—any more than you can prevent the tide from rising.” McCullough was an internist and cardiologist on staff at the Baylor University Medical Center and the Baylor Heart and Vascular Hospital in Dallas, Texas. His 600 peer-reviewed articles in the National Library of Medicine make McCullough the most published physician in history in the field of kidney disease related to heart disease, a lethal sequela of COVID-19. Before COVID-19, he was editor of two major journals. His recent publications include over 40 on COVID-19, including two landmark studies on critical care of the disease. His two breakthrough papers on the early treatment of COVID-19 in The American Journal of Medicine41 and Reviews in Cardiovascular Medicine42 in 2020 are, by far, the most downloaded documents on the subject. “I’ve had COVID-19 myself with pulmonary involvement,” he told me. “My wife has had it. On my wife’s side of the family, we’ve had a fatality . . . I believe I have as much or more medical authority to give my opinion as anybody in the world.”
McCullough observes that, “We could have dramatically reduced COVID fatalities and hospitalizations using early treatment protocols and repurposed drugs including ivermectin and hydroxychloroquine and many, many others.” Dr. McCullough has treated some 2,000 COVID patients with these therapies. McCullough points out that hundreds of peer-reviewed studies now show that early treatment could have averted some 80 percent of deaths attributed to COVID. “The strategy from the outset should have been implementing protocols to stop hospitalizations through early treatment of Americans who tested positive for COVID but were still asymptomatic. If we had done that, we could have pushed case fatality rates below those we see with seasonal flu, and ended the bottlenecks in our hospitals. We should have rapidly deployed off-the-shelf medications with proven safety records and subjected them to rigorous risk/benefit decision-making,” McCullough continues. “Using repurposed drugs, we could have ended this pandemic by May 2020 and saved 500,000 American lives, but for Dr. Fauci’s hard-headed, tunnel vision on new vaccines and remdesivir.”
Pulmonary and critical care specialist Dr. Pierre Kory agrees with McCullough’s estimate. “The efficacy of some of these drugs as prophylaxis is almost miraculous, plus early intervention in the week after exposure stops viral replication and prevents development of cytokine storm and entrance into the pulmonary phase,” says Dr. Kory. “We could have stopped the pandemic in its tracks in the spring of 2020.”
Risch, McCullough, and Kory are among the large chorus of experts (including Nobel Laureate Luc Montagnier) who argue that, by treating infected patients at home during the early stages of the illness, we could have averted cataclysmic lockdowns and found medicine resources for protecting vulnerable populations while encouraging the spread of the disease in age groups with extremely low-risk, in order to achieve permanent herd immunity. They point out that natural immunity, in all known cases, is superior to vaccine-induced immunity, being both more durable (it often lasts a lifetime) and broader spectrum—meaning it provides a shield against subsequent variants. “Vaccinating citizens with natural immunity should never have been our public health policy,” says Dr. Kory.
Dr. Fauci’s strategy committed hundreds of billions of societal resources on a high-risk gambit to develop novel technology vaccines, and virtually nothing toward developing repurposed medications that are effective against COVID. “That strategy kept the medical treatment on hold globally for an entire year as a readily treatable respiratory virus ravaged populations,” says Kory. “It is absolutely shocking that he recommended no outpatient care, not even Vitamin D despite the fact he takes it himself and much of the country is Vitamin D deficient.”
Dr. Kory43 is president of Front Line COVID-19 Critical Care Alliance, a former associate professor, and Medical Director of the Trauma and Life Support Center at the University of Wisconsin Medical School Hospital, and the Critical Care Service Chief at Aurora St. Luke’s Medical Center in Milwaukee. His milestone work on critical care ultrasonography won him the British Medical Association’s President’s Choice Award in 2015.
Risch, McCullough, and Kory are also among the hundreds of scientists and physicians who express shock that Dr. Fauci made no effort to identify repurposed medicines. Says Kory, “I find it appalling that there was no consultation process with treating physicians. Medicine is about consultation. You had Birx, Fauci, and Redfield doing press conferences every day and handing down these arbitrary diktats and not one of them ever treated a COVID patient or worked in an emergency room or ICU. They knew nothing.”
“As I watched the White House Task Force on T.V.,” recalls Dr. McCullough, “no one even said that hospitalizations and deaths were the bad outcome of COVID-19, and that they were going to put together a team of doctors to identify protocols and therapeutics to stop these hospitalizations and deaths.”
Dr. McCullough argues that, as COVID czar, Dr. Fauci should have created an international communications network linking the world’s 11 million front-line doctors to gather real-time tips, innovative safety protocols, and to develop the best prophylactic and early treatment practices. “He should have created hotlines and dedicated websites for medical professionals to call in with treatment questions and to consult, collect, catalogue, and propagate the latest innovations for prophylaxing vulnerable and exposed individuals, and treating early infections, so as to avert hospitalizations.” Dr. Kory agrees: “The outcome we should have been trying to prevent is hospitalizations. You don’t just sit around and wait for an infected patient to become ill. Dr. Fauci’s treatment strategies all began once all these under-medicated patients were hospitalized. By that time, it was too late for many of them. It was insane. It was perverse. It was unethical.”
Dr. McCullough says that Dr. Fauci should have created treatment centers for ambulatory patients and field clinics specializing in treating asymptomatic or early-stage COVID. “He should have been encouraging doctors to use satellite clinics to conduct small outpatient clinical trials to quickly identify the most effective protocols, drugs, and therapeutics.”
Professor Risch concurs: “We should have deployed teams of doctors all over the world doing short-term clinical trials and testing promising drugs and reporting successful protocols. The endpoints were obvious: preventing hospitalizations and deaths. In addition to rapidly developing and continuously updating protocols and remedies, McCullough and Kory say that the government failed to perform the essential duty of a public health regulator during modern pandemics—to publish the best early treatment protocols on NIH’s website and then establish communication lines call centers to foster consultation and information sharing and webpages to share, broadcast and update the latest remedies and continually escalate public knowledge about the most successful strategies.
Dr. McCullough adds, “We should have created information and communication centers where treating physicians and hospitals could get round-the-clock, up-to-date bulletins with data. Instead, doctors who wanted to provide their infected patients with early treatment were out of luck.”