This is my eighth entry in my critique of Robert F. Kennedy, Jr.'s book, The Real Anthony Fauci: Bill Gates, Big Pharma, and the Global War on Democracy and Public Health. My first entry is here and you can follow the links from there. Why so many entries, why so many words? It is easy to hurl out lies. Truth-telling takes more time. The next installment is here.
The first quote in Robert F. Kennedy Jr.'s book is from Luc Montagnier, Nobel Prize discoverer of HIV.* He said, "Dr. Joseph Goebbels wrote that 'A lie told once remains a lie, but a lie told a thousand times becomes the truth.'"
As I have detailed in this series of critiques of Kennedy's book, he is lying again and again. He even cites a neo-Nazi website to support one of his lies. He is Joseph Goebbels.
(*Ironically, in contrast to Dr. Montagnier, according to the Index in Kennedy's book, Peter Duesberg, prominent for denying that HIV causes AIDS, is cited on 25 different pages of Kennedy's book.)
General Notes on How to Separate Good Science from Crap
Principle #1. Bad science moves quickly. Good science is slow.
I have worked in the field of HIV for over thirty years. Especially in the early years before effective treatments were available, many useless and dangerous therapies were put forward such as black widow venom and heating the blood. They had one thing in common: hype.
Such therapies are politely labeled by science as "unproven." They are worse than that. By such standards you could call "crawling on your belly" as an unproven method of winning a sprint race. In science, having some sort of proof is necessary to rise above outright lies. Candidate drugs that have some chance at being safe and effective, must be shown that they are safe and effective.
Bad science moves quickly: good science is slow. And bad science is often not even science, just the passionate idea of a master of hype.
This principle extends beyond proving new therapies. There is a very legitimate question of how COVID got into the general population. One claim is through the exotic animal food market in Hunan. Another is an accidental laboratory leak in Hunan. Finally, some believe in intentional release.
I am not about to discuss the arguments here or weigh their value: to do so would be premature. While there is some evidence for each of the competing theories, sorting through evidence from conjecture would take the length of a book. I bring up the topic to convey that a firm conclusion takes years to nail down: with HIV it was about a decade after from the discovery of the virus before a consensus* understanding was agreed upon as to where it came from. I hope that, in several years, an answer will be found regarding the origin of COVID. Such a definitive determination will have to overcome the opaqueness and obstruction of the Chinese government.
*By consensus understanding, I mean the large majority of scientists. There are still those who believe in conspiracies and other wild theories of HIV's origin.
Corollary to Principle #1: the promoters of bad science have instant certainty and usually a lot of it. They usually cut corners in their determinations or just skip straight to promoting fraud.
Principle #2. It is easy to find bad science and bad scientists.
Kennedy begins a lengthy section highlighting physicians who opposed COVID vaccinations and who promoted alternative therapies and prophylactic treatments. His main argument, quoting Dr. Peter McCullough, is 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." Central to Kennedy's arguments is that these repurposed drugs were being ignored because they were cheap and big Pharma wanted to make big money. (I don't understand the statement many, many. I've only seen claims about several others. Added note: the book goes on to describe many in passing.)
First of all, it is not difficult to find doctors and scientists who have atypical perspectives and you can argue most any fringe idea by citing them. Kennedy highlights several, including some with impressive backgrounds. As for those with mainstream arguments, Kennedy seems to believe that all those who disagree with his viewpoint are shills for big Pharm, uninformed, or deluded (or all three). I'm not sure which category he'd put me in.
Kennedy's doctors certainly share a minority opinion. As of May 2021, several months after the vaccines came out, 96% of U.S. physicians were vaccinated for COVID, with about half of the remainder saying they were going to.
According to another survey conducted in May 2021, 88.8% of U.S. primary care physicians strongly agreed or somewhat agreed that vaccines are safe while 6.7% strongly disagreed or somewhat disagreed. This survey also found 89.9% of primary care physicians strongly agreed or somewhat agreed that vaccines are effective while 7.2% strongly disagreed or somewhat disagreed.
Still, Kennedy likes to focus on that 2-7%. These include Dr. McCullough, who according to the Index, is referenced on 19 different pages of Chapter One. Extending the above cited argument, McCullough said, "Using repurposed drugs, we could have ended the pandemic in May 2020 and saved 500,000 American lives." Dr. Pierre Kory is quoted in agreement, "The efficacy of some of these drugs is almost miraculous."
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| Dr. Peter McCullough (photo from his Cardiology practice website) |
Kennedy goes on to champion Dr. Didier Raoult. "On March 17, 2020, Dr. Raoult provided a preliminary report on 36 patients [20 treated plus controls] successfully treated with hydroxychloroquine and sometimes azithromycin at his institution in Marseille."
I mentioned in an earlier post that Dr. Raoult retired in 2021 after a scandal regarding "30 years of unregulated experiments on humans." In this context, this makes sense. He had a preliminary report on March 17, 2020? It was successful in spite of examining two different drugs, hydroxychloroquine and "sometimes" azithromycin? Anyone with experience in clinical trials knows that would be impossible to have meaningful results from a multi-drug trial in so brief a time and with so few people.
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| Dr. Didier Raoult |
Kennedy continues with "In April, Dr. Vladimir (Zev) Zelenko, M.D., an upstate New York physician and early HCQ [hydroxychloroquine] adopter, reproduced Dr. Didier Raoult's 'startling successes' by dramatically reducing expected mortalities among 800 patients Zelenko treated with the HCQ cocktail."
Zelenko first posted his results of a triple-compound therapy, azithromycin, hydroxychloroquine, and zinc on YouTube and Facebook on March 21st, 2020, in which he claimed to have treated 500 patients, all with positive results. For perspective, all of New York state had 528 COVID cases through March 14. Zelenko followed his media posts by sending a letter directly to Trump on March 23rd passed along by Trump's lawyer Rudy Giuliani.
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| Dr. Vladimir Zelenko |
Zelenko, Vladimir. A Report on Successful Treatment of Coronavirus. Global Research. 23 March 2020.
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| Tweet, March 21, 2020 |
Good science is slow. Putting together a legitimate clinical trial takes time. You need to write up a protocol, have it approved as ethical by a supervisory board (in the US these are called Institutional Review Boards or IRBs), acquire informed consent, specify and recruit a meaningful number of patients, run the protocol for a period of time, and document and analyze the results. That can't be done in a couple of weeks much less in a couple of months. Period. Twenty patients with two drug protocols is meaningless. The only way to recruit and treat those patients in such a timeline is to do what Raoult was accused of: starting without approval from an ethics board, or, unlawful human experimentation.
Similarly, Zelenko's claim to have treated 500 patients with a five day protocol and a 100% success rate had to take place through immoral experimentation. There's no other way to get those numbers so fast. Zelenko essentially agrees: when he did publish a paper with his results in October 2020, it says that the cases reflected a time period from March 18 to May 14 and that IRB approval was given on June 16. While this IRB approval was for a retrospective study, he would have had to have IRB approval to dose humans with an experimental protocol. Hydroxychloroquine for COVID-19 was an off-label use in the US at the time of his initial experiments.
This article examines Zelenko's claims and the ethics of his experimentation.
Zelenko went on to claim COVID vaccines caused millions of deaths.
Finally, multidrug therapy studies proceed more slowly than single entities. The questions are: does each drug contribute? Does the combination of drugs add to toxicities? Both hydroxychloroquine and azithromycin separately can cause fatal arrhythmias. Azithromycin is listed among the list of drug interactions for hydroxychloroquine.
Continued with
Principle #3. When it comes to judging a novel therapy, something that has been shown to work in the laboratory seldom works in real life.
and
Principle #3a. Finding compounds that work against viruses is hard. Attacking viruses through pharmacology is difficult.
and
a look at a multitude of treatments.
Martin Hill Ortiz is the author of several novels including most recently the thriller, Floor 24.
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| Floor 24 Oliver-Heber Books |
"From the mob underworld to the tops of new skyscrapers, Floor 24 is a heart-thumping New York 1920's historical mystery!" - Holly Newman, bestselling author of A Chance Inquiry mystery series
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