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MB's avatar

Remdesivir… wish I knew then what I know now. My (fully vaxxed, otherwise healthy) dad entered the hospital with Covid last July, was doing fine, chatting with us on the phone, etc. Then given a series of Remdesivir infusions (despite his having only 1 kidney), followed by a quick decline, put on a vent and died < 2 weeks later of “Covid pneumonia + Sepsis”. We had no idea at the time that Remdesivir was so controversial - we were assured by the doctors it was the best protocol in their view. While my dad was on the vent, we asked “Can we try IVM, HCQ? How about an anti-inflammatory experimental stem cell therapy we can obtain on our end - the stem cell company will arrange everything including the FDA compassionate use authorization - all you the hospital have to do is write the order.” At each request, the doctors kept objecting: “No no no. There’s no evidence to support any of those therapies. Remdesivir & steroids is the only approved protocol. We are doing everything we can.” To deny a dying person the chance to try drugs like IVM that have decent safety profiles from years of use/study is unbelievable. I will never trust such closed-minded medical “experts” again. I am just so sorry that there are so many other families mourning losses like ours.

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A Midwestern Doctor's avatar

Hello! This took me a little bit of time to put together.

Typically, you can lookup what payments physicians take from pharmaceutical companies on the medicare website open secrets.

I was not able to find 2 of the three people, which is odd because normally you can. The third one only had a large amount of money listed in research without the sponsor listed (https://openpaymentsdata.cms.gov/physician/906404).

If you go to the CDCs list, it states that none of the chairs of the panel had financial conflicts of interest (this is because by law they can't). https://www.covid19treatmentguidelines.nih.gov/about-the-guidelines/panel-financial-disclosure/

However they lied and actually did.

https://defyccc.com/covid-19-panel-gilead-ties/

Many of them had ties to the maker of Remdesivir and hence had a strong financial conflict of interest to push the drug forward and suppress other alternatives to it.

They also had a very close relationship with Fauci, who appointed each of them to chair the panel.

https://news.weill.cornell.edu/news/2020/05/dr-henry-masur-wins-weill-cornell-medicine-alumni-association-award

They also had a past history of making large amounts of money off of experimental AIDS drugs they with Fauci pushed through the NIH and got FDA approved, and failed to disclose that this had happened (including to patients in their trials they should have disclosed it to).

https://silview.media/2021/03/27/fauci-and-915-nih-scientists-caught-receiving-and-concealing-millions-in-royalties-for-experimental-treatments-ap/

As far as I know this pattern of corruption is fairly common in the HHS. I am most familiar with it occurring with the statin drugs where most of the panel who pushed forward the guidelines to put everyone on statins (which is harmful not helpful) had financial ties to the statin manufacturers who profited off of this.

Fauci has made a lot of money by having the NIH be a pharmaceutical pipeline and having either him or his guys (those he appointed to chair the panel) push the drugs of questionable value through. There are a lot of parallels between Remdesvir and Azt; Fauci suppressed alternative treatments to AIDS and pushed AZT through which was both ineffective and very toxic leading many doctors to later conclude AZT was one of the main things killing AIDS patients. The initial reason I was so suspicious of Remdesvir was due to how many similarities it had to AZT and the early reports I heard from clinicians in China at the start of COVID about it causing organ failure.

Despite this it took about a year for people to start doubting the drug due to how effectively it was pushed forward as the only treatment for COVID.

Some of these concepts and the incestuous pharmaceutical relationship in the NIH is laid out quite well in the Real Anthony Fauci.

On a personal level, I've found it's extremely difficult to get useful or innovative research approved or funded, and this is largely due to the fact the NIH does not permit that type of research to be done, so in many cases myself and colleagues interested in doing that have to self fund the research (which puts a glass ceiling on the quality of research that can be done) and it's often tremendous work to get an IRB to approve anything. One author who has written about this, Gerald Pollack makes a good case that our current grant system is now preventing science from finding anything world changing or paradigm and most of our science is focused on elucidating existing theories rather than developing anything particularly innovative.

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