Here's why nothing happened to you after you tested positive for Covid-19

Last week, I posed the question “what happened to you right after you tested positive for Covid-19?” If you didn’t read it, just take a moment to think about the moment you tested positive.

For the majority of Covid positive people across the advanced health economies, that’s Europe, North America, Australia, New Zealand and maybe South Africa, it’s likely that absolutely nothing happened. You got told you were sick with a novel disease, but you were not offered any treatment at all. “You’re sick, there’s absolutely nothing we can do for you.” You reasonably thought nothing of it and probably assumed it was because no treatments existed.

About 15 years prior to that moment, the precursor to the recent pandemic had been making headlines all over the world. “SARS”, caused by the virus then called ‘Sars-Cov’ had given us quite a scare. It too was a novel coronavirus, it too caused a novel disease, and it too scared public health figures. Thankfully, it disappeared before creating a global pandemic, but a virus “genetically closely related to” SARS re-emerged, we think, in Wuhan in 2019. 

Back during the initial SARS scare, much like now, plenty of research was ongoing into antiviral drugs to treat that novel coronavirus. “Chloroquine”, a very well-known drug, “has strong antiviral effects on SARS-CoV infection of primate cells” a study found, peer-reviewed and published in the journal of Virology in 2005. There were many others. Chloroquine “may be considered for immediate use in the prevention and treatment of SARS-CoV infections” said another from 2004. The Lancet in 2006 said “Our hypothesis that chloroquine might inhibit replication of the SARS coronavirus has been confirmed in two independent in-vitro studies.”

So what? Well, at the exact moment you got your positive Sars-CoV-2 result, the ‘medical establishment’ was well aware of the peer-reviewed evidence showing hydroxychloroquine had a “broad spectrum of antiviral activity” It was even antiviral towards a very closely related coronavirus you’d just tested positive for. A virus everyone knew was potentially deadly. So why weren’t you offered hydroxychloroquine to ‘inhibit’ the virus’ replication? It was known to be well tolerated - it had been in use for more than 60 years, so its safety profile was well understood.

The UK regulator had to directly answer these questions, one presumes because the question was burningly obvious. “No conclusions,” the regulators said, on chloroquine or hydroxychloroquine’s “safety or efficacy.” It’s a curious statement because the safety profile of the drug had been established over decades. On the efficacy, why the hesitance? In an unprecedented emergency, people are dying, and there’s already great data showing it to be effective against SARS-Cov-1, but regulators wanted to run it through trials against this “closely related” Sars-Cov-2 virus to see if it worked exactly against that. A quick glance at things one might assume its due dilligence.

And yet…

Right now, our primary weapon in the fight against Covid-19 is a vaccine which was developed for an extinct virus. BA5, the current dominant strain, is not the Wuhan strain, but its definitely closely related. Much like Sars-CoV-1 and Sars-CoV-2. So why were we able to keep going with a medical product designed for a ‘related virus’ with a novel vaccine, but we can’t do that with an antiviral drug we’d known about for decades?

The difference between the two medical interventions that actually matters is not a scientific one, it’s financial. The vaccines are novel, which means they are owned outright by the pharmaceutical companies that developed them. It means they can charge whatever they want for the product, and they lobby extensively to ensure governments buy their products in astronomical numbers. Hydroxychloroquine is generic, patent expired, and effectively owned by no company at all. Generics don’t create the billion-dollar profit opportunities which the pharmaceutical companies so desperately want. 

If a pharmaceutical company allowed a cheap and readily available drug to ‘eat their market’, by making you better, the massive market potential for their novel products disappears. So they make sure you don’t get that cheap and effective drug. If you get treated on the cheap, their shareholders lose value, and they have a legal duty to provide value to their shareholders, but they have no such legal duty to provide you with good medicine. The pharmaceutical regulators are supposed to protect you from these powerful special interests, but they’re taking 86% of their funding from the pharmaceutical industry themselves, something described as “institutional corruption”. It’s being done right under your nose. To use an analogy, it’s like the police taking 86% of their funding from organised crime and expecting us to believe we’re getting a good deal.

What paltry drug regulations we have left do require a drug company to provide data comparing their proposed new product to existing drugs already on the market. If existing treatment options look safe, cheap and effective, the pharmaceutical industry's novel, less safe, and expensive products are dead in the water. So what’s a pharmaceutical company to do? They spend huge resources distorting medical science with statistical tricks that take incredibly smart people months to spot, and even longer to translate into language people can understand. Good faith medical practitioners rely on that data, and they use it to make recommendations to you. By the time anyone sees their frauds, in whichever way of a thousand ways they can do it, these companies have already made their money. Even if they’re caught, even when their fraud directly cause 38,000 deaths, their fines are lesser than the profit they made causing the death. A business model once characterised aptly as “death for profit” by a prominent UK Cardioloigst.

They lobby extensively to have total control over the treatment regimens used by the health systems they operate in. Not a theory, but the finding of the UK Government, who found that the “industry affects every level of healthcare provision”, including “the compilation of clinical guidelines.” That means they control what treatments you’re offered when you fall sick. That way, they can always ensure there’s a path to market for their expensive novel drugs. Control the treatment regimens, and it’s easier to bring new products to market. Those products are often less tested and therefore carry more risk to the patient. Those profitable novel products can sometimes turn out not to work at all or have deadly side effects. Despite repeated examples of such dreadful results, the media are more focused on policing the public’s fears about pharmaceutical corruption than holding pharmaceutical corruption to account.

In practice, all of this means that people die because pharmaceutical companies have created the conditions in which cheap and effective medications are denied to people so that expensive ones proliferate in the market. That’s why when you tested positive for Covid-19 you weren’t offered a treatment at all. It’s not because there was absolutely nothing that could have lowered your risk in that moment, it’s because it’s more profitable for the pharmaceutical companies that you either get no treatment at all, or you get their novel profitable products. Those are the conditions they have created. The evidence for effective generic medicines are there, though if you try to demonstrate that, a small army of witting or unwitting industry goons will fight for the honour of The Science industry. They apparently suffer from willful amnesia of the fact that the industry is potted with examples of the pharmaceutical industry manipulating apparently sacred medical evidence in the name of profit.

Even though there was plenty of evidence showing that a range of options were available to lower a 70 year olds risk once they’d tested positive, none of them were recommended. Aged 18 or 80, patients were told the same thing, wait at home and when you can no longer properly breathe, come into hospital. And yet it’s no great secret or surprise that treating viral infections early is associated with better outcomes. Even now, more than two years later, with broad agreement that Covid-19 is a clotting disease, the NHS isn’t even recommending asprin after a positive test. The single ‘treat at home’ option, not available to all, is only Pfizer’s $500 Paxlovid drug. As a matter of fact, if you consult google on how to treat Covid-19, it helpfully lists the treatments available to you. Every single one of them is a novel pharmaceutical product. Our totally unbiased medical research apparatus, miraculously, only identifies the most profitable compounds as viable treatments. Incredible.

Lots of people in the industry know this is happening, lots of people know and won’t speak out, and perhaps most have no idea that this is how their industry functions.

Perhaps you don’t believe it. I don’t blame you. But in the precious few minutes I might get with you, there’s almost nothing I can say or do that will allow you to see the totality of this problem. I’m making a wager, that rather than getting stuck in the weeds with how something is happening, it's better to hear what is happening. See how it fits your own feelings about it. If you want, I can show you exactly how the industry does it, in excruciating detail. I’ve got a series of deep dive articles already written, I’ve already shown my regular readers how the industry robbed them of effective treatments for Covid-19. That such ruthlessness is possible, and at such scale, is often difficult to fathom, but it shouldn’t derail our taste for inquiry.

The ubiquity of this practice is such that I could spend the rest of my life chasing the tail of a pharmaceutical dragon, carefully documenting the things it destroyed and the various creative methods it used to achieve its diabolical ends. No one would believe me, and even so, I’m not sure how much difference it would make. That’s why I’m making a documentary that aims to show an everyday audience how they do this, both in general and with specific reference to the Covid-19 pandemic. Seeing is believing. It's only when we can see the problem definitively, clearly laid out, that we might build the public determination to fix it. In the meantime, here’s my entire substack to engage with if you want some of those answers right now. What I’d ask of you, is that you share my articles with friends, family, communities or acquaintances who might also have the beginnings of that insatiable itch, that feeling that something went drastically wrong. Consider becoming a paid subscriber. The reason I ask is that there’s close to zero chance the mainstream media will bite the hand that feeds it and detail any of this wrongdoing. I don’t know what the BBC’s excuse is.

The documentary can’t get made without your support, so if you can, support its production at the IndieGoGo page here.

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