California Physician Concerned for Future of Healthcare, Scientific and Medical Freedom

UPDATE BELOW: “A million Americans lost their lives and the rest of us lost our liberties.” This assertion is from the candidate statement of Dr. Richard Fox, a physician and attorney, who recently ran for Congress in Santa Clara’s District 16.

“Schools and churches closed. Jobs were lost, businesses closed. Hyperinflationary money printing resulted. It’s time for a reckoning,” Dr. Fox continued.

Anyone can see the platform Dr. Fox ran on – medical and scientific freedom. It was more than clever – it was ingenious.

In a Globe interview, Dr. Fox said the Santa Clara County’s GOP Central Committee endorsed him in 2014, 2016, and 2020. However by 2022,  “I was too radical for them,” because he questioned the state and county Covid protocols. “They ran and endorsed a more ‘moderate’ candidate. Since the GOP vote was split, two Dems came in first and second and we two GOP candidates came in third and fourth. But, I got my message out to all the voters, which would never have happened through the usual press.”

As one of the many physicians who challenged the state and federal government Covid “treatments,” protocols and mandates, Dr. Fox ran right into a seemingly impenetrable wall. The corrupted public health agencies were financially benefitting from the use of the antiviral Remdesivir rather than the well-known and long-used generic drugs Ivermectin and Hydroxychloroquine for Covid patient treatment.

Gilead Sciences, which makes Remdesivir, is located in Foster City California.

Dr. Fox is so concerned, he is in the process of creating “Red Pill Healthcare” to amass a listing of trusted physicians who practice medical freedom.

“Remdesivir, also known as Veklury, and the steroid dexamethasone are the only drugs authorized to treat Covid-19 patients,” NBC reported in November 2020. “But a recent massive global study of remdesivir’s effectiveness, run by the WHO, showed that remdesivir had little or no impact on hospitalized patients, contradicting previous trials.”

Dr. Fox concurred and said the National Institute of Health (NIH) and Center for Disease Control (CDC) also knew this. He laid out the timeline during Covid which shows just how Dr. Anthony Fauci was caught up in what now is known to be a huge lie about how to save Covid patients. Fauci was the director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID) from 1984 to 2022, and the chief medical advisor to the president from 2021 to 2022.

To start off, Dr. Fox explained why he and so many physicians preferred Ivermectin and Hydroxychloroquine for Covid patients. Early in the Covid pandemic, experts noticed that “people who have Lupus seemed to do better than others – people on Lupus take Hydroxychloroquine, and it is used to treat arthritis,” Dr. Fox said. Despite this, Dr. Fox said Dr. Fauci was already committed to Remdesivir (Gilead), and pushed it to teaching and training hospitals. He said it started with Massachusetts General Hospital, and then other academic centers including Brigham were contracted and using it. And they were paid handsomely.

“But Hydroxychloroquine had advantages – it is cheap, generic and safe – we’ve been using it for decades. And it is a pill, easy to take,” he added. “Remdesivir can only be administered in a hospital intravenously.” Dr. Fox said once someone is in the hospital for Covid, they are far along in the disease and starting to develop immune reactions. The late-phase of Covid starts to cause clots in the blood, heart and lungs. As a result, Dr. Fox said treatment in the first 5 days of Covid is most effective – long before hospitalization.

Yet early in the Covid pandemic, patients sick with it were told to go home and isolate, which Dr. Fox said didn’t sound right.

Remdesivir studies didn’t go that well, he added. “They could not show mortality advantage, so they moved the goal posts and go with ‘people in the hospital get out faster with Remdesivir.'”

The NBC article confirms this:

But a recent massive global study of remdesivir’s effectiveness, run by the WHO, showed that remdesivir had little or no impact on hospitalized patients, contradicting previous trials.

“Remdesivir has no meaningful effect on mortality or on other important outcomes for patients, such as the need for mechanical ventilation or time to clinical improvement,” experts from the WHO Guideline Development Group wrote in a statement. The review was published in The BMJ, a medical journal.

In light of the interim data from the WHO’s “Solidarity” trial — which included data from more than 11,200 people in 30 countries — “remdesivir is now classified as a drug you should not use routinely in Covid-19 patients,” the president of the European Society of Intensive Care Medicine, Jozef Kesecioglu, said in an interview with Reuters.

And then came the May 22, 2020 Lancet article recommending against hydroxychloroquine, which was retracted June 4, 2020.

Dr. Fox explained that he sent a public records request June 17, 2021 to the NIH regarding the financial ties of the NIH COVID guideline panel. He said that is the highly conflicted panel that, on June 16, 2020, recommended against the use of hydroxychloroquine for treatment of COVID, right after the Lancet article appeared on May 22, 2020. “Since this panel is a creature of Tony Fauci, that forms the basis of my belief, that he was behind the banning of HCQ and that the fraudulent Lancet paper, the principal author of which was Harvard cardiologist, Mandeep Mehra, was the pretext for it. Since the Lancet retracted the Mehra article under heavy international pressure on June 4, 2020, the NIH panel knew well by June 16 that it was fraudulent.”

UPDATE & CORRECTION: The Globe was contacted by Gilead’s Senior Director, Global Public Affairs COVID-19, Nicole R. Rodriguez, asking us to correct the article’s reference to the interim data from the WHO’s “Solidarity” trial in 2020.

Rodriguez said the WHO published the final results of this study in May last year, which led the WHO to update their treatment guidelines regarding remdesivir. Gilead’s press release about the final results of this study as well as the updated WHO treatment guidelines can be found here:  https://www.gilead.com/news-and-press/press-room/press-releases/2022/9/who-expands-recommendation-for-veklury-remdesivir-to-patients-with-severe-disease-in-latest-update-to-covid19-guideline

Rodriguez also said the points made from NBC are all results from the interim data, but there’s more current data from the WHO final results.

According to the Lancet paper of May 2, 2022, the authors concluded, in the summary interpretation:

“Remdesivir has no significant effect on patients with COVID-19 who are already being ventilated. Among other hospitalised patients, it has a small effect against death or progression to ventilation (or both).”

Dr. Fox added that “the final results showed a ‘small effect’ on mortality among those requiring oxygen but not yet on ventilators as opposed to no effect; and no effect for those who were already on ventilators. Whether that ‘small effect’ on a subset of patients was worth the billions of dollars spent on remdesivir is a good question.”

Lastly, the Globe made a statement about financial benefits tied to Covid treatments which needs clarification: It should say public hospitals (not agencies) as well as private hospitals benefitted. They were financially incentivized to use Remdesivir by the state and federal government. 

We learned California’s public health agencies pressured hospitals to use Remdesivir, and that hospitals received larger Medicare and Medi-cal payments for its use. We asked Rodriguez to verify this. 

We understand the federal government pays a 20% upcharge for the remdesivir protocol, plus a bonus, as several physicians told us. We were also told by a source that hospitals were told to use remdesivir for liability protection. We asked Rodriguez to verify this, and will update the article again at that time. 

 The Globe incorrectly reported that Gilead is located in Daly City; Gilead is in Foster City, CA.