Stupid is as stupid tweets

Twitter is a giant sorting mechanism combined with an inverse IQ test.

Joe Rogan recently conducted one of his patented marathon three hour interviews, this time with Peter McCullough, about the treatment of COVID-19.

One of McCullough’s points in this interview is the lack of any guidance from health agencies like the CDC in the treatment of people who already have COVID-19.

Instead he sees a huge push for universal vaccination as the cure-all, with the CDC and others paying little heed to the potential for treatment of symptomatic COVID-19 patients, either before or during hospitalization. He is making the argument that proper treatment could substantially reduce mortality, but developing these treatments is given very little (no) support.

YouTube, in their infinite wisdom, will not allow the interview to exist on their platform so check Spotify or Rumble if you want to listen. YouTube, if you try a search for Peter McCullough, puts a nice, big redirect at the top of the search, sending you to the “approved” information source. Here’s the current redirect (while I’m working on this):

---

Enough intro! Let’s make fun of someone on Twitter!

Claire Lehmann, founding editor of Quillette and Australia’s answer to Walter Duranty¹, felt compelled to give us her learned opinion on the interview via Twitter, the world’s largest cesspool:

For those unfamiliar with Quillette, their about page² fills us in:

Quillette is an Australian based online magazine that focuses on long-form analysis and cultural commentary. We are politically non-partisan, but rely on reason, science, and humanism as our guiding values.

Oh good, they rely on reason, science, humanism, and the Oxford comma³. Let’s apply a little reason to that comment about profits from alternate treatments being “several orders of magnitude” larger than for vaccines and failing basic logic.

The boring, mathy part

Merriam-Webster says an order of magnitude⁴ means 10 times something. As we have seen previously⁵, the folks at Merriam-Webster love to change the definitions of words, so I went ahead and included an archived copy of that page for when they decide to start adjudicating mathematics.

My mother always told me that ‘a couple’ means two, and ‘several’ means three or more. (This discussion usually came right after a question involving chocolate chip cookies.) So three orders of magnitude is ten times ten times ten, or 1,000 times.

According to CNN⁶, Pfizer is on track to make about $36 billion from their COVID-19 vaccines this year. Multiply that amount by 1,000 and you get $36 trillion - much, much more than the entire GDP of the U.S.

We’re going to be nice and say this was intentional hyperbole. Otherwise, someone needs to take a remedial course at the local community kangaroo college.

Let’s assume she really just meant the other treatments being suggested by Peter McCullough would be significantly more profitable. What drugs are included in those “other treatments”?

Apparently Claire’s internet connection only gives her access to Twitter and Jimmy Choo (https://us.jimmychoo.com/en/home) so she was unable to read the protocol published by McCullough (and some pals):

Pathophysiological Basis and Rationale for Early Outpatient Treatment of SARS-CoV-2 (COVID-19) Infection. (McCullough et al. 2021⁷)

First, they give us some background on why the authors thought it was important to publish this:

As in all areas of medicine, the large randomized, placebo-controlled, parallel group clinical trial in appropriate patients at risk with meaningful outcomes is the theoretical gold standard for recommending therapy. These standards are not sufficiently rapid or responsive to the COVID-19 pandemic. One could argue the results of definitive trials were needed at the outset of the pandemic, and certainly are needed now with more than 1 million cases and 500,000 deaths worldwide.

So clinical trials are the gold standard, but no clinical trials had been conducted with drugs besides the vaccines. But don’t we have huge government agencies with ginormous⁸ budgets to help with this?

On May 14, 2020, after about 1 million cases and 90,000 deaths in the United States had already occurred, the National Institutes of Health (NIH) announced it was launching an outpatient trial of hydroxychloroquine (HCQ) and azithromycin in the treatment of COVID-19. A month later, the agency announced it was closing the trial because of the lack of enrollment with only 20 of 2000 patients recruited. No safety concerns were associated with the trial.

What? Pfizer⁹ can get over 44,000 people signed up for their vaccine trials, Moderna¹⁰ gets over 30,000, but the entire NIH can only come up with 20 people (in the whole country!) for a trial using drugs that have been around forever and have been given to gazillions¹¹ of people?

And there were no safety concerns, so that wasn’t the reason for cancelling the trial. Do they suck at their jobs, or is there some other reason? Did their recruitment method just involve handing out flyers at the local Starbucks?

(That would be at 7700 Norfolk Ave, Bethesda, MD 20814-6006. You can call ahead at +1 301 951 4988 to make sure there are no NIH interns handing out flyers.)

Well, the NIH has been as useless as the CDC (they didn’t even bring back drinks from Starbucks!) so McCullough and his co-authors decided to take up some of the slack.

If clinical trials are not feasible or will not deliver timely guidance to clinicians or patients, then other scientific information bearing on medication efficacy and safety needs to be examined.

They are being way too nice there. Hey NIH, what do we pay you for? Get your feet off the coffee table and mow the lawn!

Okay, so what are these super-exotic drugs McCullough and team are using in their protocol? Are they just kangaroo de-wormers? I mean, are these even available in Australia?

Here are the drugs from their flowchart:

• zinc lozenges or zinc sulfate

• Hydroxychloroquine with Azithromycin or Doxycycline, or just Favipiravir

• Prednisone with or without Colchicine

• Aspirin with or without heparin, or one of Apixaban, Rivaroxaban, Dabigatran, Edoxaban

Well, zinc is a common over the counter supplement (“readily available nontoxic therapy” per the authors). Previous clinical trials, referenced in the paper, have shown a small reduction in the duration of the common cold, so nothing crazy here.

The second group contains common antivirals and antibiotics. Hydroxychloroquine has been around for 60+ years, the next two are common antibiotics, often used to treat things like pneumonia. Only the Favipiravir is new, but it’s commonly prescribed in Japan for influenza. And it’s just one of two options.

And why are the authors recommending antibiotics to treat a viral disease? If you read my post about the 1918 influenza pandemic you already know the answer: lots of people with pneumonia-like diseases die from secondary bacterial infections rather than from the initial viral infection.

The next group are anti-inflammatory drugs, which have also been around a long time. After that are aspirin and heparin (an antiplatelet and an anticoagulant) which are also nothing new.

Well Australia is a prison colony, so maybe Claire can’t get these locally. We should look into smuggling them in boxes of Jimmy Choo four inch black formal pumps.

How expensive are these exotic drugs like aspirin and Azithromycin?

The FDA has a nifty little thing they call the Orange Book: https://www.accessdata.fda.gov/scripts/cder/ob/index.cfm

This online book lists all the approved therapeutic equivalents for drugs, so you can look up a drug like Azithromycin and find all of the FDA approved versions of it - in this case they list about two dozen companies selling Azithromycin.

In fact, for each of the groups of drugs in the paper there are inexpensive, generic versions made by multiple companies. These generics aren’t patent protected and don’t have huge profit margins, unlike Jimmy Choo clutch bags or the brand-new mRNA vaccines. Remember that CNN article about Pfizer?

The vaccine business alone was responsible for more than 60% of the company's sales, as vaccine revenue rose to $14.6 billion from only $1.7 billion a year earlier. The company said its Covid vaccine sales accounted for $13 billion of that revenue. Revenue outside of its Covid vaccine business was up a far more modest 7%.

So Pfizer seems to think their mRNA vaccine sales are driving their huge revenues and profits. What about the McCullough protocol?

Basically a doctor can follow this entire protocol using generic, low cost drugs that have been in use for many years, but have not been tested on COVID-19 (because COVID-19 hasn’t been around for many years).

We can’t determine the potential profit from these generic drugs, but I’m gonna go out on a limb here and suggest that it will not be $36 billion (just for Pfizer!) since they are all common drugs sold in a competitive market, and we would only be giving them to people who were symptomatic or high risk - a small percentage of people who test positive for COVID-19.

But of course Pfizer and Moderna wouldn’t be the ones making that money.

So let’s sum this up for the benefit of Australians who are shopping online while they scroll through Twitter sipping a nice sauvignon blanc:

Almost two years into a “pandemic” and we have multiple large, clinical trials of new vaccines. The companies that sell those vaccines are making profits the size of the military budgets of whole European countries (and much more than those slackers in Canada, who only spend 23 billion¹² annually).

Meanwhile, the largest government health agency in the world couldn’t manage to recruit more than 20 people for a clinical trial with drugs that have been in use for decades and are super duper cheap and available everywhere.

Never forget, this is how the NIH responds to a “pandemic.”

Anyone who points out this discrepancy gets warnings slapped on their statements, some light censorship, plus sarcastic tweets from Claire Lehmann.

Meanwhile the staff and editors at Quillette are following the exact opposite of their guiding values. If reason, science, and humanism really were their values, they would be saying the same thing as Peter McCullough:

Something is clearly wrong here, even if we don’t know exactly what it is.

1. "Walter Duranty: The New York Times Reporter Who Failed To Report Soviet-Triggered Famines" History on the Net
© 2000-2021, Salem Media.
December 16, 2021 <https://www.historyonthenet.com/walter-duranty-new-york-times>

2. Quillette about page:
https://quillette.com/about/
Archived copy:
https://web.archive.org/web/20211209033818/https://quillette.com/about/

3. Oxford comma:
https://www.umaryland.edu/media/umb/oaa/campus-life/writing-center/documents/Commas.pdf
Archived copy:
https://web.archive.org/web/20210826113900/https://www.umaryland.edu/media/umb/oaa/campus-life/writing-center/documents/Commas.pdf

4. Merriam-Webster entry for order of magnitude:
https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/order%20of%20magnitude
Archived copy:
https://web.archive.org/web/20210609145654/https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/order%20of%20magnitude

5. Me complaining about Merriam-Webster :

The CDC intern defines vaccine

6. Pfizer earnings:
https://www.cnn.com/2021/11/02/business/pfizer-earnings/index.html
Archived copy:
https://web.archive.org/web/20211217014151/https://www.cnn.com/2021/11/02/business/pfizer-earnings/index.html

7. McCullough PA, Kelly RJ, Ruocco G, Lerma E, Tumlin J, Wheelan KR, Katz N, Lepor NE, Vijay K, Carter H, Singh B, McCullough SP, Bhambi BK, Palazzuoli A, De Ferrari GM, Milligan GP, Safder T, Tecson KM, Wang DD, McKinnon JE, O'Neill WW, Zervos M, Risch HA. Pathophysiological Basis and Rationale for Early Outpatient Treatment of SARS-CoV-2 (COVID-19) Infection. Am J Med. 2021 Jan;134(1):16-22. doi: 10.1016/j.amjmed.2020.07.003. Epub 2020 Aug 7. PMID: 32771461; PMCID: PMC7410805.
https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/32771461/

8. I was incredibly shocked to find the spell-checker doesn’t flag ginormous as a misspelled word.

9. Thomas SJ, Moreira ED Jr, Kitchin N, Absalon J, Gurtman A, Lockhart S, Perez JL, Pérez Marc G, Polack FP, Zerbini C, Bailey R, Swanson KA, Xu X, Roychoudhury S, Koury K, Bouguermouh S, Kalina WV, Cooper D, Frenck RW Jr, Hammitt LL, Türeci Ö, Nell H, Schaefer A, Ünal S, Yang Q, Liberator P, Tresnan DB, Mather S, Dormitzer PR, Şahin U, Gruber WC, Jansen KU; C4591001 Clinical Trial Group. Safety and Efficacy of the BNT162b2 mRNA Covid-19 Vaccine through 6 Months. N Engl J Med. 2021 Nov 4;385(19):1761-1773. doi: 10.1056/NEJMoa2110345. Epub 2021 Sep 15. PMID: 34525277; PMCID: PMC8461570.
https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/34525277/

10. El Sahly HM, Baden LR, Essink B, Doblecki-Lewis S, Martin JM, Anderson EJ, Campbell TB, Clark J, Jackson LA, Fichtenbaum CJ, Zervos M, Rankin B, Eder F, Feldman G, Kennelly C, Han-Conrad L, Levin M, Neuzil KM, Corey L, Gilbert P, Janes H, Follmann D, Marovich M, Polakowski L, Mascola JR, Ledgerwood JE, Graham BS, August A, Clouting H, Deng W, Han S, Leav B, Manzo D, Pajon R, Schödel F, Tomassini JE, Zhou H, Miller J; COVE Study Group. Efficacy of the mRNA-1273 SARS-CoV-2 Vaccine at Completion of Blinded Phase. N Engl J Med. 2021 Nov 4;385(19):1774-1785. doi: 10.1056/NEJMoa2113017. Epub 2021 Sep 22. PMID: 34551225; PMCID: PMC8482810.
https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/34551225/

11. Gazillions also passed spell check. I’m starting to worry about us as a civilization.

12. https://armedforces.eu/budget/ranking_military_Budget