Since the spring of 2020 there have been many criticisms of the blatant official attempts to silence discussion of covid treatments that involve off-label use of inexpensive drugs with an established safety record. There are two famous ones that received most of the attention while there were others that were adopted for use without much controversy. Media reports never seem to talk about how exactly patients are being treated in hospital, except for the use of oxygen and ventilators. Few reports provide any details about the steroids, anti-inflammatory drugs, and anti-viral drugs that are in use.
This post reports on another possible covid treatment that is safe and inexpensive but is being ignored and consigned to a long clinical trial that has the practical effect of excluding it from being of use during the pandemic. A study is underway in the United States to investigate the usefulness of the drug, but it is not due to end until mid 2022—a time when the pandemic and the social panic about it is likely to have subsided.
I heard about this drug through an anecdote, then I confirmed its properties and found out about the clinical trial through further research. The drug is called ibudilast, and has been approved for use in Japan since 1989 as a preventive and treatment for blood clotting and asthma.
First, it is best to go over what exactly doctors want to achieve in treating covid patients. When the virus first appeared, they expected patients to suffer from Acute Respiratory Distress Syndrome—a state in which the patient feels shortness of breath from the lungs filling with fluid while the circulatory system goes into a cytokine storm that causes inflammation throughout the body and its vital organs. They soon found that covid was unique in that the patients feel no shortness of breath while blood oxygen levels are falling. The condition is sometimes called “happy hypoxia” because the patient remains unaware of the dangerous condition he or she is slipping into. Oxygen levels fall because the blood vessels in the lung that absorb oxygen become inflamed and stop performing their function, not because the lungs are filling with fluid. The inflammation spreads throughout the body and can cause dangerous blood clots in the heart, lungs, brain or elsewhere.
This acute syndrome happens to people who suffer the second phase of the infection. Most people experience only the first stage of the infection, with no symptoms, mild symptoms, or a severe fever and malaise that lasts a few days then ends. The scandalous aspect of the pandemic reaction is the failure of health authorities to act on this knowledge. From early in the crisis, it was possible to know which chronic health conditions put patients at high risk of entering the second dangerous phase, so the public could have been educated about the importance of monitoring blood oxygen and receiving early treatment, and health care systems could have been oriented to providing this early treatment.
Below is a list of a few of the new patented drugs to treat covid that have been approved or are in trials. They are likely to be expensive and highly profitable for their makers, and thus they have been described uncritically in media reports, many of which emphasize the implications for the stock market value of the relevant pharmaceutical companies. In contrast with the campaigns against inexpensive well-known drugs, there has been no concerted effort to search for flaws in the research or to dismiss the promotion as dangerous and driven by bias and profit-seeking.
1. Molnupiravir
In June 2021, the FLCC, the American group of medical professionals favoring a treatment protocol that includes ivermectin (which is just one of several other interventions they use), denounced the $1.2 billion of government money being promised to purchase Merk’s new drug molnupiravir, if it is approved for emergency use.[1] The good news was reported by Nasdaq.com [2]. The FLCCC condemned the plan to spend this amount while effective treatments are not being endorsed.[3] Merk produces ivermectin, but it stands to profit more from the marketing of a novel drug such as molnupiravir. A report in Common Dreams bears the headline “’Entirely Unsurprising’: Merck Slammed for 4,000% Markup of Taxpayer-Funded Covid Drug.”
See also: Merck’s New COVID Drug Is Making News—How Does It Compare to Ivermectin?
2. Ritonavir + PF07321332 (protease inhibitor)
This study is described as the first of a drug that could stop the replication of the Sars-Cov-2 virus.[4] The study will be concluded in April 2022. Public health bureaucracies have failed to recognize or promote any of the known antiviral effects of common nutrients such as vitamins A, C and D, zinc, and zinc ionophores (quercetin, pyrithione, hinokitiol)[5], [6] that bring zinc into cells, allowing this mineral to prevent replication of viruses. Nor have they been in any hurry to recognize the research on existing drugs which have anti-viral effects.
3. Remdesivir
Gilead’s Remdesivir, having been through previous testing as a treatment for ebola, was approved in Japan in May 2020, and in the United States before that (for emergency use) as a covid treatment.[7] Professor Didier Raoult, a renowned French virologist, developed a successful treatment with inexpensive antibiotics and hydroxychloroquine early in the pandemic. In sworn testimony to the French Senate in the summer of 2020, he denounced the smear campaign against this treatment that was directed by people with interests in ensuring Gilead’s treatment would be approved in Europe. He stated that the attacks were clearly a stock market play to ensure that Remdesivir would be approved. It was approved, and he went on to note that the drug was ineffective and posed unacceptable risks.[8] Through the YouTube channel of the university hospital where he teaches, he has spoken throughout the pandemic about the scandalous level of corruption that has influenced government, media and scientific journals.
A patient and a doctor speak about ibudilast
To protect the privacy of the patient and the doctor in this anecdote, I will say only that it happened somewhere in Japan and that I learned about it because I know a guy who knows a guy. Although this is just an anecdote, the statements made below about ibudilast and the current trials of it can be easily confirmed with Internet searches and the sources cited.
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Testimonial
I prefer not to divulge the details of my medical problem, so I’m going to describe it only as much as is necessary to talk about a certain drug that I was given.
My doctor put me on a “neuroprotective” drug called ibudilast to help my recovery. He told me my recovery was going well and I probably didn’t need the drug. When my recovery was complete, we wouldn’t know if it was thanks to the drug. Nonetheless, he said it was a good preventive that I should take for a few weeks. Ibudilast has been used in Japan for a long time, but is not approved in many other countries yet. It is used to prevent strokes or to treat patients after strokes and head injuries. It increases cerebral flood flow, prevents excess coagulation (clotting), and reduces inflammation. Doctors also use it to treat multiple sclerosis, as well as to treat asthma because it opens the airway. It is being studied to see if it is effective also in shrinking blastomas and in treating dementia and alcohol and drug addiction.[9]
I took the drug for eight weeks and did notice some positive effects on normal breathing and energy level when I was doing aerobic exercise, but I can’t say I had any problem in that regard that needed fixing. I had a good fitness level before my accident. The very positive aspect of it was that there were no unpleasant side-effects, and no discomfort in getting off it.
Based on my experience with it and what I had read about all of its purported positive effects on a variety of ailments, it seemed like it was a miracle drug. Because it had no negative side-effects, it seemed more like a nutritional supplement than a medicine. Internet searches revealed no information about whether the drug had a source in nature or was created in the laboratory. As it is such a remarkable neuroprotective drug, I wondered if every person over the age of forty should take it occasionally as a preventive.
On one of my follow-up appointments, I was half-joking when I said to my doctor that this drug looks like a good candidate for treating covid. The doctor just smiled and asked, “What have you been reading?” I thought he was going to tell me not to believe nonsense on the Internet, but he actually said, “I wish we could prescribe this for covid, but it’s not authorized for such use. It works on everything you want to treat in someone with covid respiratory distress.” He added that studies are being done, but the results will come too late, and they may not be convincing enough to change policy. He finished by saying I didn’t need to take the drug anymore, but he offered to prescribe an additional one-month supply to keep on hand “if anything comes up.” This was during the time when the “delta wave” of the corona virus was at its peak in Japan. He stated he couldn’t prescribe it for a covid patient, but he could prescribe it for me because I’ve had one of the authorized conditions it can be used for.
Afterward, I realized there was something odd about his claim that his hands were tied because doctors couldn’t prescribe ibudilast to covid patients. Covid patients who are in the serious phase of the infection, suffering from acute respiratory distress, are also patients who are at high risk of severe inflammation and cerebral, pulmonary and cardiac infarction from excessive blood coagulation. Why could doctors not prescribe ibudilast to prevent these outcomes, as they are permitted to do already? It would just be a matter of classifying the prescription as prevention of coagulation rather than treatment of “covid.”
End of testimonial
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The study that the doctor mentioned is a clinical trial started in 2020 at Yale University.[10] At first glance, this seems like a great thing, but the trial is scheduled to be complete in the middle of 2022, after which there will be further delays while the FDA ponders whether to allow its use.
Ibudilast is just one example, but there must be many other drugs with a long safety record that could be repurposed, but their use is being discouraged while “the science” dismisses observational studies and insists on clinical trials that will take years to complete. Meanwhile, new expensive drugs that will bring great profits are being approved quickly. A cynic might say that the true purpose of the Yale trial of ibudilast is to run cover for the pharmaceutical industry. It seems to be a way of making sure that an inexpensive, safe and effective drug stays on the shelf and never gets approved during the time of the pandemic emergency. The Sars-Cov-2 virus is very likely to evolve into a less virulent endemic pathogen by the time ibudilast gets approved.
One can also wonder how a clinical trial during a pandemic could even be considered ethical. If an infected person is in the hospital with a falling blood oxygen level, why would she want to be given a 50% chance of being in the placebo group? Yet the treated group and placebo group are made up of people with a variety of pre-existing conditions who receive various other treatments (oxygen, steroids, anti-inflammatories, vitamins and minerals, nitric oxide, antibiotics etc.—all fully authorized treatments which no one finds controversial), so controlled studies are not really possible unless the definition of the term is changed drastically. They should be described as comparative studies with many confounding variables.
The doctors who have been arguing for more treatment options have stressed this point that clinical trials are impossible and unethical. Their treatments involve more than just one thing. Multiple treatments are given at various times during the course of the infection, and each patient needs individualized treatment, depending on the underlying chronic illnesses. It is a matter of the physician practicing his or her craft rather than a simple list of bureaucratic rules to follow. Most of all, they emphasize that the greatest scandal is the failure to educate the public about the importance of early treatment, along with the failure to ensure early treatment is available.[11] This is true about every infectious disease. The longer you delay treatment, the higher the risk of treatment failure. But with covid, people have been told to take a Tylenol, stay home and call back if things get worse. Twenty months after the disease emerged, this is still often the case. Patients who should have known they were high-risk arrive at the hospital more than a week after their first symptoms appeared. The single-minded official emphasis on imperfect vaccines may have just added to this neglect and complacency.
Notes
[1] US National Library of Medicine, “Efficacy and Safety of Molnupiravir (MK-4482) in Hospitalized Adult Participants With COVID-19 (MK-4482-001),” September 9, 2021.
[2] Nasdaq.com, “Merck (MRK) Signs $1.2B Deal With US for COVID-19 Therapeutic,” June 10, 2021.
[3] Dr. Pierre Kory: “U.S. Supply Deal With Merck is a “Colossal Waste of Taxpayer Money,” Covid-19 Up, June 14, 2021. Video: https://youtu.be/UEMGJLrHkE0
[4] “Pfizer begins study of oral drug for prevention of COVID-19,” Reuters, September 28, 2021.
[5] Brenton Kinker, “Quercetin: A Promising Treatment for the Common Cold,” Journal of Ancient Diseases & Preventive Remedies 02 (02), January 2014, DOI:10.4172/2329-8731.1000111
[6] BM Krenn, E. Gaudernak E, B. Holzer B, K. Lanke K, F.J. Van Kuppeveld FJ, J Seipelt, “Antiviral activity of the zinc ionophores pyrithione and hinokitiol against picornavirus infections.” Journal of Virology. 2009 Jan; 83(1):58-64. DOI: 10.1128/JVI.01543-08.
[7] Gilead.com, “Gilead Announces Approval of Veklury® (remdesivir) in Japan for Patients With Severe COVID-19,” May 7, 2020.
[8] Dennis Riches, “Laid bare by the coronavirus: laisser faire economics is laisser mourir,” June 27, 2020. This article includes a translation of Professor Raoult’s Senate testimony.
[9] US National Library of Medicine, “Compound Summary: Ibudilast.” Highlights from the summary: “Ibudilast is an orally bioavailable inhibitor of cyclic nucleotide phosphodiesterase … with anti-(neuro)inflammatory, vasorelaxant, bronchodilator, analgesic, neuroprotective and potential anti-tumor activities. Ibudilast (IBD) is able to cross the blood-brain barrier (BBB)… IBD exerts its potential anti-tumor activity against glioblastoma multiforme (GBM) cells by inhibiting PDE-4 and the pro-inflammatory cytokine macrophage migration inhibitory factor (MIF),… IBD reduces, through its inhibitory effect on various PDEs, the production of certain pro-inflammatory cytokines… IBD also upregulates the anti-inflammatory cytokine (IL-10), and promotes the production of neurotrophic factors, such as brain-derived neurotrophic factor (BDNF), nerve growth factor (NGF), and neurotrophin-4 (NT-4). It also blocks toll-like receptor-4 (TLR-4), inhibits nitric oxide (NO) synthesis and reduces the level of reactive oxygen species (ROS). It also prevents platelet aggregation, causes cerebral vasodilation, bronchial smooth muscle relaxation, and improves cerebral blood flow. In addition, IBD attenuates the PDE-mediated activation of glial cells and abrogates PDE-mediated neuroinflammation and neurodegeneration…” (Emphasis added.)
[10] US National Library of Medicine, Clinical Trials, “Efficacy, Safety, Tolerability, and Biomarkers of MN-166 (Ibudilast) in Patients Hospitalized With COVID-19 and at Risk for ARDS,” August 2, 2021.
[11] Dennis Riches, “Dr. Peter McCollough on Covid Treatment and Vaccine Adverse Reactions, June 29, 2021.” July 20, 2021.
Lit by Imagination 