Screw It: One More Rant on Hydroxychloroquine
No free passes, no apologies: even you, Orange Man.
Every Covid-skeptic will have their defining narrative of the pandemic.
Right at the start, as soon as all the key players started lining up as one their chosen narrative, I knew the fix was in — deep as I was down the wombat hole at the time, especially with all that extra lockdown time on our hands — but I was still trying to get a handle on where to even start to try and unravel it: some sort of conspiracy anchor or pivot point.
For me, and for many other armchair science-conspiracy nerds, it was hydroxychloroquine. That was where the focus needed to be, if you really wanted to wake people up and show that this was never actually about your health.
Because you could leave aside every contentious issue: masks, social distancing, lockdowns, PCR tests, co-morbidities, inflated death counts, the validity of germ theory, if there even is a goddamn virus. Even vaccines, now that we know they are thoroughly imperfect immune protectors.
You can leave all that aside, take for granted and without argument every mainstream held assumption that might otherwise automatically discredit anything else you might have to say, and simply bring it back to this point: people are undoubtedly getting sick and dying, and there are treatments we could be using to save them, but we aren’t. And I can prove it to you.
I feel like I have done that, possibly to death, in which case I should be done with HCQ by now.
I triggered friends and family with my initial attempt to show the blatant suppression by the scientific community and their enablers.
I got passive aggressive against race virtue signallers by showing the white/western supremacy that lies at the heart of this suppression.
I wrote perhaps my most smugly-proud post-academic article on it, where I broke down — blow by depressing blow — how the reputation of a potentially game changing therapeutic was brutally tarnished beyond redemption by a stunningly effective and hence quite likely coordinated series of attacks.
I then penned an open letter of gratitude to HCQ, to thank it for all the things it had taught me, and for being perhaps one of the greatest educators on how the world really works (seriously).
But enough of all that rationality and sentimentality. Watching it unfold, and still seeing it completely disregarded by the mainstream public, even as they start to finally catch on to the superior-in-all-aspects Ivermectin, is starting to piss me off somewhat. HCQ deserves better than that.
And so it is time for a rant. A rant about HCQ. Caps lock will be used.
Warning: all sides are to blame here — except me obviously — and shall cop it accordingly. Even, especially, Orange Man.
Firstly, let us start in an unlikely place: with HCQ’s advocates. Look guys, let’s be real: it was never a ‘cure’ as many of you did and still do suggest.
The scientific evidence makes this perfectly clear. Looking beyond the many clear-cut positive findings, there are also many clinical contexts where it has been found to have no significant reduction on sickness and mortality compared to control groups. It is far from the direct path out of the pandemic that many have made it out to be.
Of course: that one of HCQ’s main proponents back in those chaotic early days also believes that demonic aliens impregnate human females was also probably not helpful, but was nonetheless one of the most enjoyable conspiracy nerd-out moments of the pandemic.
But we must unavoidably blame the scientific illiteracy of the majority of the conspiracy community. Like many key Covid narrative moments, they dropped the ball on the detail badly — overplaying the black and white nature of the arguments, and further cemented in many on the other side team these people really are undeserving of a seat at the table.
Let this be a broader message to the lack of nuance that often permeates the conspiracy-leaning alternative health community. SAYING SOMETHING IS A CURE WHEN IT ISN’T A CURE DOESN’T HELP.
Unless it is Cannabis of course. Cannabis is the cure for so much of what ails us.
Where to next? Fauci: let’s get that out of the way.
How can anyone still listen to this guy with a straight face? Good lord. The guy has clearly been instructed from on high to completely destroy the public image of the TV-friendly spokesperson-on-important-subject old white dude archetype.
Even you mask advocates will have to admit that Boss Tony did more damage to your campaign than the average mask-forgoing libertarian with his now much repeated and used completely-stripped-of-context suggestion early in the pandemic that there was no reason for healthy people to wear masks. Nekminnit, or next year, we are told it is double masking, possibly until 2022.
This is but one of many “Fauci Flip Flops” that have been well documented. I guess no-one could say he is not open to changing his mind as the ‘facts’ do the same.
The most egregious of these flip flops may be on HCQ itself. I mean, the bloke was in charge of the National Institutes of Health when its own journal published a study in 2005 that had the exact title: “Chloroquine is a potent inhibitor of SARS coronavirus infection and spread”.
DON’T YOU DARE GIVE ME “oh it was only an experiment in a lab on monkey cell cultures and can’t automatically be translated to real world in humans especially since it wasn’t the same Sars-Covid virus and coz its also chloroquine not hydroxychloroquine” THEY LITERALLY SHOWED THAT HCQS MAIN FUNCTIONAL COMPOUND WAS AN ANTIVIRAL THAT KILLS CORONAVIRUSES SO ITS GOING TO DO SOMETHING AND ITS REALLY STUPID TO SAY OTHERWISE.
And that something is self-evidently not killing people, given no-one gave a shit about its potential side effects after 50 years of use until Orange Man opened his mouth. That this study can be publicly available, and people are still convinced that HCQ is not and never was able to be used effectively in clinical settings shows how far the science debate is capable of ascending up its rear end.
As for Fauci: well, not only has he completely shat on any conceivable benefits forthcoming from HCQ, right from the get go, but he has repeatedly spruiked the over-priced Remdesivir — a drug that has essentially taken the opposite trajectory of HCQ, in being widely lauded by the establishment early on before actual science proved it to be dismally ineffective.
Who next? Let’s get to the proper scientists now, who do not deserve to be tarnished by association with Fraud-ci. Nonetheless: how did you let this happen?
That withdrawn Lancet Study? That scandalishious scientific debauchery that even the Big-Pharma-enabling-as-they-come Guardian website was bold enough to blow the whistle on?
The freaking Recovery trial: the Marx Brothers Does Science moment of the pandemic when researchers decided to give already sick late-stage Covid patients 4 times the suggested amount of HCQ and then decided to use the inevitable outcomes of this horrendous lethal experiment to forever plant the inception seed in the public’s mind that HCQ was not only not effective but also potentially fatal?
You have one of the most cited websites by Covid-skeptics throughout this study — the early-treatment-therapeutics-research aggregating site c19study.com — literally laying out before you the entire body of research for this drug, for the most part transparently and objectively, and yet you have still found a way to discount it in its entirety as something run by another crazy conspiracy theorist.
It’s so easy when you really stop and look at it: give it early, not late; to the most at-risk, not those destined to recover anyway; at the right doses in the right combinations with zinc and other less-famous team players — and it works.
Just look at Switzerland. LOOK AT THEM I SAID.
There is a special place in HCQ hell for notable names in Australia. My goodness, how we have butchered it here.
It would be tempting to single out the esteemed ex-furniture salesman come conservative/conspiracy thug-life politician Craig Kelly as serving some sort of self-defeating role equivalent to that of the Orange Man (more on him below, don’t worry) — especially as he devotes roughly the other half of his social media posting to thoroughly discredit himself in the minds of all left/liberal leaning types by going after Climate Changers. However, given he has essentially been the only public figure down under consistently blowing the HCQ Trump-et, it would be vastly unfair to do so.
The main culprits: our own ‘esteemed’ health bureaucrats, highlighted by this vaguely psychopathic contribution from NSW Senior Health Advisor Dr. Jan ‘Fizzy’ Fizzell. Then we have the thoroughly predictable left-side-of-the-same-coin Labour party, notably the odious Chris Bowen and the thoroughly disappointing Tanya Plibersek. And let us not forget or leave out the smug wankery of the Media Watch guy at ABC.
All of you — you will get your HCQ karma from the early-treatment-therapeutic gods on high.
To paraphrase Kendrick, I have one final bone to pick. Before this rant winds down, we must address an elephant in the room: an orange elephant prone to his own ALL CAPS rants that this piece was very much inspired by.
Don, bruh, what were thinking? You knew about the proven-verified condition of Trump Derangement Syndrome, where the hate you bring on yourself automatically flows onto anything that you express approval of.
So why did you give HCQ the kiss of death, when you could have left it up to someone else?
It’s almost like you wanted it to get to this: you wanted the controversy, the division, the attacks on scientists and the science, the exposure of Science itself and what it has become. Almost like you did the same with the election fraud debate, almost like you did with race relations, and international diplomacy, and basic convention.
You aren’t here to save anyone, are you, or make anyone feel particularly better: you are here to expose everyone, and everything, presumably including yourself and along with it the media, entertainment, business, social and political systems you have quite remarkably managed to all-conquer.
Well, that had better be your role, because imagine all the needless deaths due to HCQ withdrawal that you might have saved?
Well, I thought that went well. Did I leave anyone out?