MM#264--Recounting a Personal Battle with COVID-19 and Unravelling the Hydroxychloroquine Controversy

Welcome to the Theory to Action podcast, where we examine the timeless treasures of wisdom from the great books in less time, to help you take action immediately and ultimately to create and lead a flourishing life. Now here's your host, david Kaiser.

Hello, I am David and welcome back to another Mojo Minute. Now, this week's Mojo Minutes will be a little different. We're going to break protocol here. I'm going to share some of my own personal stories, and those stories are going to center around the COVID-19 pandemic and my experience with it. You see, two years ago this week is when I tested positive for COVID-19. It was the summer of 2021. I had just come off a vacation with two buddies of mine. We had went to Nashville and toured the Andrew Jackson home there, which I will say even though I'm a conservative Republican slash independent that it is well worth your time and your effort to go see the Hermitage which is the name of Andrew Jackson's house, right outside or is this state, I guess, right outside of Nashville. So let me just little sidebar here. I'll talk a little bit about the Andrew Jackson house. I think visiting it provides you great insight to the history of our country. That's why I would encourage you to go, because if you, if you have read and studied our American history, you will see a clear resemblance in the way that our country reacted at the time to Andrew Jackson and how our country is reacting to Donald Trump. Both men were either loved or hated by the respective camps. Now there's obvious, there's obvious differences there. Jackson Andrew Jackson was a war hero from the 1812 war and Trump never served in the military. But Trump had some significant uphill fights in his first term, that he had a battle His first four years. The Russian hoax, a deeply, deeply embedded administrative state that we're just now understanding how corrupt that is. And President Andrew Jackson didn't have to contend with any of that. And the major point is that both both men were either vehemently hated or vehemently supported by their side of the aisle in their political party. So again, I would highly encourage you to visit the Hermitage Just outside Nashville. So after my buddies and I we visited that Andrew Jackson estate, then we went Southwest along the Mississippi, tennessee border to visit and tour the Civil War battlefield at Shiloh. This is the battle where US Grant made a name for himself as a general. He avoided getting overrun by a surprise attack by the Confederates and ultimately broke open the Western theater with a victory there, and he began a long slog down to the South on his way to surrounding the city of Vicksburg along the Mississippi, and that would begin a siege of that city that would ultimately cause the surrender of Vicksburg, and that was a crucial rebel fort along the Mississippi River. After touring Shiloh's battlefield, my friends left for their respective homes and their families and I had fully intended to go down South to tour the Vicksburg battlefield. I have not been there yet, but at the time you will remember, or you should remember, that Hurricane Ida had just rapidly intensified in the Gulf of Mexico and made a dangerous turn to the north. After coming across Cuba and the Ida Hurricane. Ida made landfall as a category four hurricane and the unbelievable coincidence was that it was on the 16th anniversary of Hurricane Katrina and its landfall, which was August 29th. So it made landfall with an incredible maximum sustained winds at over 150 miles per hour. So I was contemplating that on the morning of August 29th which direction I should go. I ultimately chose to get out of the way of a category four hurricane and I went westward and I went northward and I went to a small town in Missouri, a town that I had always wanted to visit since I was a kid and I learned about a famous speech there. And I had visited the small town of Fulton, missouri, where in 1946 the great English Prime Minister, winston Churchill, gave the infamous Iron Curtain speech. Now they have a wonderful Churchill Museum there. At the time it was opened it had tons of COVID restrictions, but you could still tour it and I think I was the only person touring it that day and I would highly recommend to check that out too. In fact, I'd highly recommend all the places that I visited and toured for you to check out the Hermitage, andrew Jackson's estate outside Nashville, the National Civil War battlefield in Shiloh, tennessee, and America's National Churchill Museum in Fulton, missouri. So it was only on that long road trip back from Missouri to Columbus, ohio, that I began to feel the yakes and pains of what I thought was the flu and ultimately would become COVID-19. At the time I didn't know that, I didn't even think I had gotten the virus and, like I said, it was September of 2021. And by then most of the country had a decreasing amount of virus cases nationwide. There was little pockets here and there, but the majority of cases were going downhill. Reasonable people in the country at the time were coming to grips that the national government had been lying to us for the last two years all about COVID, about the virus, about the origins of the virus and, most especially, how to treat the virus successfully. Now, yes, I'm quite passionate about this subject, so we'll be covering all the books. We'll be covering all the books that have come out talking about this issue and these issues. Frankly, now, today's book that we're reviewing is the courage to face COVID-19. It was preventing hospitalization and death while battling the biopharmaceutical complex. Now, the book was written by John Leckie, along with Dr Peter McCullough. Now, dr Peter McCullough was a trailblazer throughout the COVID-19 pandemic. This guy deserves a medal for all the heroic work he did saving lives, being on the front lines and learning more and more about the virus as time went on, and then sharing that information with as many outlets as possible that could have him on. So with that, let's go to our first pull quote of this book, this great book. In fact, dr Peter McCullough was, at the beginning of 2020, the vice chief of internal medicine and program director of cardiology at the Baylor University Medical Center in Dallas. In January, a Chinese friend sent him a video shot in a crowded, panicked hospital waiting room in Wuhan. Amongst the throng of patients, one individual collapsed. This, it seemed, was what can happen with SARS severe acute respiratory syndrome. One minute, the patient is conscious and breathing. The next he's decompensates and falls to the floor. Holy smokes, that's scary, mccullough thought. The sender indicated that the Chinese government didn't want such videos getting out, which is why he sent it through a virtual private network, and January and February McCullough monitored the unfolding drama, first in Wuhan and then in Milan, italy, and tried to learn everything he could about the virus. He figured it was no coincidence that both cities had a high urban density, with people living in close quarters and high rise apartment buildings with poor ventilation. If a family member brought home the infection, it was likely to spread to everyone in the dwelling who were re-inoculated by the enclosed air containing the virus. Thinking of the SARS-CoV-1 outbreak in 2003 might offer a clue, so he called a friend in Ottawa, canada, dr Manish Sood, whose hospital had admitted infected patients. Dr Sood wasn't encouraging. All staff could do was try to protect themselves. For 90 days he had worn a N95 mask and hoped for the best. As for their patients, most of those in his hospital had sickened to the point of requiring mechanical ventilation, on which many had died. None of the Canadian hospitals had developed a treatment protocol. Interest in doing so seemed to wane after the outbreak ran its course. Dr McCullough learned that the SARS-CoV-1 had generated massive interest in the virus and developed a vaccine for it, but relatively little interest in developing a treatment for it. And later on we pick up the story. Makala would never forget a staff meeting in which a young, handsome doctor originally from South America volunteered to serve on the front line of the expected wave of COVID patients. The data from China indicated that the infected young people farred far better, faired far better than people over 50. A disaster is coming, he said, a mass casualty event, and some of us will have to be in harm's way to deal with it. I and my group are relatively still young, so we are happy to volunteer. Everyone present was deeply moved and it reminded Makala of the young soldiers volunteering for a dangerous mission. Other young doctors and nurses were inspired by his example. They too volunteered to serve on the front line. Makala felt very proud of them and proud to be part of their institution. In mid-March, a 56-year-old man flew from New York to Dallas and felt feverish when he got home. In the days that followed he felt increasingly ill. Ultimately, he landed at the Baylor ICU with acute respiratory distress, where he was put on a bail-lander and died two days later. He was Baylor's first COVID-19 patient and his precipitous decline in death had a chilling effect on the staff. Though the ventilator failed to save him, the staff didn't know what else could have been done for him. The ineffectiveness of mechanical ventilation implied that the virus must have caused some pathology that was different from typical severe pneumonia. The early days of COVID-19 were very scary Because everyone in the medical community and all the experts didn't know how to combat this novel virus. It was new, it was unknown, but the more we learned about it as a society, and especially as a medical community, the more politics and money began to seep into how we fought this virus. The evidence is there and it is disgusting and it's heartbreaking. But we have to learn the truth and the failure of our public still to this day, to not seek an accounting and a demanding of what happened and how we can learn from it and, most importantly, how did the virus originate. To not seek those answers is even more disgusting. We have to demand answers to the most important questions around COVID-19. We cannot, cannot just sweep it under the rug and everyone forget about what happened. We have to face the hard facts and we have to learn from all of this, especially the last three years. Let's go back to the book. In mid-March, his chief of cardiology, dr Kevin Whelan, posed a big question what are we going to do to fight this monster? If our nurses get wiped out, we're done for. Makala had already been thinking about the bigger problem of how to prevent hospitals nationwide from being overrun. Research teams in China were reporting favorable results from treating COVID patients with hydrochloroquine, a drug that had an FDA approved had been FDA approved since 1955 for malaria prophylaxis, as well as for the treatment of lupus and rubatoid arthritis. In India, the state medical councils recommended that the frontline medical workers take the drug as a prophylaxis. The only thing I'm seeing in the literature is the anti-malarial hydrochloroquine. Makala replied. I think we should take the Indian Medical Council's recommendation and give it a try. Because of the extraordinary circumstances, there was no time to produce a placebo. It was also necessary to ask the staff to decide who wanted to take the drug and who didn't, which meant it wasn't randomized. Nevertheless, with about 200 in the experimental group and 200 in the control group, the trial seemed likely to yield meaningful results. This is later on, when they actually did a trial on hydrochloroquine to see if it would help, and the trial likely seemed to yield meaningful results. Generally, it was the older doctors and nurses who volunteered to take the prophylaxis. The younger ones tended to prefer taking their chances without it. Weekly nasal swab PCR tests were obtained from both groups to determine the presence or absence of the virus, so that simple trial provided one of the first breakthroughs. It was a small breakthrough, but it was something. It gave everybody hope that perhaps this would be the first of many ways to deal with COVID-19, especially for the frontline workers. Let's go back to the book. At the time, this endeavor seemed the most natural course of action. The trial could protect the hospital workers and provide valuable data in regular testing for staff, which was, early in the pandemic, difficult to obtain. Little Dimacola knew he was embarking on a journey that would ultimately lead him to becoming a central figure in the greatest conflict since the Cold War, a battle in which he would be pitted against an array of powerful interests and institutions, including his own. As he would soon learn, this battle had already begun in France, where a kindred spirit was squaring off against the French national medical establishment. Indeed, it has been the greatest conflict since the Cold War, and yet nobody wants to talk about it anymore. Nobody wants to get to the bottom of it. Nobody wants to get to the facts. Let's pick up the story in chapter six of this book. Mainstream media reporting suggested that no one in America's vast complex of university medical centers and public health agencies had heard about the potential value of hydroxychloroquine until March 19. But this cannot be true. Among researchers all over the world, hydroxychloroquine was known as one of the most useful drugs ever formulated. In fact, even during World War II, the US military gave chloroquine, a synthetic derivative of quinine with lower toxicity, to millions of US soldiers deployed in regions affected by malaria. In addition to malaria prophylaxis, the drug cleared up rashes in inflammatory arthritis. In 1946, bayer Labs discovered that by adding a molecule from the hydroxyl group, chloroquine's toxicity could be further reduced while conserving its efficacy. Hydroxychloroquine also showed promise in reducing glucose intolerance in diabetic patients. Hydroxychloroquine's potent anti-inflammatory property had long been well known to rheumatologists, as is the ENT, ear, nose and throat in pulmonary. Doctors have long observed inflammation is an aggravating factor for respiratory tract diseases. During the COVID-19 pandemic, treating physicians discovered that hydroxychloroquine's antiviral property was enhanced by combining it with zinc. Wow, combining it with zinc. So why couldn't the media tell the truth about this wonder drug that had been around and proven itself over the last 75 years or longer? They couldn't just simply do the shoe leather reporting of research, finding out about the drug, interviewing four or five authorities about the drug. They had to just simply lie about it, and then we have the deep politicization of this wonder drug. That's good to our last quote. So it was when President Trump declared the ol' malaria drug, hydrochloroquine, to be a potential game changer. Soon stories appeared under headlines such as Trump's COVID Cure or Trump touts hydrochloroquine, proclaiming the drug lacked efficacy and safety and caused irreversible retinal damage and dangerous heart arrhythmias. Any eye doctor could tell you that the claim of irreversible retinal damage from a five day course of hydrochloroquine was a whopper of a deception. Less than one percent of lupus in rheumatoid arthritis. Patients who take hydrochloroquine every day for five to seven years start to develop retinal toxicity. After ten years of daily use. One percent of regular users develop retinal toxicity. Likewise, the claim of dangerous heart arrhythmias was a massive distortion. On April 7, dr Oz interviewed the prominent rheumatologist, dr Daniel Wallace, who specialized in treating systematic lupus at Cedar Sinai Medical Center in Beverly Hills. Dr Oz began the interview by mentioning that 400,000 Americans are currently using the drug. How safe is it? Dr Oz asked In 42 years of clinical practice, I've treated several thousand lupus patients. I'd like to emphasize that all rheumatologists have a great deal of experience with this drug Regarding safety, since it came out 70 years ago in 1955, several million patients have taken the drug. There have not been any reported deaths from using this agent as a monotherapy. It the heart arrhythmia was a problem with hydrochloroquine in the 1950s and 60s when doctors were using two or three times the usual dose. In the current recommended dose it does not occur. The risk of retinal toxicity in five years of continuous use is zero. Dr Wallace was only speaking about the hydrochloroquine as a monotherapy. The incidence of dangerous arrhythmias for patients taking hydrochloroquine and erythromycin is approximately nine in 100,000. We say that again nine in 100,000. Another big lie frequently told in the press was that Trump's touting of hydroxy was hindering lupus and rubytoid arthritis patients from getting their prescriptions filled. The generic drug is easy to manufacture and production could have easily been ramped up. Moreover, in late March, the White House Office of Trade and Manufacturing Policy acquired 29 million tablets of hydroxy for the US stockpile. If there was indeed a supply chain problem, it was created by the meddling officers at the Department of Health and Human Services in the FDA, who obstructed the national stockpile from being distributed to pharmacies. Many marveled at the drug's hostile politicization, but it's important to understand that inciting and manipulating political passions was only a means to an end. The objective was to suppress hydroxy as a treatment for COVID-19. The motive was revealed in the Washington Posted Editorial of March 25, 2020. Already then, the DC Medical Establish had decided that a vaccine was the answer to the COVID-19 pandemic. No one in government apart from President Trump was speaking favorably about repurposing drugs such as hydroxy, and the widespread loathing of Trump was not the motive for discrediting the therapy, but it helped public health agency directors to turn the public against it. Now, that was a very long quote, so I hope you stayed with me to hear it all out, and I fully, fully understand that, looking back on it, president Donald Trump was not the best messenger to be giving medical advice. I fully get it, but we have the quotes, we have the evidence, and Dr Birx and Dr Anthony Fauci both knew that these, especially hydroxy, these monotherapies could certainly help and they said nothing. In fact, they lied about them. Now these brief quotes are just the tip of the iceberg in this wonderfully written book that I'm about halfway through right now, and it's already hard to read about the continued failures of our medical experts. These people should be held accountable. Everyone involved in this shred needs to be held accountable. There should be trials In fact, there should be Nuremberg style trials about these events. There has to be a reckoning. Medical experts just can't continue to lie to the American people and get away with it over and over. I'm sorry that should not be allowed to happen. Even if our Republic is going to hell in a handbasket, there still needs to be an accounting. Now back to me, my COVID-19 illness. My COVID was pretty bad. It was painful for the first four or five days. Then I found Tylenol arthritis, which had helped me a great deal in dealing with the pain, and after the first 15 days, my vitals of pulse oxygen. They started coming back up and my temperature had broken and thankfully I did not have to go to the hospital. So certainly there was people far, far worse than me Thousands, hundreds of thousands and that is the reason why I'm so passionate about helping all these people that went through this and people that have lost loved ones. Now, during my time, I reached out to my primary care doctor to see about any help and they were zero help. None, zero, nada. It was a telehealth video call and they were absolutely no health. I asked about hydroxy. They said we don't do that, could not give me any other reason. I asked about ivermectin they said we don't do that either. They could not give me any reason. I asked for the medical evidence that I could not take these things. They did not have it. They said we just don't use that protocol. I asked what could I actually do? They said just take Tylenol. If you get really bad, then go to the hospital. All vitamin C. Please take Tylenol and vitamin C. Now that was just absolutely piss poor medical advice in September of 2021. We knew much, much more and the fact that our medical experts cannot pass that information along is just absolutely disgusting. I even reached out to a childhood friend who was a pharmacist and he said not to take hydroxy. He touted the medical establishments line. There was all kind of problems with it. I asked about ivermectin he said it was a horse medicine, don't take that. So in the end, I made it through COVID-19, but, as you can tell, I'm super passionate about it because the medical authorities did not tell the truth and they repeatedly lied after more and more information came in. They knew the knowledge, they knew the information and they lied repeatedly to the American public. This was not a fog of war situation. This was not even the summer of 2020, when we barely knew anything. This was. They learned of the vital and better pharmacological tools and medicines and no one changed their medical positions for a variety of reasons, and we need to get down to the bottom of those reasons and if there was violations of law, with a fair trial, they need to be held accountable. It's disgusting that they're not being held accountable. There needs to be a reckoning and we can start with Dr Spouchy and Burke's Nuremberg style trials, please, and it needs to happen yesterday. So let me take a deep breath here. I want to thank Dr Peter McCullough because for over two years two and a half years I would hang on his every word and every interview, every report he would publish. He was one of the best doctors on the front lines that were trying to help people, trying to help patients, and he was proven right all along these teams of doctors, and we'll cover all of them, especially if they write books. We will certainly cover them because I'm hunting down every book that tells the truth on this whole charade and some of these doctors have never gotten credit. So thank you, dr McCullough, also for writing this book and for the courage to face COVID-19. And, yes, this extreme bio pharmaceutical complex. The truth will come out. I know for sure because I'm going to keep speaking about it. I will keep telling my friends and family and everyone I can about it and the truth will always come out. The truth always comes out. So, folks, please go out, get this book, the Courage to Face COVID-19, preventing Hospitalization and Death While Battling in the Bio Pharmaceutical Complex, by John Leckie and Dr Peter McCullough. I'll put a link in the show notes. This book tells the truth of what happened behind the scenes and the COVID-19 pandemic and again, these were just quotes, tip of the tip of the iceberg of what actually happened. But this book is a solid history of actually what took place. Now come back Thursday of this week and we'll talk about the war on Ivermectin, another possible solution and another chapter in the shameful and disgusting repeated lies by our medical experts and by our medical establishment. So come back here on Thursday and we'll hear what the real truth is.

Thank you for joining us. We hope you enjoyed this theory to action podcast. Be sure to check out our show page at teammojoacademycom, where we have everything we discussed in this podcast, as well as other great resources. Until next time, keep getting your mojo on.