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This week on CounterSpin: There is the fact that, back in February, Donald Trump was saying one thing to the public about the coronavirus while saying something else entirely in late night calls to a once-hotshot reporter. And there is the fact that the reporter chose not to share that information with the public until his book was ready to sell. Combined, those facts go a ways toward explaining the particular coronavirus nightmare the US faces, with a president who says and does whatever, public health and humanity be damned, and—where there should be a vigorous, principled check on that—a press corps that can’t seem to remember whose interest they’re meant to represent.
We talk about seeing around the limitations of corporate media’s storyline when it comes to vaccines and treatments for Covid-19 with Peter Maybarduk; he’s director of the Global Access to Medicines Program at Public Citizen. They have a new report about the impact (so far) of Gilead’s monopoly control of the possible treatment drug Remdesivir.
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Transcript: ‘A Vaccine Can Be a Public Good’
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Also on the show: Corporate predations on public health, police killing of Black people and abuse of those protesting those killings, overt GOP efforts to interfere with the vote, environmental protections gutted, millions of people out of work and facing eviction, while billionaires get richer? Everywhere you turn is a reason to protest. And calling your congressmember is crucial, but if it were enough, well, we’d be done. But as more and more people decide they have to speak up, show up, with others, in the streets—that it’s not just meaningful but necessary—they are met with tear gas, rubber bullets, truncheons and the specter of being carted off in unmarked vans, or facing felony charges that will upend their lives. It looks like law enforcement being themselves lawless, but in fact, there is a connection—underexplored —between brutish police responses to peaceful protests and a history of Supreme Court rulings around the First Amendment you thought you knew. We’ll fill in some missing history with constitutional law attorney Kia Rahnama, author of a recent article titled “How the Supreme Court Dropped the Ball on the Right to Protest.”
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Transcript: ‘The Court Has Refused to Fashion Concrete Legal Standards About the Rights of Protesters’
Haven’t listened to the interview yet, but from the Public Citizen report is this–“That same trial did not reveal a significant reduction in deaths. More data is thus needed to establish whether Remdesivir provides clinically meaningful benefit and has a favorable benefit-risk profile for the treatment of COVID-19.”
Its too bad Public Citizen didn’t delve into the chicanery, shenanigans that got the drug FDA emergency use declaration. The # 1 endpoint for the RCT was determine if Remdesivir would reduce mortality. Partway through the RCT, Gillead changed all the endpoints so whether you lived or died didn’t matter. All 10 endpoints no longer mattered, which allowed through “adaptive design”. The IRB for Remdesivir was NIH with Fauci intimately involved.
Add to this, some of Gillead’s scientists were involved in nixing Hydorchloroquine’s potential beneficial and safe treatment for early stage Covid19.
When it comes to drugs and PHARMA there is always something rotten in Denmark and the USA.
Can’t wait to smell the stench when a vaccine for SARS-Cov-2 is offered, strong armed, coerced, guilted to a frightened public.
Great comment, Michael! Yes, Fauci used to say what a good treatment for another coronavirus chloroquine was, but changed his tune when it was obvious the money was in Remdesivir, not cheap, safe, and effective hydoroxychloroquine/zinc/azithromycin or Ivermectin/doxycyline. Too bad Remdesivir, as you said, didn’t reduce mortality (the whole point), but only reduced length of hospitalization from fifteen to eleven days. And it often causes severe kidney disease. Oh, well. A thousand bucks a dose!
Cheaper than either of those drugs and more effective is getting ones vitamin D to 50 ng/ml as Dr. Tom Frieden advised at the beginning of the official outbreak.
It has reduced hospitalizations, kept people out of ICU, and greatly reduced deaths in those with levels of it for good immune system function. Drugs, such as, hydroxychloroquine, mimic one or more of its functions.
It like any drug or vaccine intervention, are only fully effective when all other body systems are also as optimal as reasonably possible. This includes a healthy whole food, low starch, low sugar, low alcohol diet plus exercise, BMI below 30, and nighttime sleep and daytime sunshine.
It has been acknowledged that one problem in the African American community is a lack of access to vegetables and fruits and an over reliance on low nutrition starches.,
Fauci only recently acknowledged that he is taking vitamin D. Other than that there has been a lack of encouraging a healthy lifestyle as sketched above, and indeed there has been a suppression of efforts to get that message out. I have had numerous such messages deleted, including when I tried to ask my congressman that in a virtual townhall meeting.