Andrew Bolt: Our doctors shouldn’t dismiss possible COVID-19 cure
Victoria’s rocketing death toll should make the Andrews government and its advisers desperate to investigate any potential treatment suggested by doctors. Yet our experts are trashing a possible cure, writes Andrew Bolt.
Andrew Bolt
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Wednesday was not the day for Julian Elliott to smirk. Not as he dismissed a possible cure for this coronavirus.
Not on Wednesday. Not on the day 24 more Victorians died.
Victoria’s rocketing death toll should make the Andrews government and its advisers desperate to investigate any potential treatment suggested by doctors better qualified than themselves.
There are two such treatments, both cheap — the antimalarial hydroxychloroquine with zinc, and the anti-lice ivermectin with zinc.
But Elliott, doubtlessly brought by Premier Daniel Andrews to his press conference for this purpose, trashed hydroxychloroquine with a smirk that suggested he was disposing of quackery.
Elliott heads the National COVID-19 Clinical Evidence Taskforce which declared that hydroxychloroquine was not just useless but a health hazard, and must not be used.
Elliott said he was “proud ... that we haven’t jumped on to the latest bandwagon because of a particular trend on social media.”
Unfortunately for him, the International Journal of Antimicrobial Agents has just reported the results of a major trial of hydroxychloroquine, involving 8000 patients in Belgium.
It found that the drug, even without zinc, cut the death rate by more than a third.
What’s more, Elliott’s claim that hydroxychloroquine is worse than useless is based on extraordinary cherrypicking.
His taskforce examined nine studies that showed the drug had little or no effect, but ignored others that showed it worked.
It also included a study that inexplicably gave patients potentially lethal overdoses.
Crucially, none of the studies included zinc. Hydroxychloroqine and ivermectin are zinc ionophores – they help the zinc get into cells and stop virus replication.
Elliott’s airy contempt for hydroxychloroquine is matched by that of Chief Health Officer Brett Sutton for ivermectin, which is promoted by Prof Thomas Borody, a genius who developed the first cure for peptic ulcers.
Asked last Friday about the drug, Sutton, too, smirked.
He said he’d wait until someone did a randomised double-blind controlled trial. Besides, “the dose that might be required in humans puts it into toxic levels’.
Again, Sutton ignored the role of zinc. Ignored Borody’s clinical evidence that the drug had worked.
As Borody told me later: “When we have dead all over the place ... this is not good advice.”
I don’t know if these drugs work, but I do know that they don’t kill, if used under medical advice. So why this hostility?