Since the arrival of Covid, too many doctors are deferring to the proclamations of the health agencies. They act as if all valid health and medical measures emanate from lofty bureaucracies. To Dr. Simone Gold this is a nightmare.
She has written a book that’s dangerous to begin because it’s impossible to put down. I Do Not Consent: My Fight Against Medical Cancel Culture is a real-life, page-turning horror story that won’t let you go until the end.
Most readers have at least heard of Dr. Gold and the politicized attacks on her for prescribing hydroxychloroquine (HCQ), a common antimalarial drug that had been approved by the FDA in 1955, had been prescribed countless times since, and that “can be safely taken by pregnant women and nursing mothers, the young and the old.” Long before the orchestrated fear campaign descended on the planet in 2020 she had used it herself on a trip to Africa—“It was a simple, white tablet, taken weekly.”
At the start of the Covid crisis her first patient was a woman in her fifties with a low fever, some difficulty breathing, and chest pain. Gold treated her with a combination of HCQ, the antibiotic azithromycin, and zinc.
Within 24 hours her condition dramatically improved. Gold was thrilled and, no doubt, so was the patient.
The next day Gold was called into the office of the hospital’s medical director.
If you had been a practicing emergency physician for two decades, as she had been, and had just cured a patient of Covid at a time when the world was desperately looking for answers, what would you expect from your boss? Kudos, perhaps? I think so. So would just about anyone, including Dr. Gold.
Instead, she was punched in the face. HCQ “wasn’t indicated,” the medical director said, and therefore using it was unjustified. He told her she was stepping on big toes (“a powerful consortium”) and if she ever prescribed it again he would fire her.
It was the strangest encounter I had ever had with a medical colleague. It came seemingly out of nowhere, almost as though an alien force had taken control of him—like something out of the 1950s film Invasion of the Body Snatchers.
The Medical Reign of Terror
After Trump called HCQ a “game-changer” on March 19, 2020 the forces aligned against him started attacking the drug. “The media vomited all over it,” she said in a recent speech. Only quacks and charlatans prescribed it, the media blared for all the world to hear.
“Before that day nobody cared about it,” she said. Among doctors it was: Use it, don’t use it, it’s safe, use your best judgment. After that date everyone had an opinion on it. Doctors began taking different positions, not based on their clinical judgment, but on what the CDC said. “I knew early on the problem was going to be the doctors,” as well as those pharmacists who were refusing to fill prescriptions for HCQ — who in so doing were practicing medicine without a license.
In her book she writes:
From the federal government down to the local level, it was worrisome to me to watch the lockstep conformity of those listening to the CDC’s public pronouncements and the media’s spin. This just wasn’t the way doctors practiced medicine, I thought. In my decades-long experience treating patients in hospital settings, I couldn’t recall a single conversation with colleagues which began, “Let’s see what the CDC says to do and then do that.” Our decisions were influenced by our education and formal training, experience, articles in scientific journals, and discussions with colleagues. To us, the CDC was less than irrelevant: it was nonexistent.
On April 6, California Governor Newsom sent out a letter telling health professionals that prescribing HCQ for SARS-CoV-2 would be deemed “unprofessional conduct,” a direct threat to a doctor’s license to practice medicine. Other governors did the same. Never before had this happened with an FDA-approved drug.
HCQ, often coupled with azithromycin and zinc, has shown remarkable results during early treatment, in outpatient settings. But the FDA had granted an EUA for hospitalized patients only. Dr. Elizabeth Lee Vliet (DrLee4America), who advocates making HCQ over-the-counter (OTC), wrote in May, 2020:
HCQ was FDA-approved in 1955 and used in hundreds of millions of prescriptions worldwide since then. If HCQ were actually killing people as media headlines and pundits claim, it would have been taken off the market decades ago. The FDA itself in the CDER [Center for Drug Evaluation and Research] data has only 62 cardiac deaths related to HCQ out of 50 MILLION prescriptions. [Italics added]
As Gold discovered, it wasn’t a variation of “Orange Man Bad” that kept HCQ from being an OTC drug in the US. HCQ is OTC in countries that have malaria or in countries where their citizens visit countries that have malaria. In the US, there was no market demand for it. No demand, no profit — no profit, no OTC.
But there was demand in France, where people took holidays in Africa. On January 13, 2020, France, with the exception of Marseilles, quietly removed HCQ from their shelves and made it a prescription-only drug, something that’s rarely if ever done, anywhere.
Why? It turns out if you have any available approved medicine that works, you cannot do an Emergency Use Authorization (EUA) for any other medicine.
Cui Bono? The vaccine manufacturers.
On April 7, the CDC announced there were no approved drugs to treat COVID-19. Meanwhile, the media continued to wail about the mounting cases and deaths.
Lancet and NEJM fake it
Something was definitely up, Gold concluded, and the infamous Lancet and New England Journal of Medicine articles in May proved it. Lancet said they had tracked over 90,000 patients and concluded HCQ was decreasing hospital survival rates and causing patient deaths. Where the hell did Lancet get 90,000 patients in so short a period of time?
Turned out the research was the offspring of Surgisphere, a company in Chicago with six employees, including a science fiction writer and an adult model and events hostess. The NEJM squandered their reputation with the same Surgisphere data. Both journals retracted their HCQ studies, but the damage had been done.
Gold with five other doctors spoke to Deborah Birx about prescribing HCQ off-label and the difficulty they were having. Birx suggested doctors could prescribe it for malaria.
Come again?
Birx, on the coronavirus task force committee, was telling her that doctors who wanted to prescribe HCQ for Covid could get around the restriction by writing the prescription for malaria. Gold says she recorded the conversation.
On June 15, 2020 the FDA revoked the EUA for HCQ and CQ for the treatment of COVID-19, due to”serious cardiac adverse events and other serious side effects.”
“Excessive use of Tylenol is the number one reason for liver transplants,” Gold says. “Does that mean we don’t sell Tylenol?” Or aspirin? In the ER, she would see some degree of GI bleeding from aspirin almost every day.
We know about this virus, she says. It is controllable. You don’t necessarily die if you’re old. But if you’re obese, diabetic, and are denied early treatment, you might do badly!
Survival rates are excellent for all age groups with no treatment. With early treatment they’re close to 100%. “That we’re even talking about this is abnormal. From my perspective as an ER physician, this is sheer insanity.”
Suspicions grow when we see governments locking down children and failing to protect people in high-risk categories, she says. Public health textbooks have long provided guidance for fighting pandemics. One, protect the frail. We knew early on that the frail were dying. We didn’t protect them. Two, don’t quarantine the healthy. Three, treat early. Don’t tell patients to go away and come back when the condition gets worse. That used to be called malpractice. Four, please note that doctors are traditionally risk averse — don’t smoke, don’t drink, don’t eat sushi when you’re pregnant. Oh, but do take this experimental vaccine!
Her message: Tell people how WEIRD all this is. What is the chance of survival for a 35-year-old woman? 99.98% with no treatment at all. How can you say she should take something experimental?
At minimum, all of the doctors supporting the vaccine are violating their Hippocratic oath.
My message: Get her book.
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If you find value in the author’s articles, please consider purchasing one or more of his products. George Ford Smith is the author of nine books, including The Flight of the Barbarous Relic, a novel about a renegade Fed chairman. He is also a filmmaker whose works include Do Not Consent- Think OUTSIDE the voting booth, Last Day, and Risky Pinch Hitter.
