No doubt many of you are tired of discussing remdesivir.  But there are two reasons to continue doing so:

1) remdesivir is still on the COVID inpatient hospital protocol, and

2) no one has been held responsible for it. 

Here I’m going to focus on responsibility, for which I’ll have to spread the wealth:

Gilead Sciences, Inc.  It knew about its drug’s toxicity, but money apparently is all that mattered.

Anthony Fauci.  I believe Fauci has zero personal remorse for illegally funding gain-of-function research in the Wuhan lab, which likely led to the COVID-19 outbreak and subsequent deaths and harm, because he views himself as a patriot who did the bidding of the CIA.  But what is his excuse for pushing remdesivir through the COVID-19 approval process (see here for the timeline), allowing Gilead to “cook” its study, when he knew how lethal it was in the earlier Ebola study?  Add in his role resulting in restricted access to safe alternatives like hydroxychloroquine and ivermectin (proof of their efficacy growing daily), and Fauci should be tried, convicted, and sentenced for crimes against humanity, not enjoying retirement with one of the largest federal pensions of all time.

Lack of proper editorial oversight in science journals.  I’ll give two examples, both related:

1. The report on the only clinical trial on humans testing remdesivir for Ebola appeared in the December 12, 2019 New England Journal of Medicine.  The “Results” section of the abstract gives the exact 28-day death rate observed for every one of the four drugs tested except remdesivir.  The remdesivir death rate is not stated explicitly anywhere in the text, either — only in Table 2 (you can also glean this figure approximately from the curve in the graph of Figure 1A), which reveals 53.1% (93/175), the highest death rate of all of them.  Furthermore, neither the “Results” section nor any other section of the abstract states explicitly that remdesivir was pulled early from the trial due to safety concerns; instead, the “Results” section states which drugs remained in the trial.  Am I the only one to notice all this?  It’s almost as if they didn’t want you to know how bad remdesivir is.  This is the NEJM, pre-COVID and pre-wokeness, considered the most prestigious medical journal in the country.

2. In the May 14, 2021 article “COVID-19: The therapeutic landscape” in the journal Med by CellPress (an Elsevier publication), Catharine I. Paules (“site principal investigator at Penn State Health for The Adaptive Covid-19 Treatment Trial [ACTT], which receives funding from the National Institutes of Health”) and Fauci write:

The first agent to show clear benefit in treating hospitalized COVID-19 patients was remdesivir, a viral RNA-dependent, RNA polymerase inhibitor that targets the replication of SARS-CoV-2. Prior to being studied in COVID-19, it had known in vitro activity against other coronaviruses, efficacy against coronaviruses in animal models, and a well-established safety profile from prior clinical trials conducted in Ebola patients.

While the article goes on to tout remdesivir for COVID-19, there is zero mention of the 53.1% death rate and it being pulled early in the Ebola trial.  Was Fauci so untouchable that he need not mention this?  A search reveals that “well-established safety profile” doesn’t necessarily mean the safety profile is good, just that it’s known.  Okay, but to not even mention remdesivir’s previous performance, let alone defend it, is crazy.  At the least, there should have been an explanation why remdesivir would be highly toxic for Ebola but not for COVID, but I’ve never seen one.  The Med article has 1,031 citations, yet I can’t find a negative comment about the article on this point in a Google search. 

Public health agencies: The NIH backed and the FDA approved remdesivir with nary a peep from anyone.  Obviously, this setup, where someone like Fauci at NIAID has complete control and no one will speak up for fear of losing funding, and where scientists involved with the FDA approval process are too in bed with the pharmaceutical companies they are supposed to monitor, has to change.  Even if no one trusts anything these agencies say anymore, don’t underestimate the damage they can do.

Censorship by science journals, gov’t agencies, MSM, search engines, and social media companies.  We won’t forget.  And shame on all the “science reporters” who can’t read, think, and come to obvious conclusions, preferring instead to just spit out quotes from government and other Follow-the-Science (TM) sources.

Congress: Congress didn’t think through (or did it?) whether there would be unintended consequences of the PREP Act it passed, which gave monetary incentives to, and immunity from lawsuits for, health care providers following the standard protocols.  To Congress: Your default should be “do nothing”!

Hospitals: In the old days, we thought of a hospital as trying its best to heal people even if sloppy procedures and questionable off-label product u$e occasionally led to inadvertent deaths.  Now all I can think is that hospital administrators are willing to intentionally kill patients with remdesivir for $3,000 a head (more if you include ventilators) to avoid hassle and improve the hospital’s bottom line.  To them I say I will never trust you again.  You should be ashamed.  Do you have no conscience?  If a few hospitals would have taken a stand, maybe remdesivir would have been consigned to the dustbin and thousands saved without your precious bottom line being hurt.

A lot of guilty parties.  They know that we know that they know remdesivir kills, yet it’s still here.  Until remdesivir gets pulled, I have lost my faith in humanity.

W.A. Eliot is a pseudonym.

Image via Raw Pixel.