Video - steroids
Early steroid treatments for COVID ignored by WHO (Umberto Meduri & Paul Marik & Bret Weinstein)
Obvious COVID remedies ignored Umberto Meduri is a professor of pharmaceutical sciences, and a former professor of medicine (lost his job) at the University of Tennessee Health Science Center, in Memphis Tennessee. Paul Marik is quadruple boarded in Internal Medicine, Critical Care Medicine, Neuro Critical Care, and Nutrition Science. Paul Marik was a tenured professor of Medicine, and chief of the division of pulmonary and critical care medicine at the University of Virginia Medical School. The pattern of blocking effective, safe, generic medications is clearly evident in the story of Umberto Meduri, an excellent physician and researcher who made a remarkable discovery about inflammation of the lung, and a safe and effective treatment with the potential to save hundreds of thousands, possibly millions of lives annually across the globe. The one problem: the drug in question was out of patent. Instead of receiving a Nobel Prize, Dr. Meduri had his career destroyed, and his reputation ruined with pure propaganda. This story, told for the first time here on The DarkHorse Podcast reveals the full depth of the capture of science and medicine, and allows us to see exactly how our response to Covid ended up the exact opposite of good science and medicine.
Transcript - steroids
0:00:03.2 Bret Weinstein: The obviously reasonable things to do for patients, both before they get sick and especially after they get sick, are conspicuously not recommended. And the idea that nobody mentioned to dwellers of high latitudes, that they were almost certain to be Vitamin D deficient during winter months. And if they work indoors and don't spend a lot of time outside, they might well be deficient all year. That that was not mentioned was preposterous because first of all, there's lots of behavioral remedy you can do without having to swallow anything. You can just simply spend some time in the sun during hours when you're capable of making Vitamin D. And it is also likely that supplementing Vitamin D is helpful. You said thiamine was also important to the health of the receptors. Not a lethal thing to give people, even if it didn't work, the harm of giving them so you're certain they're not deficient in thiamine would be low.
0:01:10.0 Weinstein: Vitamin C, likewise, a very easily excreted and neutralized substance by the body. So giving it would be the cautious thing to do. And then here we have the central player in this story, corticosteroids, right? You have patients who are dying from inflammation and what you have is some very suspicious argument that you should not give these very patients the thing that any doctor would think to give them now that we know what the role of corticosteroids is in controlling inflammation, right? So what's going on here that all of the obvious things to do, which do turn out to be useful and appear to work at a very high level. I mean, glucocorticoids, you're saying 50% reduction in mortality. That's nothing to sneeze at, right? What is going on? That these things are simply not being recommended as likely to be useful until proven otherwise and safe enough to administer in people who are otherwise threatened by their disease.
0:02:20.6 Umberto Meduri: Well, it is fascinating. So one thing that I'm very disappointed with the WHO and when they came out, we sent letters, tried to reach them, we did everything. And finally we were able to publish something in a new journal of critical care. And we made an analysis of how the WHO was completely wrong, missed everything, and this is the data. And we also brought something that was new. It is incredible that WHO completely missed the publication in Spain about literally two, three weeks before COVID in Lancet, okay, so you cannot miss it, of a final study proving the corticosteroids improve ARDS, decrease duration of mechanical ventilation and mortality, completely missed. So the chapter, "Do steroid work for ARDS, yes or no?" Was closed weeks before COVID 19 come out. They left that completely out. If they would look at that, if they look at the guidelines, they were published three years before by a task force that me and Paul were in.
0:03:36.7 Meduri: There was a task force of European and American Society of Critical Committees, which recommended based on that knowledge thing with a moderate degree of evidence, that steroid should be used. And they say, "We need a larger confirmatory trial to make it strong evidence." That was published few weeks before COVID came out, okay? They completely missed it. But then the task force told them how to use it. And this is key. You see, there is no money on steroids. There is no drug company that educate university or doctors on the proper use of steroids, so the guidelines did, okay? And the guidelines provide the rationale in how to use it correctly. And one of the important thing was tapering. In other words, slowly reduce the level of steroids at the end once the disease is resolved. Okay. Why? Because when you give steroids the hypothalamic-pituitary axis with the adrenal going say, "Hey, steroids are high, I don't need to produce them." So they go to sleep. So it takes about one week to 10 days to wake up and go back to normal. And that's why you need to do that slowly. And this is extremely important because study that have not included that give negative results and the negative results are attributed to steroids instead of affected, did not have a correct protocol. Okay?
0:05:00.4 Weinstein: Okay.
0:05:00.5 Meduri: So, the WHO missed everything. There was data coming everywhere that something was working.
0:05:07.1 Weinstein: So in a world, at some point during this podcast, I'm going to talk about the predicament that PhRMA finds itself in. As much as I have become beyond impatient with PhRMA's behavior, there is a hazard that their business faces, which is, you never know when you invest in a drug, you may invest billions of dollars pursuing some mechanism of action. And when you finally have a drug, it may turn out to be too dangerous to use or it may be disappointing relative to what you had before. And all of that investment is lost. What I believe is going on is that PhRMA has invested in hedging out that risk by taking command of the system that assesses both safety and efficacy. Efficacy being the experimental version of effectiveness. Effectiveness is how it works in patients. Efficacy is how it works in a study for those who wonder why we use those terms where we do. But, anyway, PhRMA seems to have invested in mechanisms that mean that when they have invested in a drug, that when it gets to the testing phase, it can't miss, which is terrible for patients because in general it's very hard to find substances that actually improve health, especially in somebody who is in jeopardy. So the likelihood of a drug working to the benefit of patients is low until you have such a drug.
0:06:55.7 Weinstein: So if PhRMA has invested in upending treatments that are known to work, thereby creating a niche for new drugs and then interfering with the ability to assess how dangerous they are to patients, then this means PhRMA has now become a direct threat to our health. And anyway, the reason I insert that there is that, Umberto, what you are describing with the effect of corticosteroids on ARDS, if you dose them properly, which means that at the end of treatment you taper off rather than just going cold turkey on the steroids, that if you don't do that, you're creating a health problem of your own. Because the body has a mechanism for assessing the amount of steroid in presumably the blood. And at the point that you have added steroids from the outside, it is not producing them endogenously. And if you suddenly cut the supply from outside, then you have a sudden drop, which is not beneficial to health.
0:08:06.4 Meduri: Correct.
0:08:07.7 Weinstein: So you have taken over feeding steroids into the system from outside. You need to slow down that system of externally added steroids so the body can ratchet up its internally generated steroids in order to maintain health. Now, but what you're describing is a system in which the underlying biology of steroids in the body gives PhRMA a gift. If they wish to make steroids look dangerous, all they have to do is use a dosage protocol that does not involve tapering. And we have seen in multiple cases that a drug which did treat COVID was misdosed and then declared to be either ineffective or dangerous.
0:08:58.4 Weinstein: In the case of hydroxychloroquine, a study was done with an absurdly high dose of the drug making it toxic in and of itself. And in the case of Ivermectin, a drug which is very hard to administer enough of to create a toxic dose, they created a cryptic mechanism whereby the patients most threatened with COVID were systematically underdosed in multiple large randomized controlled trials. So again, the steroid story is fascinating for two reasons. One, there's the particular details of the steroids, and then two, because the attack on a drug in which there is no profit. In order to create a market for drugs where there is profit, but also great danger and much less effectiveness, that pattern seems to be generic. You have to get rid of hydroxychloroquine, well rig a study by putting so much drug into patients that they are sick from hydroxychloroquine, in the case of Ivermectin, underdose the people who are threatened by COVID so that the drug looks ineffective. And in the case of corticosteroids don't taper the dose at the end of the treatment period so the drug itself creates a pathology. Am I right about this pattern?
0:10:21.6 Meduri: Yes. And it's fascinating because I'm gonna bring back to the WHO in their big mistakes. About two years before COVID, we published an article in which we did a re-analysis of a government run the NHLBI ARDS Network randomized study, to confirm our original study published in 1998. And the study, opposite to our, did not include tapering. In other words, they remove a drug in 36 hours. That's not tapering, that's a joke. This study was presented as steroids are dangerous and they don't work. That's the result. But when we reanalyze the data, what we found, number one, they are highly effective. During treatment there was a 9.5 days reduction duration of mechanical ventilation. The ARDS Network has never achieved any of this. The study they only achieved something was a two days reduction in duration of mechanical ventilation, this is five times that, number one. Number two, they found a reduction in shock. They found a reduction in pneumonia. They found a significant reduction in inflammation during treatment, increasing surfactant, and a lot of other positive things, none shown. Okay? We dig them all out. They just cursory went on that and they said, we recommend not to use steroids.
0:11:56.6 Meduri: They never analyze the data. What happened if it worked so well after you remove a drug? Well, about 26% of the patient went back on the ventilator. Now, when they went back on the ventilator, they were not restarted on steroids. There was no information to the patient of a risk. They had no information to the physician how to act if that happened. What you have to understand is that the FDA has a big warning sign for steroids. You must taper, otherwise there are life-threatening complications. Okay? So they avoid all that. That study that we finally unmasked just a year before COVID was the one that was used over and over again to tell intensivists across the world not to use steroids. And then I'll go back to what happened before that, which is fascinating.
0:12:47.8 Weinstein: Okay. Paul, I want to ask you a question here. What would have happened if doctors had been left to treat patients without interference of guidance from the WHO, from the CDC? How would COVID have unfolded? Would doctors have figured out that steroids were important? Would they have reduced the number of people who went on ventilators? Would the number of people who died from ventilators have gone down? Am I right that that's the picture that's being painted?
0:13:29.6 Paul Marik: Absolutely. So what we did, myself, Umberto, Pierre Kory, is we put together a guideline in March of 2020. March of 2020, right at the beginning of the pandemic. 'cause we knew what SARS-COVID did to the lung. It caused profound and overwhelming inflammation. We knew that corticosteroids dealt with the inflammation. So in March of 2020, we were recommending the use of corticosteroids. And obviously at that time, the NIH, WHO, the CDC said, do not use steroids. And so unfortunately, doctors particularly in the COVID era, are lemmings, they don't use independent thought process. They're too scared to go against the narrative. They just follow blindly like lemmings. And so, until the recovery study was published, patients just simply didn't get steroids. And patients died needlessly, let me say that again, patients died needlessly because they were denied an effective safe therapy once they had lung involvement from SARS-COVID-2.
Also rejected: Ivermectin, Magnesium, Vitamin D, Zinc
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