Response to COVID roundtable discussion [Village News, 10/21/21]

I read with concern the article, “Current lifesaving COVID-19 information shared between doctors, scientists.”

At a time when there are reliable, up-to-date reports from such legitimate sources as the Centers for Disease Control, the Food and Drug Administration, the National Institutes of Health, and the American Medical Association, the Village News has chosen to print the fringe views of members of such discredited organizations as the Pandemic Health Alliance (Dr. Robert Malone), the Front Line Covid-19 Critical Care Alliance (Dr. Pierre Kory) and America’s Frontline Doctors (Dr. Mark McDonald) – without one word of explanation or context.

If you had wanted to give that much space to these outliers from the conventional medical establishment’s views on COVID-19, you could have easily included a paragraph early on about how the paper believes in presenting alternative perspectives. Instead, because of this omission, many of your readers may have wound up believing that the group represents the medical consensus.

Let’s look at just a few of the speakers in the Roundtable Media video. Dr. Ryan Cole has claimed that some COVID-19 vaccines could cause cancer, and that public health officials should encourage people to take Vitamin D supplements rather than wear masks or stay physically distant from others, among other assertions. For more about Cole, see http://www.factcheck.org/2021/04/scicheck-idaho-doctor-makes-baseless-claims-about-safety-of-covid-19-vaccines/.

Dr. Kory has been a leading promoter of ivermectin, calling it a “miracle drug.” While ivermectin is approved for treating parasitic infections, there is no evidence it is effective against COVID-19. Those clinical trials which have been concluded and evaluated (by Cochran, an organization that reviews medical research) included 1,678 participants and found no benefit to using ivermectin. Kory’s Front Line Covid-19 Critical Care Alliance, which promotes unproven claims about using the drug, was the subject of a detailed, critical article in the Sept. 29 edition of Scientific American. The CDC, FDA, WHO, and European Medicines Agency all advise against using ivermectin outside of clinical trials.

Dr. Malone was not the “inventor of mRNA technology” as the article states, though he was an early pioneer of its potential for vaccines and did contribute important research on gene transfer involving mice in papers published in 1989 and 1990. He is one of the founders of the Pandemic Health Alliance, which was unveiled at a meeting in Puerto Rico in September. Despite his protests about being censored, he’s hardly been blacklisted – in fact, The Atlantic ran a long article about him in its Aug. 23 edition entitled “The Vaccine Scientist Spreading Vaccine Misinformation.”

Dr. McDonald is a child psychiatrist who’s a member of America’s Frontline Doctors, an outfit which Time called “a leading purveyor of medical disinformation.” McDonald said in a recent video, “If all Americans had access to hydroxychloroquine, the pandemic would essentially end in about 30 days.” Studies, including one by the National Institutes of Health, have found the anti-malarial drug to be ineffective for treating hospitalized coronavirus patients.

I could go on. But you get the idea. Maybe the next time the paper takes an in-depth look at ways to fight COVID-19, you could include more authoritative sources. And research the claims, using unbiased sites. And maybe include information such as the following:

The CDC reports that in the latest data (Aug. 29 – Sept. 4) from 16 jurisdictions which cover 30% of the U.S. population, less than 1 vaccinated person per 100,000 had died the previous week, compared with more than 9 unvaccinated people per 100,000. In August, unvaccinated people were 6 times more likely than fully vaccinated people to test positive and 11 times more likely to die.

So it appears that the best life-saving advice would be to get vaccinated as soon as possible.

One more thing: Dr. Richard Latell didn’t appear in the video, because he’s actually Dr. John Littell, a family practice doctor in Florida who’s a strong supporter of ivermectin and hydroxychloroquine. The Village News managed to get both his first and last names wrong.

Barry Meadow