As the Covid-19 pandemic was declared over in the USA this week by President Biden, many of the emergency use authorisations and powers remain in place.

The measures put in place to treat Covid-19 are now coming under scrutiny as many fear the removal of generic medicines may have led to the unnecessary deaths of hundreds of thousands of people globally.

One such expert is Dr Harvey Risch, Professor Emeritus of Epidemiology at Yale School of Public Health and Yale School of Medicine.

“Had this medication (Hydroxychloroquine) been used at the outset of this pandemic, it would have saved hundreds of thousands of lives needlessly lost because this was suppressed,” said Dr Risch.

“This medication has been used in tens of billions of doses in hundreds of millions of people for half a century or more, it is one of the most important medications on the World Health Organisation’s list of the top 50 required medicines.

“It’s one of the safest medications known and yet, the FDA had the nerve to purport to say that somehow, a very safe medication that everyone knows is safe is somehow unsafe to be used in outpatients.”

Dr Risch said the treatment of outpatients is very different to those who have progressed to requiring hospitalisation.

“Covid-19 is a completely different disease in outpatients and hospital patients.

“In outpatients, it’s a flu-like illness with cough, muscle aches, fever, sore throat, sneezing and so on, tiredness, headaches – the standard things people get in colds or flu.

“However, on day eight, plus or minus in a subset of people, they progress to a more intense pulmonary illness, a pneumonia like illness where the immune system overreacts and deposits a lot of immune debris in the lungs and makes breathing difficult and oxygenation difficult, that’s a kind of acute respiratory distress syndrome that require hospitalisation.

“This was suppressed for a year while patients waited for vaccines. This time period, of a year loss, led to hundreds of thousands of unnecessary deaths that would have been treated.”

While Hydroxychloroquine is only one of many early treatments that were outlawed, conscientious health professionals are now standing up against the suppression of open scientific debate and individualised patient care.

The Australian Medical Professionals’ Society (AMPS) is a group of doctors wanting an alternate voice to the AMA, who have also found themselves gagged by Australian Health Practitioner Regulation Authority (AHPRA) in providing fully informed treatment to patients.

Dr Jeyanthi Kunadhasan highlighted her concerns at a recent AMPS conference in Melbourne titled Reclaiming Medicine. The conference had 17 doctors and professors who presented to over 200 of their peers.

“We felt during the pandemic so many doctors were silenced, and a lot of doctors didn’t agree with what was done in the pandemic response.

“We felt we’d lost our profession because of all the censorship and suppression.

“Let doctors be doctors and keep the politicians out of medicine.”

Dr Robert Brennan AMPS vice president said, “Doctors of all stripes and all persuasions need to be able to have their voice unencumbered by regulators injecting politicisation of science and the politicisation of medicine into the discourse.”

The full coverage of the conference is available online at amps.redunion.com.au.

This article appeared in The Koondrook and Barham Bridge Newspaper, 22 September 2022.