Interview Dr. Harvey Risch. June 16, 2021. Harvey A. Risch, MD, PhD. Professor of Epidemiology Yale School of Public Health Yale School of Medicine Yale Cancer Center. Publication record of more than 350 peer-reviewed research papers in top-rated scientific and medical journals, garnering 44,000 scientific paper citations and an academic h-index of 94.
Professor Harvey Risch talks with author John Leake about how hydroxychloroquine -- a safe, effective, and inexpensive drug -- was fraudulently misrepresented and suppressed by public health agencies, academic journals, and the mainstream media. This propaganda campaign has resulted in the preventable deaths of hundreds of thousands of people. He also discusses the weaknesses of requiring large randomized controlled studies versus non-randomized studies. The empirical data shows well-conducted non-randomized trials give the same answers. The CURES Act requires the FDA to consider "real world evidence" also, in addition to randomized controlled studies. It was total malfeasance, when we knew people were dying, to send high-risk COVID patients home without treatment. We knew HCQ had been used for 65 years to prevent and treat Malaria, Lupus, Rheumatoid Arthritis, safely for frail elderly, pregnant, in children,... so why not try it? In France, in October 19, 2019 HCQ was made prescription from over-the-counter (OTC)... with ties of the French minister to the Wuhan Institute of Virology. Plus, there were three fraudulent, implausible papers re. hospitalized patients using faked data. FDA still uses these fraudulent papers to warn against using HCQ in out-patient use, even though hospitalized COVID acute respiratory/blood coagulation disease is a different disease than early COVID disease related to viral replication. In July, it made HCQ illegal to use at all stages. The FDA corrupted the treatment of COVID worldwide.
Harvey A. Risch, MD, PhD. Professor of Epidemiology Yale School of Public Health Yale School of Medicine Yale Cancer Center. Publication record of more than 350 peer-reviewed research papers in top-rated scientific and medical journals, garnering 44,000 scientific paper citations and an academic h-index of 94.
Analysis by Professor Harvey Risch, MD.
Some of the IVM meta-analyses of outpatient use conflate studies of hospital patients with studies of outpatients. A more correct meta-analysis is as follows (figures below).
It is more reliable to consider only two outcomes: hospitalization and mortality because PCR positivity is too unreliable a measure. In addition, because I am an epidemiologist, I am unwilling to include studies that used inappropriate control groups, so I have omitted Zelenko's results on HCQ, and Carvallo, Chowdhury, Gorial, and Morgenstern results on IVM. The remaining IVM studies not included are of hospital patients, and I also omitted Mahmud which was about 1/3 hospital patients as the results were all combined together.
I interpret these analyses as follows. Both HCQ and IVM show evidence of benefit in early outpatient use for the prevention of hospitalization and mortality. For death, the results are of very similar magnitude, about 75% risk reduction. However, the HCQ mortality results are based on more than 40,000 patients and largely on use of HCQ alone or HCQ+azithromycin, whereas the IVM mortality results are based on about 1000 patients in total, and 87% of the weight in the IVM analysis is for the one Lima-Morales study which used only one 12mg dose of IVM and also included full treatment courses with azithromycin, montelukast and low-dose aspirin. Thus, it is not possible to fully ascribe the benefit of the Lima-Morales study to IVM itself, and its highly disproportional contribution to the analysis lessens the overall evidentiary support.
For prevention of hospitalization, the IVM analysis includes about 5000 patients vs the 40,000 in the HCQ analysis. The point estimate for IVM, 0.31, is lower than for HCQ, 0.56, however the confidence intervals in these estimates are wide enough that these two values are not statistically distinguishable, p=.17.
IMO, both agents provide evidence of benefit in early outpatient use for high-risk outpatients, both for reducing risks of hospitalization and mortality. The IVM mortality evidence is weaker. The magnitudes of benefits may be considered essentially equal, however the overall evidence of benefit is much stronger for HCQ.
Note: "OR" =odds ratio for the risk of the outcome.
The take-away message is: for early outpatient treatment, HCQ is the first medication of choice, along with zinc, vitamin D, antibiotic (azithromycin or doxycycline) etc., as described in Dr. McCullough's papers. (Dr. McCullough papers: https://rcm.imrpress.com/EN/10.31083/j.rcm.2020.04.264 and https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0002934320306732 ) IVM can be included in the regimen, and for people who cannot or won't take HCQ, then IVM should be used for the primary role along with the other agents. IVM should be used in large enough and long enough doses to make sure that it works.
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