Democrat Politician Credits Hydroxychloroquine With Saving his Life; HCQ Studies Continue to Show Drug’s Promise

Paul Vallone took to Twitter on April 1 to tell his followers that he had tested positive for COVID-19, an especially concerning result, considering he also had an underlying autoimmune disorder that would likely complicate recovery.

“Having recently experienced mild symptoms compounded with my underlying Sarcoidosis that I have been battling for 20 years, I was recently tested for COVID-19 and the results have come back positive,” Vallone wrote.

Vallone, a New York City councilman, experienced symptoms that were far worse than his Tweets admited, according to the New York Post. “I couldn’t breathe, very weak, couldn’t get out of bed,” he told the paper.

Then his doctor prescribed hydroxychloroquine, the anti-malarial drug that the mainstream media and the medical bureaucracy have done their level best to demonize and keep from the American people.

“My doctor prescribed it. My pharmacy had it. Took it that day and within two to three days I was able to breathe,” he told the paper of his experience with the drug. “Within a week I was back on my feet.”

The Post also quoted a Facebook post by Paul Vallone’s brother, Peter, who is a former city councilman and is now a civil court judge. In his social media post, he wrote of his brother’s experience: “Guess all those doctors who are prescribing it are right. This drug is already on the market and the patent is up so it’s cheap. A new drug won’t be. So big money does not want this drug to be used. Always follow the money.”

In late spring, the campaign against the drug, once touted and taken by President Trump, really kicked into high gear with the publication of a study purporting to prove that it was ineffective and dangerous. Published in the prestigious journal The Lancet, that study was based on now discredited data from a small company called Surgisphere.

That study’s authors claimed: “We were unable to confirm a benefit of hydroxychloroquine or chloroquine, when used alone or with a macrolide, on in-hospital outcomes for COVID-19.” The study’s authors also said the drug was dangerous. “Each of these drug regimens was associated with decreased in-hospital survival and an increased frequency of ventricular arrhythmias when used for treatment of COVID-19.”

The problem was, however, that the supposed data that this study used was never available for review and could not be verified. The Lancet published the retraction of the study on June 4.

By that time, though, several important scientific inquiries into hydroxychloroquine had been halted because of the faulty Lancet study. Though this, no doubt, set back important research, findings substantiating the effectiveness of hydroxycholorquine started to be released soon after.

One of the studies finding hydroxychloroquine to be useful in the treatment of COVID-19 came from researchers working with the Henry Ford Health System. Reporting on the study, Ford said in a press release: “In a large-scale retrospective analysis of 2,541 patients hospitalized between March 10 and May 2, 2020 across the system’s six hospitals, the study found 13% of those treated with hydroxychloroquine alone died compared to 26.4% not treated with hydroxychloroquine. None of the patients had documented serious heart abnormalities.”

This caused the increasingly scandalous Dr. Anthony Fauci to turn his ire on the study in an attempt to discredit it. In testimony to a House subcommittee, Fauci referred to the study as “flawed.” When it was pointed out to him that the study was peer-reviewed, Fauci retorted: “It doesn’t matter, you can peer-review something that’s a bad study.” []

The Henry Ford team hasn’t taken this passively and has responded via an open letter penned by Doctor Adnan Munkarah, executive vice president and chief clinical officer, and Doctor Steven Kalkanis, senior vice president and chief academic officer.

In response to the criticism, they wrote:

As an early hotspot for the COVID-19 pandemic, we have seen and lived its devastating effects alongside our patients and families. Perhaps that’s what makes us even more determined to rally our researchers, frontline care team members and leaders together in boldness, participating in scientific research, including clinical trials, to find the safest care and most effective treatments. While feeling the same sense of urgency everyone else does to recognize a simple, single remedy for COVID-19, we need to be realistic in the time it takes to fully understand the optimal therapy or combination of therapies required of a new virus we are all trying to contain.

The most well-accepted and definitive method to determine the efficacy of a treatment is a double-blind, randomized clinical trial. However, this type of study takes a long time to design, execute and analyze. Therefore, a whole scientific field exists in which scientists examine how a drug is working in the real world to get as best an answer as they can as soon as possible. These types of studies can be done much more rapidly with data that is already available, usually from medical records.

The doctors further criticized the rampant politicization of hydroxchloroquine.