Posted on 12/12/2021 10:29:50 AM PST by SeekAndFind
STORY AT-A-GLANCE
Dr. Pierre Kory is one of the leaders in the movement to provide early treatment for COVID infection. Kory is a critical care physician (ICU specialist), triple board certified in internal medicine, critical care and pulmonary medicine, and is part of the Frontline COVID-19 Critical Care Alliance (FLCCC), which was among the first to publish COVID treatment guidance.
Kory spent most of his career at the Beth Israel Medical Center in Manhattan, New York, where he helped run the intensive care unit. He also had a busy outpatient practice. About six years ago, he was recruited to the St. Luke’s Aurora Medical Center in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, where he led the critical care service. “When COVID hit, I was in a leadership position,” he says. “I resigned, because of the way they were handling the pandemic.”
St. Luke’s, like most hospitals across the U.S., insisted on providing supportive care only, and Kory refused to remain in a leadership position under those circumstances. Patients were, for the first time in modern medical history, told to just suffer at home until they were near death, then go to the hospital where they were placed on deadly ventilator treatment.
“I knew there was a variety of treatments that we could use [yet] we were using nothing,” he says. Doctors were even told to not use anticoagulants, even though blood clotting was “through the roof” in many patients. “You could draw blood and actually see the blood clotting very quickly in the tubes,” he says.
Since those early days, the disease seems to have changed considerably. We don’t see the high rates of blood clotting anymore, for example, which is good news.
But for some reason, from the very start, “they were literally telling us that we needed randomized controlled trials to do anything,” Kory says, and to this day, health authorities are refusing to acknowledge any treatment protocol outside of the incredibly dangerous experimental drug remdesivir, and the experimental COVID jabs.
“People were dying, [yet] all of my ideas were getting shouted down. My superiors were showing up [to my clinical meetings] and getting me to stand down, because I was entertaining the idea that we should do this, that and the other thing, and they didn’t want anything to be done.
And so, I said, ‘I’m done.’ I resigned mid-April 2020. I then went to New York for five weeks and ran my old ICU in New York.”
In May 2020, Kory testified before the U.S. Senate, stressing how critical it was to use steroids during the hospital phase of this infection. At that time, he was still employed by the University of Wisconsin. His resignation date had not yet happened, and they “were livid that I was speaking in public, giving my opinion.”
This is remarkable, because when you’re an expert in a field, “you’re actually responsible to share your insight and expertise,” Kory says. “Yet they were very unhappy that I was doing that.”
Seven weeks later, Kory was vindicated when the British Recovery trial results came out, showing the benefits of corticosteroids. Since then, steroids have become part of standard of care in the hospital phase.
Steroids are an effective tool for reducing inflammation in general, but they appear particularly important for advanced COVID infection. I had a close friend who contracted a very serious case of COVID-19 and kept worsening despite taking everything I suggested.
He knew Dr. Peter McCullough, so he texted him and was told to add prednisone and aspirin to his current regimen. As soon as he took the prednisone, he started getting better.
As explained by Kory, this is a common experience. Importantly, the evidence shows that when used early, during mild infection, corticosteroids do more harm than good. But once you are entering into moderate illness, as soon as you start to see lung dysfunction or the need for oxygen, steroids are critical and are clearly lifesaving.
One of the reasons for this is because SARS-CoV-2 infection triggers a very complex cascade of inflammation. More specifically, Kory says, severe COVID-19 is a macrophage activation syndrome. It’s the hyperinflammatory macrophages (a subtype of macrophages) that end up causing organ damage. So, you want to use medicines that either suppress their activity or repolarize them into hypoinflammatory macrophages.
The key is to use the steroids at the correct time — not too early and not too late, the “Goldilocks” window. There are no hard and fast rules for that, as each patient is different, but as a rule of thumb, do NOT use it until or unless you are seeing a significant worsening of symptoms to where breathing is getting more difficult.
Kory’s outpatient protocol includes prednisone on Day 7, 8 or 9, if you’re still going downhill. It is important to NOT use it early in the course of the illness as it will actually worsen the infection by increasing viral replication.
The suggested dosage is 1 milligram of prednisone or methylprednisolone per kilogram of bodyweight. When using methylprednisolone (Medrol) (which Kory prefers, in part because lung tissue concentrations are higher than prednisone), he divides it into two daily doses. Kory does not recommend the use of dexamethasone, as it doesn’t work as well for lung disease. Yet, most doctors in the U.S. use dexamethasone if they’re using steroids at all.
The dose may be increased depending on the severity and trajectory of the infection. “I probably will either double or triple the [dose] until I can get them stable,” he says.
“Once they’re off oxygen, then I taper off [the steroid] over about a week to 10 days, sometimes shorter. Depends how long they were on oxygen. If they were on it for a short time, I do a fast taper; if they were on oxygen for a longer time, I’ll do a slower taper. But I don’t start fully tapering until they’re off oxygen.”
As mentioned earlier, while early COVID-19 cases often involved severe blood clotting, that feature of the infection appears to have receded. Even when clotting occurs, it’s typically much milder than what we saw in the beginning. Still, anticoagulants can be an important component in these cases.
“What I do with coagulation is, I generally follow the D dimer on admission. D dimer is a marker of endothelial injury and clotting. In patients with normal D dimers, I’ll just do routine prophylaxis doses. If it’s moderately elevated, I do moderate [doses] and if it’s severely elevated, I’ll do full dose anticoagulants,” Kory explains.
He typically uses an anticoagulant called Lovenox. Patients are also given full-dose aspirin, unless there’s a contraindication. I suspect fibrolytic enzymes like lumbrokinase and nattokinase, which help degrade fibrin, may be a better alternative to aspirin. N-acetyl cysteine (NAC) is another potential candidate. Kory is not convinced, however:
“We have used NAC in different disease models over the years. It’s a standard treatment for acetaminophen overdose, but not for pulmonary fibrosis. In pulmonary medicine, of which I’m an expert, we had decades where we studied NAC for that. None of those studies panned out. In sepsis, it didn’t really pan out.
And so, for severe disease, we think it’s an effective drug and it’s a good antioxidant. I think it does have anticoagulation [effects], but our opinion is that it’s generally weak. So, for the hospital phase, we think it’s too weak.”
Another important component is intravenous vitamin C. While some university hospitals may carry IV vitamin C, most don’t but might be able to get it from another local hospital. Importantly, the vitamin C needs to be administered within the first six hours of admittance to the ICU in order to work, and it may be similar for COVID.
This is especially true for the relatively low doses recommended by the Math+ protocol of 1,500 mg or 1.5 grams. Many outpatient natural medicine physicians will use 25 grams to 50 grams of IV vitamin C, but most hospitals will not allow this high a dose, even though it is likely that higher doses will work if you missed the early treatment window (the first six hours). So pragmatic logistics is why the Math+ protocol uses relatively low doses.
One suggestion would be to call the hospital you’re thinking of using if you ever had to be admitted for COVID and ask if they have it. If not, you can ask your doctor to order it for you and bring it to the hospital, if you or a family member are admitted for COVID or sepsis. The key, of course, is having a doctor who is willing to use it. Some aren’t.
“You should’ve seen the resistance I got. At one point, I was the director of the main ICU at the University of Wisconsin and the data was so overwhelming, I said, ‘Hey, guys, can’t we just start a protocol where we just give everybody on admission IV vitamin C? What’s the downside?’
Everyone started talking about kidney stones and all of this nonsense, and we have so much data to show that doesn’t happen in acute illness, or in IV formulations … I feel like I live in a cartoon of medicine, because every time I discuss something with someone, they just don’t believe anything works. Because if it worked, they would be doing it. It’s bizarre.”
Sadly, the willful ignorance of many doctors is literally killing many COVID patients who could have, and should have, been saved. There’s just no doubt that protocols such as the one developed by the FLCC and the other groups listed below could have saved many, had it been widely implemented. Yet despite its success, many hospitals to this day do not use it.
“Our protocol is always evolving,” he notes. “We’re not saying that this is the only way to treat it. This is how we decided to treat it. We reserve the right to deprioritize or change the dose, or substitute a new medicine.
We want to follow the data, the experience and the knowledge of this disease. That’s No. 1. No. 2, all of our protocols are combination therapy protocols.
And by the way, that gives doctors fits. You know why? Because they want to know, how do you know that this is necessary? There are trials of each individual component showing that they’re effective. We believe they’re synergistic, but we’re never going to do a trial to test every component on our protocols.
But there are a number of other protocols. The AAPS has a protocol.1 The World Council for Health,2 they have a number of options. So there are many doctors who might emphasize or de-emphasize a medicine on our protocol. And we do not pretend that ours is the only way. But we do put a lot of thought into it.
Most of our medicines are repurposed, so they’re not novel. They’re very well-known over decades, their safety profiles are well known, they tend to be generally low cost, and their mechanisms are well-known. A central medicine to all of our protocols — prevention, early treatment, hospital, and late phase like long-haul [syndrome] is ivermectin, for many reasons.”
As noted by Kory, ivermectin is a potent antiviral. “That’s been demonstrated for 10 years now in the lab on a number of viruses,” he says. “They’ve shown that it interrupts replication of Zika, Dengue, West Nile, even HIV. And then the clinical studies are just overwhelming.” He continues:
“Can I just take one minute to say that if anyone wants to call ivermectin a controversial medicine, I just want to call out it is absolutely not controversial.
It is a medicine that is buried in corruption, and the corruption is in the suppressing of its efficacy. There are immense powers that do not want the efficacy of that drug to be known because, if it is known and becomes standard of care, it will obliterate the market for a number of novel pharmaceutical products.
Ping for your interest
NOTE* to anyone who has an Android phone. Activate Voice Assistant and say “sing me a song”. Report back your results.
Very interesting - but clearly not for DIY’rs.
Until recently I had been able to say that I did not have anyone I knew who had been seriously impacted by Covid. Then my cousin’s husband got it, was hospitalized for 4-5 weeks, sent home for what ended up being just 2-3 days before being readmitted and then dying one week later. He was 57 and in generally good health before getting Covid. Unvaccinated, do not know the treatment he received (Metro Milwaukee.)
I’m recovering from the Delta Variant. It’s been 13 days so far and definitely a bad virus. Treated with a Z-pac, prednisone, increase in vitamins. Virus(es) are real but you know the rest on the fear/behavior mod.
Anyway, I’m one of the 99.74% who is going to survive.
It’s too bad the whole world is pretty much shut down for all this.
Waiting for the democrat/media/big pharma/Faux-xi cheerleaders on here to say the death serum is perfectly safe with 98% efficacy.
I'm guessing initially nothing, then remdesivir and a ventilator the second go around; that one worked correctly. Yes, they wanted him to die.
BTTT
“Very interesting-but clearly not for DIY’rs”
The preventative and early treatment are aimed exactly at DIY’rs.
Re-read the second paragraph and let it sink in. “Treatments have been vehemently opposed”
“...do not know the treatment he received (Metro Milwaukee)
Going by the above article, NONE).
Ping IVR Dr. Kory
Until recently I had been able to say that I did not have anyone I knew who had been seriously impacted by Covid.
——————-
I can say I know more people that where affected adversely by the jab (plus 2 deaths) than those that died of Covid. My world means little, but that is how I formulate my logic. I did learn those that have been jabbed should monitor their micro clotting through the D dimmer testing. I had mentioned that months back to the jabbed and was ridiculed by some “experts”. Well, it appears more doctors are doing just that.
Buried in the article explains all about the importance of D Dimer testing.
Good post.
Bookmark
I’ve just been notified that my son in law, grandson and his wife all have positive covid tests. My daughter may have con tracted it also. She’s been vaxed. However, she has 2 of her grandchildren with her and their parents have been freaking out because the kids are 10 hours away, and they’ve been so careful to protect them.
My daughter is expected to return to Iowa where I am visiting with my granddaughter. GD has informed me that if her mom returns, that I am imprisoned (🙄) in the basement. Thankfully it’s a huge basement and nicely finished so I’m sure the bread and water will be just fine but the toilet is upstairs. My daughter will be confined to her room.
Both of them work in a medical environment so their risk of exposure is high despite PPE.
My youngest sister has just recovered from covid, she nearly died. She is 1200 miles away from me. My granddaughter in law lost her grandmother to covid, and I lost a neighbor. So it’s only now beginning to get close to home.
I will be contacting frontline to see what I can gather for meds and protections as I have several comorbidities.
Life sure can be a booger.
My brother received the “death protocol” last summer. The Covid doctor at Kaiser was content to let him die until another doctor literally had a meltdown and screamed “you are going to kill this man” and demanded that my brother get transferred to another facility for ECMO therapy. That was ultimately what saved his life. Way too many doctors and hospitals refuse to deviate from the “death protocol” because they lose their immunity from legal liability. Shame on them...history will not be kind to these purveyors of death!
bkmk
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