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Posted on 03/04/2022 9:42:52 PM PST by SeekAndFind
Repurposed drugs that have been shown to prevent or treat COVID-19 may be prescribed by physicians, the Florida Department of Health said in its new COVID-19 guidance for health care practitioners.
The guidance, published on Feb. 24, says that health care practitioners are encouraged to provide early treatment for COVID-19 patients with federally approved generic drugs that they find will work. That’s in addition to the outpatient treatments granted emergency authorization usage (EUA) for people at risk of developing a serious illness.
“When recommending COVID-19 treatment options for patients’ individualized health care needs, physicians should exercise their individual clinical judgment and expertise based on their patient’s needs and preferences,” the guidance states. “These options may include emerging treatments backed by quality evidence, with appropriate patient informed consent, including off-label use or as part of a clinical trial.”
The new guidance is an effort by Republican Gov. Ron DeSantis to offer health care practitioners protection from lawsuits. He said that it’s important for doctors to be able to have access to these drugs.
“We want people to be able to have a right to access these medications, especially if they’re in a situation where nothing else has worked,” DeSantis said in a video announcing the new changes to the COVID-19 guidance.
The guidance also states that doctors can make a report to the Agency for Health Care Administration if their hospital prevents them from treating their patients who wish to try certain medications not recommended by the federal health agencies.
“So now doctors who practice medicine in the way that they think is most appropriate for their patients, when they receive pushback from hospitals, we have an avenue for them to file a complaint with our Agency for Health Care Administration,” said Florida Surgeon General Dr. Joseph Ladapo.
Florida is the first and only state to go against the Centers for Disease and Prevention’s (CDC) recommendation of staying home and only going to the emergency department when symptoms become severe unless the individual is at high risk, then they may be eligible for treatment with an authorized antiviral or monoclonal antibody.
The CDC did not reply to a request by The Epoch Times for comment.
Dr. Pierre Kory, president and co-chief medical chief officer of the Front Line COVID-19 Critical Care (FLCCC) Alliance, claims that many people have died unnecessarily during the pandemic, as COVID-19 is a treatable disease. He also said that it didn’t make sense that the government continues to focus only on pushing the vaccines.
“We know there have been hundreds of thousands of deaths in the U.S. and all for a treatable disease,” Kory said at a panel discussion on COVID-19.
“We have identified effective treatments, for now two years, and those effective treatments that are widely available generic repurposed [drugs], they continue to increase. And yet, we are still trying to vaccinate people with a 2-year-old vaccine against an Omicron variant, which is absolutely absurd,” he added.
As early as March 2020, doctors at FLCCC Alliance developed a COVID-19 treatment protocol for hospitalized patients, later adding the I-MASK+ protocol, using ivermectin as a core medication for the prevention and early treatment of COVID-19 in October 2020.
Kory also alleged that the EUA antiviral drugs for early treatment of COVID-19 are toxic.
“We’re still perpetuating these toxic novel pharmaceutical company concoctions like Paxlovid and molnupiravir. Molnupiravir does not work and Paxlovid is poisonous,” Kory said.
Paxlovid can be fatal when taken with common medications such as blood thinners, statins, and some antidepressants. One component of Paxlovid prevents the breakdown of other drugs leading to an increased level of these drugs causing toxic effects.
There are also concerns that the CCP (Chinese Communist Party) virus that causes COVID-19 may develop resistance to the antiviral drugs because each only attacks one part of the virus instead of multiple fronts like its inexpensive federally approved competitor, ivermectin.
For an antiviral to successfully eliminate the CCP virus, it must target “two key pieces of a virus’s biological machinery, a polymerase and a protease, both of which are essential for viral replication,” according to an article in Nature.
Molnupiravir, developed by Merck and Ridgeback Biotherapeutics, targets only the RNA polymerase, while Pfizer’s Paxlovid just inhibits the virus’s main protease.
For a 5-day treatment course consisting of two pills per day, molnupiravir costs the United States government $530 and $700 for Paxlovid. Whereas ivermectin costs as low as $29.72 and as high as $93.77 for 20 tablets, according to GoodRx.
In a report (pdf) examining the outpatient treatments for COVID-19 from the Institute for Clinical and Economic Review (ICER), a drug-pricing research organization, the authors raised concerns about the effectiveness and safety of the drugs due to lack of long-term data.
“While the clinical trials of all four agents [Paxlovid, molunupiravir, the monoclonal antibody treatment sotrovimab, and fluvoxamine that is waiting for a EUA] demonstrate statistically significant benefits of treatment, there remains substantial uncertainty regarding the comparative effectiveness of each drug in the current U.S. landscape,” the authors wrote. “Some of this uncertainty is due to the preliminary nature of the evidence base, which for several drugs include only data that has not yet progressed through peer review.
They added, “As of January 2022, the Phase III RCT [randomized control trial] evidence for sotrovimab is only available as a pre-print (i.e., without peer review) and the evidence for Paxlovid is based on the manufacturer’s press release and the EUA factsheet for health care providers. This lack of data makes it difficult to fully evaluate these drugs.
“Such issues are compounded by each treatment being supported by only one Phase III RCT.”
The Food and Drug Administration (FDA) issued emergency authorization usage for both molnupiravir and Paxlovid in December 2021 and recommends against ivermectin for COVID-19. The drug regulator says the “most effective ways to limit the spread of COVID-19 include getting a COVID-19 vaccine” and “following current CDC guidance.”
Pfizer and Merck did not reply to a request for comment by the time of publishing.
Ping for your interest
The Free State of Florida does it again!
What “allow”? Off-label prescribing has always been OK.
In a free America, it was okay.
In this America, if you prescribe off-label drugs like Ivermectin for Covid, you can lose your license in some states. No joke.
That is one of the most heinous things they have done in this mess, was to interfere with off-label use.
In addition to that, using the power of the state to limit the availability of drugs like Ivermectin and Hydroxychloroquine.
I think hundreds of thousands of people died unnecessarily because of this.
RE: Off-label prescribing has always been OK.
In theory, yes. In practice? Try prescribing Hydroxychloroquine or Ivermectin for Covid and see what you get for doing so in some states or even in some hospitals.
I’m beginning to reconsider DeSantis for president.
I was thinking he’d be better off staying governor of FL and being a thorn in the side of the democrats, but could you imagine a DeSantis/Rand Paul ticket?
But I would still hate to see a governor like him go. We need way more of his caliber. He’s setting the bar very high and someone needs to do that. Someone needs to set an example of what a real man in politics should be like.
But, surely you know that it was not allowed to use off label Ivermectin and HCQ for Covid, right?
Medical Boards were pulling medical licenses.
DeSantis is standing up to the Federal Govt.
I feel the same way. Just need to be sure Florida stays conservative. It’s been a refuge and an example of how state should be run. What a stark contrast....and that’s really important.
But, yes indeedy ...It would be fantastic to have DeSantis as POTUS.
Give us an address/contact please.
The NIH says docs should use own judgment in prescribing. It is. Greedy heartless corporations that force ineffective protocols, especially in hospitals.
God bless common sense prevailing!
Welcome to Bizarro World/Clown World...
All true.
Try telling that to doctors who will have their hospital privileges revoked if they prescribe ivermectin for Covid.
DeSantis needs to find a way to clean out Florida’s public health snakepits.
Public health.
Talk about an oxymoron.
And the PREP Act ensured that liability protection only conveyed with covered countermeasures.
Docs could always prescribe.
But faced with threats snd/or bribes, most refused.
We now have a de facto NHS.
Clap for carers!
In talking to my primary care family doctor this month at check-up time, I asked about the current protocol for Covid treatment. She confirmed it was the same as it has been for the past two years. Stay home and do nothing until you have trouble breathing then go to the hospital. When I asked if she would still be my doctor while at the hospital, she confirmed that no, the hospital doctor would be in charge. So the fact is, in our state, our family docs that we know and who know us, will not be prescribing anything. We will be in the hands of who ever the hospital doc is and in essence, what ever policy the hospital has put into place which will not be based on medicine, but on profit…. A one-policy-fits-all situation when it comes to Covid. Almost as if this is a “plandemic” where the treatment was decided before the onset and nothing else can be tried.
That is a sorry state of affairs! How have we reached this point ? I would think that more real doctors would be contesting this, as they are in danger of becoming “medically” irrelevant and just puppets of the government.
Let’s pray that what is happening in Florida spreads.
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