No Regrets-Part 1

My Covid Journey -- The Beginning

Beginnings are hard.

I haven’t really ever written before—well, except for letters of reference as an adult, and papers submitted for grades as a student. I feel that it’s now time to change that.

My life, in the last few years, has changed significantly, for better or for worse. It all started in the winter of 2020. I’m a political junkie, have a B.S. in Political Science. I listen to podcasts while operating. I rewind parts of videos that make me go “huh?”. We talk politics the whole time and when the subject changes to something more “normal”, we have to rewind the podcast to the part where we all began to get ‘distracted’!

I’m a Plastic Surgeon, and work in the Salt Lake City area. I have been here for nearly 20 years. My life has been somewhat interesting: born in France, growing up in Italy, college in Maine, Grad School in Philly, and Med School in Miami. A brief stint in the US Navy as a Naval Flight Surgeon, and then private practice in Idaho and now Utah. Not particularly politically active until 2020, but always interested and kept myself up to speed on current events and political climates.

Anyway, in early 2020, this new virus was making headlines. It was just in China, though, but it was making news all over the world. People were seemingly just keeling over ‘DEAD’ in the middle of the streets. Satellite heat maps purportedly showed ‘hot-spots’ due to crematoriums working around-the-clock to incinerate all the dead bodies—again, ostensibly further illustrating the dire consequences of this new viral epidemic decimating the towns and cities in China. Scientists were ‘disappearing’.

This disease was not transmitted from human to human, though, so ‘nothing to worry about’, was the going narrative.

So, what were all the ‘hotspots’ on the satellite pictures in Wuhan, China? Why were the streets completely empty in a city of 14 million people? Were those people on the Princess cruise ship all sick, how many were dead or dying? Was the virus airborne, or was it transmissible thru direct contact? Casual or intimate contact?

When the 'virus’ hit Italy, Spain and then Seattle, and people reportedly started dying, it was becoming more real. Answers were in short supply, but questions abounded: what was this, where did it come from, how transmissible was it, were the affected people healthy or did they have other medical problems, was this a naturally occurring virus from a wet market, or did it come from a Level 4 Bioweapons Lab just a few miles away from the first known case? Rumors of millions of ‘lost’ cellphone signals in China were making headlines, implying massive unreported deaths. There were even rumors of a ‘lab accident’ in the late fall of 2019 at the same Wuhan lab, but details were sketchy. Either way, there were a myriad of questions, and very few answers.

Hindsight being 20/20, the reality was that there were actually only 41 total hospitalized patients thru the whole month of January and just ONE death!

March 17, 2020, I finish surgery, and head home. My daughter, a junior in high school and my son, a 6th grader, got home later that day. While sitting at my kitchen table, reading the online news, watching video clips of the various pundits, and seeing more ‘scientific’ support for this rapid viral spread, I called my office manager and closed my office, effective immediately. We weren’t going to ‘risk’ getting ourselves infected, and we were going to do the best we could to protect ourselves. I’m a single dad, raising my two teenage kids that had already lost their mom, no way I was going to risk my life, and theirs, for my career—-that’s what my thought process was at the time.

Some states had already shut down. Donald Trump and his Covid Task Force were on TV every day, updating us on this deadly disease. Governor Cuomo was also on TV every day, making himself look like the savior of New York (and being touted as the next POTUS!), begging for more ventilators, building more mobile hospital wards, as they had done elsewhere, parroting the comments of Drs Fauci and Birx. Within a week of me closing my office, having had nothing but time to study, review, critique all the available science and data, I was ready to go back to work—this was all fake. It was a farce and nothing but outright fear-mongering, plain and simple—-it reminded me of the 2001-2002 weapons of mass destruction narrative that had been just jammed down our throats for weeks, making the case to invade Iraq. I was not going to fall for this crap again.

Meanwhile, Dr Vladimir ‘Zev” Zelenko made the ‘news’ I was watching. He sent a video to President Trump espousing all the benefits of his hydroxychloroquine, Zithromax, Vitamin C, Vitamin D and Zinc regimen. His own clinical results were amazing. I believe he had already treated nearly 2000 patients, only one had died, the rest had survived! Dr Brian Tyson and Dr George Fareed were also having tremendous results using a similar regimen. These reports were making ALL the alternative news platforms, but not one of the MSM platforms, except to disparage the regimen—-therefore, there had to be some truth to it! The cynic in me came out in full force.

I called all my family, friends, staff, and prescribed them all these medications. Most were asking me what is was for, but all filled their prescriptions as I directed them to—’keep it until you start getting flu-like symptoms’ and then use it to lessen the effect of the virus. In some of my friends who had significant co-morbidities, I would instruct them to take the hydroxychloroquine prophylactically 2x/week.

More and more HCQ studies were being published, but more and more MSM, NIH, CDC pushback followed. Reports of people dying from drinking fishbowl cleaner and people flooding the emergency rooms of rural hospitals because of the ‘cardiac’ side-effects of HCQ were being spread all over the MSM news channels. Again, I knew this was all fake. I had prescribed HCQ for hundreds of people on my numerous humanitarian trips to Ghana—-I knew exactly what the side-effects were—-it was ALL FAKE! The more MSM/expert pushback there was, the more it convinced me we were over the target.

Because my office was still closed, and people started to get sick, and they were not being treated, if even just with typical flu medications, I was getting calls from dozens of people asking for help in treating them or their friends/family. Word was getting out! I treated everyone of them, not one call was refused, not one plea was ignored. To my total amazement, I was having the same success as all these other doctors—-not one of my patients got admitted to a hospital, not one died. Until you actually see the results yourself, there is always some skepticism.

As I was one of a very few doctors actually treating people, the word spread even faster. I was getting multiple calls every day, and was treating everyone remotely. This carried on for months. Concurrently, the narrative only got worse, and getting these benign medications became exceedingly difficult. All of a sudden, there were shortages, backlogs at the pharmacies, and then many would just stop allowing me to prescribe them—’I was merely a Plastic Surgeon, knew nothing about HCQ and it was not in my scope to prescribe that for patients’ was a common excuse I would get from a number of pharmacists and pharmacies—CVS was the worst!

I also could no longer even get it thru my regular medication suppliers—it was more or less removed from their list of available medications, and if it even was available, it was 10-15x the price it had been merely 2 weeks before! A $10 prescription became $120-$150 for the same medication/dosage. Quercetin and EGCG were over-the-counter alternatives I started using in lieu of HCQ.

As the disease became more rampant, and more people seemed to be getting sick, some presented later in the disease process, and HCQ was no longer as effective in those people. Monoclonal antibodies were all the rage, and I had some people that I felt would benefit from them. The criteria were strict, though. The medications were rationed and given only to those the government deemed ‘worthy of treatment’. In particular, a patient of mine, the husband of one of my nurses, presented to me 7-8 days after onset of symptoms, and was very sick. He called me on a Sunday evening, and I filled out the online form to ‘qualify’ him for the monoclonal antibody treatments, set up an appointment for him the next morning, but when he arrived, he was refused treatment due to his skin color—it wasn’t dark enough, and the monoclonal antibody treatment was refused to him because he wasn’t ‘sick enough, yet’! The reality was, he was refused treatment due to overt, discriminatory, racist criteria.

He struggled for 2 more days, even with the medications I had prescribed him, but he finally went back to the Emergency Room on Wednesday—this time he was ‘sick enough’, and he got the monoclonal antibodies. They tried to admit him to the hospital for the ‘Covid Protocol’ treatment. Mind you, the protocol did not include an oxygen cannula while in the Emergency Room, as his saturations were not below 85%! Let me repeat that: He was refused oxygen in the Emergency Room because his saturations were above 85%! His wife gave it to him anyway. She called me in somewhat of a panic and I had her immediately leave the ER, go home, and I met them there, and we started him on high dose steroids, per the FLCCC published online protocol—thank you Drs. Kory and Marik! Three days later he was off oxygen, and keeping himself busy cleaning the kitchen for his wife!

This happened on at least 3-4 other occasions, some I treated in the office, some at home. No one died. Everyone went back to their previous job, and all are healthy to this day. I only got paid by one of my patients, at their insistence, just for the supplies, otherwise, all of these patients were treated completely for free.

No one else was treating them! I don’t have the ability to bill insurance and these people, many of them, were desperate, were scared and too terrified to go to a hospital, and I was their last resort. Imagine the anxiety, stress generated in people who previously had always trusted our health care system? What a paradigm shift—-they were SCARED to seek medical care WITHIN the healthcare system!

Then came Dr. Stella Emmanuel, Dr. Richard Urso, and Dr. Brian Tyson et. al.. What smart, wonderful, compassionate people. Dr. Emmanuel stole my heart at the AFLDS Supreme Court steps! She had so much passion, so much compassion, and you could just feel the empathy thru the computer screen and microphone. It brought tears to my eyes! Their presentations and speeches to everyone were so cogent, coherent and truthful, it should have been world-changing. But, it wasn’t.

And then it was gone! Millions of views, millions of shares, and it was gone! ‘Covid misinformation’, or some such BS from Youtube/Google ‘fact-checkers’! The 15-20 doctors on those steps were ALL wrong, their conclusions, actual clinical experiences and scientific prowess were not good enough for the ‘scientific consensus’ espoused by the CDC, NIH and FDA! Not one of whom actually cares for patients on a daily basis. What a crock! I was also censored for trying to repost that video.

And, it’s still only July, 2020!