The Dr Fauci Speech that Will Make the History Books
We covered a groundbreaking interview by Professor Didier Raoult, on April 14, where he already anticipated a likely end of the pandemic and reported about his results on thousands of patients successfully treated from COVID-19.
Based on his extensive research and experience, Professor Raoult recommends a very cheap early treatment for COVID-19, relying on two generic drugs: hydroxychloroquine and azithromycin.
In that interview, Professor Raoult also alludes to the commercial interests at stake and associated stock exchange speculations.
This April 29, it was the turn of Dr Anthony Fauci to make a speech that will likely make the history books, but maybe for less glorious reasons.
In the Oval Office, with President Trump, high-ranking officials and the media present, he touted the preliminary results of a non-published study sponsored by the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID) – the institute he directs.
“The data shows that remdesivir has a clear-cut significant positive effect in diminishing the time to recover… It’s highly significant,” he asserted.
As for reducing mortality with the treatment, Fauci said: “It has not yet reached statistical significance but the data needs to be further analyzed.”
The timing of this announcement at the White House was particularly strange, as the very same day, a peer-reviewed randomized study, concluding that “remdesivir was not associated with statistically significant clinical benefits.” It was published in the prestigious The Lancet medical journal.
Will this speech by Dr Fauci go into the history books as the proof that a therapeutic route now exists for COVID-19, or just as one of the most high-powered ever display of questionable scientific practice?
For helping you find an answer to this question for yourself, check our report.
VIDEO
TRANSCRIPT
This is a quick transcript. Please refer to the original in the video.
It’s quite good news. So a trial that the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases which is the Institute I direct sponsored a study called the Adaptive Co Virus Disease Treatment Trial – ACCT 1 – was started in February 21st of this year and it was a randomized placebo-controlled trial comparing the Gilead drug remdesivir with a placebo.
It was highly powered with about a thousand ninety plus individuals so it is the first truly high-powered randomized placebo-controlled trial. It was an international trial involving multiple sites not only in the United States but in various countries throughout the world including Germany Denmark Spain Greece the UK etc
The primary endpoint was the time to recovery, namely the ability to be discharged. When you have a study like this, we have a data and safety monitoring board which looks at the data and they are independent so there’s no prejudice on the part of the investigators because they’re doing the trial or the drug is from a certain company.
The data and safety monitoring board on Monday afternoon contacted me on April 27th, first on Friday the week before and then again on April 27th and notified the study team namely the multiple investigators who are doing the study throughout the world that the data shows that remdesivir has a clear-cut significant positive effect in diminishing the time to recover.
This is really quite important for a number of reasons and I’ll give you the data. It’s highly significant if you look at the time to recovery being shorter in the remdesivir arm it was 11 days compared to 15 days. That’s a p-value, for the scientists who are listening of 0.001. So that’s something that although a 31% improvement doesn’t seem like a knock out one hundred percent, it is a very important proof of concept because what it is proven is that a drug can block this virus.
And I’ll give you an example in a moment. We think looking forward this is very optimistic. The mortality rate trended towards being better, in the sense of less deaths in the remdesivir group: eight percent versus eleven percent in the placebo group. It has not yet reached statistical significance but the data needs to be further analyzed.
The reason why we’re making the announcement now is something that I believe people don’t fully appreciate. Whenever you have clear-cut evidence that a drug works, you have an ethical obligation to immediately let the people who are in the placebo group know, so that they can have access. And all of the other trials that are taking place now have a new standard of care.
So we would have normally waited several days until the data gets further. The dot the I and cross the T. But the data are not going to change. Some of the numbers may change a little but the but the conclusion will not change.
When I was looking at this data with our team the other night, it was reminiscent of thirty four years ago. In 1986, when we were struggling for drugs for HIV, and we had nothing. And there was a lot of anecdotal reports about things that maybe did work maybe not.
People were taking different kinds of drugs and we did the first randomized placebo-controlled trial with AZT, which turned out to give an effect that was modest but that was not the end game. Because building on that every year after we did better and better. We had better drugs of the same type and we had drugs against different targets.
This drug happens to be blocking a enzyme that the virus uses and that’s an RNA polymerase, but there are a lot of other enzymes that the virus uses that are now going to be targets for this. This will be the standard of care.
And in fact, when we look at the other trials, we’re doing to do a trial with another antiviral. Actually it isn’t an antiviral. It is an anti-inflammatory, a monoclonal antibody. We’re gonna now compare the combination of remdesivir with this, so as drugs come in, we’re gonna see if we could add on that.
So bottom line, you’re going to be hearing more details about this. This will be submitted to a peer-reviewed journal and will be peer reviewed appropriately.
But we think it’s really opening the door to the fact that we now have the capability of treating. And I can guarantee you, as more people and more companies, more investigators getting involved, it’s gonna get better and better.
