You may have heard the name Harvey Risch. If not, you will likely hear about him in the not too distant future. Some, particularly in the mainstream media, will likely try to smear him as a crackpot, or, at the least, as someone who is commenting on an area of science that is outside his area of expertise. Don’t believe any of this propaganda you are likely to hear. Believe instead those who point out that Dr. Risch is a science and public policy hero for coming forward to point out the failings of Dr. Anthony Fauci, the NIAD that Fauci leads, and the FDA that is the umbrella agency over the whole sordid mess.
Ricsh will be smeared because he is pointing out that hydroxychloroquine — an old, inoffensive, safe and cheap drug — can save lives and that by obstinately opposing its use Dr. Fauci and his collaborators are sentencing Americans to death.
Risch, it should be remembered, can not be easily dismissed. He is both a PhD and an MD, having received the former from the University of Chicago in 1980 and the latter from the University of California, San Diego, in 1976. He is currently professor of epidemiology (chromic diseases) at the Yale School of Medicine where, according to his Yale profile, he has researched “ovarian cancer, pancreas cancer, lung cancer, bladder cancer, esophageal and stomach cancer, and of cancers related to usage of oral contraceptives and noncontraceptive estrogens. His research interests, Yale says, include the “effects of reproductive factors, diet, genetic predisposition, histopathologic factors, occupational/environmental/medication exposures, infection and immune functioning in cancer etiology.” As if this is not enough, Risch has authored “more than 325 original research publications in the medical literature” and is “Associate Editor of the Journal of the National Cancer Institute, Editor of the International Journal of Cancer, and Member of the Board of Editors, the American Journal of Epidemiology.”
He is, in other words, an enormously successful and respected epidemiologist. And, he strongly suggests that Fauci and his minions are killing people by standing in the way of the use of hydroxychloroquine. Moreover, Risch charges, Fauci has done this before, condemning Americans suffering from HIV to death by standing in the way of another simple drug treatment in the late 1980s.
Dr. Risch explained his views on Fauci and the FDA’s opposition to useful medical treatments in an important interview with radio host and Fox News commentator Mark Levin. It is worth quoting Dr. Risch at length (see video below):
The FDA is a very strange organization that has a history of not making science-based, rational-based decisions about its approvals. This was started, most noticeably, in 1987, when people with AIDS in New York City were dying of what is called pneumocystis pneumonia — PCP. And, the clinical experience then had been amassed, a large number of cases who were prevented from dying by use of the antibiotic Bactrim. This is, even then, was a generic medication and cheap. And activists obtained a meeting with Dr. Fauci and 15 of his selected scientists at FDA, at NIH, and asked Dr. Fauci just to make guidelines to physicians that they consider using Bactrim to treat preventively AIDS people so that they wouldn’t die of this pneumonia. Dr. Fauci refused. He said, “I want randomized controlled, blinded controlled trial evidence. That’s my gold-standard, that or nothing.” The activists left, the NIH did not fund any randomized trials.
They [the activists] raised money themselves from their own AIDS patients to collect the data to do a randomized trial. It took them two years. They came back to Dr. Fauci. During those two years the FDA approved AZT as a treatment for AIDS. AZT works but not completely. It needs other medications as well. And during the two years that it took them to get this data to come back to Dr. Fauci to support using Bactrim, 17,000 people with AIDS died because of Dr. Fauci’s insistence on not allowing even a statement supporting consideration of the use.
This has gone on before. Now we have Dr. Fauci denying that any evidence exists of benefit and that’s pervaded the FDA. The FDA has relied on Dr. Fauci and his NIH advisory groups to make the statement saying that there is no benefit of using hydroxychloroquine in outpatients. And this is counter to the facts of the case. The evidence is overwhelming. The FDA has also said that there is the harm of using these medications in outpatients overweighs the benefit. And in fact they said this with no information, no evidence whatsoever, of any harm in outpatient use. And this is provable both by the fact that the FDA’s webpage says, has a warning, against outpatient use but says it relies on inpatient hospital data, which means they don’t have any outpatient data. As well as the fact that 90 percent of the cases of COVID this year have occurred since the time that the FDA restricted usage to inpatients only. So the FDA knows that it has no data for outpatients and no data on harm and yet it denied the Henry Ford petition for outpatient usage.
Again, keep in mind in reading this that Dr. Risch is a skilled and respected epidemiologist with years of experience. This fact makes his conclusion even more alarming and startling:
“Dr. Fauci and the FDA are doing the same thing that was done in 1987 and that’s led to the deaths of hundreds of thousands of Americans who could have been saved by usage of this drug,” Dr. Risch told Levin. “And this is the same thing that the FDA has done. It’s outrageous.”
So what is to be done to reverse this abominable situation wherein unfeeling authoritarian technocrats like Fauci play politics with people’s lives? Dr. Risch offered a suggestion.
“People need to be writing or calling their Congressman and Senators and complaining that this is not the way the country should work. That a bureaucracy that’s in bed with other forces that are causing them to make decisions that are not based on the science, that is killing Americans, is not acceptable.”
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