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I didn’t follow all the White House C19 task force briefings, so I don’t know everything that they have discussed. But I do have some questions that I haven’t seen answered. So, here is what I would ask Dr. Fauci if I could sit in on the next briefing.

Hydroxychloroquine, Azithromycn, Zinc
Dr. Fauci, I understand that you are a scientist who needs to have clinical trials proving that a new drug is effective before approving it for a new use. Yet, I also know you understand that a doctor trying to help a virus patient right now is not in the same position you are. And so when a radio interviewer asked you

“If you’re a doctor listening to me right now and a patient with coronavirus feels like they want to try [hydroxychloroquine], and you’re their doctor, you’re not Anthony Fauci the guy running the coronavirus task force, would you say ‘alright, we’ll give it a whirl’?”

You said, “Yeah, of course, particularly if people have no other option,” (Source: TheAnswer Radio Show March 24 edition found at 50:40 ff)

Now, if front line doctors are reporting anecdotally that certain treatments are working exceptionally well against C19, I’d assume you’d agree with me that it would make sense to put these treatments into clinical trials ASAP, right?

(It’s a safe bet Dr. Fauci would agree with me.)

One of these reported treatments is the combination of Hydroxychloroquine+Azithromycn+Zinc.

A doctor named Vladimir Zelenko reports treating 1,450 patients. Of this group 1,045 were low risk (defined as under 60 with no symptoms and no chronic medical problems such as cancer, diabetes and high blood pressure and things like that. These patients were not treated with this therapy. The remaining 405 patients were high risk, (over 60 with symptoms, under 60 with no symptoms but with an underlying chronic medical problem, as well as anyone who looked sick or had difficulty breathing. These patients were treated immediately on first presentation – without waiting for test results.

“Statistically,” Dr. Zelenko says, “out of that number, you would have expected 20 dead, and a multiple of that, perhaps 30 or 40, on a respirator.”

But Dr. Zelenko’s numbers were different. Only nine patients were admitted to hospital, five for pneumonia and they quickly recovered and returned home. Four were temporarily on respirators before recovering. Only two patients died. Because the correct dosage of HCQ was used, none of these patients experienced any side effects during treatment. (Source: Medical Misinformation, Part 1: Hydroxychloroquine

Would you agree that these anecdotal results suggest that this therapy should be tested in a clinical trial ASAP?
(This would be an interesting response.)

Do you know if either the South Dakota or the University of Washington Clinical Trials are testing this specific treatment?

If not, do you think these reported anecdotal results justify a new clinical trial on this specific therapy?

Or, since the South Dakota trial has been described as scalable, should it add a new test and control group to it to test this therapy?

Or would you advise the University of Washington to add Zinc to the HCQ+Azithomycn therapy now being tested in their clinical trial? 

In the event that one or both clinical trials does try this combination and it echoes Dr. Zelenko’s results on a large scale, would it be a safe bet to assume that the government would launch a crash program to produce these two drugs plus Zinc in large amounts?

But my real question is not about clinical trials. My real question is about what happens after a clinical trial (hypothetically) confirms Dr. Zelenko’s results. For the sake of simplifying the math, let’s assume for a moment that Dr. Zelenko only treated 1,000 patients. In this scenario, a total of only 279 people are high risk patients. Of these, 6 will need to visit the emergency ward for a time, and all but one will go home within a few weeks. Note also that 721 patients are not at high risk and they will not receive the therapy because the initial diagnosis suggests and events will likely demonstrate that they will recover on their own.

Assume that a clinical trial demonstrates the therapy works, and we do launch a crash program to produce, by September 15, enough of these drugs to provide courses of treatment for one million individuals. I’m using a million because my next question assumes that the US experience with C19 will echo that of the Spanish Flu. If that were to happen, we might see a cooler-weather-prompted spike of two million new cases turning up between September 15 and October 15 – or somewhat under double what we have seen far reported in the last two months. 

If the HCQ+Azt+Zinc therapy is administered to high risk individuals when they first present with symptoms and it works according to the results described above, the US will need to supply the therapy to 558,000 patients on first presentation with a C19 emergency room load of 12,000 visits of which about 3,000 are relatively short, and approximately 3,000 will be a few weeks longer. And we’ll have 542,000 surplus treatment packages in reserve to meet demand if the spike is followed by additional cases.

Here’s the critical question: If we keep in mind that roughly half of this caseload will come from within 100 miles of New York City, could the US medical system and emergency rooms handle such a caseload so that everyone who needs it will get the best possible medical care? If the answer to this question is yes, will we even need a vaccine?)

I think these are significant questions. I wish some reporter would ask them of Dr. Fauci.