Critical thinking about medicine or any topic requires weighing multiple sources against one another and distinguishing between degrees of certainty, not ruling out all sources of evidence but one and equating “unproven” with “false.” The approach to health information increasingly taken by public officials, reporters, and social media—under which any statement is “unproven” and must be assumed harmful, barring some definitive pronouncement by public health authorities to the contrary—is thus not only authoritarian but also damaging to public health and science as a whole.

Imperial County, California, a poor, largely Hispanic agricultural region in the southeastern corner of the state, has been hit hard by Covid-19. By the end of January, according to the New York Times’s Covid-19 database, Imperial County had suffered 845 Covid deaths, or 4.7 per thousand inhabitants—a rate almost 80 percent higher than the U.S. average. The case fatality rate in Imperial County is 1.44 percent, the second-highest in California—and was significantly higher, 2.10 percent, at the end of October 2021 before the Omicron wave.
Two doctors in Imperial County, though—George Fareed and Brian Tyson, who run the All Valley Urgent Care network of medical centers—claim to have done far better with their Covid-19 patients. In fact, they claim near-perfect success: in a book that they published last January, they claim to have seen more than 7,000 patients and had only three deaths, all among patients who began treatment in later disease stages. A statistical analysis of part of their results by the statistician Mathew Crawford, included in their book, counts only seven hospitalizations and three deaths among 4,376 patients seen up through March 13, 2021—a reduction in hospitalization risk of well over 90 percent from the county average, even after (admittedly imperfect) statistical adjustments for differences in age between Fareed and Tyson’s patients and the general population.
According to prevailing medical views, Fareed and Tyson’s claimed results should be impossible. The doctors’ first protocol was based around hydroxychloroquine (HCQ), a repurposed anti-malarial drug, with other drugs such as ivermectin as more recent additions. Received opinion on the drugs is that ivermectin is at best unproven in treating Covid-19 (the Food and Drug Administration maintains an official webpage warning against using it as a treatment for the virus), and that HCQ has been actively disproved: early optimism from laboratory experiments and small clinical studies did not hold up in larger, more rigorous trials.
Such opinions have influenced not just news coverage but also the moderation policies of social media platforms, which have imposed ever-stricter rules against “misinformation” (meaning, in practice, contradicting American public health authorities). After Fareed and Tyson spoke by invitation at a meeting of the Imperial County Board of Supervisors, the Los Angeles Times ran an article noting that the Imperial County Medical Society “had urged supervisors to ‘not contribute to the dissemination of false or misleading information by legitimizing unproven treatments.’” The paper also quoted an executive at an Imperial County hospital, saying, “We need to stick with what we know is approved by the FDA for COVID-19 treatments. . . . Misinformation itself ought to be stopped.” In December, Twitter also suspended Tyson’s account for breaking its policies against Covid misinformation.
The dismissal of hydroxychloroquine as a possible Covid-19 treatment, however, was never based on solid science. The Los Angeles Times article reveals a fundamentally authoritarian worldview: medical claims are “unproven,” and dangerous for the public to discuss, until some official body endorses them—an approach that threatens public health and science alike.
Interest in hydroxychloroquine as a coronavirus treatment stretches back at least to 2005, when an in vitro study showed that chloroquine, a very similar compound, might protect against SARS infection. Based on laboratory studies and small clinical trials, medical authorities in China and South Korea recommended chloroquine as a Covid-19 treatment in February 2020.
Some doctors outside East Asia followed. Vladimir Zelenko, a doctor in a Hasidic community in New York, advocated a combination of HCQ, azithromycin (an antibiotic to guard against secondary infections), and a zinc supplement: HCQ increases the uptake of zinc ions into cells, a property that Zelenko surmised might provide antiviral effects. In an open letter in April 2020, Zelenko claimed to have treated about 1,450 patients, including 405 that he judged “high risk,” with only two deaths. Luigi Cavanna, a doctor in Piacenza, Italy, also claimed about the same time that thanks to an HCQ treatment protocol, none of his patients had died and only 5 percent were hospitalized—one-sixth the contemporaneous Italian hospitalization rate of over 30 percent. Many more systematic “observational” studies of HCQ—comparing patients in a hospital or elsewhere who received a drug (because of their own or a doctor’s choice) with those who did not—returned good results both as a treatment of Covid-19 cases (including one large study from the Henry Ford Health System in metropolitan Detroit) and for prevention of Covid-19 in individuals at high exposure risk. One especially striking example of the latter is a set of 11 “case-control” studies from India, where medical authorities recommended but did not mandate a weekly prophylactic dose of HCQ for medical workers. Most of these studies found that workers who took HCQ had reduced odds of testing positive for SARS-CoV-2 antibodies, with especially marked reductions for those who took six or more doses of the protocol.
Medical researchers tend to discount doctors’ reports and observational studies—which, granted, have many potential biases that can’t always be spotted or corrected. For instance, observational studies can underestimate the efficacy of a treatment that’s given more often to sicker patients—or overestimate it, if health-conscious patients are more likely to demand experimental treatments, or if doctors who give ineffective experimental drugs are also more likely to give effective experimental drugs (this latter point was a common and valid criticism of the Henry Ford study). So doctors generally consider randomized trials, which avoid these classes of bias, to be more reliable—though they have drawbacks, too, such as considerably greater expense and, therefore, typically smaller sample sizes.
And most analyses of randomized trials of HCQ—on the basis of which mainstream medical opinion decided that it doesn’t work for Covid-19—do draw negative conclusions. For instance, a February 2021 review by Cochrane, an organization that produces comprehensive reviews of randomized trials, concludes, “HCQ for people infected with COVID‐19 has little or no effect on the risk of death and probably no effect on progression to mechanical ventilation.” Another meta-analysis in Nature by Cathrine Axfors et al. estimates an 11 percent increase in risk of death on the basis of 26 randomized trials.
The results of both meta-analyses were essentially determined by two large, similar trials: the Solidarity trial run by the World Health Organization and the Recovery trial at the University of Oxford. These trials accounted together for over 97 percent of the statistical weight in Cochrane’s main analysis, and both claimed to rule out more than a tiny benefit of HCQ for hospitalized Covid-19 patients.
But neither trial disproves claims such as Fareed and Tyson’s. First and most importantly, both trials were on hospitalized patients and are not necessarily applicable to “outpatients” earlier in the disease course. Antiviral treatments work better earlier: for instance, oseltamivir (also known as Tamiflu), an antiviral influenza treatment, works well if started within two days of symptom onset, but not later. In Covid-19, viral load peaks soon after symptom onset, and viral replication has already ceased in most hospitalized patients, guaranteeing that antiviral treatments will have limited effect. One review in The Lancet found that dozens of studies consistently find that viral load in Covid-19 peaks in the first week of symptoms and that “No study detected live virus beyond day 9 of illness.”
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With God, there is no room for improvement. He has always been, and always will be, utterly and delightfully perfect in every way.

I recently watched a short film that still haunts me. It was actually from a comedy show, but it had such a sense of sadness to it.
A man goes into a train station. At the counter, he holds up a photo for the ticket agent and says, “This is a bit of a strange question, but can you tell me how to get there?”
The ticket agent looks at the photo and she says: “Oh yes, that’s Millport. What you’ve got to do is get the train to a place called Largs, then you get the ferry . . .” And the man says: “No, I know how to get to Millport. But can you tell me how to get to there?” And he points to the photo again.
He says: “I took that photo when I was about 16; that’s me there. That summer was amazing. Hanging out with friends all day, not worrying about tomorrow, just laughing, having a great time, jumping off the pier, swimming around, and it was like summer seemed to go on forever.” And after he reminisces about it for a while, he goes quiet. And then he says: “I don’t want to be here anymore. I want to be there. So can you tell me . . . how do I get there?”
And she looks at him and says, “You can’t do that; I’m sorry.”
So he says, “Ah, just give me a return to Largs then.”
Places never stop changing. People too. They can’t stay the same, and neither can we. Often, that simple fact is enough to break our heart.
But there is One who is the same yesterday, today, and forever.
When we talk about God like this, we’re talking about His immutability. Immutability is the biblical idea that God is unchanging in His character, will, and His promises.
James chapter 1, verse 17 puts it like this: “Every good gift and every perfect gift is from above, coming down from the Father of lights, with whom there is no variation or shadow due to change.”
Numbers chapter 2 says, “God is not man, that he should lie, or a son of man, that he should change his mind.” In Malachi chapter 3, God says, “I the Lord do not change.” Hebrews talks about “the unchangeable character of his purpose,” and in 2 Timothy we read that “if we are faithless, he remains faithful—for [God] cannot deny himself.” (In other words, God cannot deny His own immutability. His unchangeability is unchangeable.)
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Written by Jeffrey A. Tucker |
Monday, January 17, 2022
What historian Phil Magness has discovered, with newly unearthed emails, comes not as a shock to any of us but it is satisfying to see the confirmation of what we suspected. It seemed at the time that the effort to attack and destroy both the GBD [Great Barrington Declaration] and its authors was coordinated from the top. Here at last is the proof that our intuition was not crazy. 

Those weeks following the release of the Great Barrington Declaration did feel odd.
On the good side, medical doctors, scientists, public health workers, and citizens all over the world were thrilled that three top scholars in fields of public health and epidemiology had spoken out against lockdowns and for a reasoned approach to Covid. They eagerly signed the document.
Yes, there were some attempts to sabotage it too, with fake names and so on, which should have been a clue about what was coming. The fakes were deleted in days and new methods of confirming signatures were deployed.
The document, on the one hand, said nothing controversial. The right way to deal with this pandemic, it said, was to focus on those who could face severe outcomes from disease – a very plain point and nothing new. There was nothing to be gained by locking down the whole of society because of a pathogen with such a huge differential in its demographic impact.
The virus would have to become endemic in any case (including the realization of “herd immunity,” which is not a “strategy” but a descriptive term widely accepted in epidemiology) and certainly would not be stopped by destroying peoples’ lives and liberties.
The hope of the Declaration was simply that journalists would pay attention to a different point of view and a debate would begin on the unprecedented experiment in lockdowns. Perhaps science could prevail, even in this climate.
On the bad side, and at the very same time, following the release, the attacks began pouring in, and they were brutal, structured to destroy. The three main signers – Sunetra Gupta (Oxford), Martin Kulldorff (Harvard), and Jay Bhattacharya (Stanford) – made the statement as a matter of principle. It was also born of frustration with the prevailing narrative.
Mostly this declaration was intended as an educational effort. But the authors were being called vicious names and treated like heretics that should be burned. There certainly was no civil debate; quite the contrary.
It was all quite shocking given that the Declaration was a statement concerning what almost everyone in these professional circles believed earlier in the year. They were merely stating the consensus based on science and experience. Nothing more. Even on March 2, 2020, 850 scientists signed a letter to the White House warning against lockdowns, closures, and travel restrictions. It was sponsored by Yale University. Today it reads nearly like a first draft of the Great Barrington Declaration. Indeed on that same day, Fauci wrote to a Washington Post reporter: “The epidemic will gradually decline and stop on its own without a vaccine.”
But following the March 13-16, 2020 lockdowns, the orthodoxy had evidently changed. And suddenly. The signers of the GBD had declined to change with it. Thus did they endure astonishingly brutal smears. What felt odd at the time was the sheer intensity of the attacks, as well as their dogmatism and ferocity. These attacks also had a strong political flavor that had little regard for science.
Already by the summer, it was very clear that the lockdowns had not achieved what they were supposed to achieve. Two weeks had stretched into many months, and the data on cases and deaths were uncorrelated with the “mitigation measures” that had been imposed on the country and the world. Meanwhile, millions had missed cancer screenings, schools and churches had been shut, public health was in a state of crisis, and small businesses and communities were fighting to stay alive.
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