Palmer Foundation, September 22, 2021

On a balmy night on the outskirts of San Juan, Puerto Rico, a panel of doctors and scientists convened for the first Conversation on Covid, hosted by media startup Roundtable. While the conversation was far-ranging, it often hit on controversial topics around the causes, prevention strategies, and treatments for Covid.

“We are in a pandemic of undertreatment,” said intensive care specialist, Pierre Kory, M.D., Former Director of the Center for Trauma and Life Support at the University of Wisconsin School of Medicine and winner of the British Medical Association’s President’s Choice Award. What drives him and the other doctors and scientists attending is the overarching principle to “first, do no harm”.

“Everything else that we’ve discovered, everything that’s in our protocols is because we have used good clinical sense, lots of experience, and we’ve used trial and error using our best judgments of risks and benefits.” For him, undertreatment and nontreatment is harm. In his view, long-haul Covid and hospitalizations are caused by undertreatment and a lack of an effective prevention strategy.

While some of the conversation veered into the controversy around vaccinations, many of the doctors strongly emphasized they do not oppose vaccines.

“I have had all my childhood vaccines, as have my children. I’ve had plenty of military vaccines back in the day. I’m not anti-vaccine, never have been,” said Ryan Cole, MD, a board-certified pathologist and CEO of Cole Diagnostics who once trained at the Mayo Clinic. He emphasized that he is “pro good science” and hoped to give a “thoughtful and probing voice” to a discussion that has become polarized around the Covid pandemic.

Brian Tyson, MD stood out as a frontline physician who’s treated probably more patients than anyone—over 6,000 at his Urgent Care Covid Clinic in Imperial Valley, California, one of the hotbeds for Covid-19, just over the border from Mexico. He freely acknowledges kids are getting sick. But with similar viruses causing similar symptoms, he took the additional step to purchase a $100,000 PCR machine to confirm whether the illness he was seeing was actually Covid or something else.

What he found was eye-opening. Typically a winter illness, RSV or respiratory syncytial virus causes pulmonary symptoms, pulmonary bronchiolitis—not bronchitis, but bronchiolitis—in the lower airways. “And that’s why the kids are having the trouble right now,” he says, “not, in my opinion, from Covid, but from RSV.”

The effect of Covid on kids was an impassioned topic addressed by Mark McDonald, double board-certified child and adult psychiatrist. “My concern is that the developmental stage that children need to go through, babies, toddlers, young adults, is being foreclosed on them,” he ominously observed. “My concern is that we are building a generation of young people who are so traumatized that they will never fully recover from this.” He cited a study recently published by Brown University Department of Pediatrics that found a 20-point drop in the IQs of babies born after January 1, 2020 compared to those born before.

The panel included Nobel Prize-nominee Robert Malone, M.D. who worked on the mRNA technology that the Moderna and Pfizer vaccines are built on. “I think the vaccines need to be used intelligently. That’s my objection,” referring to his well-publicized stance on the vaccines. He believes the vaccines have a common problem. “They only have one antigen, it’s the spike antigen and when they were developing them, they didn’t realize that spike was biologically active.” Malone is not against vaccines at all, but feels they should be deployed strategically.

Malone pushed back on the notion that this is a pandemic of the unvaccinated and that the unvaccinated are the ones driving variants. “From a fundamental evolutionary standpoint, as a molecular virologist,” he said, “this doesn’t make sense.”

“We’re going to keep seeing variants. It’s normal,” explained Richard Urso, M.D., scientist, sole inventor of an FDA-approved wound healing drug, and Former Chief of Orbital Oncology at MD Anderson Cancer Center. “We’re vaccinating in a very narrow framework. And so when you vaccinate just the spike, you’re going to get variants, because we are doing a very specific treatment.”

Urso clarified, saying people don’t die of the virus itself. Studies conducted last year were not able to culture the virus past eight days. What people die of is the effects of the virus on the body. “They die of inflammation and they die of thrombosis,” according to Urso.

https://www.palmerfoundation.com.au/covid-conversations-8-prominent-doctors-scientists-engage-in-a-remarkable-exchange/