RIGHT TO TRY LAWS

What Happened During Covid

The Right to Try Act

The Right to Try Act, or the Trickett Wendler, Frank Mongiello, Jordan McLinn, and Matthew Bellina Right to Try Act, was signed into law May 30, 2018. This law is another way for patients who have been diagnosed with life-threatening diseases or conditions who have tried all approved treatment options and who are unable to participate in a clinical trial to access certain unapproved treatments.

This Act was a huge step in empowering people to have a choice in how they managed their health care.  For many years, there were few laws regarding what you could choose for medications.  Thalidomide really changed the game, making the FDA more hesitant to approve any drug without years of trials, even as thalidomide was never actually approved for use in the US.  But when you are dying and have exhausted all approved remedies, you should be able to opt for riskier options.

The CCP Virus Changes Everything

Despite the fact that the virus is blamed for killing a lot of people, the main factor was reporting, not actual deaths.  We typically don’t see death rate reporting on a year-to-year basis, even when we have a bad flu year.  As you will see in the graph below, there was a slight increase in deaths in the elderly, as might be expected on a bad flu year anyway.  But the increase in other age ranges was minor.  Keep in mind that if you entered a hospital during 2020-2021 and had a positive Covid test then died, your death was written off as Covid, even if you had died from another cause.

But why did healthy people die?  The simple fact was that this virus was treated completely differently from any other illness.  Doctors know that you want early intervention in any disease to minimize long-term impacts.  Yet, despite that, people were denied any treatment until they needed hospitalization, which inevitably increased the number who needed to be admitted.  Researchers had some treatments which had shown some efficacy, but hadn’t met the FDA standards of proof yet.  But, since people had been dying around the world, shouldn’t the “Right to Try Act” allow them to try these medicines?  It should have been an option.

Why Did Everything Change?

I don’t have an answer for this, but I can make a stab at understanding it.  Covid became intensely political   First, you had the problem that the CCP denied first that it came from a lab and then denied they had anything to do with it, despite the clear evidence of massive deaths in Wuhan.  Then, Trump was President.  As he pushed for a rapid vaccine, he also encouraged rapid testing of treatments, including hydroxychloroquine, a drug which has been used successfully in many countries for years for a variety of ailments.  In other words, it wasn’t dangerous as many authorities speculated.  Other anti-virals had shown success in minimizing the impact of the virus.  Fluvoxamine, related to a common anti-depressant, appeared to work by lopping off the “unusual” part of the molecule and turning the disease into the common cold.  Ivermectin, rather than being limited to animals, is actually a common drug used internationally.

If you see things through a political lens, you can’t let Trump and his party “win” by having successful treatments.  So, you manage the health care system, a superpower encouraged by Obamacare.  Hospitals and doctors were told not to treat patients early or to provide them with the medications.  The story told to the press was that “we can’t have patients playing around with these drugs,” but the reality is that you can’t just walk into a pharmacy and get any of them.  You have to have a doctor prescribe them, but in many cases, doctors’ hands were tied.

One friend has gotten hydroxychloroquine from an internet doctor. Another has ivermectin from her travels.  This is ridiculous.  Since none of these medications are all that harmful, even if it turns out that they don’t help, what is the issue?  Why can’t we just call our doctor, tell her we tested positive and get any of these medications we want?  We can easily get Tamiflu, even as most of us self-diagnose our flu.

Politics and Medicine Don’t Mix

More people died than should have, and many have long-haul Covid due to the failure to diagnose and treat early.  This has nothing to do with masks and social distancing.  Lockdowns did nothing.  The big issue was ignoring the rights of patients to have a role in their healthcare by obtaining whatever treatment they and their doctor were willing to try.  As to treating a disease that kills people, governmental agencies had no role in interfering with the doctor-patient relationship.

The FDA, NIH and the CDC own a fair share of blame for CCP deaths, as do the politicians who tied the hands of doctors and hospitals.  They tried to block the results of research of scientists trying to treat this thing.  They silenced doctors who had data proving lockdowns don’t work.

Let’s silence these agencies who do not have our welfare as their primary focus.  Keep searching out the medicines that will give you a better chance to survive and thrive thru this now-endemic virus.  Don’t let others take your choice (and your life) away from you.