This Viral Video About the “cure” for COVID-19 Is Incorrect
There is a viral video – removed from many platforms, but chances are you will see it soon if you haven’t already – in which a doctor standing in front of the steps of the Supreme Court claims that “you don’t need a mask” because There is a cure for the coronavirus. This is wrong and dangerous.
Sometimes things get silly politicized. For some reason, President Trump was one of the first to support the use of hydroxychloroquine as an experimental treatment for COVID-19. After that, the drug began to appear in conspiracy theories. Big Pharma is trying to hide it or something.
There’s nothing special or even promising about hydroxychloroquine, but it makes a great MacGuffin in stories that claim the virus is fake, or that masks are just a symbol of control, or that Bill Gates is trying to microchip us all with the Sign of Liberty. A beast disguised as a vaccine. (I wish I were kidding, but this is a surprisingly widespread opinion.) As with any conspiracy theory , the message being spread is the conclusion that we should reopen businesses or something, and the alleged facts behind at the heart of this vary depending on what’s convenient.
What is true in the video and what is not?
Speaker Stella Immanuel says she is a doctor and practiced in Nigeria. This is confirmed: the person with that name has a medical license in the state of Texas , and the license states that she received her medical degree from a university in Nigeria.
She says she cured 350 COVID-19 patients by giving them all a regimen of hydroxychloroquine, zinc and the antibiotic Zithromax, and that none of them died. We have no way of judging whether this is true; she has not published any data that I have been able to find.
“You don’t need masks,” she says. It is not right; masks are imperfect, but extremely useful in protecting us from transmitting the coronavirus to each other.
She continues: “… There is a cure.” There is no cure.
What do we know about hydroxychloroquine?
Immanuel claims the hiccups article “proves” that the NIH knows hydroxychloroquine “cures” COVID-19. But the article is not proof of cure. It states that the patient had hiccups and tested positive for COVID-19, and that the patient was feeling well enough to be discharged from the hospital a few days later. The authors’ conclusion is that doctors should consider COVID-19 as a possible diagnosis for patients with hiccups or other unusual symptoms. Yes, the patient was treated with hydroxychloroquine in the hospital, but from this article we cannot tell if it really helped or if he would have done just as well without it.
In truth, hydroxychloroquine has been used a lot over the past few months. The first trials, which were reported in the news, had serious flaws , but doctors around the world often preferred to try. It is a (usually) readily available drug with known side effects that are often easy to manage. Immanuel says she used it to treat malaria in Nigeria, and it’s true that the drug is commonly used for that. Its use for malaria and other conditions such as lupus is the reason this drug is so widely available and its side effects are well known.
But in all of these studies, hydroxychloroquine – with or without zinc and azithromycin – has shown itself to be neither a cure, nor even a promising treatment. You can read here about which experimental treatments are promising and which are not . Hydroxychloroquine falls directly into the “not promising” category.
So why is this doctor telling us that hydroxychloroquine is a drug if it’s not a drug?
I can’t tell you what’s going on in Stella Immanuel’s head. Perhaps she did have good results with 350 patients; maybe not. I know that in March she told her Facebook followers that “those who know what to look for” will find a way to make money in the pandemic. In April, she still advised people to wear masks. Later that month, she began tagging people like the President and Tucker Carlson in her tweets about the pandemic.
She shared other misinformation on her social media profiles, including the claim that the coronavirus vaccine “will fuse with your own genes and change your genetic makeup,” which is not the subject of any vaccine in development, nor, as far as possible. … as you know, they know how to do it remotely. The Daily Beast has more on her past health claims, including that her gynecological problems are caused by having sex with demons in her sleep.
Immanuel was on the Supreme Court with a group called America’s Leading Doctors. The band’s website disappeared somewhere between when I first loaded it this morning and now as I write. The video itself has since been removed from Facebook and YouTube, although people are still re-uploading it. Today I found several private group video posts, including one that still remains.
Whatever happens to the video, the myths will continue to spread because they are engaging. This falsely tells us that masks are unnecessary, that isolation is unnecessary and that there is a surefire cure for COVID-19 that the government is hiding. All of this is clearly, obviously, a lie, and these myths have been circulating long before this particular video. They are still more wrong than ever.