Fourteen Fresno families file wrongful death suits over remdesivir
Complaint cites medical malpractice, fraudulent concealment, elder abuse and battery
Chart showing deaths among participants in a 2018 study on remdesivir and ebola published in the New England Journal of Medicine.
Good people are dying because of remdesivir. And they know it’s not effective, and they continue to do it. So we hope this sparks additional lawsuits, not just in this state but across the country. Fundamentally, personal autonomy is a right that we all have. Personal autonomy in medical decisions – that’s really what’s at issue here.
And the result of that .. is that all of these loved ones are gone. They did not need to die.
— attorney Dan Watkins
By Tatiana Prophet
Two attorneys are suing three Fresno-area hospitals for wrongful death on behalf of 14 families whose hospitalized loved ones they allege died from a combination of remdesivir, “food and fluid deprivation” and high-dose morphine “to spiral patients down the dark road to death.”
“This is not an exaggeration,” said Dan Watkins at a press conference last week. “It’s crazy. But that’s the day and age we live in now.”
Even in the clinical trials, remdesivir, brand name Veklury, had serious adverse effects, particularly in the form of kidney disease including the need for transplants. And these side effects have continued through emergency use authorization and FDA full approval. In fact, it’s still listed on the NIH website as an effective therapeutic authorized to treat Covid-19.
The defendants’ motive? The complaint alleges “bounty”: $110,000 from the state of California for a non-complex Covid-19 hospitalization, and $450,000 for a patient who is intubated, according to attorney Michael Hamilton who is also a legal strategist for the non-profit Truth for Health Foundation. A Covid patient who is treated but not admitted generates an average bill of $3,200. Those numbers are the average billings for three types of Covid patients, he said.
The complaint alleges the following causes of action:
fraudulent concealment leading to wrongful death
violation of the Elder Abuse and Dependent Adult Civil Protection Act
medical negligence leading to wrongful death
medical battery leading to wrongful death
“We allege the defendants had information that they intentionally did not provide to the decedents or to family members, Information about the dangerous nature of remdesivir, its history, its lack of effectiveness in prior years — information that would have changed the decisions of those people in the hospitals, had they been told,” Watkins said at a press conference in Fresno.
He added that much more effective therapeutics were omitted from these hospitals’ treatment protocols.
Remdesivir is a a “nucleotide analogue RNA polymerase inhibitor” developed by Gilead Sciences to fight the ebola virus. As of this writing, one can read on the NIH Covid-19 protocol web site that remdesivir is approved for patients of all ages, that remdesivir had shown to be effective against SARS-Cov-2 in vitro, as well as in a study of rhesus macaques. The study cohort had lower levels of virus and less lung damage than the control, according to the NIH.
Throughout the pandemic, almost no opposition to remdesivir was voiced from America’s public health leaders in spite of the existence of a pre-Covid study showing serious harm among ebola patients in the Democratic Public of the Congo. Watkins and Hamilton’s complaint cites a study in the New England Journal of Medicine begun in 2018 in which remdesivir resulted in the most deaths out of the four therapies that were tested (see chart above). Remdesivir was pulled from the study four months before it concluded.
REMDESIVIR FOR COVID
Ironically, in early 2020 the NEJM published a favorable study involving remdesivir given to the very first Covid-19 patient who arrived in the United States. (It was not a randomized controlled trial, obviously). The paper noted that the patient began to improve after the administration of remdesivir on an emergency basis. According to the authors, they chose the drug because it had shown effectiviness against the novel coronavirus in the lab — the same claim currently being made on the NIH web site to justify approval, along with other studies cited by the FDA in its approval. These studies showed barely any difference in recovery time, death and serious adverse events between the remdesivir group and the control group. And in one study, both groups had received corticosteroids (something Fauci said disqualified a study on malaria drug hydroxychloroquine — more on that later).
Oddly, therapeutics that kept most patients alive in the early months of the Covid-19 pandemic were systematically shut down by the same public health leaders who greenlit remdesivir.
BURYING THE MALARIA DRUG
Almost immediately after Donald Trump mentioned the malaria drug hydroxychloroquine as a therapeutic from the White House press room, Dr. Anthony Fauci was markedly unenthusiastic and uncertain about the drug’s effects, if any, on patients with Covid-19. He even smeared a successful study from Henry Ford Health System in Detroit during a congressional hearing.
“That study is a flawed study," said Fauci, at the hearing, because it wasn't a randomized, placebo-controlled trial and that patients also received corticosteroids, which in a separate study exhibited benefits for seriously ill patients. But that was the same problem with a remdesivir study linked on the NIH web site — all cohorts had also received corticosteroids (see link above).
Fauci’s study purism for hydroxychloroquine was in spite of a 2005 study in the journal Virology in which chloroquine, an older form of the drug that has also been used to treat malaria, was shown to be a “potent inhibitor of SARS coronavirus infection and spread.” The experiment had been conducted in a lab with primate cell lines, and the study concluded that it showed promise as both a prophylactic and treatment. A viral meme began circulating that Dr. Fauci had himseld written the paper. It was this error that Snopes seized on in its move to debunk it. While Dr. Fauci’s name was not on the study, there is some truth that most studies, including this one, published by prestigious journals usually receive the NIH blessing and reprint. (He did call chloroquine an effective antiviral in 1985.)
The Snopes article took great pains to distinguish between SARS-CoV-1 and SARS-CoV-2, saying there are hundreds of coronaviruses, most of which come from animals, so to Snopes, the results showing chloroquine a potent inhibitor of the first SARS coronavirus was basically meaningless. This was despite the fact that the two SARS viruses are 79 percent similar and both use human ACE2 as an entry point. Snopes further went on to say that hydroxychloroquine really isn’t that similar to chloroquine.
Then came more studies widely publicized in elite media around the world that hydroxychloroquine was harmful to the heart and that a study of chloroquine in Brazil had to be discontinued because patients were dying. All of these negative outcomes, when examined closely, showed shockingly high levels administered of the malaria drug. In this instance, chloroquine and hydroxychloroquine were used interchangeably.
Hydroxychloroquine (and the related chloroquine) was brought to the attention of then-president Donald Trump by New York state primary care Dr. Zev Zelenko, who had been successfully keeping patients alive and out of the hospital.
Likewise, Dr. Didier Raoult, world-renowned virologist and infectious disease expert, published resiults of a non-randomized, non-controlled study showing nearly 100 percent success at keeping patients alive. He refused to do a randomized, controlled study in the middle of a pandemic on the grounds that it was inhumane not to treat the control group. (Oddly, the reason pregnant women have never undergone trials for the flu vaccine is also because it would be unethical not to administer it to a control group — as to do so would be to risk an adverse outcome from the flu).
Never mind all that; Dr. Raoult’s nearly 100-percent success rate was still ignored.
By April 21, a retrospective study of records at the Veterans Administration showed hydroxychloroquine did not help patients improve, while several died. It turned out that all patients were already severely ill, and the dosages, like in Brazil, were much too high. Other studies were halted or never finished the recruiting phase. Suddenly the QT interval was of massive concern to the establishment, despite an early paper from the Mayo Clinic saying the QT interval disruption was minuscule and that hydroxychloroquine should be used immediately to keep millions from dying.
Once the media declared hydroxychloroquine dead, the New York Times magazine almost immediuately published a hit piece on Dr. Raoult. They hadn’t even waited for a damning study to smear Dr. Zelenko as a “simple country doctor” turned right wing “star,” three weeks before. That he was “touting” the Trump drug was enough to go on.
The New York Times, April 1, 2020.
After the VA study, the FDA pulled its emergency use authorization for hydroxychloroquine and several governors around the United States banned its off-label use for Covid-19.
DOUBLE STANDARD
But remdesivir’s approval was never withdrawn, even to this day in spite of acute kidney illness still being widely reported. I guess remdesivir falls into the category of “ask your doctor if Veklury (brand name) is right for you.” This is code for “make sure you aren’t at risk for the more serious side effects we list here.”
The three hospitals named in the complaint are: Clovis Medical Center Community Medical Center, Community Regional Medical Center, and Saint Agnes Medical Center. All three told The Epoch Times that they couldn’t comment on pending litigation, according to the publication.
Watkins told the gathering that Truth for Health Foundation had recently given a sizable donation for the lawsuit to go forward. Attorneys for the plaintiffs and the foundation are calling the lawsuit a “landmark” and a “first-of-its-kind.”
“So someone’s got to stand up and push back, and that’s what Michael and I are trying to do,” Watkins said. “We’re gonna work our tail off to hold these defendants accountable. And we’re doing it in the hopes that this lawsuit will spark the filing of many others.”
Further reading:
Truth for Health article on the lawsuit
