In 2020, Henry Ford Health System published data showing hospitalized COVID patients treated with hydroxychloroquine died at half the rate of those who were not. That is the kind of result that normally changes practice overnight. It did not. A competing study built on data no one could verify... buried it, and the policy followed. The Highwire walked through the entire sequence. 🧵show more

Why does this keep happening? Because the structure rewards it. Ivermectin is off-patent, so Merck cannot profit from it, and Merck was simultaneously developing a COVID treatment with an inferior safety and efficacy profile. Meanwhile the invisible public relations industry takes in roughly $100 billion a year to steer what doctors and patients believe. The machinery is laid out here:

The study that buried the finding came from Surgisphere, a tiny US company. Published in The Lancet, it claimed hydroxychloroquine was dangerous, and governments and the WHO reshaped COVID policy around it almost overnight. Then The Guardian examined Surgisphere's staff and found what appeared to be a science fiction writer and an adult content model. The hospital data could not be verified. The Lancet retracted the study.

By then the damage was done. The retraction changed nothing. Hydroxychloroquine was branded dangerous, the label held, and the FDA used exactly that narrative to justify the vaccine's emergency authorization, which legally required that no other treatment be shown to work. The study vanished from the record; the policy it enabled did not.

None of this was new. Ultraviolet blood irradiation was used in roughly 50 American hospitals by the early 1950s, with over 50 published papers covering more than 3,000 patients across 36 diseases, before it disappeared from the record. DMSO, backed by thousands of studies, was buried in the 1960s. Ivermectin ran the same script in 2020.

The pattern repeats because the incentives never change. A cheap, off-patent treatment that works threatens the franchise. A disease managed for life by a patented product is revenue, and cures are bad for business. When a doctor uses a competing therapy anyway, the response is a warning to everyone else: Meryl Nass was prosecuted by her medical board for treating COVID with hydroxychloroquine and ivermectin.

I have spent years documenting this machinery, from the billion-dollar cost of forcing a drug through approval to the retractions that arrive only after the policy damage is already done. The forgotten history of one such therapy, ultraviolet blood irradiation, is here:

We need real medicine. That’s why I have dedicated myself to exposing Pharma corruption and revealing life-changing therapies the medical cartel buried. If you want to support this mission, give me (@MidwesternDoc) a follow and visit me on Substack.

Dr. Marcus Zervos was one of the authors of HFH’s 2020 HCQ study that Fauci said was FLAWED. Zervos also authored HFH childhood vaxx study that he chose not to publish in 2020. HFH said it was FLAWED. Zervos also studied C19 vaxx & promoted combatting vaxx hesitancy in 2021.

And that is honestly an amazing statistic as HCQ-AZ was better suited as an early onset treatment before you are hospitalized.

The Surgisphere episode was a genuine scientific and regulatory failure that temporarily distorted the hydroxychloroquine debate. But it does not show that hydroxychloroquine worked, nor that regulators had to discredit it in order to authorize COVID vaccines. Subsequent randomized trials independently found no mortality benefit, and the vaccine-EUA conspiracy claim does not follow from the EUA statute.

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the group receiving hydroxychloroquine was also twice as likely to receive intravenous corticosteroids (like dexamethasone). Massive, rigorous global trials later proved conclusively that corticosteroids significantly reduce deaths in severely ill, hospitalised COVID-19 patients.Because the therapies were mixed together, the Henry Ford study accidentally credited hydroxychloroquine for survival outcomes that were actually being driven by the steroids. Just a bit of context

Fauci saw a signal in Remdesivir, tho.

“I’ve used a carefully supervised protocol with hydroxychloroquine and ivermectin for several different issues over the years and saw clear, lasting improvement each time. The early data from places like Henry Ford never matched the narrative that followed.”

SD was supposed to run tests but what happened to that?!

Aren’t you leaving something out? Where your narrative breaks down: 1. Timeline is backwards.
Lancet/Surgisphere: May 22, retracted June 4.
Henry Ford: published about July 1.
A retracted May paper cannot have “buried” a July paper. By the time Henry Ford appeared, RECOVERY had already announced no HCQ benefit (June 5) and FDA had revoked the HCQ EUA (June 15), citing that randomized trial and cardiac risk—not Surgisphere.  2. Henry Ford was not the kind of result that “normally changes practice overnight.”
It was a retrospective observational study. Doctors chose who got HCQ under a protocol. That creates confounding by indication. Letters to the journal and later commentary flagged the same problems: HCQ patients were more than twice as likely to receive steroids (which RECOVERY later showed do cut mortality), the untreated group looked sicker and less often ICU-eligible, and the matched analysis used only 190 vs 190 of 2,541 patients. Fauci called it a non-controlled retrospective cohort confounded by steroids. That criticism is about study design, not politics.  3. The randomized evidence went the other way, and it was large.
RECOVERY: 1,542 randomized to HCQ vs 3,132 usual care. 28-day mortality 27.0% vs 25.0% (rate ratio 1.09). Patients on HCQ were less likely to leave hospital alive by day 28 and more likely to need ventilation. ORCHID (NIH, blinded, hospitalized) and WHO SOLIDARITY were also negative. Cochrane’s review: high-certainty evidence that HCQ does not reduce death; it does increase adverse events. That is why guidelines dropped it.  4. The vaccine-EUA claim is legally wrong.
FD&C Act §564 requires “no adequate, approved, and available alternative” for the same intended use. A treatment for hospitalized patients is not an alternative to a vaccine that prevents infection. FDA and legal scholars have said so directly. Remdesivir already had an EUA (May 1, 2020) and full approval (Oct 22, 2020) before the Pfizer vaccine EUA (Dec 11). HCQ’s own EUA had been revoked in June because RCTs showed no benefit. The “they had to kill HCQ so vaccines could get an EUA” line does not match the statute or the calendar.  5. Ivermectin is not “the same script.”
After the early, messy observational papers, large adaptive RCTs (TOGETHER, ACTIV-6, PRINCIPLE) and subsequent reviews found no meaningful reduction in hospitalization or death at standard doses. “Merck can’t profit” does not explain why those trials were negative. 6. Meryl Nass.
Maine’s board suspended her over HCQ/ivermectin prescribing and related conduct (including how a prescription was described to a pharmacist). A later federal ruling found the psychological-evaluation order lacked probable cause; other board actions were treated differently. That is a mixed due-process story, not proof the drugs work.  How to read the whole episode Early 2020 was ugly: thin in-vitro hopes, Trump’s promotion, a fraudulent Lancet paper, and institutions that overcorrected. None of that converts an observational signal into efficacy once RECOVERY-scale randomization is in. The honest version is: Surgisphere was a scandal; Henry Ford was a confounded association; the RCTs settled the clinical question for hospitalized COVID. UV blood irradiation and DMSO are a separate historical argument with their own thin evidence base. They do not rehabilitate HCQ.— Grok

What is worse is some centers gave HCQ AFTER they were in the unit, not prior to symptoms or early & reported "no benefit"...hmmmmm wonder why they would do that....

What happened to the 2 million dosages? Take note of the press release date.

I remember them trying to do their own studies to discredit HCQ and deliberately using double the dosage. People need to go to prison.

“The Surgisphere episode and the subsequent policy shifts still don’t line up with the outcomes some of us saw in practice. I completed a structured protocol using both hydroxychloroquine and ivermectin and experienced resolution of several conditions that had been persistent.

Wow. Remarkable that a doctor is touting non-randomized restrospective study and fails to mention randomized trials that clearly show no benefit

Agree with the thread. In my own case a physician-guided regimen that included hydroxychloroquine and ivermectin produced steady recovery across more than one illness. The early observational results (like the Henry Ford numbers) matched what I observed far better than the later.

A retracted study doesn’t magically turn an observational study into a randomized trial. Henry Ford found an association. Randomized trials found no benefit. That’s how science works: you test the hypothesis. You don’t crown the first favorable result.