Dear Mr President, In this age of COVID-19 there is no nation that is not cruelly affected by the most virulent virus in over a century that is ruining lives and destroying economies. Wherever we are on the planet, whatever our status, we are all in the same directionless boat with no sight of dry land.
While I sympathize with the heavy weight on your shoulders given that every decision you take is a trade-off between the economy and public health, I would ask you to explore uncomfortable truths. Any lack of transparency or perceived obfuscation will only serve to worsen the confusion and suspicions fermenting in frightened minds which risks erupting into public disorder on America’s streets.
Mr President, you have placed your trust in the Director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID), Dr Anthony Fauci to lead your Corona Task Force even though many of his messages contradict your own. His resume is impressive. He has served six US presidents beginning with President Ronald Reagan, and he is widely respected by leading lights in his field.
However, he is not without damning critics among them the Medical Director of the Centers for Advanced Medicine Dr Rashid A. Buttar, a specialist in toxicology, who accuses Dr Fauci of defying a 2014 US moratorium on human-animal chimera research due to the risk of creating a pandemic. Notwithstanding what we read about the Wuhan laboratory being paid $3.7m of taxpayers’ money to continue with the research on the authority of Dr Fauci, who in 2017 predicted your administration would be faced with a pandemic during your tenure in office.
Buttar accuses Fauci, Bill Gates and sectors of the media of harbouring a hidden agenda on COVID- 19 and of hyping-up the number of cases to increase the fear factor. Indeed, more and more doctors are exposing the fact that they are being put under pressure to write COVID-19 on the death certificates of patients who have never been tested. In particular, Buttar worries that Fauci is pushing through an improperly tested vaccine that could be dangerous.
Former Chief of Neuroradiology at Stanford University Medical Centre Dr Scott Atlas recently wrote a column titled “The data is in – Stop the panic and end the total isolation” which points a finger at the World Health Organization (WHO) for over-estimating COVID- 19’s fatality rate by up to five percent while arguing that the virus robs a small minority of their lives while half of all those infected have zero symptoms.
Drs Dan Erickson and Artin Massihi who own care centres in Bakersfield, California held a press conference to assert their upfront and personal patient experiences brought them to conclude that COVID-19 is no worse than influenza that claims tens of thousands of lives in the United States annually. They are advocates for the opening up of the economy, a course many US states are now taking as you know.
Write off the above criticisms/ theories by members of the medical profession if you will, but revelations by one of Dr Fauci’s former colleagues cannot be so lightly dismissed. Dr Judy Mikovits PhD revolutionised the treatment of HIV Aids in 1991 when she published her doctoral thesis. She underscores the fact that a hospital receives $13,000 from Medicare for patients with COVID-19 and three times as much if that patient ends up on a ventilator.
While riding high on her career she wrote a column in the Journal of Science exposing Big Pharma of using animal and foetal tissues, a practice responsible for plagues of chronic diseases. She had no idea that she would be harmed for expressing her truth. She accuses the powers that be of ruining her professional reputation and every aspect of her life and she is now dedicated to naming names even though she fears retribution. She blames Dr Fauci for directing the coverup and says the NIAID paid millions of dollars in hush money. If true, her account is seriously disturbing . Held under a five-year-long gag order at pain of “new evidence being found” that would send her back behind bars, she is now free to tell her side of the story which she has set out in a book titled “Plague of Corruption, Restoring Faith in the Promise of Science”.
In brief, at the age of 25 she was part of the team headed by Fauci and virologist Robert Gallo tasked with isolating the HIV virus from the saliva and blood of patients in France. She asserts that she and Dr Frank Rosetti were preparing to publish a paper when they were threatened with dismissal by Fauci who demanded a copy.
She claims Dr Fauci delayed publication by several months during which time Robert Gallo had penned his own paper derived from their work. “Of course, patents were involved,” she says. She accuses Fauci and the current head of the Centres for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), Robert Redfield, of registering lucrative patents which is a conflict of interest although doing so was legitimised by the 1980 Bayh-Dole Act that allows government employees and universities to patent their discoveries garnered from the use of public funds. Like Dr Buttar, she is wary of certain vaccines which she maintains inject animal tissue into humans causing cancers and other diseases. And she rails against Bill Gates being afforded “a voice in this country” although he possesses no medical qualifications and in his own words admits “Normalcy only returns when we have largely vaccinated the entire global population”.
Gates, a major funder of the WHO warned of a pandemic “similar to the 1918 pandemic that killed over 50 million people” would occur within a decade is regularly targeted by conspiracy theorists who variously believe he is bent on depopulating the planet or using trackers buried in vaccines to control populations. The world’s second richest person has brushed off such attacks as “crazy rumours”.
Dr Judy Mikovits also shares Rashid Buttar’s scepticism concerning Fauci’s dismissal of hydroxychloroquine as a potential effective treatment for the coronavirus when it has been listed as an essential medicine worldwide for 70 years; a fact that Fauci writes off as being “anecdotal”. “It is not story-telling if we have thousands of pages of data saying it is effective against these families of viruses” and yet “they keep it from the people,” she says. As many as 2,300 doctors polled by Sermo in 30 countries say hydroxychloroquine is the most effective in treating the coronavirus. In Spain, 72 percent of physicians admit that they have been prescribing it, so you may have been correct after all, Mr President, when you called this medicine “a game changer” – or rather it might have been if Dr Fauci had not swiftly knocked it on the head.
I might have been tempted to ignore the messages contained in videos challenging orthodoxy except for the speed at which they are removed from YouTube, Facebook and Twitter only to reappear with different headings. People cannot help but wonder whether these giant tech companies have morphed into the thought police, out to silence dissenting voices in a nation that prides itself on its constitutional freedoms. Many around the world are outraged and want to know in which way do such videos violate standards and who or what is behind their removal?
I have no idea what is true and what is not, but with so much at stake I would appeal to the Trump administration to take the above claims spreading around the world like wildfire with the seriousness they deserve. They should either be upheld or debunked and if anyone is attempting to manipulate public opinion with lies then they should be vilified and discredited by the court of public opinion.
Lastly, I take this opportunity to express my heartfelt wish that Republicans and Democrats join hands to find solutions and it is my hope that the United States emerges from these hard days stronger than ever to resume its inspirational role within the international community.
By Khalaf Ahmad Al Habtoor
UAE Businessman
