Gresham’s Law & the Covid-19 pandemic

Gresham’s Law and the Covid-19 pandemic

By Jacob Puliyel, M.D.

Gresham’s law holds that bad money drives out good money. If there are two coins with the same face value, but of different intrinsic value (assume that one is made of a more precious metal) the coin with less intrinsic worth (bad coin) will be used for currency transactions and the more valuable coin will go out of circulation.

This law applies to the pharmaceuticals today. If there are two drugs of comparable efficacy, the drug that costs more (bad coin) will drive out the good drug (less expensive one) out of the market. It is unfortunate that we are experiencing this in the midst of the humanitarian tragedy of the Covid pandemic.

The present pandemic is caused by a novel virus and mankind has no experience with how to deal with it. There are no drugs or vaccines we know will work. To fight the virus, one approach is to re-purpose approved drugs developed for other uses. A variety of drugs on the market can be tested for efficacy against the new virus. We will discuss the testing of two such drugs against Covid-19.

Remdesivir is a candidate drug. It had been developed for the Ebola virus but it was not found to be effective against it. A generic version of the drug manufactured by Hetero costs Rs 5000 to Rs 6000 ($65-$80 USD) per vial. The 11 vials needed for a 10-day course costs Rs 55,000 ($728 USD). Remdesivir was subjected to a clinical trial against Covid-19 and the early results of this study were published by Beigel and colleagues in the New England Journal of Medicine (NEJM) on 22 May 2020. There was no statistically meaningful benefit for survival with use of the drug, but among those that survived, recovery time was reduced by four days to a median of 11 days instead of 15 days. The US FDA has approved this drug for compassionate use.

Hydroxychloroqunin (HCQ) is another drug under consideration. It is an antimalarial drug that costs Rs 68 for 10 tablets and a course of treatment requires 12 tablets. The WHO studied this drug in 400 hospitals in 35 countries. It was called the Solidarity trial. However, on 22 May 2020, on the same day that the Remdesivir report appeared in the NEJM, another famous medical journal, The Lancet, published a report that HCQ caused 35% more deaths due to adverse effects of the drug in another trial. Within three days of the publication of the Lancet paper, the WHO suspended the Solidarity study.

India, however, decided to defy the WHO and continue its trial of HCQ. During the period when the Solidarity study was suspended, the Indian Council of Medical Research (ICMR) wrote to the WHO, that Solidarity schedule was employing four times the recommended dose of HCQ. The WHO schedule prescribed 1600 mg of the drug on the first day and total of 9600 mg for the full course of treatment. This dose was likely to be toxic and potentially fatal. Dr Vinod Paul in the Niti Aayog was of the opinion (New Indian Express 29 May) that the drug given in the correct dose was useful against Covid in India.

It turned out that the Lancet paper about HCQ deaths was fraudulent and used fabricated data. The Lancet paper was retracted within 13 days of publication. On 3 June, the WHO resumed the Solidarity HCQ study. In spite of the warning about the drug dosage from the ICMR, the same toxic dose was continued.

Ten days later, Dr Meryl Nass, an US physician and expert on adverse reactions with drugs, wrote in her blog on 14 June 2020 about the lethal dose of HCQ being used in the Solidarity trial. People on Twitter, took it up. Three days later, on the 17 June, the WHO announced that it was suspending the HCQ trial because ‘there was no reduction in mortality’ with the drug, without any mention of the controversy about the drug dosage being used. No data was published.

By a strange coincidence, on the same day the WHO stopped its HCQ trial, the UK announced that it was stopping its trial of HCQ (called the Recovery trial) because they found simultaneously, that there was no reduction in mortality with the drug. The UK Recovery trial was funded in part by the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation (B&MGF) and it was also using the same toxic dosage as the Solidarity trial. No data was provided about the other outcome measures like the reduction in time to recovery.

Clearly there are different standards operating here for the two drugs.

One can see the contrast here between the trials with the two drugs. The Remdesivir trial reported in the NEJM had found no reduction in mortality but the trial was continued on the basis of an improvement in recovery time among survivors. This was not reported on in the HCQ study. Clearly there are different standards operating here for the two drugs.

We cannot let matters rest here. The Lancet paper was retracted but we need to investigate who was really behind this effort to fraudulently discredit HCQ. “Surgisphere” is reported as the organisation that manufactured the data, but who got them to do this? Did they get any extraordinary help from the journal for publication?

Was this a concerted effort by pharma to discredit the less expensive drug? While it is made to appear as a rogue company “Surgisphere” appears to have done this to improve its visibility, it is necessary to have a deeper investigation into the motives and involvement of others, including publishers.

Further, one needs to know who was responsible for putting lives at risk by recommending toxic doses of HCQ in Solidarity and Recovery trials. One cannot assume this was an unintentional mistake, as the dose was not corrected even after the error was pointed out by the ICMR. We need to get to the bottom of this and those involved need to be discredited and weeded out, if we do not want bad science, like bad coins, taking over the world. If this is not done, in all probability, the results of the ICMR HCQ study will not be allowed to be published. Gresham’s Law of Pharmacotheraputics–only expensive drugs will show positive results.

••••

The above article was originally published by The Sunday Guardian, by author Jacob Puliyel

••••

The above article Gresham’s Law and the Covid-19 pandemic originated on Children’s Health Defense and is re-published here by ‘contribution’ with attribution to the articles author Jacob Puliyel, M.D., and ChildrensHealthDefense.org.

••••

TLB Editors Note: This is World Mercury Project on steroids! TLB highly recommends you click on the image below, visit this great website, and do whatever you can to help see this vital forum succeed … for the sake of our children !!!

Sign up for free news and updates from Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. and the Children’s Health Defense. CHD is planning many strategies, including legal, in an effort to defend the health of our children and obtain justice for those already injured. Your support is essential to CHD’s successful mission.

••••

Read more articles by Children’s Health Defense

••••

••••

Stay tuned to …

••••

The Liberty Beacon Project is now expanding at a near exponential rate, and for this we are grateful and excited! But we must also be practical. For 7 years we have not asked for any donations, and have built this project with our own funds as we grew. We are now experiencing ever increasing growing pains due to the large number of websites and projects we represent. So we have just installed donation buttons on our websites and ask that you consider this when you visit them. Nothing is too small. We thank you for all your support and your considerations … (TLB)

••••

Comment Policy: As a privately owned web site, we reserve the right to remove comments that contain spam, advertising, vulgarity, threats of violence, racism, or personal/abusive attacks on other users. This also applies to trolling, the use of more than one alias, or just intentional mischief. Enforcement of this policy is at the discretion of this websites administrators. Repeat offenders may be blocked or permanently banned without prior warning.

••••

Disclaimer: TLB websites contain copyrighted material the use of which has not always been specifically authorized by the copyright owner. We are making such material available to our readers under the provisions of “fair use” in an effort to advance a better understanding of political, health, economic and social issues. The material on this site is distributed without profit to those who have expressed a prior interest in receiving it for research and educational purposes. If you wish to use copyrighted material for purposes other than “fair use” you must request permission from the copyright owner.

••••

Disclaimer: The information and opinions shared are for informational purposes only including, but not limited to, text, graphics, images and other material are not intended as medical advice or instruction. Nothing mentioned is intended to be a substitute for professional medical advice, diagnosis or treatment.

Be the first to comment

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published.


*