By Herbert Vego
THIS corner has repeatedly questioned the refusal of the World Health Organization (WHO) and the Department of Health (DOH) to endorse medicines that could cure Covid-19. They are limited to “promotion” of vaccines, which are by nature merely preventive rather than curative.
Contrary opinions posted on Facebook end up deleted during “fact check”.
But if there were no effective medicine, why do the majority of Covid patients recover? As of yesterday, the cumulative cases of the pandemic worldwide in one year had hit 124,300,060, of which only 2,735,343 had died.
Of the reported cases, 85 percent are asymptomatic – having no symptoms of the disease at all – and therefore have greater chances of recovery.
In the Philippines, yesterday’s one-year count was 671,792 cases, with 12,972 deaths – or a mortality rate of less than two percent.
As I have repeatedly stressed in this corner, that’s not as alarming as we are led to believe. The Philippines has a population approaching 110 million and an average death rate of 1,600 daily. Therefore, with or without Covid, more than half s million Filipinos die of different diseases and other causes in one year.
The world has survived worse pandemics in the days of yore. Thanks to Google, we can travel back in time to the year 1918 when the Spanish Flu of 1918 killed a bigger number of at least 50 million people worldwide.
I am sad that the media have been stressing deaths, not recoveries, due to COVID-19. Otherwise, we could have enthused about how survivors have pulled through.
Hardly heralded is how known personalities licked the disease. Remember when two Cabinet front-liners – Secretary Eduardo Año of the Department of the Interior and Local Government (DILG) and Secretary Leonor Briones of the Department of Education (DepEd) – caught the dreaded disease? They were big news but little was published about how they survived.
Año tested COVID-positive on March 27, 2020. He underwent his second test on April 8 and got a negative result. Healed in only 12 days!
In an interview on radio station DzMM, Año revealed his medicine: “I inhaled steam from a bowl of boiling water laced with salt.”
Briones, tested positive on April 8, 2020 and negative the second time on April 12 after. Within that short period, she said, “I gargled warm water with salt, drank ginger tea, and ate a balanced diet.”
The fast recovery of Briones, now 80, is incredible. I wonder if she had been breastfed in childhood.
Gynecologists today tell mothers-to-be to breast-feed so that by the time their infant turns one year old, he or she will have developed a trillion different antibiotic and antiviral agents in his body to protect him from diseases. If the child retains these antibodies and immune cell warriors into adulthood through healthy food and exercise, then he remains ready to battle bacterial and viral enemies.
To really know what medicines have effectively healed Covid-19 survivors, we have to ask them.
The other day, a doctor friend sent me a YouTube presentation hosted by former TV newscaster Mari Kaimo. One of his guests, Dr. Allan Landrito, confessed having prescribed Ivermectin to his Covid patients, and they have all recovered.
That drug, long approved by the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) as an antiparasitic drug to treat tropical diseases like malaria and scabies, has not been approved yet for anti-viral uses.
My doctor friend (name withheld) messaged me his conformity with Dr. Landrito’s option because the said drug has a mechanism that prevents “cytokine storm” or the excessive inflammatory reaction of the human body to a foreign body.
“Inflammation engulfs the foreign body,” he wrote. “But in the case of Covid, the body’s response is so much that the blood gets sticky and clots until it obstructs the flow of air.”
I can imagine the losses that vaccine manufacturers would incur should health authorities endorse that medicine priced at only two hundred pesos per tablet.
