The statistics are humbing. Highest number of total Covid-19 infections worldwide; highest number of persons hospitalized from the disease; highest number of related deaths; and highest number of daily new infections. It’s like a script from science fiction. Or a documentary from some other region of the globe more commonly associated with tragedies. But this is no fiction. America’s highly regarded healthcare system is on medical ventilator as its army of doctors and other healthcare professionals are locked in debate over how best to respond to the pandemic. Is it Hydroxychloroquine or should they wait for the arrival of a new remedy from the scientific community?
To understand this phenomenon is to understand the fundamental flaws and limits of capital and democracy in a prosperous society. It is not so much about the absence of a functional and acceptable treatment for Covid-19. It is about the presence of an unfit-for-this-purpose mechanism for identifying and adopting what is in the greater public interest.The US is using peacetime methods and practices cultivated during prosperity to tackle a “wartime” emergency that calls for decisive action.
Nothing better dramatizes this dilemma than a recently released video by a group of doctors attacking official lethargy in recognizing Hydroxychloroquine as a treatment for early stages of the Covid-19 infection. A particularly impassioned speech by Dr. Stella Immanuel, an African immigrant physician practicing in Texas, stood out from the pack. While others spoke in measured, “professional” tones, Dr. Stella threw down the gauntlet. She said she was tired of watching people die while officialdom fiddles. She said big pharma companies were in conspiracy with the healthcare establishment to stop the use of a cheap, effectIve remedy so they can make jumbo profits from an eventual “new” solution. She said she had successfully treated over 300 early-stage patients with a cocktail of Chloroquine, Zinc and Azythromycin, based on her training and experience in Africa. She said countless studies validating the efficacy of this treatment against Corona-related viral infectikns were available but systematically suppressed by vested interests…
Literally moments after those words were spoken, Dr. Stella was literally undressed in full public glare. Her private and professional lives were scrutinized by an opposition movement apparently bent on discrediting her claims. Some said she was a paid spokesperson for the Trump Campaign which was hoping to use the Hydroxychloroquine agenda (Trump had earlier promoted it as the way out) to salvage failing electoral fortunes ahead of November. Others said she was all sentiment and no science.
No one disputed her claim that big pharmaceutical and biomedical companies routinely manipulate scientific papers, federal regulators and medical practice to ramp up sales and profits. If it could happen with opioid painkillers, as demonstrated in the case of Johnson and Johnson and Purdue Pharma only last year, why not Covid-19?
It’s pretty difficult if not impossible to know where politics and economics stops and where science begins in the US, especially in an election year. Everything gets denominated in Republican or Democratic terms. Or viewed from pro-Trump or anti-Trump prisms. But one thing is sure: There is nothing scientific about public health officials fiddling while bodies pile up in the morgues. It is actually un-scientific to ignore, reject or discredit an old existing remedy while waiting for new fancy ones with no certain time of arrival.
Growing up in Nigeria, in the not-so-fancy parts of town, especially after a devastating civil war, I quickly observed something: there are lessons learned on the streets through hardship which neither affluence nor the best schools in the world can afford or teach. Like humility, making friends quickly and surviving on a near-empty stomach. It’s called street wisdom or native Intelligence. I observed that kids from high-brow neighborhoods always struggled with that subject. They were used to buffets, soft beds and chauffeur-driven cars.
America’s healthcare system is probably like that. It was designed for a normal, stable, prosperous society. Not for a pandemic. It is accustomed to the elaborate manners of big pharma, big data, FDA and the intellectual fat cats of Harvard, Stanford and Johns Hopkins.
Those are the ones who insist on two-year-long scientific procedures and double-blind tests to validate treatment regimens before they are approved for public use. Those are the ones who say Chloroquine is cheap and “may have harmful side effects” – as if there is any drug without potentially harmful side effects if wrongly used. Closely related to that, the American legal system also evolved to exact maximum punishment on those who did not comply with the protocols.
Did the system work? Absolutely! It ensured that average life expectancy in the US rose steadily over the years to an impressive 79 years. Compare that with Africa’s 64 years and Europe’s 81 years (according to 2017 World Bank findings) and you have to give credit where it is due.
But even good things have their limits and too much of a good thing can sometimes be bad. Under emergency conditions of a pandemic, America’s well-oiled healthcare system has so far proven to be unresponsive – if not dysfunctional. Covid-19 (or any global health crisis) was not part of the original script.
It would probably take another decade to resolve ongoing controversies, harmonize party lines and integrate lessons learned into a revised healthcare manual. Meanwhile, over 170,000 Covid-related deaths had been recorded across the US at the time of this writing. That’s approximately three times the number of people in a modern sports stadium sitting at full capacity!
In moments like this, the rugged (some would say rudimentary) healthcare systems of Africa and less affluent societies appear to fare better. They were either designed for crises or simply got innoculated from being in a perpetual state of emergency – from Influenza to Malaria, HIV, Ebola and everything else in-between.
In those places, who has time for WHO? Who has time for big pharma and double-blind tests? People survive on self-help and “anecdotal” therapies. Even the doctors who are trained in Western medicine know by virtue of their environment the alleyways to effective treatment. Those are the folks who started using Chloroquine, Zinc, Azythromycin (and whatever else helps their patients) without fanfare.
This pandemic appears to have exposed the underbelly of a pampered and compromised healthcare system driven more by a desire to avoid blame and litigation (as well as make more money) than by anything else. Privilege certainly has its downside.
Victor Anazonwu, a Nigerian writer, is author of The 8 Habits of Highly Ineffective People (amazon.com 2019)
