When reputable Texas doctors offered the world evidence of apparently successful treatment plans for the coronavirus, one might have expected medical researchers and leaders to rush to explore the feasibility of the treatment plan.
Instead, leaders have shunned the news, mainstream media has gone into hyperdrive to discredit the doctors, and medical elites have refused to explore the treatment plans. And now, tech giants have removed and suppressed viral social media posts containing information from those medical professionals regarding their treatments.
It is a terrifying act of suppression straight out of George Orwell’s “1984,” a book that describes a tyrannical future where truth is suppressed and lies are promoted.
The most well-known treatment plan receiving the most pushback is the use of hydroxychloroquine, a common drug used for treating malaria, combined with zinc tablets and an antibiotic.
This formula gained national attention when Texas physician Dr. Robin Armstrong used it to successfully treat residents of a large nursing home in Texas City.
Armstrong, who also serves as a member of the Republican National Committee, spoke before the legislative priorities committee at the Republican Party state convention in Houston earlier this month, where he mentioned the pushback and retribution being exacted on any doctor who dares to publicly state they have had luck with a viable treatment option for COVID-19.
Additionally, Armstrong told the committee he was actively speaking with another Texas doctor who is gaining notoriety with another treatment option: Dr. Richard Bartlett.
Bartlett, a highly respected private practitioner and emergency room physician, studied the virus and says he produced his unique treatment option from a scientific approach.
Dozens of Bartlett’s patients have since come forward, offering their testimony of Bartlett’s treatment and saying it saved their lives.
Bartlett bills his treatment plan as the “silver bullet” for COVID-19 and has launched a website where he has released a white paper on the effects of his treatment. Bartlett is submitting the white paper to a scientific journal for review and publishing.
The “silver bullet” treatment consists of an inhaled steroid, “budesonide,” which is FDA-approved and has been commonly used to treat asthma since the 1970s. Along with the inhaled steroid, Bartlett prescribes zinc tablets and an antibiotic, the combination of which he and his patients say has worked extremely well to treat the symptoms of the virus.
Texas Scorecard previously reported on another Texas physician, Dr. Ivette Lozano, and her success in treating patients with the virus, as well as the pushback and interference she received from bureaucratic state regulators regarding her treatment.
State Sen. Bob Hall (R–Edgewood) was forced to intervene on Lozano’s behalf to keep the State Pharmacy Board from preventing her usage of hydroxychloroquine, and blasted the regulators, saying they are trying to keep available and affordable medicines from being used so pharmaceutical giants can produce a new product at a higher, more profitable cost.
State Rep. James White (R–Hillister) has also weighed in on the issue, taking to social media to praise Dr. Bartlett’s efforts and blasting “medical elites” for immediately trying to disprove Bartlett’s treatment rather than explore its potential. White has said Texans are fed up with “this Luddite behavior of the medical elites.”
Efforts to suppress alternative treatments escalated even higher this week, when a video of a group of doctors from across the country holding a press conference in Washington D.C. went viral, gaining millions of views on social media platforms.
Social media and tech giants reacted, with Facebook and Twitter scrubbing the videos from their platforms, saying the information was false and misleading.
But they didn’t stop there.
Twitter went so far as to temporarily ban Donald Trump Jr.’s personal Twitter account for sharing the press conference video. Even more alarmingly, Twitter deleted the post when President Donald Trump shared it on his account.
“This is outrageous,” Congressman Chip Roy (R-TX) said, weighing in on the social media platform’s censorship of the president.
“Whatever you think of hydroxychloroquine, no government should stand between you and your doctor, much less be censored for promoting a hypothesis.”
Dr. Lozano claims to have been the subject of such censorship, as well. She regularly posts stories of successfully treating coronavirus patients on Facebook, which she says has resulted in Facebook repeatedly issuing short-term bans on her account. She is currently under a 30-day posting ban.
As alternative coronavirus treatments continue to gain more attention across the country, it remains to be seen how long the media and tech giants will continue to attempt to suppress them—or if these treatments will ultimately be proven to work.
Author’s note: Before publication, I received a notification from Facebook that I had “shared a post with false information about COVID-19″ on my personal page. The notice informed me that my post had been removed, and I was encouraged to share a link from the World Health Organization to correct my apparent wrongdoing. The post was a local news story about Dr. Richard Bartlett and his treatment plan for COVID-19.
