Source: Herald Sun Author: Anthony Piovesan
Senior doctors across Melbourne are calling on the nation’s COVID-19 task force to consider the use of the drugs hydroxychloroquine and ivermectin as a cure against coronavirus.
Some of the city’s top general practitioners, urologists, psychiatrists, and surgeons in the group known as the COVID-19 Medical Network said the drugs could cure coronavirus when taken in its early stages.
GP Dr. Mark Hobart said he prescribed ivermectin to a 94-year-old woman in a nursing home who “responded very well” last year.
“This drug works early on before the virus gets into the lungs,” he said.
“I’ve taken it myself when I was treating elderly patients at a nursing home last year and there were dozens of infections, I never got coronavirus. “I’ve written numerous prescriptions for people who want to have it on hand — you’ve got nothing to lose with this drug, it’s very safe.
“We’re coming up to another cold and flu season and if it’s given to people in nursing homes before an outbreak it’ll cover them.”
Australia’s COVID-19 task force recommended against the use of the widely-used anti-parasitic drug ivermectin as treatment outside of trials, and had no recommendation for its use in prevention.
Hydroxychloroquine is used in Australia to treat arthritis, with the task force also discouraging its use against COVID-19 unless the patient was enrolled in a clinical trial.
But anaesthetist Dr Eamonn Mathieson — who practises in Melbourne’s north — is urging the task force to reconsider.
“The evidence in favour of the efficacy and safety of the treatment options for the management of the early phase of COVID-19 illness is now considered by many Australian and international medical experts, including the esteemed professor Robert Clancy, to be virtually beyond dispute,” he said.
“It could be argued that this death toll may have been significantly reduced if early treatment options and protocols were made available and were not blocked or banned.”
Dr. Mathieson cited studies from overseas and said countries that used hydroxychloroquine against coronavirus had “dramatically lower” death tolls than other countries that didn’t use the drug.
Coalition MP Craig Kelly put his political career on the line and spoke out about the two drugs and his attempts to lobby health officials to consider them as treatments against coronavirus.
Peer-Reviewed Journal Reports Hydroxychloroquine Can Reduce Mortality Rates In COVID-19 Patients
Ivermectin for Covid-19: Database of all Ivermectin COVID-19 studies – 35 trials and growing
COVID-19: A realistic approach to community management – HCQ & IVM in concert with vaccination