Minnesota's Democrat Governor Flips Stance on Hydroxychloroquine

P. Gardner Goldsmith | August 20, 2020
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Like the child who stands against the prevailing pusillanimous psychosis of “The Emperor’s New Clothes” in the 1837 Hans Christian Andersen tale of the same name, Minnesota Governor Tim Walz (D) finally has gone against the political deceivers, changed course and is now “allowing” hydroxychloroquine (HCq) to be used to treat COVID19.

Jon Miltimore reports for RealClearPolitics that the announcement from the first-term Democrat followed the July 31 reversal by the Ohio Board of Pharmacy on the same matter, paving the way for doctors to prescribe the quinine-based immunomodulator for a “parallel use” without the physicians fearing any loss of medical license. Likewise, it allows pharmacists to sell the drug without fear of losing their “licenses” – which, of course, are political permission slips which free people should not have to get if they want to offer services or products to others.

It also reverses Walz’s earlier position. Writes Miltimore:

’We are pleased that Governor [Tim] Walz lifted his March 27 Executive Order 20-23 restrictions on chloroquine and hydroxychloroquine,’ said Twila Brase, president of Citizens’ Council for Health Freedom.

That’s almost four months of political restrictions on the freedom of individuals to choose their own therapeutics and on doctors and pharmacists to offer them.

One wonders if this is such an abstract issue for some folks that they can’t see how despotic that kind of power is. If politicians had prevented residents from obtaining aspirin or other pain relievers for four months, or, if politicians had prevented citizens from obtaining any new soap for four months, would they have risen up more vigorously against that kind of authoritarian nonsense?

Heck, even as this state politician changes his mind and magnanimously “allows” people to take HCq for COVID19, the overlords at the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) stand in opposition to such a use.

The reversal by Walz, a first-term Democrat, clears the way for doctors to prescribe hydroxychloroquine, a drug commonly used to treat malaria and other conditions but one the FDA has declined to recommend for COVID-19 treatment.

That would be the FDA, for which no enumerated power exists in the U.S. Constitution, which has been cited by writers as being responsible for mass deaths due to its favoritism for certain corporations and its delays in “permission” for other companies to sell their therapeutics, and the overlords of which had to have known in 2005 that chloroquine worked with zinc to overcome SARS – because Anthony Fauci’s National Institutes of Health helped fund a study showing precisely that.

As a small window into the perfidy and twisted operations of the FDA, here are some thoughts from Raymond March, writing for FDAReview.org, a project of The Independent Institute:

In 1962, the Kefauver Harris Amendments granted the FDA authority to determine whether drugs were effective and safe. Granting the agency the power to decide which drugs were safe or unsafe gave it more ability to discriminate between pharmaceutical firms competing to have their products approved first. To compete for FDA attention, drug makers now needed a way to navigate new safety hurdles to have their products approved.

Those “safety” barriers -- barriers that prevent Americans from being able to decide for themselves if they will take a drug -- create incredibly long and expensive delays that, in turn, see millions of people unable to obtain or afford life-saving or pain-relieving medicines. And they see a revolving door of “regulator-turns-pharmaceutical-big-shot” movement from the FDA to giant pharma corporations in order for the corporations to work around these “barriers”.

Adds March:

That way was for the drug industry to hire FDA employees. As Dr. Mary Ruwart notes in her book Death by Regulation, only ten percent of FDA officials left the agency for the pharmaceutical industry between 1959 and 1963. After the amendments took effect, the percentage increased to seventy-six percent. Such figures continue today as the FDA continues to develop ‘evolving regulatory powers.

And, one can add, this happens as the FDA continues to run counter to ethics and logic by telling people who are supposedly “free” that they cannot take a drug that has been used safely for decades, a drug that, when used in conjunction with zinc, hundreds of doctors testify has been successful in combating COVID19.

At least Minnesota’s Governor Walz has had a change of heart. The larger problem of state and federal politicians and bureaucrats claiming the abstract power to control what medicine we can obtain, or how much it will cost, or what companies get to make it? That problem remains.

And it will continue to stand over us like a hooded executioner as long as vast portions of the American population believe the Emperor’s fantasy that the FDA is sanctioned by either the US Constitution or basic human ethics.

The naked truth is just the opposite.


(Cover Photo: Lorie Shaull)

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