Covid-19 and Guttenberg’s press   E. Ablorh-Odjidja July 29, 2020   Say something positive about hydroxychloroquine these days and you will be promptly censored and struck off social media.   That was what happened to Dr. Stella Immanuel. Her media post on the efficacy of hydroxychloroquine combination cure went viral, attracted some twenty million viewers, but got removed.   Mass media politics has impacted science. Why that is, I am not in a position to say. But clearly, censorship on the search for COVID-19 cure is at the fore. And information on the subject is being snubbed at a rate unknown in previous generations, all because of politics.   The consequences of this phenomenon are not certain. But it is left to society to grapple with it.   On July 26, 2020, Dr. Stella Immanuel and a group of doctors, “Doctors on Frontline,” appeared at Capitol Hill, Washington, DC to announce that hydroxychloroquine, azithromycin, and zinc combination, when applied early, was a cure for COVID-19.   Dr. Immanuel’s message, a pediatrician from Africa, trained as a doctor in Nigeria, went viral.   Twitter, Facebook, and YouTube promptly took her message down; deemed too dangerous for public consumption, they said.   Thus, the medium that is supposed to be a public platform to connect people to information has now become more like one in the Rome of old before the Guttenberg press.   Before the 16th century, Rome had censorship right over most information; politics, science, and religion.  The monopoly began to crumble after Johannes Guttenberg invented the moveable type printing press around the 1450s.   But, five hundred years later, we have rebounded to the Rome type of censorship.  Corporate giants of mass media can now censor inconvenient information; not based on standards that are known, but on conjecture and the politics of convenience.   So, Dr. Stella Immanuel’s message became offensive.  Her view, that “hydroxychloroquine, azithromycin, and zinc” combination worked, when delivered early to patients, went into the trash basket.   Surprisingly, just at the time the world was waiting anxiously for the COVID-19 cure; the simpler and cheaper the cure, the better was the doctor's intent.   In this context, hydroxychloroquine, already in use for some 60 years, should be welcomed news.  Instead, it has become a drug of much controversy.   Dr. Stella Immanuel and her group asserted on anecdotal experiences, that the drug cured 350 COVID-19 patients that were in their care.  Could science first check the anecdotal findings of cure, before rushing to dismiss the claim and then accuse her of trying to favor Trump?   Trump was the first to express open optimism for hydroxychloroquine.  Immediately after, the drug became controversial.   “The drug has “toxicities …. Add to that politicians like Donald Trump, full of magical thinking and possessed of a long history of selling snake oil himself, glommed onto these drugs as the solution to the pandemic before clinical trials showed any benefit.” Wrote “Science-Based-Medicine,” a left-leaning web publication.   Notice the absence of scientific certainty and the openly subjective political tone in the above remark.   Following shortly, The Lancet, a highly reputable medical publication, raised alarm about the drug. The underlying message was that Trump was promoting a cure that had yet to be proven sanguine to health.   Soon after the Lancet report, The WHO, an organization that was in open opposition to Trump, suspended trials on hydroxychloroquine because of similar concerns; insisting that the drug had not met strict clinical trial in a double-blind study.   Switzerland and some other countries followed The WHO lead.  But soon, Switzerland was back on hydroxychloroquine.   “The retraction was so stealth that the ban was not lifted in Switzerland until June 11th,” said PJ Media.   The Lancet was to follow with a retraction of the negative concerns it had earlier published.  And another retraction followed in the New England Journal of Medicine, which had earlier similar negative concerns on the drug.   Both publications wrote, “We can no longer vouch for the veracity of the primary data sources…. The authors have requested that the paper be retracted.”   Meanwhile, in the wings were non-conforming doctors like Dr. Immanuel, who wished for a cure, and were willing to repurpose the hydroxychloroquine drug for Covid-19.   Didier Raoult, MD, Ph.D., a renowned epidemiologist from France, and others had already reported favorable research on the drug on their own.  So did the Henry Ford Healthcare System of Chicago.  Fearing that COVID-19 would overwhelm its workers, the group decided to research the drug.   The Ford Health System said, “Hydroxychloroquine saved coronavirus patients' lives, Michigan study shows,” wrote the press.   It went on, “Early treatment with hydroxychloroquine cut the death rate significantly in certain sick patients hospitalized with COVID-19 — and without heart-related side effects, according to a new study published by Henry Ford Health System.”   Another independent report came from a prestigious university.   “Harvey Risch, a professor of epidemiology at Yale as well as the director of that school's Molecular Cancer Epidemiology Laboratory, argues in a Newsweek op-ed this week that "the data fully support" the wide use of hydroxychloroquine as an effective treatment of COVID-19,” reported by JustTheNews web publication.   These reports were known before Dr. Stella Immanuel spoke, but they were ignored.  The scientific approach went out of the window because of the fear that it might support Trump’s speculation.   So down went Dr. Immanuel’s social media face.   “The president is pushing the coronavirus theories of a Houston doctor (Dr. Immanuel) who also says sexual visitations by demons and alien DNA are at the root of Americans’ common health concerns,” the DailyBeast wrote.   Of course, Dr. Immanuel is African so the description must fit.  She probably had the bones in her nose removed before the press conference on Capitol Hill.   But please note, the white doctors in her group were spared.  And had the same insult been leveled to a Whoopie Goldberg, the howls of racism from the "woke" crowd would have promptly resulted.    But to be fair, there was some vitriolic criticism of Dr. Immanuel from some African medical colleagues too.   One said, “She lives in Louisiana and Huston but comes to Washington for this speech.”  And another, “She is not a Nigerian. She comes from Cameroon.”  And one notes the idiocy:  what her origin has to do with medical science!   But the scientific proof of her assertion on the drug, total silence!   Before Dr. Immanuel's statement, Trump had already declared that he took the drug for 14 days for prophylactic reasons. How well or worse off is he now at the time of the doctor’s statement?   COVID-19, or the Chinese Virus, is killing millions.  And a drug is needed.  But we need to preclude hydroxychloroquine because of Trump.    Thus, nowhere in the attack against Dr. Immanuel was it asked if her optimism and anecdotal observations on the drug were warranted.  And no show of sympathy or wish for this drug that could have been so affordable for poor nations, except the mission to bury all efforts in promoting it.   It will be disingenuous not to admit at this stage that the search for a COVID-19 cure has turned into political war on Trump.  He was the first to endorse hydroxychloroquine.  Therefore, the need to ridicule Trump has resulted in a hurried condemnation of the drug’s efficacy.    Hopefully, a cure will be found soon and should prove as affordable as the hydroxychloroquine combination.  But right now, it is enough to claim that the “listen to science” cry against the drug is powered by political angst, not science.   E. Ablorh-Odjidja, Publisher www.ghanadot.com, Washington, DC, July 29, 2020. Permission to publish: Please feel free to publish or reproduce, with credits, unedited. If posted on a website, email a copy of the web page to publisher@ghanadot.com. Or don't publish at all. at this stage