About the non-reappraisal of the Covid-19 pandemic

Death by WHO recommendation?

by Professor Konstantin Beck,* Switzerland

(29 December 2023) During the Covid-19 pandemic, Switzerland deviated from WHO recommendations and thus avoided thousands of deaths. If the “Pandemic Treaty” had already been in force, the death toll would probably have been as grim as in the United States.

The “World Health Organisation” (WHO) probably made its biggest mistake at the start of the pandemic. At that time, thousands of doctors around the world were looking for ways to fight Covid-19, a learning process took place. Vitamins D and C, “Ivermectin” and the antimalarial “Hydroxychloroquine” (HCQ) were promising candidates.

Hydroxychloroquine is cheap, very old, has harmless side effects, and was already successfully used years ago against SARS-CoV-1. In March 2020, prominent French infectious disease specialist Didier Raoult published a preliminary report on the successful treatment of 36 Covid-19 patients with HCQ. In April 2020, Vladimir Zelenko from New York State confirmed the positive effect in 800 patients. Further publications of positive treatment results followed.1

Yet the WHO ignored these results. From the start, it took the view that Covid-19 was a completely new disease that needed to be fought with completely new vaccines. Infected people could do nothing but isolate themselves at home and go to hospital as soon as they started having difficulty breathing. The website of the Federal Office of Public Health (FOPH) also provided information in accordance with the WHO.

Alternative drugs were officially considered dangerous. Rightly so? In May 2020, the specialised publications “Lancet” and “New England Journal of Medicine” published the results of a large-scale HCQ study covering 96,000 patients from 600 hospitals. The conclusion was overwhelming: HCQ was far too dangerous, the risk of a heart attack as a side effect was not justifiable.

A barely noticed scientific scandal

But the story didn’t end there. About 200 researchers reviewed the studies and concluded that the database was a fabrication and that the study was botched. For example, the number of deaths from HCQ in a single Australian hospital was higher than the total number of deaths in all of Australia.

The “New York Times” revealed the forgery on 29 May 2020, the “Neue Zürcher Zeitung” called it a “tangible scandal”,2 but it took two full weeks to remove these botched studies: one of the biggest scientific scandals of all time, barely noticed by the mainstream.

However, what did the American health authorities do? They prohibited American doctors from using the products at their own risk. And many governors have implemented this ban in their states. HCQ was collected, locked up and destroyed. On 17 June 2020, the Secretary General of the WHO called for all countries in the world to no longer authorise the use of HCQ for the treatment of Covid-19.

How was this possible? The decision was based on the Recovery study3 funded by the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, which focused on cases in which HCQ was administered very late in the course of the disease, when it was common knowledge that early administration was decisive for favourable developments. In addition, the dosage administered for the study was also too high: not just a little, but 2400 to 800 mg/day instead of the standard dose of 400 mg/day. The American Medical Association (AAPS) writes on this topic4 that HCQ was used in the Recovery study, but also in various WHO studies, in doses so high that it was potentially toxic, even fatal. In all cases, the maximum recommended dose was far exceeded.

As of 11 October 2021, 31 other studies have shown improvement with HCQ, 13 of which were statistically significant. Only one study showed minimal, but not significant, worsening. No study has been able to demonstrate a significant deterioration in health in the event of low doses and early administration.

Despite this, HCQ has been outlawed, banned in many places, and physically destroyed in the United States. An incredible story. And what was Switzerland doing? It was among the countries that banned the use of HCQ following the publication of the fraudulent “Lancet” study and authorised it again when the fraud was discovered. The ban was valid from 27 May to 11 June 2020. And what was its consequence? Twelve days after the ban on HCQ, the Covid mortality rate in Switzerland (deaths per infected person according to FOPH statistics) rose sharply, and ten days after re-authorisation, it dropped suddenly. Just one spike at the right time could be a coincidence, but two in a row?

Not really. The difference in mortality was considerable. If Switzerland had maintained the ban in accordance with WHO requirements, there might have been 5,300 additional Covid deaths by the end of 2020 (i.e. before the vaccination mandate) – an increase of 69%! My calculation was criticised, the argument being that HCQ played no role in Swiss hospitals’ Covid-19 treatment guidelines. However, it turned out that the use of HCQ had to come early to be effective, before entering the hospital.

Its absence in the treatment guidelines was therefore of no importance. Rather, the question is whether HCQ played a role in outpatient care. And it did. The “Aargauer Zeitung” confirmed a doubling of HCQ demand from March 2020;5 the product was therefore well known in Switzerland and, except for the short ban period, also available.

However, HCQ was not the only alternative product. Ivermectin is a drug whose development was honored with the Nobel Prize in 2005 and which has also found many applications outside of human medicine. In the “Aargauer Zeitung” we could read: “Vaccination skeptics rely on dewormers for horses.”⁶ Who would still want to swallow Ivermectin after such a description? The ordeal of Ivermectin was comparable to that of HCQ. Although not been completely banned, it was successfully discredited and the WHO has limited its use to clinical studies.

The Elgg miracle

Strengthening immunity with cheap vitamin preparations was also ignored. Anyone recommending or even discussing such a treatment on a YouTube video risked being deplatformed, as the praise of vitamin D contradicted WHO recommendations. In October 2020, the “Neue Zürcher Zeitung” reported on the “Elgg miracle”. One of the largest Covid-19 epidemics in Switzerland took place in the retirement and nursing home of this small Zurich town. 56 people were infected, including 25 very old people. But no one got seriously ill. According to the “Neue Zürcher Zeitung”, the experts were faced with a conundrum. Elgg’s miracle had a trivial explanation: the residents’ immune systems had been boosted before infection with vitamins D and C, zinc, and selenium.

A “miracle” that the literature had already predicted in June 2020. Later, Jason B. Gibbons and his colleagues quantified the effects: 33% fewer contaminations and 20% fewer deaths thanks to the use of vitamins – which, for 2020 in the United States alone, would have reduced Covid-19 cases by four million and preventable deaths by 116,000.⁷ In Switzerland too, there were reprehensible omissions, because the Elgg treatment protocol was never made public. In autumn 2021, I discovered a surprising correlation when analysing the results of the Covid referendum [edit. instrument of direct democracy]. In the cantons that rejected the Covid-19 measures at the ballot box, there were 24% fewer recorded Covid-19 deaths in 2020, the year prior to vaccination, than was to be expected based on the number of inhabitants and age in each canton. In the cantons that clearly supported the measures, the same mortality was 13% higher than expected.⁸

Can a virus from China distinguish between a Swiss-German activist supporting freedom of choice and a French-speaking person? Probably not! Considering the debate on drugs, this suddenly made sense; opponents to the measures weren’t generally vaccinated either, they therefore had a vital interest in knowing about effective means in the event of contamination.

Are there any counterexamples? The United States, which protected its citizens particularly effectively against taking allegedly dangerous immunity enhancers, have today a record rate of 3,500 Covid deaths per million inhabitants. Even if there are other reasons for this, it is certainly not a success of the drug bans.

Based on everything we know about the preventive and curative effect of the drugs banned by the WHO, it is clear that a reasonable prevention strategy – without lockdowns – would have made it possible to considerably reduce the number of Covid victims.

However, if the planned Pandemic Treaty by the WHO had been in force already in 2020, there would have been no Elgg miracle nor HCQ re-authorisation, but thousands of additional preventable deaths.

* Konstantin Beck (born 1962) is Full Professor of Insurance Economics at the University of Lucerne. This text is a revised extract from his new book on Covid and the influence of the WHO, which will be published shortly.

Source: «Schweizer Monat», Special issue 45, November 2023
https://schweizermonat.ch/tod-durch-who-empfehlung/, 1 November 2023

(Translation “Swiss Standpoint”)

1 A more detailed presentation with numeous sources can be found in: Robert Kennedy Jr : «The Real Anthony Fauci», Skyhorse Publishing, 2021, and Werner Vontobel : «Die Medien kannten die Antworten, bevor sie die Frage gestellt hatten», in: Konstantin Beck, Andreas Kley, Peter Rohner, Pietro Vernazza. (éd.): Der Corona-Elefant, Versus, Zurich, chap. 4, 2022

2 Alain Niederer: «Wenn Forscher Abkürzungen nehmen». In: NZZ from 19 June 2020

3 Recovery Collaborative Group: «Effect of Hydroxy-chloroquine in Hospitalized Patients with Covid-19». N Engl J Med 383: 2030–2040, 2020.

4 AAPS, States Association of American Physicians & Surgeons: «Researchers Overdosing Covid-19 Patients on Hydroxychloroquine», 17 June 2020.

5 Lorenz Honegger: «Ärzte kauften angebliches Corona-Wundermittel zum Eigengebrauch». In: Aargauer Zeitung from 18 May 2020.

6 Christoph Bernet: «Ivermectin – Impfskeptiker setzen auf Entwurmungsmittel für Pferde». In: Aargauer Zeitung from 1 November 2021.

7 Jason B. Gibbons et al.: «Association between Vitamin D Supplementation and Covid-19 Infection and Mortality». Sci Rep 12, 19397, 2022; https://doi.org/10.1038/s41598-022-24053-4

8 Konstantin Beck: «Wer sind die Corona-Skeptiker?» YouTube; 8 November 2021; https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4cvJRMxjKql