Fauci Brushed Off E-mail Suggesting Hydroxychloroquine Was Effective Against COVID-19: “Too Long for Me to Read”
Dr. Anthony Fauci (AP Images)

Dr. Anthony Fauci, in March 2020, received an e-mail from Erik Nilsen, the co-founder and interim CEO at Bio-Signal Technologies, regarding China covering up the Wuhan Lab outbreak as well as two effective drugs for treating patients with COVID-19. Dr. Fauci brushed off the message as “too long” for him to read.

Bio-Signal Technologies, which Nilsen works for, is a Texas-based company that develops sophisticated tools for neuroscience research and applications of neuroprosthetics and brain-machine interfaces (BMIs). 

Nielsen, in the e-mail, said he had instructed members of his family to get “Alvesco (ciclesonide) for emergency use only.” He claimed that his “colleagues on the front-line in Japan, China, and Korea found several pre-print papers, that it is an effective treatment for late-stage COVID-19 patients.”

The physicist continued, “Some patients on ventilators who were approaching death have fully recovered after treatment with ciclesonide,” noting “ciclesonide has much smaller particles than other corticosteroids, so it reaches deeper into lungs and alveolis,” while the treatment also seems to be a potent suppressor of virus replication.” All while being “safe for infant – 100+ year-old patients.”

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Neilsen claimed there was a second drug that could possibly be used, which he advised his family to get. He wrote to Fauci the drug “is called hydroxychloroquine,” which, he said, “also seems to be effective and safe.”

However, he noted, “Alvesco is better because it appears to prevent the virus from replicating so infection is wiped out and no longer contagious. Alvesco seems to be two silver bullets in one.”

Two days after this e-mail, Fauci, to whom most of the nation looked for a trusted voice of science, said, “The answer is no” when he was asked if hydroxychloroquine (HCQ) is an effective coronavirus treatment. Fauci stated that the “signs of the drug’s promise were purely ‘anecdotal evidence.’”

“Anecdotal evidence,” however, was published in 2005 by The Virology Journal — the official publication of National Institutes of Health (NIH) — in a study titled in a very explicit way: “Chloroquine is a potent inhibitor of SARS coronavirus infection and spread.”

Write the researchers, “We report … that chloroquine has strong antiviral effects on SARS-CoV infection of primate cells. These inhibitory effects are observed when the cells are treated with the drug either before or after exposure to the virus, suggesting both prophylactic and therapeutic advantage.”

In April 2020, a French study showed HCQ combined with azithromycin, an antibiotic, was safe and effective in lowering COVID-19’s virus count in patients who had first contracted the disease. President Trump immediately cited the study — as it was good news. The world was at the height of the pandemic and HCQ had been approved and used by physicians for 85 years to treat both malaria and some autoimmune diseases. 

The drug was generic, cheap, and widely available. It offered hope as the nation waited for Big Pharma to develop a vaccination.

In May, two respected scientific journals the Lancet and the New England Journal of Medicine reported studies purportedly showing HCQ increased the death rate of COVID-19 patients and caused heart problems. It seemed like a much-needed excuse for the media and the Democrats to shut the door on HCQ — except both studies were retracted within the following two months for shoddy work. Still, the damage was done. 

“I’m not so sure it should be banned, but clearly the scientific data is really quite evident now about the lack of efficacy for it,” Dr. Fauci said during a CNN interview, when asked whether the United States should ban the drug for treating Covid-19, as France did, following the Lancet and The NEJM publications.

Later in July, the Henry Ford Health Center in Detroit released a study that found HCQ lowered mortality rates in hospitalized COVID-19 patients by more than 50 percent.  

Another portion of information sent to Fauci by Nilsen, who said he had been “modeling this outbreak since January,” suggested China was lying about the number of coronavirus deaths.

“The data posted by China is not only garbage, it has misled the world into a false sense of security” vis-à-vis “death rate, age vs. death” and “I truly believe the outbreak tsunami in the USA is either already happened or is about to happen. As you know, as soon as a surge is sensed, the Tsunami will immediately follow. I believe we missed the containment boat quite a while ago,” Nilsen wrote.

The physicist mentioned that he had “lots of information about China” because of his “business, scientific, friendship, and other ties with many there, including immunologists & virologists at top-tier institutions and laboratories.”

Fauci forwarded the e-mail to a member of the NIH, writing, “Too long for me to read.”

The newly released e-mails of Dr. Fauci were obtained by BuzzFeed News via the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA).