Testimony before Texas Senate
Peter McCullough, M.D., is an internist and cardiologist. A professor of medicine at Texas A&M University College of Medicine, Dr. McCullough works on the Baylor Dallas Campus. He’s been involved in the response to COVID-19, both as an academic and as a physician who treats patients. In this testimony, Dr. Peter McCullough argues that COVID-19 is treatable, that the COVID-19 vaccines are not a magic bullet, and that there has been a concerted effort to keep important and even life-saving information from the American public.
Dr. Peter McCullough testified to the Texas Senate Health and Human Services Committee on March 10, 2021.
What follows is an edited and annotated transcript of his testimony. We’re concerned about the censorship on YouTube, Medium, Facebook, and many other social media platforms. In case it gets scrubbed from YouTube, we provide Peter McCullough’s testimony here.
The opinions I’ll express are those of my own and not necessarily those of my institution, Peter McCullough, M.D., began. I am an academic doctor. I see patients but I’m very involved in research. I’m also an editor of two major journals. I can tell you, I’m the most published person, in my field—which deals with the heart and the kidneys—in the world.
He continues:
When COVID 19 hit I saw it as our medical Super Bowl. There were going to be doctors, like Dr. Urso [Richard Urso, M.D. is an ophthalmologist in practice since 1988. He argues that masks, lockdowns, and waiting for a vaccine was an unsustainable model from the beginning], coming out of wherever they worked to face the virus.
Peter McCullough refused to let patients languish without treatment
And there were doctors in the hospitals that just had to receive the virus, and then there were those who headed for the sidelines. Then there were those that were detractors against the pandemic. So as I started to survey the literature, I had patients with heart and lung disease who needed urgent treatment. And I refused to let a patient languish at home with no treatment and then be hospitalized when it was too late … So I used the best tools or drugs available at the time, and these are appropriately prescribed off-label.
A label isn’t a scientific document
Remember a label is an advertising label. A label isn’t a scientific document. Sure, there is an appropriately prescribed off-label use of conventional medicine to treat an illness. In May I put together a team of doctors. The group that was facing the pandemic to the greatest degree was in Milan, Italy, so most of them were in the Coracle Italian Research Network.
[Our team] summarized all we knew about the available drugs. And we published our finding in the August 8th issue of The American Journal of Medicine. And the title of that paper was “The Pathophysiologic Basis and Rationale for Early Outpatient Treatment of SARS-CoV-2 (COVID-19) Infection.”
[Our paper] had a premise. There are two bad outcomes to COVID-19:
- Hospitalization
- Death
The second premise: if we don’t do something [to treat patients with COVID-19] before the hospitalization, we can never stop it. We can never stop it.
I was the lead author on that paper. But we had dozens of authors from Italy, India, UCLA, Emory. We had the best institutions in the United States. I can tell you the interesting thing was, there were 50,000 papers in the peer-reviewed literature on COVID, not a single one told a doctor how to treat it. Not a single one. When does that happen? I was absolutely stunned.
And when this paper was published in The American Journal of Medicine it became a lightning rod. It became the most cited paper in basically all of medicine at that time. Boy, the world started knocking down my door. And I said, ‘Oh my lord I just can’t believe what became untapped.’
My daughter said, “Why don’t you make a YouTube video?”
I had never been on social media before. My daughter, who was home from law school, I was talking to her about it, and she said, “Well why don’t you make a YouTube video?”
So I made a YouTube video with four slides from my paper. This is a peer-reviewed paper published in one of the world’s best medical journals in the world.
Four slides. I even wore a tie and a suit. And she showed me how to record it in PowerPoint and I posted it on YouTube.
It went absolutely viral. Within about a week, YouTube said, “You violated the terms of the community.”
And that’s when Senator [Ron] Johnson’s office got involved in Washington [Senator Ron Johnson held hearings in Washington on alternative COVID-19 treatments]. And said, “Oh my gosh this is important scientific information to help patients in the middle of this crisis, and social media is striking it down. Based on what authority?”
Blocking information about how to treat COVID patients
Well, one thing led to another, and I became the lead witness for the U.S. Senate testimony on November 19, 2020. And the reason why there was senate testimony is because there was a near total block on any information of treatment to patients. A near total block.
So what had happened over time was that we had gotten into a cycle in America of no information on treatment, patients actually think that the virus is untreatable. And so what happens is they go out to get a diagnosis. Now, I’m a COVID survivor. My wife Negalia is a COVID survivor, my father in a nursing home is also a COVID survivor.
A diagnosis feels like a death sentence, says Peter McCoughlin
You get handed a diagnostic test, it says here you’re COVID positive, go home.
Is there any treatment? No.
Is there any resources I can call? No.
Any referral lines, hotlines? No.
Any research hotlines? No.
That’s the standard of care in the United States! And if we go to any one of our testing centers today in Texas, I bet that’s [still] the standard of care. No wonder we’ve had 45,000 deaths in Texas! The average person in Texas thinks there’s no treatment. They honestly think there’s no treatment.
They don’t even know about the EUA [Emergency Use Authorization] antibodies [the FDA authorized a treatment for COVID-19 using monoclonal antibodies in November of 2020. Read more about that here].
You heard from a 90 year old gentleman who got Bamlanivimab [a drug to treat COVID], terrific!
Where’s the focus? Cause there’s such a focus on the vaccine; Where’s the focus on people sick right now? This committee ought to know where all these monoclonal antibodies are. They ought to know where all the treatment protocols are. They ought to have a list of the treatment centers in Texas that actually treat patients with COVID-19.
So I led the initiative. Our second paper was published in a dedicated issue of Reviews in Cardiovascular Medicine. Now I had 57 authors including Dr. Urso, Dr. [Stella] Immanuel, lead doctors in Houston, San Antonio, all over, and it was another worldwide paper. And now we have it updated, integrated.
Peter McCullough: “The best inflammatory drug is colchicine”
So, yes, we used drugs to effect viable replication. The antibodies are terrific. We can use intracellular anti-infectives in that box. We use corticosteroids and inflammatory drugs. The best inflammatory drug is colchicine. You’ve probably never heard about it. In the largest highest quality randomized trial of over 4,000 patients; double-blinded randomized placebo-controlled trial. There’s a [nearly] 50% reduction in mortality.
No word of it, none. Complete block to anybody. Colchicine.
How can that be?
And then the most deadly part of the viral infection is thrombosis. So I have always treated my patients with something to treat the virus, something to treat the inflammation, and something to treat thrombosis. Just as Dr. Urso had. And I have very very sick patients, and I’ve lost two.
The censorship has been beyond belief: “It is a blanking phenomenon”
But I have to tell you, what has gone on has been beyond belief. How many of you have turned on a local news station? Or a national cable news station and ever gotten an update on treatment at home? How many of you have ever gotten a single word about what to do when you get handed the diagnosis of COVID-19?
No wonder, that is a complete and total failure at every level.
Okay, let’s take the White House. How come we didn’t have a panel of doctors assigned to put all their efforts to stop these hospitalizations? Why didn’t we have doctors that actually treated patients get together in a group and every week give us an update?
Why didn’t we have that? Why didn’t we have that at the state level? Zero. Why didn’t we have any reports about how many patients were treated and spared hospitalization? I listened to 6 hours of testimony today. Zero. Zero.
We have a complete and total blank spot on treatment. It is a blanking phenomenon.
There are some heroes, says Peter McCullough
At least in the United States there are some heroes. The American Society of Physicians and Surgeons took the lead. They’re the group. They’ve identified 35 treatment centers in Texas. AAPS knew who they are. They have emergency hot lines. They helped Dr. Hall put together this very brief pamphlet, but there is a more extensive one. We can pass it [the AAPS guide, which has been used to treat over 500,000 cases in the United States] around to everyone. That at least gives people half a chance to find out about information.
This is a complete and total travesty: to have a fatal disease and not treat it. Now the National Institutes of Health and the Infectious Disease Society of America started putting out guidelines in the treatment of COVID-19. And to date [these guidelines] nearly exclusively deal with a hospitalized patient.
The two papers that I have published as the lead author, and supported by wonderful people like Dr. Urso, are the only publications in the peer-reviewed literature that tell doctors how to treat COVID-19 as an outpatient, based on the support of scientific information. The only two.
The home treatment guide by the American Physicians and Surgeons is the only source of information available to patients on how to treat COVID-19 at home. The only source.
We need a treatment guide
So what can be done right here right now? There’s going to be more people who die in Texas, and it’s an absolute tragedy. How about tomorrow? Let’s have a law that says there is not a single result given out without a treatment guide and without a hotline of how to get into research.
Let’s put a staffer on this and find out all the research available in Texas. And let’s not have a single person go home with a test result with their fatal diagnosis, sitting at home going into two weeks of despair before they succumb to hospitalization and death.
It is unimaginable in America that we can have such a complete and total blind spot. I blame the doctors for not stepping up. Where was the medical society stepping and putting effort on this? How about the federal and state agencies? There never was a single bit of group collaborative effort to stop the hospitalizations! Nobody even kind of thought about it. Bob Hall had me on a teleconference in April or May and we were like wait a minute, how come, where’s UT Southwestern? I’m a graduate of UT Southwestern. Where’s A&M? Where’s the rest of the universities? How come we’re not stopping this? How come we are not stopping this?
Why haven’t we looked to successful treatment in other countries?
But it gets worse! Because in the paper I published in December of 2020, you know what we did, I had a terrific doctor in Brazil. We went through country by country by country and just asked the question “What are the other countries doing?”
When was the last time you turned on the news and ever got a window to the outside world? When did you ever get an update about how the rest of the world was handling COVID?
Never.
What’s happened in this pandemic is a world has closed in on us. There is only one doctor whose face is on TV now. One. Not a panel. Doctors, we always work in groups, we always have different opinions. There’s not a single media doctor on TV who’s ever treated a COVID-19 patient. Not a single one.
There’s not a single person in the White House task force who’s ever treated a patient. Why don’t we do something bold? Why don’t we put together a panel of doctors that have actually treated outpatients of COVID 19 and get them together for a meeting? And why don’t we exchange ideas? And why don’t we say how we can finish the pandemic strongly?
Isn’t it amazing?
The complete and total blind spot on treatment
Think about this. Think about the complete and total blind spot.
So what happened?
I can tell you what happened.
What happened was that in around May it became know that the virus was going to be amenable to a vaccine. All efforts on treatment were dropped.
The National Institutes of Health actually had a multi-drug program. They dropped it after 20 patients, said we can’t find the patients. The most disingenuous announcement of all time. And then [Operation] Warp Speed went full tilt for vaccine development and there was a silencing of any information on treatment. Any. Silencing. Scrubbed from Twitter, YouTube. Can’t get papers published on this. We can’t even get information out in our own medical literature on this. There’s been a complete scrubbing.
So this program has been one of try to reduce the spread of the virus, and wait for a vaccine. And when we vaccinate, all efforts have to be on vaccination. And probably I’ve had 4 hours of vaccination on here.
Herd immunity in Texas achieved without vaccines
Think about it as we sit here today, the calculations in Texas on herd immunity. We’re at 80% herd immunity right now. With no vaccine effect. Eighty percent. And more people are developing COVID-19 today. They’re going to become immune.
People who develop COVID have complete and durable immunity. It’s a very important principle: complete and durable. You can’t beat natural immunity. You can’t vaccinate on top of it and make it better. There’s no scientific clinical or safety rationale for ever vaccinating a COVID-recovered patient.
There’s no rationale for ever testing a COVID recovered patient. My wife and I are COVID recovered. Why did we go through the testing outside? There’s absolutely no rationale.
Peter McCullough, M.D.: COVID-recovered patients should not get the vaccine
I’d encourage this committee to actually look at what’s being done and ask is there any rationale? Is there any rationale for anything? Listen, there are plenty of COVID-recovered patients. Let them forgo the vaccine. And let people who are clamoring for it get it. But at 80% herd immunity … In the vaccine trials fewer than 1% in the vaccine and in the placebo actually get COVID. Fewer than 1%. The vaccine’s going to have a 1% public health impact. That’s what the data says.
It’s not going to save us. We’re already 80% herd immune. If we’re strategically targeted we can actually close out the pandemic very well with the vaccine, but strategically targeted.
People under 50 who fundamentally have no health risks: There’s no scientific rationale for them to ever become vaccinated. There’s no scientific rationale.
Fear of asymptomatic spread not a reason to vaccinate
One of the mistakes I heard today as a rationale for vaccination is asymptomatic spread. And I want you to be very clear about this.
My opinion is: There is a low degree, if any, of asymptomatic spread. Sick person gives it to sick person. The Chinese have published a study in the British Medical Journal, 11 million people. They tried to find asymptomatic spread. You can’t find it. And that’s been one of the important pieces of misinformation.
When Senator Hall called a conference call, “What should we do in the Capitol when we reopen?”
I said, “You know what? You know what we do at Baylor when you walk in? They zap your temperature.” You have a temperature check and go in.
Do we test everybody that walks in Baylor Hospital?
No.
Are they a lot sicker than everybody in this room?
You better believe it.
So, why would we do something here at the Capitol that has absolutely positively no scientific rationale?
It’s always been a treatable illness
So my testimony as we sit here today is that COVID-19 has always been a treatable illness.
A very large study from Mckinney, Texas, another one from New York City, show that when doctors treat patients early who are over age 50 with medical problems with a sequence multi-drug approach with the available drugs, 4 to 6 drugs that are available to them, now that monoclonal antibodies are better, there’s an 85% reduction in hospitalizations and death.
Eighty-five percent. Eighty five percent. I want you to remember that number: 85%. We’ve had over 500,000 deaths in the United States. The preventable fraction could have been as high as 85%, if our pandemic response would have been laser-focused on the problem: the sick patient right in front of us. We’re focused over here, and focused over there, and focused on masks, and what have you. Laser-focused: sick patient—treat them. We lost focus on the most fundamental thing. That’s my testimony.
15:20 At this point in the testimony, Senator Lois Kolkhorst interrupted Dr. Peter McCullough.
Senator Lois Kolkhorst:
I can tell how passionate you are … COVID-19 is going to be with us. The message is that there are drugs out there that work, there are therapies out there that work.
Dr. Peter McCullough:
But no single one works alone. The dismissive mistake was to do a very small study. Oh, we studied 200 patients and we used ivermectin or hydroxychloroquine and it didn’t work. That’s like picking one drug and saying oh, it doesn’t reduce cancer mortality. We never do that in cancer, we never did that in AIDS.; we don’t do that in hepatitis C … What we look for is signals of benefit and safety and then we combine them.
At the 19-minute mark Dr. Peter McCullough claims that medical doctors who say they don’t treat COVID are really saying they don’t care about the outcomes of patients with COVID. “We have a crisis of compassion in our country, in the medical field.”
Wendy Walker transcribed the YouTube video of Dr. Peter McCullough’s testimony. She has been in the medical field for over twenty years. She’s an advocate for informed consent and honest information. Wendy supports transparency in healthcare, to combat the fear of the unknown. She believes in standing up for the right to speak out, against policies she feels are wrong.
References:
McCullough PA, Kelly RJ, Ruocco G, Lerma E, Tumlin J, Wheelan KR, Katz N, Lepor NE, Vijay K, Carter H, Singh B, McCullough SP, Bhambi BK, Palazzuoli A, De Ferrari GM, Milligan GP, Safder T, Tecson KM, Wang DD, McKinnon JE, O’Neill WW, Zervos M, Risch HA. “Pathophysiological Basis and Rationale for Early Outpatient Treatment of SARS-CoV-2 (COVID-19) Infection.” Am J Med. 2021 Jan;134(1):16-22. doi: 10.1016/j.amjmed.2020.07.003. Epub 2020 Aug 7. PMID: 32771461; PMCID: PMC7410805.
McCullough PA, Alexander PE, Armstrong R, Arvinte C, Bain AF, Bartlett RP, Berkowitz RL, Berry AC, Borody TJ, Brewer JH, Brufsky AM, Clarke T, Derwand R, Eck A, Eck J, Eisner RA, Fareed GC, Farella A, Fonseca SNS, Geyer CE Jr, Gonnering RS, Graves KE, Gross KBV, Hazan S, Held KS, Hight HT, Immanuel S, Jacobs MM, Ladapo JA, Lee LH, Littell J, Lozano I, Mangat HS, Marble B, McKinnon JE, Merritt LD, Orient JM, Oskoui R, Pompan DC, Procter BC, Prodromos C, Rajter JC, Rajter JJ, Ram CVS, Rios SS, Risch HA, Robb MJA, Rutherford M, Scholz M, Singleton MM, Tumlin JA, Tyson BM, Urso RG, Victory K, Vliet EL, Wax CM, Wolkoff AG, Wooll V, Zelenko V. “Multifaceted highly targeted sequential multidrug treatment of early ambulatory high-risk SARS-CoV-2 infection (COVID-19).” Rev Cardiovasc Med. 2020 Dec 30;21(4):517-530. doi: 10.31083/j.rcm.2020.04.264. PMID: 33387997.
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About Jennifer Margulis, Ph.D.
Jennifer Margulis, Ph.D., is an investigative journalist, book author, and Fulbright awardee. She is the author of Your Baby, Your Way: Taking Charge of Your Pregnancy, Childbirth, and Parenting Decisions for a Happier, Healthier Family, co-author (with Paul Thomas, M.D.) of The Vaccine-Friendly Plan, and The Addiction Spectrum: A Compassionate, Holistic Approach to Recovery. Follow her on Facebook, Twitter, and Pinterest.
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Lawsuit against Dr. McCullough dismissed with predjudice