Free Republic

The Taliban returned to power last year - but have since failed to live up to their promises when it comes to women's rights.Large crowds gathered in Afghanistan to watch the first public flogging gathered at a football stadium in the country since the Taliban were ousted more than two decades ago. In scenes described by one commentator as “just history repeating itself”, three women and nine men were beaten in front of hundreds of spectators at the orders of the religious extremist organisation, which returned to power in August. The office of the governor of Logar province, south of...

Melania Trump made an announcement on Twitter this week that had some users scratching their heads. She’s joining all of the living former first ladies — Michelle Obama, Laura Bush, Hillary Clinton, Rosalynn Carter, along with current First Lady Dr. Jill Biden — to join efforts to get a women’s suffrage monument erected on the National Mall in Washington, D.C. “I am honored to join @WomensMonument and serve as an Honorary Chair of the Women’s Suffrage National Monument Foundation to help secure a monument on the National Mall of enduring inspiration for women and future female leaders,” Melania tweeted. The...

Attorneys Dan Watkins and Michael Hamilton announced in a national Press Conference September 7 the filing of their first-in-the-nation landmark lawsuit against three hospitals on behalf of families who had lost their loved ones with the “bounties” paid to hospitals for using the toxic combination of food and fluid restriction, remdesivir, mechanical ventilation, high dose morphine-midazolam respiration-suppressing cocktail to spiral patients down the dark road to death. After more than 2 ½ years of daily COVID deaths in America’s hospitals, we finally have the first two attorneys in the US to take legal action boldly and courageously against three hospitals...

Just north of the City of David (ancient Jerusalem), archaeologists believe they have found the first of its kind engraving on a precious gem of a biblical plant known to many as the Balm of Gilead. Deep underground in a 2,000-year-old drainage ditch next to Jerusalem’s Western Wall, archaeologists say a rare artifact from Second Temple times was uncovered. “It is a stone seal made of semi-precious amethyst stone with an engraving of a dove and a branch of a tree with fruit on the branch,” said Eli Shukron, former archaeologist of the Israel Antiquities Authority. What was surprising was...

Sen. Rand Paul revealed Wednesday in a disclosure that was more than a year overdue that his wife in February 2020 bought up to $15,000 worth of shares in Gilead, a biotech company that brought to market the first drug designed to treat COVID-19. Paul’s mandatory filing with the Senate shows that his wife purchased between $1,000 and $15,000 worth of Gilead stock on Feb. 26, 2020. Gilead’s antiviral drug remdesivir became the first COVID-19 specific treatment to win an emergency use authorization from the Food and Drug Administration less that three months after the purchase in May 2020.

The World Health Organisation (WHO) has stated that it has suspended Gilead Sciences’ antiviral drug remdesivir, which was touted as COVID-19 treatment, from its prequalification list—- an official list of medicines used as a benchmark for procurement by developing countries. In an emailed response to news agency Reuters, WHO spokesperson Tarik Jasarevic said,”Yes we have suspended it from the PQ (prequalification list). The suspension is a signal to countries that WHO, in compliance with the treatment guidelines, does not recommend countries procure the drug for COVID Earlier on Friday, the WHO had warned that the antiviral drug remdesivir should not...

Gilead’s remdesivir should not be used for patients hospitalised with COVID-19, regardless of how ill they are, as there is no evidence the drug improves survival or reduces the need for ventilation, a World Health Organization panel said on Friday. “The ... panel found a lack of evidence that remdesivir improved outcomes that matter to patients,” the guideline said. “Especially given the costs and resource implications associated with remdesivir ... the panel felt the responsibility should be on demonstrating evidence of efficacy, which is not established by the currently available data,” it added. The advice is another setback for the...

The Food and Drug Administration on Thursday approved Gilead Sciences’ antiviral drug remdesivir as a treatment for the coronavirus. In May, the FDA granted the drug an emergency use authorization, allowing hospitals and doctors to use the drug on patients hospitalized with the disease even though the drug has not been formally approved by the agency. The intravenous drug has helped shorten the recovery time of some hospitalized Covid-19 patients. It was one of the drugs used to treat President Donald Trump, who tested positive for the virus earlier this month.

Gilead Sciences Inc has questioned the findings of a World Health Organization (WHO) study that concluded its COVID-19 drug remdesivir does not help patients who have been admitted to hospital. The American company told Reuters the data appeared inconsistent, the findings were premature and that other studies had validated the drug's benefits. In a blow to one of the few drugs being used to treat people with COVID-19, the WHO said on Thursday its "Solidarity" trial had concluded that remdesivir appeared to have little or no effect on 28-day mortality or length of hospital stays among patients with the respiratory...

Is Gilead, the maker of Remdesivir, waging war on HCQ (hydroxychloroquine)? Attacks on the drug have been continuous ever since Dr. Didier Raoult used this quinine derivative to save the lives of COVID-19 patients last March. The first attempt to discredit HCQ was a hastily compiled Veterans Administration hospital system study last April. Notably, one of the study’s authors had in the past received numerous grants from Gilead, with one grant in 2018 totaling nearly a quarter of a million dollars. After deep flaws in the VA study were exposed, Surgisphere came to the rescue in May with a...

Members of the National Institutes of Health's COVID-19 Treatment Guidelines Panel have financial ties to a company behind clinical trials of a drug to treat coronavirus, as well as to another large pharmaceutical company involved with developing a COVID-19 vaccine. According to the NIH, members of the panel include U.S. physicians, statisticians, and other experts who are developing treatment guidelines on COVID-19 "intended for healthcare providers." A total of eight panel members list a financial relationship with Gilead Sciences on the panel's Financial Disclosure for Companies Related to COVID-19 Treatment or Diagnostics document: Judith Aberg, MD, Adaora Adimora, MD, Jason...

Esteemed French Dr. Didier Raoult Testifies Person Behind Death Threats He Received Is Top Doctor Linked to Gilead Pharmaceuticals By Jim Hoft Published July 31, 2020 at 12:29pm 31 Comments Share (114) Tweet P Share Email Way back in late March Laura Ingraham reported on the latest study by the French research team led by the renowned epidemiologist Dr. Didier Raoult that was able to repeat his findings from a previous study. This time Dr. Raoult administered hydroxychloroquine and azithromycin to 80 patients and observed improvement in EVERY CASE except for a very sick 86-year-old with an advanced form of...

The European Commission has signed a contract with US pharmaceutical giant Gilead, securing 30,000 doses of the COVID-19 drug remdesivir for EU member states and Britain. Remdesivir is the first drug that received EU approval to treat severe cases of COVID-19, the disease caused by the coronavirus. The €63-million ($74-million) contract will be paid for with an emergency instrument from the European Union’s shared budget, the EU’s executive body announced on Wednesday. Stella Kyriakides, EU Commissioner for health, called this move “another important step forward in our fight to overcome this disease”, and said the contract between the commission and...

Family emergency medicine physician Dr. Janette Nesheiwat talks to FOX Business’ Jackie DeAngelis about the Gilead study regarding remdesivir. #FoxBusiness 5:32 video

In the midst of a pandemic like Covid-19, for which there are no FDA-approved drug treatments, hope is important. That’s one reason why remdesivir, an antiviral drug that Gilead Sciences originally made to fight Ebola, has been propelled into the spotlight with the hope that it can stop, or at least curtail, the ravages of SARS-CoV-2, the virus that causes Covid-19. Data from the open-label SIMPLE trial, sponsored by Gilead, and the randomized controlled Adaptive Covid-19 Treatment Trial, sponsored by the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, show that remdesivir may accelerate recovery rates among patients with advanced Covid-19....

Full Measure interviewed these medical experts who say they are witnessing much harm being done not only by the media, but also by those within their own profession, who negatively compare hydroxychloroquine - which has been around for 70 years, and is cheap to manufacture - and Gilead's remdesivir, a new drug that is not yet approved by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA). Attkisson reports that one of the authors of that Veteran's hydroxychloroqine report received a $247,000 grant from Gilead in 2018. Dr. O'Neill says some in the field believe there is some value with hydroxychloroquine and...

The first step in the bioactivation of GS-441524 is the rate-limiting step, something that remdesivir was designed to avoid. But that doesn’t matter clinically because of remdesivir’s rapid transformation to GS-441524 in the bloodstream. Remdesivir’s lackluster results in patients with advanced Covid-19 in the NIAID-sponsored trial and the finding that it provided no statistically significant benefit in a clinical trial conducted in China among patients with severe Covid-19 symptoms are likely due to the suboptimal level of active GS-441524 triphosphate in the lungs. Patients with advanced or severe Covid-19 generally have a high viral load in their lungs and would...

The First Case of COVID-19 in the US Treated with Remdesivir Was in late January – Two Weeks Later China Was Mass Producing the Drug – The Firm Gilead Sciences and Dr. Fauci Are In the Middle The first known case of COVID-19 showed up in the US in Washington state on January 19, 2020. The individual had traveled to visit family in Wuhan, China, and had returned on the 15th. The patient was immediately placed under surveillance and after declining health, he was finally given a drug being developed, remdesiver. Treatment with intravenous remdesivir (a novel nucleotide analogue prodrug...

At least 7 (seven) members of the Panel on COVID-19 Treatment Guidelines, including 2 out of 3 Co-Chairs, have not disclosed their financial ties to Gilead Sciences (GILD), the patent owner and manufacturer of remdesivir.Under the direction of WHO, Remdesivir is being tested as an alternative treatment to COVID-19. Currently, COVID-19 is treated by hydroxychloroquine (HCQ) with or without azithromycin (AZ).Nine members of the Panel tasked with determining acceptable COVID-19 treatments have disclosed financial ties to Gilead, the manufacturer of Remdesivir. However, at least 7 other members failed to disclose their financial ties to Gilead and a number of...

The CEO of Gilead Sciences, the company that makes the promising drug remdesivir, says it will be available to treat COVID-19 patients as early as this week after receiving approval from the FDA. The drug showed promising results in a study of more than 1,000 people around the world and has been touted as one of the first steps in reopening the economy. Scientists found that patients who were given it recovered 31 percent faster than those who did not and that the mortality rate among recipients was around three percent lower; it was 8 percent in the drug recipients...