Doctors now treat test results rather than patients.

The result of the "covid" years - and / or a launch of Season 2.

H/t to Josh Walkos who tweeted the below paper, published yesterday (click on the image to go to the paper):

As Josh said in his tweet:

She is severely obese with asthma and they want you to believe it’s the avian flu and we are on the verge of a pandemic. “On November 4, 2024, a 13-year-old girl with a history of mild asthma and an elevated body-mass index (the weight in kilograms divided by the square of the height in meters) of greater than 35 presented to an emergency department in British Columbia with a 2-day history of conjunctivitis in both eyes and a 1-day history of fever.”

(A BMI of 35 for someone of that height equates to 14 stone 9 lbs / 220 pounds / 100 Kg.)

But the astonishing thing about this case was the treatment received - or rather not received.

Despite presenting with a classical picture of pneumonia, because of the positive PCR test for influenza it looks like she never received any antibiotics.

Granted, the patient thankfully got better, but that does not mean that there was no indication for broad spectrum antibiotic treatment upon admission. It looks like she successfully fought off a bacterial infection, but not receiving antibiotics may have slowed down her recovery and increased her risk of not recovering.

This was an obese girl with asthma who presented with neutropenia¹ (reduced white cells in the blood) a few days after an obvious URTI. It is implied that she had radiology (chest x-ray) indicating lobar pneumonia.

In my clinical days, she would have received broad-spectrum IV antibiotics as bacterial pneumonia would have been presumed from the clinical picture, and the neutropenia would have been an added diagnostic marker for increased risk from the same.

It is anyway generally considered that when patients become severely ill or die with “influenza”, it is in fact bacterial secondary infection which predominates the pathological picture.

One Anthony Fauci himself said as much, in this 2008 paper.

In that paper, the authors conclude:

The majority of deaths in the 1918–1919 influenza pandemic likely resulted directly from secondary bacterial pneumonia caused by common upper respiratory-tract bacteria. Less substantial data from the subsequent 1957 and 1968 pandemics are consistent with these findings. If severe pandemic influenza is largely a problem of viral-bacterial copathogenesis, pandemic planning needs to go beyond addressing the viral cause alone (e.g., influenza vaccines and antiviral drugs). Prevention, diagnosis, prophylaxis, and treatment of secondary bacterial pneumonia, as well as stockpiling of antibiotics and bacterial vaccines, should also be high priorities for pandemic planning.

As I wrote in the below piece, English sporting hero Geoffrey Boycott is lucky to be alive - probably saved by urgent antibiotic treatment after a bout of pneumonia.

Reading through the case report for this girl, there is an unhealthy obsession with treating the test results rather than the patient’s clinical picture.

Success is measured by the Ct value of the positive PCR result obtained after treatment with various antivirals - of which several are given, and at no stage was an antibiotic considered.

The authors state that “bacterial cultures of blood (samples obtained at admission) and endotracheal aspirate (obtained after intubation) yielded no growth”, but this does not rule out bacterial involvement. Again, this indicates total obedience to the tests over and above clinical assessment and the use of experience to guide treatment.

1. Notably, her “covid vaccine” status is unreported. This may or may not have been significant in her case since these injections are known to reduce white cell counts in some, and increase susceptibility to infections generally.