John Leake - The Courage to Face Covid-19: Preventing Hospitalization and Death While Battling the Bio-Pharmaceutical Complex

The Courage to Face COVID-19

Preventing Hospitalization and Death While Battling the Bio-Pharmaceutical Complex

John Leake

Peter A. McCullough, MD, MPH

Counterplay Books

Copyright 2022 John Leake & Peter A. McCullough, MD, MPH

All rights reserved
No part of this book may be reproduced, or stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without express written permission of the publisher.
Counterplay Books
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Dallas, TX 75209
Cover design by: TheBigLogic.com

This book is dedicated to all men and women who have shown the courage to face COVID-19 by choosing critical reasoning over fear, principle over expediency, and factual reality over propaganda. For the last two years they have paid a heavy price for obeying their conscience. Men and women like them have always struggled to lead mankind out of the dark. They are the backbone of all free nations.

Very few have been granted the ability to prove of great and lasting service to mankind, and with few exceptions, the world has crucified and burned its benefactors. Still, I hope you will not tire in the honorable struggle that remains for you.

Dr. Louis Kugelmann to Dr. Ignaz Semmelweis

Contents

Preface

by John Leake

Soon after SARS-CoV-2 started spreading in the United States, I sensed that the official pandemic response was full of fraudulent misrepresentations. Public health officials and the corporate media falsely depicted the virus as a grave threat to the entire population, including the young and healthy. The infectious agent was portrayed as an insidious and unassailable monster of which everyone should be equally terrified. Nothing (we were told) in the entire pharmacopeia would work against it, and we were discouraged from even trying anything . Safe old drugs like hydroxychloroquine and ivermectin that had been prescribed to millions for other diseases were suddenly characterized as dangerous and made inaccessible to COVID-19 patients.

This created a big problem for people who were at significant risk of severe COVID-19namely, older people, especially those over 65, and those with underlying medical conditions such as diabetes. I suspected that a crime was being committed against this large segment of the populationa crime with elements of fraud and negligent homicide. As the reader will see, public health agencies started maligning and restricting access to certain repurposed, generic drugs right as evidence was emerging that these medications help to prevent hospitalization and death from COVID-19. To me, this raised some disturbing questions that became the basis of my inquiry. If you deny sick people medicines that could prevent them from sickening further to the point of hospitalization and death, are you not at least partly to blame if they indeed wind up going to hospital and dying? Is withholding medicine from a sick man any different from withholding a life ring from a man who has fallen overboard in high seas?

Initially I had no idea why our public officials and media would suppress repurposed, generic drugs, and I was astounded that anyone would want to do such a perfidious thing. Nevertheless, the totality of circumstances indicated that this crime was being committed, and I resolved to investigate it.

I got my first lead on or around May 12, 2020, when I saw Dallas County Judge Clay Jenkins giving a COVID-19 press briefing. He was standing in front of a color-coded graph titled "Today's COVID-19 Risk Level." On the far left was code red on which was printed "Stay Home Stay Safe," which had been the risk level all spring. On the far right was code green on which was printed "New Normal Until Vaccine." In other words, only with the arrival of a COVID-19 vaccine would we be able to enjoy a semblance of the old normal we'd always known. This indicated that, for our public health officials, it was a forgone conclusion that a safe and effective vaccine was coming, and that it was the only solution.

But how could they possibly know this? The first human trial of Moderna's new vaccine had only begun on March 16. What if it and other vaccines in development didn't prove to be safe and effective? To me, this sounded an awful lot like a done deal, regardless of how the trials went. It reminded me of an old TV ad from the eighties in which a purveyor of custom mufflers contrasts his product with that of a shop that only sells mufflers in one standard size. At the competitor's garage, an alarmed customer asks, "But what if that muffler doesn't fit my car?" To this query, the shop owner points to a group of chimps pounding the muffler with baseball bats. "We'll make it fit," he says.

Yet another feature of the official narrative that made me queasy was the frequent proclamation that public health officials were "following the science"as though "science" was a fixed entity in their possession. I knew from forty years of studying history and medical history that every generation overestimates its understanding of nature. Proper scientific inquiry has always given us glimpses into how much we don't know. As Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr. put it, "Science is the topography of ignorance. From a few elevated points we triangulate vast spaces, inclosing infinite unknown details." What did our public health officials know about the novel virus? They spoke a great deal about contagion control and computer modelling of its hypothetical spread, but they never mentioned what treating doctors in the field were observing.

I sensed that if anyone was going to lead us out of the disaster, it would have to be a talented and diligent doctor. Likewise, I figured I could only pursue my investigation so far without the assistance of a medical authority. Ideally, he or she would combine extensive clinical practice with academic medical distinction. Where would I find such a person? And if I found him, would he have the time and inclination to work with me?

Shortly after Halloween, someone sent me a YouTube video of Dr. Peter McCullough, standing in a park, wearing a jogging outfit. In the video he was talking about the early treatment of COVID-19 in order to prevent hospitalization and death. This struck me as both marvelous and odd. For months, our public health officials had told us there is no treatment for COVID-19. And yet, here was the Vice Chief of Internal Medicine at Baylor University Medical Center telling us the disease is treatable. His message gave me hopethe first time Id felt it since March. Another notable thing about the video was his statement that he was in Glencoe Park, which happens to be about a mile from my home.

I followed Dr. McCullough and watched recordings of his U.S. Senate testimony on November 19, 2020, and his Texas State Senate testimony on March 10, 2021. Then I watched his Tucker Carlson Today interview on May 7, 2021. That is when I decided to contact him and invite him to my own studio interview. He spoke so eloquently, with such encyclopedic knowledge, that his interview required no editing. The astonished video director recommended releasing it uncut for the world to see.

This conversation was the first of many. I got to know him not only as a compassionate doctor (who frequently took calls from sick patients in the evening and made house calls) but also as a devoted family man and loyal friend. Beyond his boundless passion for medical scholarship, he is deeply interested in the entire human condition and the integrity of our Constitutional Republic.

One fine evening in July 2021, we met at a Spanish tapas restaurant, and over dinner he suggested that we write a book together. During this same dinner, he told me that I wasnt the only investigative author whod realized the official policy response to COVID-19 was terribly wrong. Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. and Peter R Breggin, MD were also writing books about it, and hed given extensive interviews to both authors. He told me they shared many of my suspicions and had arrived at many of the same conclusions. That all three of us were, independently, seeing many of the same things indicated to him that what we were seeing was real. At the end of dinner, we agreed that, with his experience as a medical doctor and mine as a true crime writer, we could tell this story together.