LAURA INGRAHAM (HOST): Yeah, that good news that Dr. [Ramin] Oskoui referencing from NPR today, these — these new peer-reviewed studies are showing this sharp drop in mortality among hospitalized COVID-19 patients. It's seen in all groups, including older patients and those with underlying conditions, comorbidities.
Now, they're suggesting that — what — physicians are getting better at helping patients survive this illness. So, Dr. Risch, what else could be going on here as well and what — what has the medical establishment screwed up the most in the handling of the pandemic and the fearmongering that they continue to do up to this minute?
DR. HARVEY RISCH (PROFESSOR, YALE SCHOOL OF PUBLIC HEALTH): So, yes, it's exactly right. They created a climate of fear, which has substituted for a rational discussion of what can be done, and that has originated from the FDA, which instituted the fear by creating a warning on its website against a medication that's proven to work in early usage. That medication and others, hydroxychloroquine or ivermectin, combined with other medications, is essentially almost completely effective in reducing risks of hospitalization and mortality when it's used in the first — within the first five days. That is the answer to how we can open the society, to reopen the society. That is the answer for dealing with school openings. That's the answer for everything opening.
DR. RAMIN OSKOUI (CARDIOLOGOIST): Sure.
INGRAHAM: And Dr. Oskoui, I mean, you and I and other members of the — my medicine cabinet, as I call it — we've been talking about hydroxychloroquine and other medications for months and months and months. And yet the politicized response to that by the America's FDA. And then you have, as Dr. Risch wrote about in his Washington Examiner piece, you have all these former FDA officials, Gotlieb and Kessler and McClellan, coming out in an op-ed, trashing Trump for hurting the FDA. But what do they not reveal about their own connections to Big Pharma?
OSKOUI: Well, they don't reveal the fact that many of them are board members or are paid consultants. I believe Scott Gottlieb is on the boards of Eli Lilly and Pfizer.
INGRAHAM: Pfizer.
OSKOUI: And because of this, they're clearly biased toward more expensive drugs. I wonder why they don't tout some very simple and noncontroversial things to do: Vitamin D and zinc. The data there is irrefutable and not nearly as controversial as, say, masks or social distancing or lockdowns. This is -- this is absurd that simple things are not talked about by Dr. Fauci, Dr. Birx, or any of these so-called experts.