How RFK Can Accelerate Inexpensive Treatments For Long Covid

Five years after Covid, even New York Times columnists are admitting the horrendous public policy mistakes that nearly destroyed the country. While very few are defending what happened, we are all living with the trail of broken promises and the broader and enduring health setbacks. This failure is most evident in the misguided mass vaccination strategy pursued by the Biden administration.

Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. can seize this opportunity to regain public trust by harnessing the potential of repurposed generic drugs that have been sitting on the sidelines for too long.

Early in the pandemic, top research institutions urgently collaborated to study potential treatments. Physicians around the world published research showing repurposed drugs like hydroxychloroquine and ivermectin treated Covid symptoms and had demonstrable clinical benefit. But the National Institutes of Health (NIH) and other scientific bodies halted trials on the basis of safety concerns that were clearly driven by politics — not science. Proponents of repurposed drugs were shunned, and resources that were committed to studying them were used to push vaccines with no long-term efficacy or safety.

Biden and his top health officials made numerous false claims about the protection vaccinated people could expect against Covid and illegally attempted to force employers to require vaccines. As a result, after five years. trust in public health has never been lower, and we haven’t learned much about the potential of repurposed drugs to treat Covid. The disease killed about 2,700 people in the past month.

Repurposed drugs alone or in combination can combat an array of chronic diseases, but only if the Trump administration reverses the policies of its predecessor and creates a structured, interdisciplinary study of repurposed generic drugs. Working hand in hand, government agencies, together with independent, practicing physicians, scientists, clinicians, and other health experts, can build a transparent and accountable system to study and discover cost-effective new ways to improve health.

About 17 million adults have Long Covid, which is defined as symptoms that last for three months. The CDC website correctly labels Long Covid a “serious public health concern.” Yet, in the same breath, they also refer to the Covid vaccine as the “best available tool.” On that point, the government could not be more wrong. In fact, Long Covid more often starts after vaccination than it does the illness.

Over the past three years, my practice has evaluated and treated more than 1,500 patients suffering Long Covid symptoms. Most reported their symptoms starting not after a Covid infection, but after vaccination. Two generic drugs that we have found that improve symptoms are ivermectin — a Nobel-prize winning wonder treatment that FDA mocked during the pandemic — and low-dose naltrexone.

Other treatments show promise and merit further study. Elon Musk’s critics weaponize his use of ketamine to discredit his decision-making, but at low doses the drug’s ability to regrow nerves and synapses, remyelinate nerves, and inhibit neuroinflammation has led to growing use in psychiatry to more effectively treat anxiety, depression, and bipolar disorder. Through my network of practicing clinicians, I have learned that many experienced psychiatrists using low-dose ketamine have also observed improvements in co-morbid neurological conditions such as peripheral neuropathy, dementia, and ALS. A Mount Sinai study found it could even help treat a rare form of autism in children.

Then there is dimethyl sulfoxide (DMSO) — an FDA-approved treatment for bladder pain syndrome. Dozens of in-vitro studies show DMSO’s potential for treating cancer in humans and animals. Several clinical trials found that long-term administration of DMSO significantly increased survival in colon cancer and gastric cancer, and even led to remission in some patients. In 2022, President Biden re-launched his Cancer Moonshot with the laudable goal of cutting the cancer death rate by at least half by 2047, but he missed an opportunity to study new applications for old drugs.

My organization, Rebuild Medicine, is sponsoring an ongoing observational study tracking how patients respond to various adjunct cancer therapies using repurposed drugs and nutritional intervention. These clinics will collaborate and share anonymous patient information in a centralized collection tool, where the data will be tracked and analyzed to determine improvements in the five-year survival rate for breast, prostate, lung, colorectal, and many other types of cancer. The insights from this study will inform public and clinical understanding of the potential for available and affordable medicines to improve overall health.

A key takeaway from the Covid era is that government officials may never fully earn the public’s trust back, but the Trump administration can certainly try. We should get back to real “science,” — not the Democrat’s politicized “follow the science” messaging — but a new regulatory framework for the systematic, transparent study of repurposed generic drugs. This effort can complement FDA review, guide clinical practice, and devise new methods for reimbursement to assure Americans benefit. Doing so will mark a major step forward in Secretary Kennedy’s vision for a healthier America.

Pierre Kory, MD, is president and chief medical officer of the Front-Line COVID-19 Critical Care Alliance.