Peter McCullough on health: what the evidence says · JRE #1747
SUBJECT: HEALTH
The short answer
McCullough claims that despite tens of thousands of published COVID-19 papers, none had proposed a multidrug outpatient treatment protocol before his August 2020 paper. McCullough was likely referencing his own paper, "Pathophysiological Basis and Rationale for Early Outpatient Treatment of SARS-CoV-2 (COVID-19) Infection," published online in the American Journal of Medicine in early August 2020 (indexed as Epub 2020 Aug 7).
Not a true/false call. Every claim is logged with its sources; read the exhibits below.
There was 55,000 papers in the peer-reviewed literature on COVID-19 and about 4,000 that could have related to certain drugs, but not a single one put the concepts together on how to treat patients.
What the evidence says 01 / RECORD
McCullough was likely referencing his own paper, "Pathophysiological Basis and Rationale for Early Outpatient Treatment of SARS-CoV-2 (COVID-19) Infection," published online in the American Journal of Medicine in early August 2020 (indexed as Epub 2020 Aug 7). However, the peer-reviewed literature already contained proposals for combining repurposed drugs in early outpatient COVID-19 treatment before that date. Harvey Risch's paper, "Early Outpatient Treatment of Symptomatic, High-Risk COVID-19 Patients That Should Be Ramped Up Immediately as Key to the Pandemic Crisis," was published online in the American Journal of Epidemiology on May 27, 2020 (CrossRef record created May 23, 2020), roughly two and a half months before McCullough's paper, and explicitly argued for combination outpatient treatment with hydroxychloroquine plus azithromycin in high-risk patients. This directly contradicts the claim that no prior peer-reviewed paper had proposed a multidrug outpatient treatment approach. The specific figures of 55,000 total papers and 4,000 drug-related papers are not independently verifiable and appear to be rough, unsourced estimates rather than a documented literature count.