With the news of the first coronavirus patient being successfully treated with a drug used for malaria, Bryan Fischer declared in a column for the American Family Association that “hope for the coronavirus is here.”
“We don’t have to wait for it,” Fischer stated. “We don’t have to wait for a year and a half to get a vaccine developed and tested. There is an inexpensive, readily available drug which has already cured its first coronavirus patient. It is cheap, effective, and available today.”
Fischer referred to chloroquine (or hydroxychloroquine), which has been an approved malaria treatment for patients of all ages since 1944.
“Scientists in China and South Korea began testing it on patients diagnosed with coronavirus, and discovered that it is something of a wonder drug in dealing with this disease,” Fischer noted, suggesting that the use of chloroquine may be responsible for China’s daily rate of new infections dropping “virtually to zero” and South Korea serving “as a model of how to respond to this virus.”
Fischer pointed to the case of Ray Giardinieri, a 52-year-old from Florida, who he touted as the first American cured with chloroquine.
Fischer continues:
He experienced five days of excruciating back pain, headaches, cough and fatigue. When his own doctors wouldn’t see him, he drove himself to the Joe DiMaggio hospital in South Florida, near his home. Doctors there diagnosed him with COVID-19 and put him on oxygen in the ICU.
After more than a week, doctors told him they had done everything they could do. So, on Friday night, a night Gardinieri believed was his last night on earth, he said goodbye to his wife and three children. He said, “I was at the point where I was barely able to speak and breathing was very challenging. I really thought my end was there.”
It was then, however, that a friend sent Giardinieri an article about hydroxychloroquine. Giardinieri talked his doctor into prescribing the drug for him. “He gave me all the reasons why I would probably not want to try it because there are no trials, there’s no testing, it was not something that was approved,” he said, according to the New York Post.
When Giardinieri replied, “Look, I don’t know if I’m going to make it until the morning,” the doctor gave in, and he received his first dose half an hour later.
That first night was difficult, but Giardinieri pulled through with the help of Benadryl and other drugs. When he woke up at 4:45 the next morning, Giardinieri said it was “like nothing ever happened.”
His fever had disappeared, his breathing had returned to normal, and Giardinieri was hopeful that he would be discharged from the hospital before the week’s end.
“To me, there was no doubt in mind that I wouldn’t make it until morning,” he said. “So to me, the drug saved my life.”
Fischer pointed to South Korea, who “has never resorted to the ‘incarceration in place’ edicts that are keeping the American people imprisoned in their own homes while criminals are released from jail so they won’t catch the virus from other inmates.”
“Unlike panic-stricken America,” Fischer noted, “restaurants and gyms are still open in South Korea and people are off to work every day just like we used to do. And yet South Korea’s rate of new infections has stopped virtually dead in its tracks. The fatality rate due to the coronavirus in South Korea is 0.6%, the lowest in the world.”
Fischer also stated that South Korea has also “relied heavily on testing to identify victims of the virus as quickly as possible. Rather than quarantining entire cities, states, and countries like hysteria-driven America and the rest of the world is doing, South Korea quarantines only those who have been infected. The rest of the country proceeds as normal.”
“We can do something similar here in the U.S. by urging people to get tested at the first sign of symptoms – fever, dry cough, shortness of breath, and maybe even the loss of the sense of taste and smell,” Fischer declared. “By reserving testing for those who actually display symptoms, we can extend limited testing kits and laboratory resources as far as possible. At the first sign of symptoms, folks need to self-quarantine to protect friends, neighbors, and co-workers and then they need to get tested as soon as possible.”
“God has always used unorthodox means to bring plagues to an end,” Fischer said, pointing to instances in 2 Kings 2 and 4 in which Elisha once purified a poisoned spring with salt and a poisoned pot of stew by tossing flour into it.
“If a malaria medication that’s so old school it’s been around for 76 years turns out to be the cure for the worldwide coronavirus pandemic,” Fischer proclaimed, “that would be just like God.”
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