Dr. Jeanne Marrazzo, the newly minted successor to Dr Anthony Fauci at the National Institute for Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID), was recently one of America’s chief hype women for an antiviral drug that is now unanimously considered an unsafe and catastrophically failed treatment for Covid-19.
Prior to moving to her Government Health post, Marrazzo was the longtime director of the Division of Infectious Diseases at the University of Alabama at Birmingham (UAB).
In partnership with Big Pharma drugmaker Gilead, UAB played a major role in the research and development of Remdesivir. The drug was developed over a decade ago with the hopes to treat Hepatitis C and respiratory syncytial virus (RSV), but was suddenly repurposed to “treat” Covid-19 when coronavirus hysteria reached the United States.
Given the UAB-Gilead partnership, one would think that Dr. Marrazzo would refrain from commenting on issues through which she maintained a clear conflict of interest. Or at the very least, she had the duty to disclose her conflict of interest when speaking to the media about the UAB-developed “wonder drug.” She did no such thing.
Even worse, Dr. Marrazzo bashed harmless and low cost alternatives like hydroxychloroquine, while hyping the super expensive Gilead-UAB competitor drug.
“The hope was maybe, if you treat early in the disease, you don’t need a silver bullet” such as remdesivir, she told The Washington Post in a July 2020 piece. “Hospitals are on the razor’s edge,” she added, contributing to the fear and paranoia that was enveloping the nation at the time.
In interview after interview, Dr. Marrazzo had nothing but good things to say about remdesivir, despite the incredible lack of data available to support her outandish claims about the drug.
On social media, Marrazzo lavished endless praise upon Remdesivir, declaring it the best agent against coronavirus disease, and boasting that her hospital tries to use it on every covid-hospitalized patient.
“We don’t have enough remdesivir to treat everybody who’s in the hospital,” she said in a late 2020 news conference about the state of her hospital system. “It’s a really challenging situation.”
Her predecessor at the NIAID, Mr Fauci, infamously paraded Remdesivir as the “standard of care” for Covid-19 treatment, adding that it can “block the virus.”
