In this listener story, Julian talks to disabled rights activist and journalist Abby Mahler about how the fake COVID-cure grift endangers people who really need hydroxychloroquine to survive.
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To be clear for anyone who's hearing this for the first time, you're describing people who have progressive autoimmune conditions in which their immune systems are in various ways attacking different other systems in their bodies, different tissue in their bodies and hydroxychloroquine is the thing that limits and in some cases maybe even halts further progress, worsening of symptoms, continuing You know, to really suffer at the hands of these various conditions and there's a whole group of people who are now saying, I don't have access to the medicine that I need to basically survive.
Essentially, I think that's a great summary.
I think the thing that really gets me is although hydroxychloroquine has a long half-life and that was an excuse given to not worry so much about those autoimmune people.
If you meet one person with an autoimmune disease, you meet one person with an autoimmune disease.
It is a common saying in chronic illness spaces that people vary so much in their experiences.
I can miss a dose and not necessarily notice, but I rarely miss more than one dose, so I don't exactly know what would happen.
But for some people, they know immediately if they don't miss a dose.
If they miss a dose, they notice symptoms immediately.
Exactly, exactly.
And that precarity can mean having to seek out more intense medication.
Positive about hydroxychloroquine for a patient population like us is it is not only one of the most well-tolerated medications for a wide group of people, but It can also stabilize in a way that negates the use of more serious medications.
So, even if you're still dealing with symptoms day-to-day, it doesn't necessarily mean you have to go on steroids, which have, you know, much more of a trade-off.
And a lot of people do pretty much everything I can, myself included, to avoid having to go on them.
And likewise, you know, other biologics, you will have to go in to get infusions.
There are a lot of barriers between more intense medication for autoimmune people than there are for hydroxychloroquine.
And when we are already at higher risk for more serious COVID, the prospect of having to not only dampen our immune systems more with more serious medication, but to perhaps have to expose ourselves to go get it.
It just felt like a runaway roller coaster, runaway train, you know, whatever the metaphor.
Yeah, I mean my understanding is that when you're on high doses of steroids, everything from mood swings to heart palpitations to sleeplessness to skin irritation to bone density stuff over time, The prospect of having to say here's this drug that really helps me that I tolerate well that I now don't have access to and so the other option is steroids or maybe I mean I've heard of things like various chemotherapy drugs being sometimes used for some autoimmune conditions.
There's a massive leap there in terms of having to face some pretty Unfortunate side effects and long-term impacts.
Yeah, absolutely.
The biological commitment to taking more intense medication may not always be worth the trade-off, so people will rather go unmedicated and take their chances with their immune system taking it out on them than they will dampening their immune system, especially during, you know, at the beginning of COVID when everybody was Ironically, more afraid then than they are now, knowing what can happen to them.
Yeah.
Yeah.
But we were terrified.
And I think especially people who felt particularly vulnerable were really terrified.
You know, when we talked before, you told me that a lot of what you've learned about activism, especially as a young person, was you described it as being at the feet of AIDS activists.
And you shared a particularly egregious example of an exploitive misuse of that epidemic by COVID quacks.
So maybe back up a little like fill us in on that thread of your development and your life experience and then tell us about this example.
Yeah.
So just to add on to, you know, the reasons that grifters will likely hate me for my intrinsic identity.
I'm a queer person and, uh, Growing up, I was always attracted to queer activism in whatever way that meant for a kid, so I started going to the LA AIDS Walk when I was in middle school.
And as I got into high school, I joined our Gay-Straight Alliance and became the president, ultimately.
And a lot of things that we did at GSA, you know, we'd bring in mentors.
A lot of these elders that we would speak to were veterans of the AIDS epidemic, if you will.
And hearing their stories, hearing the ways that Queer people were medically marginalized resonated very deeply with me in, I think, a way that I don't know if I would have been able to properly parse until I was properly diagnosed, but that interplay between our sexualities and disability, that kind of marginalization, the way those interact, was very moving.
Even if I, you know, didn't quite know why.
So that brings us then to America's Frontline Doctors.
America's Frontline Doctors has a lot of different little propaganda series.
One of them is Lawson's Hunt, that they literally stalk the president of the California State Medical Board to get footage for.
Another one is Frontline Flash, which is written out as the L is a lightning bolt that looks a lot like some other lightning bolts in history.
So I like to call it Frontline Fash.
So we're picturing here this sort of logo or stylized design of the words Frontline Flash, but the L has been turned into a lightning bolt.
And so it basically says Frontline Fash with an SS symbol.
Just sometimes they're so overt that it almost feels comical.
I take my time to laugh.
It's so farcical that describing this to folks who have never heard of it, I just feel like a goof.
It's wild.
Now, is that like an email newsletter or a website?
What are you referring to?
So, Frontline Fash is put out as a video series on their website, though they do have an extensive website.
They have a lot of news.
You can sign up for their emails.
We'll see how that tends to go.
Things are a little up in the air for America's Frontline Doctors right now.
They're in a bit of a schism suing each other.
Right now, it appears Simone Gold may be being evicted from her mansion that she helped them purchase.
