Letter to journalist I am actually a journalist
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Posted On: 08/28/2020 4:02:52 AM
Letter to journalist
I am actually a journalist (sort of), but disqualified from writing about CYDY because I hold shares. Yes, there is such a thing as media ethics. But I've written to a journalist who has written a lot about COVID19, asking him to look into Leronlimab. It occurs to me that others on this board might want to ask journalists to look into the reasons why Leronlimab is not a household word (yet). So I'm pasting in my generic letter. If anyone wants to copy and send to a journalist they know (or know of), feel free. I'm sure many on this board can do it much better than I have done.
Dear --
thanks for your good article about the medical response to Covid19.
I'm also a writer, mostly of PBS documentaries. I have a story idea which I cannot write because I'm a shareholder in a company that would profit from such an article.
In a sense it's a classic story. The old American success story, in fact. A tiny company with 11 employees (now 19, I believe) and an Iranian-American CEO creates a medical treatment that might be able to save the world from a number of dread scourges. Yes, one is Covid19. But there's a hitch, of course.
The company is Cytodyn, and it has just one product: a drug called Leronlimab, a human monoclonal antibody.
I won't go into the mechanism of action, but I'll say it suppresses the expression of a receptor called the CCR5. The end result is it probably thwarts many diseases that rely on inflammation -- which is a surprising number of maladies. The drug was developed for HIV, and is now close to sending a BLA to the FDA. The drug's safety profile is both well-established and remarkable.
Meanwhile, in Feb., doctors at the company realized it should work on CV19. They got permission for EINDs, and were successful in many of them -- about 70, I believe. They've initiated a number of clinical trials. One was a trial for mild to moderate --which is rare, because most of those patients get well on their own -- which resulted in statistical significance for one end\point and clinical significance for the primary endpoint. (A trial for severe to critical has reached midpoint for enrollment.) The company has filed for an EUA, as well as the equivalent in the UK, EU, Mexico, and Israel. No other drug has achieved statistical significance in a placebo-controlled, double-blinded clinical trial for mild to moderate COVID patients.
Here comes the hitch. A media attack. A series of accusations from a disreputable reporter named Adam Feuerstein. Several negative articles in WSJ, Seeking Alpha; a positive article by Thomas Langstreet pulled from Forbes because the management said it misrepresented the Trump press conference about plasma. (You can sorta see the article here:
https://www.forbes.com/sites/thomaslandstreet...834d7f6234 . )
The negative articles all contain many distortions or outright falsehoods. If you've read anything about the drug, it is probably negative.
But more likely, you've never heard of it. Instead we have convalescent plasma, with no proof of efficacy and no placebo-controlled or double-blinded trials. We have vaccine candidates by the bushel, despite a good chance that the virus will mutate into a new form and the possibility that vaccine protection won't last all that long.
Yet here we have a drug that can substantially be said to work on Covid19, as Langstreet said. In fact, most of the negative articles are NOT about the drug, which is best represented by the head of the virology department at Stanford, Dr. Bruce Patterson. See his Tedx talk on Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=...verse+city
I think the question is, why is there so much negativity about a company with a drug that seems to work and has already had clinical success? It could be because the government has not aided in the drug's development (or anything else about the drug), and the govt likes to take care of its own; it could be that Big Pharma is too tightly interwoven with both the media and the government. I don't know. But I think you could and should write about it.
Again, multiple thanks.
Best --
I am actually a journalist (sort of), but disqualified from writing about CYDY because I hold shares. Yes, there is such a thing as media ethics. But I've written to a journalist who has written a lot about COVID19, asking him to look into Leronlimab. It occurs to me that others on this board might want to ask journalists to look into the reasons why Leronlimab is not a household word (yet). So I'm pasting in my generic letter. If anyone wants to copy and send to a journalist they know (or know of), feel free. I'm sure many on this board can do it much better than I have done.
Dear --
thanks for your good article about the medical response to Covid19.
I'm also a writer, mostly of PBS documentaries. I have a story idea which I cannot write because I'm a shareholder in a company that would profit from such an article.
In a sense it's a classic story. The old American success story, in fact. A tiny company with 11 employees (now 19, I believe) and an Iranian-American CEO creates a medical treatment that might be able to save the world from a number of dread scourges. Yes, one is Covid19. But there's a hitch, of course.
The company is Cytodyn, and it has just one product: a drug called Leronlimab, a human monoclonal antibody.
I won't go into the mechanism of action, but I'll say it suppresses the expression of a receptor called the CCR5. The end result is it probably thwarts many diseases that rely on inflammation -- which is a surprising number of maladies. The drug was developed for HIV, and is now close to sending a BLA to the FDA. The drug's safety profile is both well-established and remarkable.
Meanwhile, in Feb., doctors at the company realized it should work on CV19. They got permission for EINDs, and were successful in many of them -- about 70, I believe. They've initiated a number of clinical trials. One was a trial for mild to moderate --which is rare, because most of those patients get well on their own -- which resulted in statistical significance for one end\point and clinical significance for the primary endpoint. (A trial for severe to critical has reached midpoint for enrollment.) The company has filed for an EUA, as well as the equivalent in the UK, EU, Mexico, and Israel. No other drug has achieved statistical significance in a placebo-controlled, double-blinded clinical trial for mild to moderate COVID patients.
Here comes the hitch. A media attack. A series of accusations from a disreputable reporter named Adam Feuerstein. Several negative articles in WSJ, Seeking Alpha; a positive article by Thomas Langstreet pulled from Forbes because the management said it misrepresented the Trump press conference about plasma. (You can sorta see the article here:
https://www.forbes.com/sites/thomaslandstreet...834d7f6234 . )
The negative articles all contain many distortions or outright falsehoods. If you've read anything about the drug, it is probably negative.
But more likely, you've never heard of it. Instead we have convalescent plasma, with no proof of efficacy and no placebo-controlled or double-blinded trials. We have vaccine candidates by the bushel, despite a good chance that the virus will mutate into a new form and the possibility that vaccine protection won't last all that long.
Yet here we have a drug that can substantially be said to work on Covid19, as Langstreet said. In fact, most of the negative articles are NOT about the drug, which is best represented by the head of the virology department at Stanford, Dr. Bruce Patterson. See his Tedx talk on Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=...verse+city
I think the question is, why is there so much negativity about a company with a drug that seems to work and has already had clinical success? It could be because the government has not aided in the drug's development (or anything else about the drug), and the govt likes to take care of its own; it could be that Big Pharma is too tightly interwoven with both the media and the government. I don't know. But I think you could and should write about it.
Again, multiple thanks.
Best --
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