In 1953, the award-winning and much lauded American playwright and author Lillian Hellman was called to testify before the Committee on House Un-American Activities (HUAC), chaired by Senator Joseph (‘Have you now or have you ever been a Communist’) McCarthy.

 Like many other intellectuals in the creative or academic spheres remotely suspected of being a Communist sympathizer at any point in their lives, she was essentially told that she could save her neck by exposing suspected communists among her acquaintances, or go to trial for political subversion.

Hellman refused to hand over any names – famously announcing “I cannot and will not cut my conscience to fit this year's fashions...” – and also managed to avoid standing trial.  

But like so many of her friends in the screenwriting and literary community, she was blacklisted from much future work, sustaining enormous financial and personal loss.

Twenty years later, Hellman published Scoundrel Time, a detailed memoir of her time during the Red scare, highlighting all the central scoundrels such as McCarthy and his henchman, a young Richard Nixon.

But she reserves her greatest scorn for those in the intellectual and creative fields – all former champions of the right to freedom of speech – who had either implicated their friends or colluded with McCarthyism by simply staying silent.

Evidence is now emerging that we have been living through another, even more insidious Scoundrel Time, where the government, medical establishment, scientific community and media (including social media) actively discredited or censored doctors on the frontline who were producing promising treatments for Covid-19. 

This is all detailed in a book called Overcoming the Covid Darkness: How Two Doctors Successfully Treated 7000 Patients.  The authors are Dr. George Fareed, a Harvard Medical School educated doctor and professor and expert in treating viruses, and Dr Brian Tyson.  

Fareed has taught at Harvard, held three patients in biotech products, created AIDS treatments, been a medical missionary (his father had worked with Albert Schweitzer), and is currently a family care physician, revered by his California community. 

When the pandemic first hit, Fareed teamed up with Tyson, an emergency care specialist with his own first response clinic. 

They began formulating a treatment based on their knowledge of viruses and emergency care, and their observations of symptoms patients were presenting with. Before long, they created a short-term cocktail of repurposed FDA approved anti-virals, steroids, anti-coagulants plus supplements like zinc.  

They saved the lives of more than 7000 people – and in their book they detail the work of some 15 other doctors around the world who used cocktails like theirs and saved more than 100,000 others. Most patients got better in days. 

Work, you might say, worthy of a Nobel prize, recognition of the United Nations and the World Health Organization, not least governments in the US, UK and elsewhere.

Instead of plaudits, Drs Fareed and Tyson were ignored or repeatedly attacked by attempts to discredit their findings.  

One study published in May 2020 in the Lancet by a prominent cardiologist concluded that hydroxychloroquine was not only ineffective but also harmful, causing increased cases of cardiac arrhythmias.  

The research was subsequently discredited and the study later retracted by the Lancet, but only after it had done its damage, convincing the public and the press that HCQ was nothing more than dangerous snake oil.

Over the summer of 2020, Fareed and Tyson wrote to their state legislature, congressman,  the California Health Department, the US President, and then sent an open letter to Dr. Anthony Fauci, detailing their treatment success, pointing out the scientific evidence for the use of their cocktail, asking pages of pointed questions about the US’s response to the pandemic and outlining a national plan to treat Covid-19.  

They never received a response. 

In autumn 2020 Fareed was one of three doctors testifying in Congress about the success of the Covid cocktail.  He also provided details of his national plan. ((https://www.c-span.org/video/?478159-1/ senate-hearing-covid-19-outpatient-treatment)

Nothing came of the testimony, but Fareed and Tyson kept up their campaign, speaking at a Rome summit of worldwide physicians united against government restrictions prohibiting them from prescribing what they knew were safe and effective treatments for Covid. 

Dr Tyson took out a personal loan of $250,000 to buy protective personal equipment (PPE).

Perhaps most scandalous of all, their Covid response was politicized, with they and other doctors opting for early anti-viral treatment labeled as right-wing Trumpian crazies. 

Dr. Tyson was threatened with losing his license.

Undeterred, they put up videos describing their protocol, which were immediately removed by social media.  Other scientists carried out a detailed study of their patients to confirm their own empirical results. 

Tyson and Fareed continued re-posting their results and getting the word out through their book. 

The problem was simple:  the government had invested all hope (and money) in several vaccines and new vaccines can only be rushed through emergency regulatory channels if there are no viable medical alternatives.   

There’s a special place in hell for Anthony Fauci, for shutting down simple treatments that could have saved millions of lives, for all the drug researchers who falsified data about vaccine side effects, for government bodies like the FDA and the CDC who hid all the data about vaccine casualties, for every person who made this issue a political, rather than a medical one.

 But the greatest scoundrels of all are those in the media and elsewhere, all the ‘free speech’ advocates who watched this travesty and never asked the right questions, never spoke up, didn’t want to believe any medical treatment that might not fit their political persuasion.  

They, more than anyone, let the scoundrels get away with it.