At minute 51:00 of Steve Kirsch’s interview of COVID nurses, the respiratory therapist Mark Bishofsky admitted that, during COVID, they were taking people from oxygen supplementation with a nasal cannula at 3-liters per minute and advancing them straight to invasive mechanical ventilation (IMV) if they did not improve.
But when researchers measured the methemoglobin levels in a small set of COVID patients, the median value was 15% methemoglobin (normal is ~1%). And because methemoglobin causes pulse oximetry readings to read low, even with oxygen supplementation, then it means that many, most, or all patients didn’t need IMV.
As Mr. Bishofsky explained, IMV comes with a 25% increase in risk of death.
A methemoglobin level of 15% can make your lips turn blue, but the proper treatment is to bring it down — such as with the triple-therapy of methylene blue, vitamin C, and N-acetylcysteine (NAC) — and not to escalate respiratory support with IMV. One has to wonder why the FDA went after NAC, given how it was so promising.
Caveat: Mr. Bishofsky didn’t mention methemoglobin, but it is my attempt to explain the facts on the ground.
Reference
[at least 80% recovery of small sample of critically ill COVID patients with median methemoglobin of 15%] — Alamdari DH, Moghaddam AB, Amini S, Keramati MR, Zarmehri AM, Alamdari AH, Damsaz M, Banpour H, Yarahmadi A, Koliakos G. Application of methylene blue -vitamin C -N-acetyl cysteine for treatment of critically ill COVID-19 patients, report of a phase-I clinical trial. Eur J Pharmacol. 2020 Oct 15;885:173494. doi: 10.1016/j.ejphar.2020.173494. Epub 2020 Aug 20. PMID: 32828741; PMCID: PMC7440159. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7440159/