COVID-19 Home Therapy. It Has Never Been a Matter of Freedom of Cure

Abstract

I read carefully the recent paper by Fazio et al., on this journal, where the authors widely criticized the approach with which COVID-19 pandemic was addressed by the Italian Government in the dramatic period 2020-2022 [1]. They focused all major concerns on the failure in recommending a sound and reliable home COVID-19 therapy, an issue particularly debated on my own [2-5]. The authors detailed with commendable stubbornness the many shortcomings (and mistakes, as they stated) of the Italian Government Institutions engaged to address public health policy during the COVID-19 pandemic emergency, some of these allegations were addressed also elsewhere [6]. Yet, I wrote this Letter to the Editor because, despite I retrieved some scientific convergence in the tale exposed by the colleagues, I would like to raise doubts about the “alternative” the authors make available as a convenient proposal, i.e., “freedom of cure” rather than “Government guidelines”. First, naming as a “Government’s guideline” a draft focused on a trivial, commonly used painkiller to address SARS-CoV2 infection at the earliest, is ridiculous.