A walk-in clinic for the treatment of COVID-19 “designed for the unvaccinated” which is to open its doors on Wednesday is of concern to the College of Physicians of Quebec (CMQ). The doctor behind the project, Dr.r Trevor Wesson says he wants to “reduce the number of hospital beds needed for unvaccinated patients” by administering drugs like fluvoxamine.
Posted at 4:48 p.m.
“I think we can at least use this kind of drug to treat people who do not get their vaccine, when they are positive for COVID-19”, pleads Mr. Wesson in an interview with The Press.
He plans to offer his services as of Wednesday, between 9 a.m. and 5 p.m., at the Polyclinique médicale populaire de Montréal, where he practices. The clinic will be “accessible without an appointment” to people aged 18 and over, on a “first come, first served” basis. The doctor says he wants to “send a positive message to society and end the acrimony against the unvaccinated” in Quebec. If the clinic is relatively busy, he also intends to “continue the following week”.
I want to protect the unvaccinated like I protect my patients from illness and hospitalization, even if they smoke cigarettes or don’t take the flu shot. It’s public health.
The Dr Trevor Wesson
Fluvoxamine, a generic antidepressant that the doctor plans to administer to his patients, is an “interesting alternative to Paxlovid” from Pfizer, says the Dr.r Wesson. He recalls that Ontario has already included fluvoxamine in its treatment recommendations, and that certain credible clinical studies, carried out by Johns Hopkins University or Harvard University, have “shown its effectiveness”. A medical journal study The Lancet also concluded in October that the drug “significantly reduces the risk of hospitalization in some COVID-19 patients at serious risk of severe disease”.
In Montreal, the McGill University Health Center (MUHC) participated in clinical trials of fluvoxamine, but had to discontinue participation due to recruitment issues. “We will know more about the real effectiveness with other studies in progress”, said Saturday to The Press Todd Lee, internist at the Research Institute of the MUHC, for whom the fluvoxamine trials are nevertheless promising.
“Great caution”
For the moment, the College of Physicians of Quebec (CMQ), however, calls for “the greatest caution” before consulting such a clinic.
Its spokesperson, Leslie Labranche, recalls that “vaccination remains the best protection against COVID-19”. “We urge the public to exercise the utmost caution. Under his Code of Ethics, physicians must refrain from having recourse to insufficiently proven examinations, investigations or treatments, except in the context of a research project and in a scientific environment,” she continues.
The Dr Wesson, for his part, promises to “proceed with the utmost caution”. “I believe that this clinic can only be positive”, he persists, recalling “that enough clinical studies” throughout the world give it the necessary legitimacy.
Four years ago, in a completely different matter, Mr. Wesson was struck off for 13 months for having abandoned 1,500 patients at his former Novomed clinic, located near Victoria Square in downtown Montreal. The CMQ then went to the Superior Court of Quebec to urgently block all access to Dr Wesson to computer platforms for consulting medical records.
With Mathieu Perrault, The Press