You can tell media literacy is low nowadays by how many people are willing to follow rich people to islands to participate in their unregulated scientific experiments. It’s like people have never watched or read The Island of Doctor Moreau or played Bioshock. Sadly, it’s what a lot of people stricken with cancer did after putting their faith in a billionaire and his snake oil.
According to this lengthy and at times jaw-dropping New York Times feature, billionaire Alan Quasha allegedly learned about a medical device called ExThera. The blood-filtering machine was designed to treat severe cases of COVID-19. It rose to prominence during the pandemic, but the company wondered if its technology could be applied to any other illness.
It conducted a small study in Croatia on the device’s effectiveness on cancer patients. The results were promising but nothing incredible. It was a small study of only 12 people. One of the participants showed signs of tumor shrinkage, so things were looking promising.
A Billionaire Lured Cancer Patients To Antigua For Unregulated Cancer Treatments. It Did Not End Well.
Enter the billionaire Alan Quasha. Upon learning about the device’s minuscule success with cancer patients, Quasha allegedly bought up a bunch of the devices. He then allegedly acquired a small medical clinic on the island of Antigua in the Caribbean, outside of the regulatory reach of the United States government.
It was there where he allegedly began recruiting cancer patients, luring them with the promise of a miracle cure. He started charging terminal cancer patients $45,000 per treatment. The conditions at the clinic were horrific. Of the two dozen patients who were treated, at least six died for reasons that could be attributed to inadequate care.
An oncologist is a doctor who specializes in the treatment of cancer. Not a single oncologist was brought on for the trials. Conditions were unsanitary, and procedures were conducted with insufficient amounts of anesthesia, leaving subjects in intense pain, and sometimes left them screaming. On top of all that, the patients were inexplicably told to stop their normal chemotherapy treatments.
A lot of this was witnessed firsthand by ExThera’s then-director of medical affairs Jonathan Chow. He reported back to the ExThera’s top brass. They just plugged their ears and hummed, pretending none of it was happening. Chow resigned. ExThera’s leadership resorted to what appears to be straight-up lying to one of its patients, claiming that a different unnamed patient had so thoroughly recovered from their cancer that now they were able to run marathons.
The patient, David Hudlow, eventually died after his condition worsened despite the ExThera treatments. There is no end to the story. The bad guys have not been caught, or prosecuted, or brought to justice for any crimes they may have committed.
“I’m angry,” the wife of one of the patients told the New York Times. “They preyed on our desperation.”
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