People used to have an immune system, you know.
Dr. Mark Jan Rowe, [in a private communication, ca. 2000]
If we , as a matter of public health, focused on health, not sickness, we would not have a pandemic to begin with. The reasons are simple. The focus on disease symptoms is great for selling various medical interventions, including pharmaceuticals, vaccines, and so on, but maybe not so good for health. The focus on health should be on prevention, and natural disease reversal instead, including an awareness of our natural immune system and in general, our body’s ability to function and heal itself, in all conditions. In the context of living a healthy lifestyle, the predominant Covid-19 protocol for normal, healthy adults would be an all natural, drug-free protocol like the one by SHARAN-India that I wrote about recently. I will post the video here again:
The clue for how we got caught up in hysteria, apart from various mistakes or purposive misinformations in the early part of the Covid episode, is in the human tendency to overestimate some risks, typically “unknown” risks. A recent poll in Australia showed that people thought their risk of dying from Covid-19 would be 38%, when in fact it is less than 0.2%. We underestimate some risks we think we know and we exaggerate other risks that seem unknown or at least new to us. That is the marketing opportunity right there. Selling vaccines to people who already think they have a 38% chance of dying from this infectious disease, is already easy. The non-stop fear messaging by government and public media was just free promotion first for the lockdown measures and then for the vaccine hucksters. One of the best summaries of our completely irrational approach ever is the article The Panic Pandemic by John Tierney in the City Journal.
From pure data-driven analysis, such as this study of over 500,000 adults hospitalized with Covid-19, it is evident that the overwhelming majority of Covid-deaths are old and have multiple comorbidities. Here is a study about the relationship between BMI and bad Covid outcomes, and finally Alex Berenson put it all together, in this piece: Why COVID is like AIDS, pointing out that it seems to be politically correct to not talk about obesity as a comorbidity, but that this is self-defeating. We might also take note that age is but a proxy, your risk of dying is always greater in the next ten years than it was at the beginning of the last ten years. Such is life. Older people who do not have significant comorbidities have reduced risk. In other words age is a proxy for more comorbidities, as they tend to increase with age. At worst Covid seems to advance some people’s death by a few weeks or months, as most have multiple comorbidities. obesity is merely the biggest one. For the rest of this article, I will stick to Prof. ioannidis’ most up to date assessment of an IFR of 0.15%, ignoring localized variations in the rate. Averages are averages.
From a Health POV
I emphasize that none of what I write, now or ever, is medical advice, since I am not a doctor, but it is based simply on my own experience and common sense. Had I known of the SHARAN protocol above, that is what I would have followed, but my Covid episode predated that publication, so I could not have used it. As it was, I did not do too badly, mostly without drugs (aside from some cough medicine), just supplementation of Vitamin C and D3, zinc, Quercetin and NAC, and living on fruit while my appetite was down, but green smoothies might have been an even better idea.
If health is the focus, the obvious issue is how to operate from strength, not weakness. It is much more interesting why so many people never catch the infection, and of those that do, large numbers never develop any symptoms than the few who die. As we know from the stats the majority of Covid deaths are over 80 and with multiple comorbidities. On the Diamond Princess about 619 of 3700, or 17% on board got infected, and that must have been a fairly high risk environment, so in part between dissipation of the aerosols, and people simply not being susceptible, less than one in five got infected. Half (318) of those again were a-symptomatic. Clearly your chance of getting infected is one thing, and it is small, in this example less than 1 in 5, and if you do get infected, using the general IFR number of 0.15%, 99.85% of the infected survive the infection which would make the risk of dying in a relatively high risk setting with under 20% infected means 20% of 0.15% or 0.03% is probably a relative upper bound of one’s risk at any given time. In the real world, you go in and out of higher concentrations of the virus, but that becomes less and less likely as herd immunity sets in.
For the sake of consistency, I will stick to the figures of John Ioannidis, of a global IFR of 0.15%, this means a 99.85% survival rate. What if we could push that to 99.86%, or even 99.9%? With that focus, in lieu of panic, we would first realize that many healthy people could simply increase their resistance by living healthier, and the single biggest factor there appears to be Vitamin D. Low Vitamin D is strongly associated with bad Covid outcomes. But we are not hearing that from government and the media. Ergo, from a standpoint of public health, it is easier to help the 99.85% live healthier, than it is to start the fight from the other end, the 0.15%. And the same would apply to sick people, turnaround can be very quick, and since age and comorbidities seem to be the drivers, this approach would include:
- Healthy living advice. One great source is the Covid-19 page at the American College of Lifestyle Medicine. SHARAN-India has also published fascinating stuff about ways to boost your immune system, available on their YouTube page.
- Solid, common sense information, about prophylaxis, including supplementation e.g. certainly vitamin D, possibly zinc, quercetin and NAC, especially during the flu season, exercise and fresh air, and adequate ventilation at home.
- For healthy people, if they get infected and develop symptoms, a protocol like the SHARAN protocol could be the standard of care, for healthy patients and at least with doctors with the adequate lifestyle medicine training.
- For high risk patients, besides the supplements, some of the various treatment options might be worth considering and for that the Association of American Physicians and Surgeons has been the go-to with their Guide for Home-based Covid Treatment, more so than mainstream doctors.
- It should be noted that we know from wide clinical experience that many chronic conditions, all of which are lifestyle related begin to turn around even within days or weeks of switching to a healthy lifestyle, and principally Whole Foods, Plant-Based nutrition. More nutritious food instantly begins to shore up your immune system. Ergo, that should immediately reduce susceptibility in the population.
- Given the above steps, hospitalizations and deaths would have been much reduced, which is also the overall purpose of the Monotti Protocol, which makes sense to me, except it lacks the emphasis on nutrition, and an all natural, drug-free protocol as I have suggested here in the form of the SHARAN-India Covid protocol.
The upshot is, that making the 99.85% of survivors of the infection healthier by one hundredth of a point, or 0.01 percentage point, reduces the IFR by 0.01 also, but 0.01 of 0.15 is a 6.67% improvement. That would be a true public health approach, operating from strength. The positive contributions would be honest information, which would immediately focus on prevention first, from healthy food to supplements and fresh air. Disrupting society and locking up healthy people was a direct attack on the immune system, so it weakened the 99.85% instead of strengthening them. Likewise to pretend that there could ever be a vaccine or any type of pharmaceutical or medical intervention of any sort without side effects was a disastrous like, and this creates uncertainty.
To talk about “vaccine hesitancy” is dishonest. People simply sense they do not have the complete and honest information. Bear in mind that the VAERS database gathers but a small fraction of cases, but the reports on adverse effects are coming in and should not be ignored or denied. As of July 9th, 2021 we were at 10,991 reports of deaths related to these vaccines. What people need is the full information and informed consent, so they can weigh the pros and cons. Healthy people generally have little to gain from the vaccine, for Covid-19 is eminently survivable and once you’ve had it once, you should be immune for life.
A Medical Sidelight
The Microbe is Nothing, The Terrain is Everything.
Hans Selye
Amidst all the insanity that is going on, we are now seeing an emergence of a more holisitic view of health. Before, the Lifestyle Medicine movement embraced the Whole Foods, Plant-Based diet, mostly on the grounds of preventing or reversing chronic disease (which accounts for 86% of healthcare spending in a normal year). Since Covid however, the fact that Whole Foods, Plant-Based nutrition reverses these chronic conditions has gained new focus, as these are all the typical comorbidities for Covid and we can turn them around with nutrition and lifestyle. But not only that, a reasonably diverse Whole Foods, Plant-Based eating pattern also boosts the immune system directly.
As a corollary to the above, some have also been re-discovering the terrain theory of disease, in this case best summarized in the notion quoted above that was apparently formulated by Hans Selye, who was responsible for recognizing stress as a cause of various illnesses. Evidently people do not like that notion for with it comes a sense of responsibility for my health, which is unpopular as we typically want to have our cake and eat it too – burn the candle at both ends, without consequences. It is time to revisit this issue, as has started brilliantly with an updated edition of the book Virus Mania. Dr. Samantha Bailey from New Zealand, one of the co-authors has been doing marvellous videos on the topic of terrain theory. The upshot is that we would look at our immune system more as a circuit breaker, and an alarm system that allows us to do a course correction, than as an anti-aircraft battery trying to shoot down an incoming bombing raid of which we are the innocent victim. Taking responsibility for our health is the central theme here.
What we did instead
An outcome from the absurd politicization of the situation, the lockdowns made things worse. Staying cooped up inside is the worst option, we needed fresh air and sunshine. There is growing recognition of how much the immune system is driven by emotions so this should be included in the evaluation. Here is a tentative list of things we did versus what we should have done.
- Using scare tactics. Maintaining emotionally healthy communication, and realism. Scaring the population half to death by politicians and mass media in and of itself depresses the immune system. Honesty and real information enables people to take appropriate action.
The panic was evidently complete, for in most countries, politicians went and adopted measures in a panic that made no sense and utterly without any rational cost-benefit analysis. - The lockdowns were (and are) an atrocity and a likely crime against humanity, and in complete contravention of all previous notions on how to manage a pandemic. Quite apparently the unprecedented hints to quarantine the healthy not the sick came from China. Politicians world-wide, with the notable exception of Sweden fell for this appeal and happily went about destroying their economies and throw the world into a long term economic decline of unprecedented proportions.
Plus, the lockdown measures were very specifically contrary to good health practices – fresh air, sunshine, exercise and good nutrition. Substance abuse reached all-time highs, one of many coincidences that of course had nothing to do with the virus, but everything with the lockdown. No surprise then that many looked back to other totalitarian regimes, such as Nazi-Germany, as witnessed in the powerful testimony of Vera Sharav. Even masks and social distancing may have done more harm than good. There is no evidence they worked. Witness Sweden and some American states also.
Overall, the economic destruction from the lockdowns is likely to be well into two orders of magnitude greater than from the virus alone. Possibly 2-300% greter. - There was a complete failure to encourage prophylaxis, as has been discussed above.
- Apparently the desire to sell vaccines was so great that early treatment options wore neglected or actively discouraged. Or there was promotion of new drugs like Remdesvir, which was mostly useless, but Dr. Anthony Fauci apparently had a stake in it. The vaccine industry has achieved complete co-optation of its product by all the institutions of public health in a most perfect example of graft and corruption that was ever seen. We wonder about the struggles of some Latin American countries with corruption of government by illegal drug cartels, but north of the border with Mexico, the legal drug cartels have perfected the art.
- Vaccination was sold with the Warp Speed initiative, and the results were as was to be expected. Nobody noticed a well known issue that you do not vaccinate into a pandemic, for you will drive mutations and eventually defeat yourself. It seems this is now playing out, to begin with in countries with the highest vaccination rates, like the UK and Israel. Some country leaders who happened to resist vaccinations, happen to have been murdered, such as the President of Haiti most recently. Apparently From a medical perspective, Prof. Luc Montagnier, Dr. Michael Yeadon, Dr. Sukharit Bhakdi, and Dr. Geert vanden Bossche all argue, if in slightly different ways against mass vaccinations, or at best a risk-stratified and very targeted vaccination strategy. This is a worthwhile scientific dialog, that has been completely ignored and is being stifled by an unprecedented censorship campaign.
Preliminary Conclusion
Preliminary, for this is only just entering the end-game, and we are probably looking at 5-10 years of prospective litigation, including likely criminal prosecutions before this episode is settled. The pile of books about this is already growing, and it will be unbelievable by the time we are done. The world got distracted by an above average flu epidemic. For the most part, some city slickers were staying in the country house and one of them saw a field mouse and so they burned the house down and sent the owner the hotel bill, in lieu of damages for the emotional harm cause by the mouse. Nobody remembered that it was only a mouse, or at most a run of the mill virus with an 0. 15% IFR versus 0.10% for the common flu, but with a very clear risk stratification, that could have enabled a very targeted response, as was suggested by the Great Barrington Declaration.
The upshot is that by and large this pandemic, if it even qualifies as such, was made worse by the panic of the political leadership in most countries with a very few notable exceptions. To try to quarantine the healthy population indirectly shifted risk to the most vulnerable, on one hand by increasing the likelihood of infections of the elderly who are vulnerable, and on the other hand stealing a piece of the youth and education of youngsters who effectively had zero risk nor posed any risk to anybody else. The failure to create risk-appropriate solutions increased the burden. The same logic applies to the population, for by all appearances, the vaccines are on their way to losing their effectiveness by undertaking mass vaccination in the middle of an active pandemic, causing rapid mutations that seek to escape the vacines. On the surface this looks like good business for the drug companies, until you understand that the vast majority of people may not be helped by the vaccines, and again, by failing to pursue a targeted approach, we seem to have created a bigger disaster.