Medical Science: COVID-19 - Outrunning the Virus
- Details
- Category: Medical Science
- Published on Saturday, 16 January 2021 10:50
- Written by Dr. Jane M. Orient, M.D.,
Vaccines are coming out at warp speed, but is the virus faster? It was feared that a new strain of COVID was loose on a mink farm in Denmark, so a million mink were killed, destroying an industry.
Seven municipalities were put on extreme lockdown affecting 280,000 people. But it didn't help (see graphic below). The disease spread just as fast as it did in the four municipalities that continued the moderate measures prevailing in the rest of Denmark.
Medical Science: Medicine In Turbulent Times
If virus is in an aerosol—say generated by toilet flushing—social control measures won't protect you. What if, as James Conca writes in Forbes, "we have created the equivalent of cities with contaminated water and sewage running down the streets."
Even if we conquer COVID-19, "it's a safe bet this will not be the last virus to find this environmental niche and take advantage of it. In addition, this virus exchanges genetic material with just about anything that is alive and is likely to pass on its talents to other air-borne pathogens."
Treatments and vaccines are narrowly targeting specific features of the COVID-19 virus: the spike protein or an enzyme needed for replication. But what if a single mutation alters the three-dimensional structure of the protein so that the template no longer fits? The vaccine or antibody or drug may just wipe out the competition so that the mutated virus can take over.
Vaccines Have Arrived: A Few Tips to Consider Before Vaccination
The most important means for stopping epidemics in history has been engineering. Methods that can be used to filter and purify the air kill viruses and other pathogens indiscriminately. Ultraviolet light was previously used to control tuberculosis. Innovations are under development, especially in Israel. But for lack of published studies, public health authorities are not recommending them.
Re-purposed old drugs—ivermectin and antimalarials such as hydroxychloroquine—act by mechanisms that do not depend on a stable virus. They may shield the spike protein from cell receptors and prevent viral entry, or may prevent viral-mediated red blood cell clumping, among other effects. Dr. David Scheim discusses how the clumping effect explains many features, including the effects of sex and blood type and the low oxygen saturation sometimes observed in alert patients.
Medical Science: Got My Shot, Can I Go Out Now?
Research funding goes to expensive, novel interventions. And for lack of studies it considers acceptable, the National Institutes of Health recommends against these long-established drugs.
For more information:
· "Following the (Fake) Science," Civil Defense Perspectives, July 2020
· A Home-Based Guide to COVID Treatment
Medical Science: COVID-19 Danish Mask Study Published
Jane M. Orient, M.D. obtained her undergraduate degrees in chemistry and mathematics from the University of Arizona in Tucson, and her M.D. from Columbia University College of Physicians and Surgeons in 1974. She completed an internal medicine residency at Parkland Memorial Hospital and University of Arizona Affiliated Hospitals and then became an Instructor at the University of Arizona College of Medicine and a staff physician at the Tucson Veterans Administration Hospital. She has been in solo private practice since 1981 and has served as Executive Director of the Association of American Physicians and Surgeons (AAPS) since 1989.
She is currently president of Doctors for Disaster Preparedness. She is the author of YOUR Doctor Is Not In: Healthy Skepticism about National Healthcare, and the second through fifth editions of Sapira's Art and Science of Bedside Diagnosis published by Wolters Kluwer. She authored books for schoolchildren, Professor Klugimkopf's Old-Fashioned English Grammar and Professor Klugimkopf's Spelling Method, published by Robinson Books, and coauthored two novels published as Kindle books, Neomorts and Moonshine.
More than 100 of her papers have been published in the scientific and popular literature on a variety of subjects including risk assessment, natural and technological hazards and nonhazards, and medical economics and ethics. She is the editor of AAPS News, the Doctors for Disaster Preparedness Newsletter, and Civil Defense Perspectives, and is the managing editor of the Journal of American Physicians and Surgeons.
