The COVID-19 Conundrum

Although this should be a science-driven topic, led by physicians and researchers, this pandemic has been horribly politically contaminated. To my dismay, our approach (conventional medicine) to this infectious disease has been eerily different than any other condition we diagnose and treat. I feel that there are a few reasons for this, but I am going to avoid personal opinion in this blog post. Because of the political divide regarding mask-wearing ideology, impact of mRNA vaccinations or efficacy of an arbitrary 6′ social distancing radius, I will try to stick to factual information that is unable to be politically disputed.

When the COVID-19 pandemic started to hit mainstream media, right around February 2020, I was returning home from Bangladesh on a mission trip, treating an underserved village in Sirajganj district of the Rajshahi division in Bangladesh. I was traveling home from the capitol city, Dhaka, when I received an e-mail on my cell phone from the CDC telling me that there had been one documented diagnosis of COVID-19 in Dhaka. Dhaka is a city of 20 million people, and Bangladesh does not have the capacity or resources needed to test (especially that early in the pandemic) enough people, but it was unlikely just one person that had been affected in a city of that size, living in tight quarters.

When I returned home to Michigan, February 5, 2020, I had come down with a very nasty respiratory infection and had no reserve when trying to work out. I was tired, had the chills and a bad respiratory illness that lasted for about 6 weeks. At that point, I thought it was just a bad respiratory bug that lingered for weeks on end. My family and co-workers thought nothing of it as the pandemic had not reached the states, according to the mainstream media. My wife and kids remained healthy, even without distancing, masking and only sleeping in a separate room than my wife for a couple of nights. We were in Florida on vacation in early March, and this is when COVID started to become real for the citizens of the United States. While we were there, this is the time that Disney World shut down. For a while, we didn’t even know if we were going to be able to get a flight home to Michigan.

As the pandemic progressed, my thoughts have evolved. I have learned a lot and have become disappointed in a lot. Most of my disappointment lies with some of my colleagues that have been persuaded by media propaganda and have lacked the critical analysis of the data that we have been given. Virtually nobody (there may be some centenarians, but too young to remember) has lived through a pandemic with the last one being the Spanish Flu pandemic of 1918. Because of this, this situation was “new” to our medical discipline. It felt as if our medical colleagues and system started making decisions out of emotional panic rather than calm, rational, strategic thinking.

Here is what we know:

1.) The CDC has an approved patent on the “Coronavirus Isolated from Humans”: https://patents.google.com/patent/US7776521B1

This patent was granted in 8/17/2010 with an extended expiration of 7/17/2024. This patent is illegal. Under 35 U.S.C. Section 101, a patent on something natural is prohibited. If the coronavirus was manufactured, a patent is legal, but it is a violation of biological and chemical weapons. This patent also gave them a patent on a specific detection method and a test kit for the virus. This gave the CDC complete control over the entire industrial complex surrounding the coronavirus.

2.) The CDC has a patent on “Methods for producing recombinant coronavirus”: https://patents.google.com/patent/US7279327B2/ru

Ralph Baric, Ph.D., is a virologist and UNC-Chapel Hill, he received funding through the CDC to conduct “Gain of Function” research on the coronavirus.

3.) This is the only disease that we search for, whether you’re healthy or sick.

During our medical training, we are instructed to order exams based on a patient’s symptoms. With rising health care costs for patients, we try to be judicious about ordering tests or imaging exams. The coronavirus has adopted a different approach and we not will test EVERYONE, whether you’re sick or not. Indications for testing is enormously broad and one of the symptoms of the disease is simply human existence.  This lack of judicious testing, in addition to making PCR the gold standard for detection, has grossly inflated the positive test results and deaths attributed to COVID-19 around the world.

4.) The logic of basic science of how vaccines and immune systems work have been abandoned.

Historical vaccinations have been inactivated virus/bacteria, live-attenuated viruses, toxoid or viral vector vaccines.  This mRNA vaccination has never been used on a large scale and the animal testing was bypassed in order for emergency use. The basic science surrounding these vaccines are sound.  The virus is injected into the body and the white blood cell (macrophage) “eats” the virus and digests it in the phagolysosome.  The white blood cell then identifies a foreign piece of material to the virus and places it on the cell surface for presentation for development of humoral immunity (antibody generation through B- lymphocytes and stimulation of helper and memory T-lymphocytes).  This presentation is very important for the induction and perpetuation of immunity to a certain invading organism.

With the mRNA vaccine, its vector is a lipophilic (fat-loving) granule, carrying a 40,000 positive-sense RNA molecule for the spike protein.  “Corona” stands for “crown,” and it gets this name from the numerous spike proteins that sit on the cell surface.  When the lipophilic granule gets into the body, it doesn’t selectively target the white blood cell, it just gets incorporated into the nearest cell, because there is no target on the surface of the lipophilic granule to ONLY go to the white blood cells.  Also, the phagolysosome is intricately involved in the antigen presentation to the humoral immune system, which is bypassed with this mRNA particle.

When it incorporated into the cytoplasm of the cell, ribosomes (protein manufacturers) begin making multiple copies of the spike protein, usually within the muscle cell, since this is an intramuscular administration.  The muscle cell has one function — to contract.  It has no idea how to present foreign material to the immune system and it’s not the job of the muscle cell to do this.  Apparently, the spike protein is transported out of the cell and into the intravascular space, but these particles are too small to stimulate phagocytosis and go freely in the blood stream.  We do not test for antibodies after vaccination, which I think many people would be surprised that no antibodies have been generated, based on the process required, with a different method of vaccination.

The spike protein is a fusigenic (sticky) protein causing rouleaux formation of red blood cells, leading to coagulopathic conditions (heart attacks, strokes, miscarriages).  I have also seen reports of the spike protein crossing the blood-brain barrier and behaving like a prion disease, a rapidly progressive, irreversible neurological disorder (i.e. mad cow and kuru). – https://dundasvalley.files.wordpress.com/2021/03/covid19-rna-based-vaccines-and-the-risk-of-prion-disease-1503.pdf. 

5.) PCR testing is inappropriate as the “gold standard” for detection of the virus

For those of you unfamiliar with PCR testing, it stands for polymerase chain reaction.  The developer of this technology, Kary Mullis, won the Nobel Prize in Chemistry in 1993 for this discovery.  It has myriad uses in nucleic acid science and has been able to detect presence of DNA from a very tiny, almost undetectable, sample size.  The way it works is that a sample of interest is placed into a broth of nucleic acids with a long base ‘primer’ that will attach to a certain sequence that we are looking for, specific to the virus or DNA sample we are looking for.  Then we duplicate the sample for a certain number of cycles to get a much larger sample to see if the “thing” we are looking for is actually present.  It is a highly sensitive (will identify presence of), but non-specific test.  Specificity refers to the ability of a test to rule out a disease in question.  PCR can detect presence of RNA, but is unable to tell us if there is enough viral particle to cause symptoms or pass on to someone else.

Historically, we have used a threshold of 17 cycles to determine presence of nucleic acid in question, but the CDC and WHO increased this threshold to 40 cycles, which will detect and even smaller amount of RNA present.  This is completely inappropriate test because of its lack of specificity.  A good test, especially for an infectious disease, is a test that has both high sensitivity (ability to detect the disease) and high specificity (the disease is actually causing the symptoms we’re looking for.  Because there is a high sensitivity, but low specificity, we end up with a very large false positivity rate.  This is an absolute disaster of a detection method, especially for a virus causing a pandemic.

I hope this post helps elucidate the science behind COVID-19, the vaccine and detection of the illness.  One main question I have now is: how was the coronavirus RNA so stable for over a year, but now we’re seeing massive instability with numerous variants? This boggles my mind and seemingly defies all logic.