My name is Sam Vaknin, and I am the author of Malignant Self-Love, Narcissism Revisited.
During the day, I drink water, and I am going to prove it to you. This is a bottle of water. It is sealed. It is mineral water. I am opening the cap, and I am pouring water into the glass.
Yes, the yellow glass, or orange glass. And now I am sipping from the water.
And for those of you who don't know Russian, vodka in Russian means little water.
Now, here is the thing.
If you are symptomatic, stay away six feet from the screen, because I don't want to get infected. I belong to the vulnerable population. I should be in quarantine, and you should be six feet away from me.
So draw your chair back and don't infect me via the screen. I'm trying to imagine sex six feet apart. I think only a tiny percentage of men would be able to bridge the gap. I think all the others would need prosthetic extensions.
This is something to discuss in another video. I'm also delighted to see that some conspiracy theories graduated from alien reptiles to 5G and exosomes. It shows me that even utterly deranged, profoundly ignorant people have hope.
So now that I got rid of half the viewership, those of you who remain, presumably possessed of some critical thinking faculties and some common sense, stay with me for a very, very interesting ride into COVID-19 land.
The thing is the law of unintended consequences. When we implement quarantine and social distancing, when we shut down all our economies, we are playing with fire. We are playing with our destiny.
And I am not talking about unemployment benefits. I am not talking about the collapse of small and medium businesses. These tsunami waves are on the way. And for the next decade at least, we're going to suffer the consequences of this hard-headed foolishness.
I'm talking about some things which are irreversible and much, much more detrimental and deleterious to the future of the human species.
Consider for example the following.
In East Africa, at the beginning of every spring, around January, February and March, people have to spray, they have to use insecticides to kill locusts, larva. And when they don't, locusts multiply. Now locusts move in herds, moving in huge swarms, and they devour vegetation.
About two weeks ago, a locust swarm 20 times the size of the largest swarm ever seen descended upon East Africa. Today, another swarm had descended. It is 210 times the largest swarm ever seen before, 70 years ago. Nothing will be left of vegetation in Africa. We are headed for a famine the size of which we have never, ever seen before.
I could even say in human history, tens of millions of people will die of hunger and famine or be at least subject to malnutrition, be famished.
Children with stunted growth will survive for generations to come.
Why all this?
Because of social distancing and universal quarantine. People were not allowed to go out and spray the fields. Locusts larvae multiplied, locust swarms descended.
In a typical swarm, for you to understand, there are now two billion, that's billion with B, insects. And this is only one of the unintended consequences of our foolish policies.
What we need is a doctor house, and what we have is a doctor chaos, who struts around in comedy central of all programs.
Dr. Anthony Fauci, America's top infectious disease expert, just reappeared on the Daily Show with Trevor Noah. And this time, he again reversed himself and contradicted himself. He, unquoting, expressed a high degree of confidence that COVID-19 patients who recover will have immunity from the disease.
He said, if this virus acts like every other virus that we know, once you get infected, onceyou get better, once you clear the virus, then you will have immunity that will protect you against reinfection.
The contradiction of his earlier positions. I am not a pandemic denier. Of course there is a pandemic. Of course the pandemic is very real. Of course there is a virus. Yes, a virus, no other nonsense, just virus.
Of course, people are dying, real people, thousands of them, tens of thousands of them. That's what happens in pandemics. That's what viruses do. They kill people, and people in turn kill viruses. It's a war.
I'm not denying any of this, but what we lack is a sense of proportion, a sense of proportion.
This pandemic is far less than a typical bad flu season, far less potent, far less lethal. It's a bit concentrated, so it had some impact on a select few hospitals which were not prepared. Their fault. It's the hospital's fault.
We have to thank the media for this widespread mass hysteria and mass psychosis which has ruined our economies and now are screwing up with nature. You screw up with nature, nature will screw back with you, and this is an asymmetrical warfare. Nature always wins.
From the very beginning we've been dishonest. For example, if you go to the WHO website, or even to World Ometis, the website which monitors the number of fatalities and number of cases, you get the wrong info. You get the information that this pandemic started in January 20th.
That is explicitly untrue. Absolutely 100% untrue.
Dr. Lee Wen Yang posted about the first COVID patients already hospitalized for two weeks on December 5th 2019 in a group chat.
Now let's reverse engineer.
His first post was on December 5th.
The patients he was describing in that post were already two weeks in ICU, so subtract two weeks. That's the middle of November.
The incubation period for this virus is somewhere between two days and 14 days. Let's say an average of a week. That's the beginning of November.
The pandemic started at the beginning of November, not at the end of January.
Why the lies? What's the aim of this?
Donald Trump says that the WHO is protecting the Chinese. Possibly. It has anti-Taiwan policies owing to Chinese pressure. China is a big donor. China has a lot of political and economic muscle. It's the second largest economy in the world and the biggest manufacturing and consumption now. That gives you a lot of power.
But why do we repeat? Why do we parrot the official line when a simple Google search can reveal that the number of flu victims on a bad season is 650,000 people? Like last year. CDC, Center for Disease Control confirmed that. Why don't we Google? Why don't we Google?
It's all out there. You don't need to be an expert. You don't need to do research. You need to type three letters. You need to type Dr. Lee Wenliang to discover that the pandemic started three months before we are being taught.
Moreover, the panic is based on death rates.
In my previous video, I gave you a short lesson in epidemiology, explaining the difference between death rates, incidence and prevalence rates.
Liebe Tzuszawa, a study by the University of Bonn, has tested a randomized sample of 1,000 residents of the town of Gangild. Gangild was an epicenter of the outbreak in Germany.
This study found out that 2% of the population was currently infected and that 14% were carrying antibodies. When you carry antibodies means you had been infected, means you went through the disease. Your immune system developed antibodies and destroyed the virus. You survived.
So 2% are infected plus 14% had been infected.
So some of these infected people experienced symptoms. Some of them did not experience symptoms. They were asymptomatic.
Eliminating the overlap between the two groups, the team in Germany concluded that 15% of the town have been infected with the virus.
If these findings are correct, Germany's actual death rate could be as slow as hold your seats, the death rate in Germany could be as low as 0.02%. That is five times less than the death rate of flu. The death rate in flu is 0.1%.
In Germany, the death rate seems to be one fifth of the death rate in flu.
Assuming 14% of the German population have been infected and have recovered, we get the same number. The rate of infection in Gangeldt might be higher than the national volume.
Another estimate could be obtained by taking into account only deaths occurring in Gangeldt against estimated infections in the same location.
Never mind which path you adopt, you end up with a death rate that is substantially lower than the flu.
The same results in Italy now. And the same results were known to Dr. Anthony Fauci in January. I repeat, in January. In January, in February and in March, Dr. Anthony Fauci and others have published academic papers in which they had concluded that the death rate from this pandemic probably is equal to or lower than the death rate in a typically bad flu season.
I am not sure what to make of it. I'm not a conspiracy theorist. I'm adverse to conspiracy theories and I don't believe there was any conspiracy here.
I believe it was a panic reaction of people who were caught off guard, unprepared, incompetence ruled everywhere in hospital among hospital administrators in the healthcare establishment and of course in the political echelons.
When you plug in these results from Germany, from Italy, from Spain, I'll talk about it in a minute, and China of course, the United States, now Israel has developed two new models, mathematical models, brilliant, of course. I'm an Israeli.
So when you plug in the numbers, here are the results, the most updated results.
The pandemic will kill a maximum of 290,000 people. It will peak at 290,000 people plus minus 60,000 people. So between 230,000 and 350,000. The pandemic is already plateauing. It's leveling off. It's leveling off in Spain, leveling off in Italy and leveling off in the United Kingdom, appearances to the contrary notwithstanding.
Consequently, many countries in Europe are reopening their borders, reopening their population centers, removing restrictions, allowing certain shops and stores to open, including bookstores, for example in Italy, allowing people to go to work, even non-essential people to go back to work and so on and so forth.
At least in Europe, the panic is over. People are realizing that it's been bad, but not much worse than a bad flu.
So they're reversing the measures of quarantine and social distancing.
Good news, common sense prevails. It's coming back, making a comeback, a comeback of common sense.
Today, I will give you a short lesson in virology, and tomorrow, the next video, I will discuss vaccination.
Stanford University is developing a COVID-19 test that can tell whether a person has been infected and would likely have some degree of immunity.
The FDA, the Food and Drug Administration, has to approve all medications or vaccinations and all medical tests. The FDA approved the first such test developed by North Carolina-based CELEX, and that was on April 2nd.
But testing is only the first very important phase.
There are two types of tests. One test replicates the virus. It's a test called CPR. It's based on a technology known as CPR, and that's simply multiplying the virus, amplifying the virus until it's discernible, it's observable, then calculating.
And the other kind of test uses antibodies. It checks whether someone had been exposed to the virus and the immune system of that person had reacted by developing virus-specific, immunogen-specific antibodies. The presence of the antibodies proves that there had been an infection.
I told you that in the next video, I will discuss vaccination. And it's going to be very controversial, of course, among some of you.
But I would like to make only one comment about vaccination. I've received, I don't know how many letters, informing me that I've been wrong and that vaccines do not interfere with cellular activity, that vaccines are outside the cells. They have no impact on what's happening inside the cells.
Because in one of my previous videos, I said the vaccination has to be clinically trialed a lot before it's made universal and definitely before it's made compulsory. I'm against compulsory vaccination because herd immunity is statistical. It's enough that 60 percent of you or 70 percent of you get the vaccine. No need to impose it on 100 percent of population.
Alternatively, the vaccine could be applied only to vulnerable population in the first stage, populations such as elderly people, immunocompromised people, pregnant women and others.
Absolutely universal vaccination for COVID-19, in my view, at this stage is unnecessary.
But the people who had written to me these comments, including to my pretty complete shock, medical professionals, they're wrong. Vaccines do interfere with some cellular activities and cellular mechanisms, action mechanisms.
Moreover, vaccines interfere even with genetics. They have epigenetic influence on some genes. Vaccines activate, good vaccines, activate both the innate and the adaptive immune subsists and they provide an effective immune response to an immunization.
Effective immunization must induce long-term stimulation of both the humeral and the cell-mediated arts of an adaptive system. In other words, vaccines produce cells. They encourage the immune system to produce cells, effector cells or memory cells, B cells are activated, then T cells are activated, antigens.
I mean, there's a whole enormous amount of processes that are triggered simultaneously by vaccines. And of course, they affect the internal environment of the body. They have effect on how cells operate and function, what's happening between cells, inter-cell signaling and communication. Signaling molecules wake up and ultimately they even have some effect on genetics.
There are at least seven different action mechanisms of vaccines. And we will discuss all this next week.
Just to make a clear statement, vaccines are good. Vaccines are the main bulwark against disease. They are the central pillar of public health. Some of them should be compulsory, some of them should not.
Without vaccines, many of us would have been dead and the population would have been far lessened today. Vaccines are the first line of defense. They are necessary, they're good. The vast majority of them are extremely safe, much safer than many types of food.
Many types of food provoke food allergies and they're deadly. They create anaphylactic shocks and they kill you. And that includes peanuts and shellfish and milk and soy milk.
I mean, there are well over 300 types of food, including strawberries, including things you won't believe like eggs that kill people. Vaccines have a far smaller mortality rate than for example peanuts or milk or eggs. And of course, they're very beneficial.
I'm all for vaccines. I'm going to talk about it tomorrow. In the meantime, there's a new announcement.
There's a drug called Vemdesivir. It's an antiviral drug and it was included in major COVID-19 drug trials. It interferes with an enzyme that helps RNA viruses.
And by the way, it's not true that all viruses are RNA viruses. I'm referring to a specific medical profession who had written to me, trying to educate me that all viruses are RNA viruses.
I'm sorry, dear correspondent, that's absolutely untrue. Some viruses are RNA viruses, other viruses are DNA viruses, and there are even other types of viruses.
So this drug interferes with an enzyme that helps RNA viruses to replicate.
It has been shown to be successful against Coronaviruses in laboratory tests. It was initially developed a long time ago to help treat Ebola during the outbreak in West Africa a few years ago.
There are several major global studies of the drug, which is manufactured by Gilead Sciences in the United States. The US National Institutes of Health is currently funding a double-blind study, which I've been recommending for weeks now, a double-blind study of 440 patients with a control group for the drug.
Vemdesivir is also one of several antivirals being tested, and there is a European study. It's called clinical discovery, or DISCOVERY for short. It's a study which is looking at experimental treatments deemed priorities by the World Health Organization.
And so the same trial is also looking at the drug hydrochloroquine. Hydrochloroquine, depending which country you are, is a buzzword right now.
Donald Trump has just purchased 29 million doses from India. It's a drug that is originally used to treat malaria.
The problem with this drug is that it has very bad adverse side effects.
One of them is heart arrhythmia. It creates deadly heart arrhythmias.
So we use it very, very sparingly in other clinical settings.
Still, there are some indications that supposedly it ameliorates symptoms in active COVID-19 patients.
Mind you, there are a few reliable studies of this drug, one of them in Marseille, in France, and some others.
There are doctors who make claims about the drug, which are irresponsible claims. But there's no question that the drug in combination with azithromycin, the drug should be trialed. There's no question about this because it seems to have ameliorated some symptoms.
More comprehensive results from these tests are expected next month. In the meantime, more than 60% of a group of severely ill COVID-19 patients intubated with ventilators, they showed improvement when they were treated with it's an antiviral drug.
The preliminary results published in the New England Journal of Medicine didn't have a control group.
So more research is needed.
Nevertheless, they tried it on 53 patients and 36 of the 53, 68% of the group showed marked improvement. Some of them were taken off ventilators.
The patients were in the United States, in Italy, in France, in Austria, in Spain, Netherlands, Germany, Japan, and Canada. And they received a drug intravenously through the vein for at least 10 days, if I remember correctly, 17 of the 30 patients.
So there were 30 patients that were in ventilators. 17 of them received a drug and they were taken off ventilators. Eight patients did not react to the drug and their disease worsened. And seven patients didn't react at all and they had died.
Mayo Clinic in the meantime, which is a great source of information, reliable source of information. Mayo Clinic is a clinic with 6,000 doctors all over the world. Mayo Clinic is a website and you can get the best, absolutely best of breed info in there, even better than the WHO, or the CDC, or the NHS in the United Kingdom.
Mayo Clinic said that Premier Health, it's a company, is the first health system in the nation to treat a COVID-19 positive patient using the Mayo Clinic's plasma protocols.
The plasma from someone who had recently been infected by COVID-19 has antibodies and these antibodies may be able to fight the infection.
So they found someone who has tested positive for COVID-19. That person cleared all the symptoms two weeks before, so there was no viral load in his blood, only the antibodies.
And they took the antibodies from that person, they took his plasma with the antibodies in it and they injected it to a patient, the first trial of plasma injections.
Now let's see what a few of my readers or viewers have written to me.
I'll start with Spain. Maria from Spain writes, I'm quoting, in a different order of things, I also wanted to share with you some updates about the situation in Spain that might not be well documented in the English speaking media.
Finally, the government is going to undertake a seroprevalence survey among the whole population starting next week.
I am not an epidemiologist, but I have worked for years in market research and it seems to me that the study has been carefully and thoroughly designed and we are the only country in Europe that has taken this path so far.
So it could provide an unparalleled source of information about the actual magnitude and impact of the pandemic.
The sample in Spain comprises 30,000 homes, 30,000 households, about 62,000 individuals, which is extremely over-dimensioned.
Taking into account the panel of homes used to measure TV audiences in Spain includes only one seventh of this.
And the biggest opinion polls for elections include less than 40% of this size.
So it's a very huge, very big representative sample.
This will allow knowing the immunity rate among the population, not only at a regional level, but at a country level, county level, I'm sorry, provinces, as it's called in Spain, in both urban and rural areas, with a really tiny margin of error.
The entire sample is going to be tested for antibodies with blood drop quick tests that have been proven to be 80% reliable seven days after infection.
I do not know where these tests came from and how the government has been able to perform such a miracle considering the news coming from the United States, but the tests do exist and they are available in huge quantities now.
Those individuals that test negative in antibodies are also going to be tested by PCR in order to see whether they carry the infection, but have not yet developed any immune response high enough to be detected by the serological tests.
Finally, it is also going to include follow-up testing 21 days afterwards.
I'm quoting now, bravo. That's precisely what the United States should have done in January.
It's precisely what every country should have done in January.
The minute they heard about the pandemic, the minute WHO declared a pandemic, every single country in the world should have started these tests.
It is absolutely mind-numbing and mind-boggling that no such tests have been carried four or five months after a pandemic had been started.
It was designed to create panic somehow. It's insane.
I'm continuing to quote from her email about Spain.
We still don't know when the results will be available, but most likely it's going to take three to four weeks to gather and analyze all the data.
We'll see by then if some surprising conclusions about the pandemic arise.
Finally, on a more psychological sphere, I would also love to hear what you have to say about how these confinement measures are affecting people.
I do not know if it only applies to Spain, but I'm appalled by some reactions of witnessing even among my closest family members and friends, people with university degrees who call themselves rational and educated.
Recently, it is common to hear things such as we should report the neighbors to the police because they take their dog for a walk for too long, or because they have got to spend the holidays in their summer house.
The Easter break in Spain is one week earlier than Dean in Anglo-Saxon countries, and people are saying that's why mobile phone tracking should have been implemented already.
I can't help but think, she says, that changing the context those conversations are here are worthy of a communist state in the years before the fall of the Berlin Wall.
Another thing that also concerns me a lot is the fact that many of my contacts are falling prey to fake news and gross manipulation techniques, fueled by the far-right apparatus via social media, and I have never seen such full-blown confirmation bias in my life.
They do not only deny the facts that contradict their opinions, they are convinced that they are the only ones who can see the truth, and they have appointed themselves as saviors of humanity that lives in denial.
And I wouldn't be so worried if it all were about the typical conspiracy theories about 5G or bioweapon experiments, but their claims are about the government willingly murdering people, organizing concentration camps, retaining protective equipment, or buying corpse, burying corpses in secret.
It is all very, very macabre.
I will deal with mental health consequences of these measures, quarantine, social distancing, six feet away from the screen, remember? I will deal with all this in one of my future videos.
But I want to mention briefly one much neglected aspect, the post-traumatic stress disorder of health care workers.
Health care workers, doctors, nurses, even women who sweep the floors in hospitals, ambulance drivers, EMT technicians, everyone involved in the health care production chain, in the health care process, everyone there is deeply traumatized. They're exposed to death. They're exposed to horrors. They're exposed to signs, the likes of which happened only in the Black Death. They're exposed to the same way health care workers were exposed at the beginning of AIDS in the early 1980s.
And they are going to be traumatized for life. They're going to suffer PTSD. They're going to have flashbacks. They're going to need treatment.
Here is another thing where governments are totally negligent.
The psychological support for health care workers is anywhere between absent and minimal. There's no infrastructure being built to cope with these people later.
They have gone and are going through things. They are frontline. They're in a war. It's true. They have gone and are going through things which are the equivalent of the Vietnam War and it's worse.
And yet they have no veterans administration to cope with their future mental illnesses. And the vast majority of them are going to be very mentally ill and traumatized in the near future.
I received an email from one of the most prominent ophthalmic surgeons in the United States, Elizabeth Davies, who I'm proud to call a friend. And she has made a few observations. She is not an epidemiologist, nor is she a mathematician, but she's one of the finest minds I know. And she has written a very long email, which was fascinating, as usual. All her emails are.
And she's made a few observations which I would like to share with you.
Just a few, unfortunately. I can't quote the whole email. She wrote, number one, the flu is deadly and kills many every year. Yet not once did we ever take one iota of any of these current proportions.
No social distancing, no masks, no shutting down businesses. Remember, she's a doctor.
Yes.
So to go from nothing to complete shutdown is nonsensical. Some intermediate measures would have been far more prudent and likely more effective.
Number two, when epidemiologists and others show us the viral curves with and without social distancing, and they emphasize flattening the curve, the focus is entirely on the y axis or the height of the curve.
No one speaks about the x axis or the prolonged duration of the epidemic when you social distance. No one talks about the area under the curve, which represents total deaths over time.
As you yourself mentioned, since social distancing precludes herd immunity, it simply prolongs the pandemic until a vaccine or treatment is available, which could ultimately lead to a greater number of total deaths.
Excellent point. As a mathematician, I can tell you it's an excellent point.
Ultimately, we cannot escape a constant of deaths. There's a constant number of deaths. You can't escape this concept. You can just spread it thin. That's flattening the curve.
And the idea behind this is not to overburden ICU units in hospitals, but instead of beefing up hospitals and developing herd immunity, I mean, what should have been done is this.
And this is me now. I'm not quoting now, Elizabeth Davis, but I'm interjecting. What should have been done is this. They should have isolated and guaranteed effectively by law if necessary, by force if necessary, vulnerable population, populations, elderly people, immunocompromised people, sick people, pregnant women, people with COPD and other respiratory illnesses and so on. These should have been guaranteed. End of story.
Don't exit home on pain of a fine or even an arrest. All the rest should have been left to their own devices and should have developed herd immunity.
The number of deaths would be the same, whether you flatten the curve or not.
So they should have beefed the hospitals. They should have manufactured ventilators using the War Production Act. They should have manufactured PPE, protective equipment. They should have emphasized the supply side, not the demand side.
And it was utterly wrong what they've done, because this guarantees a second, potentially even more lethal, and it guarantees the mutation of the virus.
This is absolutely what they've done is absolutely the wrong pathway.
I'm continuing to quote from Elizabeth Davis's excellent email. She's an ophthalmic surgeon, one of the leading ones in the United States.
Number three, the problem with a social distancing approach is faulty logic. If you do it to minimize spread and reduce deaths, then at what point is it safe to become more lenient?
Without a cure or a vaccine, at what point does your logic allow for letting up the gas when the curve is flattened? And if so, for how long? When the curve starts to decline? And if so, by how much? How much is enough?
5%, 10%, 20%?
But since you haven't cured the problem, and therefore all of the conditions at the beginning of the curve are still present, no cure, no vaccine, no herd immunity, why do you think the trajectory won't just start all over?
She's absolutely right. When one institutes a plan of action, one needs an exit strategy that makes sense, but clearly no one had thought of this.
All that we ever see are death curves from one etiology, the virus.
I'd like to see death curves from all etiologies with or without social distancing.
Of course, deaths from social distancing, suicide, homicide, homicide, homicide, increasing crime, stress worsening, cardiovascular disease, and diabetes, etc.
All these delays in treatable diagnosis due to medical shutdowns, people not going to doctors, people not having surgeries, loss of health insurance due to job loss, poverty, all these would be hard to track as caused by the shutdown response. And many may be delayed for months and years, but I guarantee that they exist. I guarantee that they are enormous.
So what she's saying is the social distancing and shutdown and lockdown, they have their own price in terms of deaths.
We should take all this into account.
I'm continuing to quote her.
If one were able to show these two curves, two etiologies, virus, social distancing, I know that the area under the curve with social distancing would be far greater than without social distancing.
Why do these people have such a narrow focus on one disease etiology, the virus?
She's actually comparing the virus as a cause of disease to social distancing as an agent of disease.
Social distancing is the same like the virus. It also causes diseases. Many.
We have studies by the NCBI, others by the Bureau of Economic Research, studies showing that every point rise in unemployment in the United States causes in the long run 40,000 fatalities.
Do you know that unemployment had just risen by 10 points from three and a half percent to 13 and a half percent? That's 10 points multiplied by 40,000 deaths.
Unemployment, the rise in unemployment alone is going to kill half a million people in the United States.
This is not mentioning all the rest, the stress, the cardiovascular problems, the lack of elective, I mean the problem with with surgeries, elective surgeries, not going to doctors, I mean forget all this, unemployment alone is going to kill 25 times more people than the virus.
And now so this was Dr. Elizabeth Davis and I thank her for her thoughts.
Today I would like to to give a short primer on viruses and virology. Last time I gave a short primer on epidemiology or more precisely the ratios that we use in epidemiology. Today I would like to talk about viruses and how they operate in the body and in the next video I will discuss vaccines and vaccination, vaccinology.
Viruses have several action mechanisms.
Pathogenesis is the process by which an infection leads to a disease. Viral disease has a few pathogenetic paths, a few ways that being infected with a virus leads to a disease.
And yes, of course you can be infected with a virus without being injected with a virus. You can breathe the virus in, you can eat the virus. I mean where this nonsense comes from.
Viruses can enter the body wherever you have an opening and mucosa, whenever you have a mucous membrane in an opening you are vulnerable to a virus. The virus causes disease, viruses cause disease diseases in a variety of ways.
First of all the virus must find a point of entry, a portal point of entry. Then it enters, it replicates locally, then it spreads to the target organs. These are known as disease sites and then it spreads to other sites and it sheds. Sheds means it exits the body and re-enters the environment ready to infect another person.
The factors that affect this process are the accessibility of the virus to the tissue, contact. The contact will be through a droplet, through a surface, through eating, any way of entering the body. The cell susceptibility to virus multiplication and the virus susceptibility to host defenses. In other words to our immune system.
So actually natural selections prefers low virulence virus strains because they don't kill all the hosts and they survive much better. Viruses that are very aggressive like Ebola, they kill all the hosts, they kill 75% of the hosts, so they run out of hosts. And as you see Ebola kills 2,000 people, 10,000 people, it stops. It runs out of hosts. Low virulence strains infect millions and kill very few.
So they can continue to infect millions, luckily for us, because they are low virulence.
We develop immunity, population-wide immunity and community immunity and we can survive.
Now how does the virus work inside the cell?
So there is direct cell damage and the cell itself dies from viral infection and this is for several reasons.
First of all the virus is like a vampire. It takes the cell's energy, consumes the energy of the cell, ATP molecules and so on. It takes over the energy transmission mechanisms and conveyor belts in the cell, consumes the molecules the cell is using and deconstructing to obtain energy.
Second thing, many viruses shut off the cell macromolecular synthesis. I'll come to it in a minute.
And finally the viral messenger RNA, the genetic material inside the virus, competes with the RNA of the cell. There are bodies, small organs inside the cells, they are called ribosomes. And ribosomes are necessary for replication.
So what the virus does, it enters the cell and then it takes over the ribosomes. And then it uses the ribosomes, ribosomes, I'm sorry, I am not a native English speaker, speaking ribosomes, I think maybe.
So the ribosomes, the ribosomes, they are hijacked by the virus and then the virus uses them to replicate and so the cell cannot replicate.
And the final viral mechanism, there's a competition of viral promoters and transcriptional enhances for cellular transcriptional factors such as RNA polymerases and inhibition of interferon defense mechanisms.
In other words, again, there's competition between the virus and certain types, certain stages, certain phases in transcription.
Transcription is simply the translation of RNA via DNA to protein.
And so there's a competition there.
The viral promoters, there are elements that are called viral promoters, they're kind of molecules that help the virus, they're like a fifth column, they're like traitors.
So they have the virus.
The viral promoters, transcriptional enhancers, the enhancers, for example, they usually help the cell. They help the cell, they help RNA within the cell to polymerase to multiply.
But the virus hijacks them and they become allies of the virus and all this mess inhibits also the immune system.
Interleukins, interferons, this first line of defense peptides, molecules that attack and then inform the immune system that there's an invader, then neutralize. This is the direct cell damage, but there is also indirect cell damage.
And this is because the viral genome, the genes inside the virus, they get integrated with the cell. The virus becomes a part of the cell.
It kind of clicks in and they become one organism, one kind of microorganism.
From that moment, the cell is compromised. It's like body snatching. The cell becomes a virus and the cell begins to replicate and as it replicates, it's actually replicating the virus.
So the viral genome is injected into the cell.
Then there is an issue of induction of mutations in the host genome. The virus not only injects its genetic load into the cell, it then mutates the cell. It mutates the very genes inside the cell, the genome of the host.
It's shocking what the virus does. It takes over our bodies through the cells, through the cellular mechanisms. It then colonizes us and it transforms us into one giant virus.
This, of course, is, I mean, the immune system doesn't take this line down. It tries to fight back. As it fights back, our fever spikes. Fever is good. Fever should never be reduced up to a point. Fever is the body's first line of defense and should be encouraged, I mean, should be left alone, left to itself.
Unfortunately, in most hospitals, the protocol is to reduce fever and we have antipyretics and other medication that reduces fevers, which is a cardinal mistake.
The first line of defense, first activity of the immune system is to raise the temperature because viruses die in high temperatures. And this, of course, has the effect of inflammation or, in extreme cases, hyper-inflammation, when cytokines go out of control. And the virus is fighting back by compromising the immune response of the host.
So one way is to turn the immune system against the host, not against the virus. In other words, to turn the immune system against the person and the person's tissues, not against the virus.
And that's called autoimmune response. Cytokine storm is an autoimmune response where the virus misleads the immune system and the immune system sends molecules, nucleotides, and these molecules attack the tissues of the person, the lungs, rather than the virus.
How does the virus decide which tissues to attack and which tissues to leave alone? Why, for example, the SARS-CoV-2 attacks the lungs. Why doesn't it attack, I don't know, a believer?
Well, viral affinity for specific body tissue is known as tropism. The tropism, the tissues that viruses like, each virus likes a specific tissue.
It's like some people like to eat certain types of food and other people detest the very same kind of food. So, viruses like certain tissues and dislike others. And this is known as tropism.
So, the virus's tropism is determined, first of all, are there any receptors on the cell for the virus?
Receptors is like, you know, in sci-fi movies where there's a supply ship and it reaches a station, a space station, and then there's this port and it lands on the port.
So, a cell receptor is like a port of entry for the virus. The virus can come there and connect with the cell.
And so, for example, for SARS-CoV-2, the receptor that works for this virus is called ACE2. And there's another receptor, probably ACE21, we'll see. And the ACE receptors are common only in specific tissues.
For example, there's a few of them in the trachea, in the windpipe, some of them in the throat, but most of them are in the intestines and in the lungs.
The second reason that affects tropism, the second reason that affects the happy union between viruses and specific cells is the cell transcription factors, the factors within the cell that help the cell to replicate.
They recognize the molecules that the virus is sending, virus sending molecules known as viral promoters and enhancer sequences.
Never mind, we're not going to eat right now, but these are kind of signaling molecules and the transcription factors inside the cell, the parts of the mechanism of the cell that help the cell to replicate or to copy genetic material, they recognize these signaling molecules from the virus and they welcome the virus and the virus recognizes them in return.
It's like a hello protocol. And then there's a question of the ability of the cell to support the virus replication.
Not all cells can support the virus's needs to replicate. There's also physical barriers, physical barriers, for example, acidity, level of acidities is crucial, temperature, temperature is not the same in all parts of the body. And physical barriers, literal tissues that block and don't allow, for example, there's a brain barrier with pores which are extremely small. As I mentioned, local temperature, pH, oxygen tension enzymes, body secretions, they all contain a virus fighting thing, elements. Digestive enzymes, for example, bile in the gastrointestinal tract, they inactivate certain viruses.
Not true, by the way, for the SARS-CoV-2. SARS-CoV-2 thrives in the gastrointestinal system.
So all this nonsense about drinking water and hot water and no one else is, unfortunately, doesn't work with this specific virus, but it's good for other viruses.
So go ahead.
Once the virus arrives at the cell, there's a portal of entry, virions implant onto living cells, mainly via the respiratory, gastrointestinal, skin penetrating, and genital roots. There are other roots, of course, but these are the four main points of it.
The final outcome of infection is determined by the dose and location of the virus, as well as ineffectivity and virulence.
So yes, dosage matters. That's why healthcare workers die so much more. 19 healthcare workers died in the United Kingdom already, the NHS, 60 or 70 Italian doctors. Most of them were young and without pre-existing conditions, but they were exposed to gigantic amounts of virus.
Now you can ask yourself, they're wearing masks, they're wearing goggles, they're wearing protective gowns when they get them. How come they got infected?
Well, I don't know how many of you have seen, actually, how a COVID-19 patient is treated. He's intubated, intubated in preparation for ventilator or for some other reason, and then there's high pressure aerosol injected.
So, the insides of his windpipe are aerosolized. Everything comes out as a cloud, and within this cloud, usually, there are a million viral, million virulence, million viral particles, per square cubic micromet, micro space unit, per volume unit, a million. It's enough to be exposed to 100 viral units to get infected.
Now, imagine a doctor is routinely exposed to a million units in the volume unit. Most virus types spread extracellularly. In other words, they spread amog cells, but it's not always true, and this is why vaccination actually has an effect inside cells because many, because some viruses spread intracellularly. They spread inside the cell. They make copies and colonize the entire cell. A vaccine interferes with it.
The establishment of a local infection may lead to localized disease and localized shedding of a virus.
So, what happens? The virus reaches the body somehow. You swallow it, you eat it, you breathe it in, and there's a portal of entry.
So, the first thing is viramic, the viramic dissemination. Viramic dissemination is the most common route of how viruses spread from the portal of entry to the circulation, and it's via usually the lymphatic system. Viruses enter the target organs from the capillaries by multiplying in endothelial cells or fixed macrophages.
So, a virus reaches a portal of entry and begins to circulate, and it circulates very often through the lymphatic system, and it targets organs from the capillaries because it enters endothelial cells. We have endothelial cells in the skin, in the intestines, everywhere. It multiplies within these cells, or even within cells of the immune system, macrophages, which are fixed.
Another way that viruses do this, they diffuse through gaps. We have many, many vacuums and gaps in our body, and viruses can kind of diffuse through these gaps.
And finally, ironically, leukocytes, white blood cells, which are theoretically a part of the immune system, very often they carry viruses. Viruses are so small that some leukocytes fail to engulf and destroy them, and so they remain within the leukocyte. The leukocyte carries them to other parts of the body.
So, the immune response in many people actually enhances the virus, and that's precisely why we need to have many people already immune. The people who get sick, become immune, and survive are the best defense against viruses because we can't rely on the immune system of every person to react. Some of these immune reactions would propagate the virus. Some of them would destroy the host. Viruses are not like bacteria, and what I'm seeing is the healthcare establishment is thinking bacteria. They're not thinking viruses. They are just a bacteria, and yeah, in bacteria, you know you isolate this, that bacteria goes away. But even that is not true. Even that is not true, but it's not the case in viruses. There's even a neural dissemination.
Some viruses like herpes, they disseminate via nerves, rabies, polio. I mean, these viruses disseminate via nerves. Viruses everywhere. They use every single transmission channel we have in our bodies.
And the incubation period is a problem because viruses have variable incubation periods, not like bacteria. Most bacteria have a pretty fixed incubation period. Viruses change their incubation periods. Viruses can leave people asymptomatic for two days, then five days, then 14 days, then 27 days. That is the case, by the way, of SARS-CoV-2. The virus that is responsible for COVID-19 started with an incubation period which was about five days, five to 14 days. But today we have quite a few cases with 24 days and 27 days. 27 days someone is walking around infecting everyone inside, asymptomatic. This is the fear. Incubation period is a time between exposure to a virus and the onset of disease. And during this asymptomatic period, implantation, local multiplication, spread, we have what we call a disseminated infection.
And so depending on the balance between virus and host defenses, the virus multiplies in the target organ.
And if the multiplication is fast enough, and if the effects on the cell are, I mean, if the cells are critical cells, you die simply.
And then there's a problem after you have recovered. After you have recovered, you have antibodies in your system, uranium.
There's a problem of the shedding period. Shedding period, first of all, in respiratory tract, in gastrointestinal, intestinal, alimentary tract, in urogenital tract, in blood, all these shed.
Shedding simply means that exactly like the period that you were asymptomatic, the period after recovery, you're still infectious. The viruses are coming out of your body. Your body cannot accommodate them anymore. Your body has become inhospitable. It's like the immune system is making the viruses life fatal. The viruses that says the hell with this host are moving to another host. So it comes out of your body. It's on your skin. It's in your breathing. It's in droplets. I mean, you infect everyone around you via shedding. And ironically, the more internal the tissues infected by the virus, the more you shed. So respiratory viruses, in gastrointestinal viruses, urogenital viruses, blood viruses, nerve viruses like herpes, you shed them all the time. And virtually everywhere in your body, you shake hands, you infect yourself. Even fetuses, even embryos can be infected. The virus treats the embryo as an organ or a tissue.
It's a bit more difficult because the virus has to cross many physical barriers, placenta and so.
But the fetal immune system, interferon defense systems, they're immature. And the transfer of maternal defenses is usually partially blocked by the placenta.
And so in the first trimester, the developing fetal organs are vulnerable to infection. And hormonal changes are taking place.
So in the first three months of pregnancy, even embryos and fetuses can be infected.
This is more or less the, in all of you, a primer of viruses and what they do to our body.
Viruses are amazing, known creatures. They're not living creatures. And of course, they don't have a brain. I was using a metaphor. They don't plan anything. Natural selection doesn't operate on an individual level, on each virus. It operates in populations.
But they're still amazing. They are like a courier service. There's a protein membrane, a protein kind of package, membrane in a way. And inside this package, there's a load, like a missile, there's a load of RNA or DNA, a load of genetic material.
And virus looks for a place, a factory, to reproduce this material.
Why do viruses do this? There's no why here. They do it.
Does it have any evolutionary reason? I think so, yes. I think viruses are the agents of evolution, exactly like cancer. Both viruses and cancer deal or engender or encourage mutations.
This is nature's laboratory. Nature is experimenting. We are guinea pigs. Nature is mutating us using viruses as messengers, using cancer as a process. And nature is mutating us.
Many of us don't survive this experiment, this clinical trial with nature. But those who do are much stronger, much more resilient.
It's a eugenic experiment. Nature-wide eugenic experiment is culling of the species.
Indeed, the vast majority of people who survived the Black Death, the bubonic plague in Europe, were naturally selected. They were the ones who had antibodies to the bubonic plague.
So now the European population is largely immune to the bubonic plague. There's no chance in hell for the bubonic plague to do to Europeans what it had done in the 14th century.
This is nature's way of helping species survive. We should be grateful for viruses and for cancer because nature is trying to help us. In the process, it is eliminating. It has to eliminate individuals.
But in a synoptic view, a species-wide view, a historical view, nature is our biggest ally and is helping us.
Of course, we should fight back. We should fight back. We should try to cure diseases. We should try to avoid the untoward consequences of diseases.
But we should accept disease and death as part of the natural process, as part of life.
We must stop denying life.
This is the Cartesian view that there is us and there is nature. That we are mere observers and spectators. We are not. We are actors. We are participants. Nature is us and we are nature.
Whatever we do is totally natural. Whatever nature does to us should be accepted, usually with gratitude.
We should stop being so arrogant and so divorced from our roots and from who we truly are, animals.