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Hey and welcome to Politics and Science. I'm your host John Barkhausen. This week we return to part two of our conversation with Ray Peat. This was recorded on the 24th of March, 2020, and we are discussing the coronavirus, COVID-19, which has caused a lockdown in the United States in many, many areas due to its expected high contagion rate and potentially very serious mortality rate. So I hope you find this show informative. It's not intended as medical advice. It's just an independent analysis of what's going on. Ray Peat has a PhD in biology from
the University of Oregon. He specialized in physiology and hormones. His newsletter is also available at raypeat.com. You can read many of the archive newsletters, and I believe you can also subscribe to get on his mailing list for new newsletters which come out every other month. And now here's the show. Thanks for coming back on Politics and Science today, Ray. I'm always a pleasure to talk to you. And we're in the midst of this coronavirus, so-called pandemic, that's been declared by the World Health Organization and the CDC,
and everybody is having a hard time and is very scared about what's going on. There's, I just listened to a podcast today with a New York Times reporter talking to an epidemiologist saying that it's going to be very bad and we're not taking enough across-the-board measures. It's too piecemeal that the states are doing it individually, and there needs to be some strong federal action to make sure everybody's staying home and behaving themselves and not getting close enough to transmit the coronavirus.
I wonder what your take is on that. I still am not convinced that anything special is happening. Did we talk about the German virologist Wolfgang Vodarg? No, we didn't yet. Well, he is one well-known expert in pulmonology and viruses. And as of the last time I checked on his website, he still wasn't convinced that anything different from previous years is happening. He showed that in previous years, from 5 to 15% of the lung disease, infectious disease, was caused by some type of coronavirus. And so far, this one hasn't really
been proven to either be much more virulent or much more infectious. But that is yet to be determined. But they've jumped to the conclusion that it is both more harmful and spreads faster. But you can't find that in the evidence, according to Vodarg. And another German well-known pulmonologist and virologist named Bhakti, sounds like a Hindu name, B-H-T-I, I think it is, says similar things. He says that the country is causing very considerable damage economically and harming especially older people by the measures they're introducing, without any real evidence
that anything special is happening. And another well-known, mostly epidemiologist, John Ioannidis, has various positions at Stanford. He says this might be one of history's greatest evidence fiascos, because they're talking about just fragments of evidence and drawing huge conclusions and then taking unprecedented political, economic actions against no clear scientific evidence. Could you spell the German epidemiologist and the pulmonologist that you've mentioned at the beginning, just so people can look up their evidence? Yeah, the first one was Wolfgang Vodarg, last name W-O-D-A-R-G. And I think the second guy's
name, last name is spelled B-A-K-H-T-I. And then you said the guy at Stanford, John Ioannidis. I-O-A-N-N-I-D-I-S. Okay, great. Yeah, and they're saying that, you know, the Trump administration isn't doing enough. Yeah, I've always been considered crazy for pointing out that Trump in many ways has been less harmful than the so-called progressives like Obama, that he tends to be withdrawing from wars, for example. And I think I'm inclined to see his reluctance to go ahead with a war on the virus as another virtue, even though everyone considers that crazy. The Pentagon wanted to
go back into Iraq heavily in retaliation against a couple of soldiers getting killed, and to use the virus as an excuse, an argument against renewing the war in Iraq. So even though he's been being criticized again for everything he does against the grain, so far I think he's justified by the evidence. Yeah, and in these cases, it's too bad he doesn't do himself any favors in his social behavior. Yeah, it's too bad he doesn't have a pleasant personality to do some reasonable things.
Yeah, and he has sort of the personality of a gangster, and at least he sounds like one to me. But I think you're right, he has an isolationist tendency when it comes to wars, and I'm all for that myself. Yeah, and he proposes to stop the clampdown on society by Easter, which he's being criticized for again, that the so-called health experts are saying that's foolish and dangerous to consider restoring freedom in just two weeks. Yeah, I mean, I can understand why people
are scared. If you listen to any news at all, it's just one dire warning after the next. What do you make of the reports from Italy where people over 65 aren't being allowed to have a ventilator, and so people are doing triage, and some people are being basically told they'll have to die? I saw a little video from a hospital in Bergamo, and it looked like they were stuffing people in oxygen tents and putting oxygen masks on them. And if people come in with a minor
respiratory ailment and they're 70 or 80 or 90 years old, and they get put into a pure oxygen atmosphere, that's exactly the wrong thing to do, but it's what almost all the hospitals in the world are doing, thinking they need oxygen. They're having trouble breathing, so give them fewer oxygen, but carbon dioxide is anti-inflammatory, and when you give them fewer oxygen, five times more than normal, you're tremendously displacing the natural balance of carbon dioxide, which is the anti-inflammatory stuff in our breath. Several good research projects
have found that if you hypoventilate people who are having some problem in the hospital, like surgery, slight hypoventilation to let the CO2 build up reduces inflammation and produces much better outcomes overall, because inflammation is such a pathogen in any kind of sickness, and especially in this particular virus infection or any lung infection, the symptoms are basically inflammatory. The angiotensin system, the interferon system, which turns on other inflammatory agents, histamine, all of the defensive reactions triggered by these respiratory infections amplify inflammation, and that causes the congestion, constriction,
swelling, exudation of serum into the lungs. Instead of a balanced moisture economy in the lungs, the serum and proteins in the blood ooze out into the lung space and interfere with breathing, but anything you do to increase inflammation is going to increase that pneumonia tendency and general sickness. So oxygen and many of the virus-cycle chemicals they're giving greatly intensify inflammation. That's one of the reasons old people are so susceptible, where about, different studies say about 85% of the proven infected people have almost no symptoms
of infection, and the main ones who react badly and get very sick or die are mostly the very old people who already have some kind of degenerative circulatory or inflammatory kind of disease, heart disease, stroke, kidney disease, and so on. The changes of aging that cause the circulatory problems are essentially overactivity of the immune system, sort of a variation on the autoimmune thing, but it's a general tissue degenerative process that exaggerates the inflammatory processes. And in one study where they gave a given type of coronavirus known, they were
intending to produce common cold symptoms, and they put this stuff in the volunteers' noses, and they found that the people with pre-existing inflammatory problems were the ones that reacted more seriously to the virus. And mice, studies in mice, they find that the given virus does very little damage to the young animals. The older the animal is, the more mature the immune system, the more harmful the virus is. So in this situation, the so-called immune defenses are really the instrument by which the virus is damaging the organism. So it's the reaction of
the organism to the virus. Yeah. Yeah. The successful virus, which these are, succeeds by, if possible, causing something like chronic diarrhea and a chronic cough. If the person stays well enough to go around living normally but coughing, that's good for the virus to spread. So a successful virus doesn't kill many of its infected hosts. It causes them to spread the virus rather than die. Yeah, I was going to ask you that. It would make sense for the longevity of the virus not to kill its host. Yeah. Yeah. And diarrhea and coughing and spitting are typical
ways a virus will spread. So if you're already inflamed and the virus comes along and attacks you, attacks your cells, then you're much more likely to have an overreaction, an overimmune reaction. Yeah. Because that reminds me of, you know, socially or politically what we're doing right now. If what you're saying is correct, then we're having an overreaction to the threat of this virus, which could potentially cause a lot of damage to our society. Yeah, it already is causing unemployment and it's being taken as an opportunity. Bernanke and Yellen
proposed that the Federal Reserve and the Treasury Department join up so that the taxpayers will be made responsible for everything the Fed does and that they will then bail out big corporations at their choice. But what it leads to is super corporations guaranteed by the government and the taxpayers, but no guarantees to the employees of middle-sized and small companies. So it's like pushing towards total monopoly and all of the proposals that I've seen lead in that direction, giving money to bail out the big banks and corporations, which is like a war against
small business. Yeah, that's right. And, you know, Naomi Klein has written about this extensively in her book, Disaster Capitalism, where she cites a lot of examples of this in the past. And this seems like a combination of disaster capitalism/fascism, because I think the definition of fascism is a combination of corporate and federal power. Yeah, exactly. Except that as it's going, it bypasses some of the nastiness of Hitlerism and Mussolini's fascism, and goes right directly to giving orders around the world to stop protests, interfere with elections,
and so on. Like the yellow vests in France aren't able to go into the streets as they've been doing for a year. So they are allowed to put their vests out on the balcony or in their windows as protests. But basically, it's already established total quiescence and control. Yeah, and it's very effective if you make everybody very afraid. Then it's not just government force like Hitler was trying to use or Mussolini. It's peer pressure. Yeah, much, much smoother and more effective. We start policing ourselves. Yeah.
Yeah. So, and I feel like a lot of this is pushing towards, you know, once they have everybody scared. And I see a lot of talk on social media about, if only we had a vaccine that would save us from this coronavirus. And I was wondering if you could speak about the efficacy of vaccines in terms of flus and this virus. In the great swine flu pandemic that didn't exist, the man in charge of influenza vaccines at the center, I guess, was the CDC at that time. He was a supervisor of that
department, not all vaccines, but especially the flu vaccines. He pointed out to his superiors repeatedly over, I guess, several months that the time it takes to develop any of these flu vaccines is usually a year to a year and a half. And by that time, the flu germ has spread, reached its peak and disappeared. People are naturally immune to that particular strain by the time the vaccine comes on the market. And he lost his job for going on television, talking on 60 Minutes, I think it was. Oh, Phil Donahue, I think it was.
Yeah, Phil Donahue. Yeah, that got him fired. And then later, 60 Minutes did a detailed analysis of the failure of the epidemic. One death, one soldier was confirmed to have died of the flu virus, no one else in the world, by the admission of the head of the CDC. But hundreds died from the vaccine. And so now when someone says that vaccines are confirmed not only to be useless, but to be dangerous, and in many cases worse than the disease that they can't conceivably
be produced in time to prevent, those people are now being called quacks. Yeah. Now, in the history of vaccines, there have been useful ones, right, in the past. Yeah, when it's an organism that doesn't change faster than the vaccine can be produced. A smallpox was probably the best example of a vaccine being able to totally abolish a disease when it's used intelligently. They would identify where the outbreaks were, and then form a ring of vaccinated people around those outbreaks and let the disease run its course
inside that ring. And repeatedly doing that, they closed in and eradicated the vaccine from nature. Because that particular disease, was that a virus, smallpox? Yeah. So it just didn't mutate quickly so they could get a handle on it. Yeah. And I think other diseases are probably slow enough to change that they could be treated similarly. If the effort were made, they could close in on them and eliminate them for a relatively small price. The cost for eliminating smallpox on the world scale was microscopic compared to the annual expense on measles and the standard
array of vaccines that kids are getting in the United States and most other countries. The cost alone is enough to lead to a more intelligent policy. Yeah, I think you said the cost now is $50 billion, $4.5 billion a year, just for vaccines for children. Yeah. Yeah, that's stupendous. And maybe not that effective. How do you rate their efficacy? Since they're stupidly used, trying to vaccinate the whole world rather than closing in on the virus. When you have an outbreak at Disney World, for example, you can track those people
and vaccinate everyone around them. And a thousand people for every one vaccinated will have avoided the vaccine. And the vaccines have a consistent and predictable rate of damage and harm, mortality, paralysis, brain damage. Autism is one of the outcomes. But no one really denies the government pays at least a proportion of the people they harm. They acknowledge that they're doing harm. But instead of intelligently reducing the number of people given the vaccine, they prefer to pay for a stupid use of vaccines that otherwise could be effective.
Yeah, and that makes sense to me. And the testing is of questionable merit. The safety testing is absolutely crooked. Some of the vaccines with the known harmful adjuvants, aluminum hydroxide is added because it causes a systemic inflammatory reaction. And so that's the most harmful, more harmful than the germ itself. But when they're testing the safety of a vaccine, you would expect that they would test the safety of the combination of aluminum hydroxide and the other junk that goes along with the actual antigen. But in some of the studies, they gave the adjuvant to the control
group as well as the test group. So they're creating a certain level of damage in their control group and comparing that to the damage in the complete virus, complete vaccine. It basically is, I can't think of any way that a person could design that experiment without intending to defraud. Yeah. And just so people know, the adjuvant is the addition to the wounded or weakened vaccine or the weakened virus. After using aluminum hydroxide to produce that general inflammatory reaction that revs up your ability to produce antibodies, after using that for generations, it's gradually
becoming recognized by the people suing the government for brain damage and death and so on, that it is developing a bad reputation. So they're looking for new adjuvants, things that will do just as much inflammatory damage, but that doesn't, things that don't yet have the bad reputation that aluminum hydroxide does. But the same thing will occur with these lipid-based, nanoparticles of lipids used as antigens. After another 50 years, those will develop a bad reputation. You mean you can't actually stimulate an inflammatory reaction without damaging the organism?
Yeah, that's probably a major, if not the only, motor of the aging process, is the accumulated damage done by interacting with irritating, stressful parts of the environment. Your body changes with every encounter, and the more of an adjuvant function that the environment imposes on your body, the bigger reaction it forces you to make, the greater the change in your life course is. We're in a constantly revising process as we develop and age, and these systemic reactions for every encounter, foods we eat and digest and assimilate properly, even those are adding to our immunological
burden, so that to deliberately increase the activity of the immune system is to deliberately accelerate the process of aging and degenerating. I see. So in the history of vaccines, when you go way back to, in your recent newsletter, which is available at raypeat.com, you mentioned a fellow named Johnny, John Williamson, called Johnny Notions. And so how did his vaccines work if they didn't have this adjuvant? The smallpox vaccine all by itself is irritating enough. It doesn't need an adjuvant, and he weakened his, just by reasoning, he reasoned that if he could weaken a deadly
something, they didn't know what, any idea of what viruses were at that time, but if he could weaken this nasty material, he put it in smoke. He would take a pus or a scab from a person with smallpox and smoke it for a while, and then pack it under, I forget what kind of leaves he covered it with, and a layer of camphor, and then buried it for years, letting chemical processes happen. This was in the 1700s, so almost nothing was known about how chemistry works. But he intuited that he
was doing something to weaken and change the agent. And then he would introduce it into the skin, not into the muscle or under the skin, but he had a very fine tool he made that would split the skin so it went into the living material but didn't reach the blood. And all of his people were made immune. He vaccinated thousands. None of them died from the vaccine as they would have from a modern vaccine. Yeah, and that sounds a lot more gentle in that it's not being, what's the
difference between a dermal application like that, a skin application, and having something injected into your bloodstream? Yeah, in the last 10 years or so, a few alternative doctors were practicing it 30 or 40 years ago, rubbing it into the skin gently rather than injecting it. But experiments now in the last 10 years show that when you take a particular antigen and either take it by inhalation or ingestion or rubbing it into the skin or injecting it carefully intradermally, that the systemic results are absolutely different from when you
inject it into the blood or into the muscle or even under the skin. The immune system is designed to react in a maximally appropriate way when things get rubbed into the skin or inhaled or eaten. And when you bypass those normal routes of infection, we don't have an evolved immune system for proper reactions to needle injections into the muscles. The whole thing about using needles seems to have been a matter of professionalism. In the 1800s, doctors were the only ones who could have access to needles and syringes.
They were technologically beyond the public. And so they created or claimed to have a monopoly on what they said was the most effective way for giving medication instead of the crude, old-fashioned way of having people eat or inhale the medicine they would give it by needle into your muscle or directly into your bloodstream. There never was any valid scientific basis for giving medications by injection. And so you said it's radically different if you take it through a more natural way, where you do have actually a defense. Can you still get the same vaccine reaction adequately
enough? The reaction is more organized. What they get from the injected reaction is largely a reaction to the tissue damage, leading to autoimmune-type reactions, more reactions against your tissues than against the antigen. But in the process, the antigen can be taken down by these specific antibodies. But that whole antibody theory of immunity is essentially a superstructure built on ignorance of how the immune system works. The antibody theory came about more than 100 years ago with the lock and key idea of Paul Ehrlich,
which was a way to sell chemical drugs by arguing that he would have a specific chemical for the specific lock. The chemical key was so specific that a particular drug would cure it, and the antibody became the model for the equivalent of a specific drug cure. And the antibody-based theory has been given a series of Nobel Prizes at the end of the last century. But since then, most of the knowledge of the real immune system, the innate immune system, is intricable. They used to say that only the antibody system was a real adaptive process, but
they simply weren't looking at the adaptive processes on the other tissue levels. Hmm. So, since the flus and viruses adapt too quickly for vaccines to be useful against them, it sounds like we really should depend on the innate immune system. How do we get the innate immune system to work for us? Making people healthy, exposing them to fewer vaccines as they grow up is, I think, a very important part of it. Allergies, allergic people are known to be the ones who react the
worst to the coronaviruses. And the changes, the degenerative or autoimmune changes that happen with aging make a person more susceptible to harm from the otherwise mild coronaviruses. But just being allergic or already having an activated interferon system makes you more susceptible. So, the person who can have an abundant energetic metabolism, but without a lot of inflammatory experiences, can produce the most organized and almost unnoticed rejection of the infection. The 80% of the people who don't know that they're infected with this particular coronavirus, they are the ones with a good immune system. They don't react noticeably.
And at the beginning, you spoke of, let's see if I can find that. Oh, yeah. You said a lung infection is inflammatory and it's triggering the angiotensin, interferon, and histamine reactions. And you covered some of the angiotensin problem last week, although I have some more questions. But you haven't mentioned anything about how the interferon and histamine systems would react with the coronavirus. One of the main things that the interferon system does is to activate the production of nitric
oxide, which in vitro is a very good virus killer. It's a free radical that will destroy just about anything. But in vivo, there have been comparisons with the coronavirus. Nerve infection is a major target of some coronaviruses and other respiratory viruses as an alternate target causing encephalitis. And in experimental infections with nerve-targeted coronaviruses, they find that blocking interferon's production of nitric oxide prevents death of the animal. And it's specifically the interferon production of nitric oxide that's killing them. And I think analogous
things are probably happening. It does kill the virus, but it also helps kill the host. And same with serotonin. Serotonin is produced by any inflammation and blocking the effects of serotonin. For example, the Chinese are using cinanserin, a serotonin blocker, as one of their tools against the coronavirus. Can you spell that again, Ray? C-I-N-A-N-S-E-R-I-N. Okay, great. And so that's actually cutting down. So serotonin is an inflammatory chemical that we make when we're under stress? Yeah. Serotonin is talking about the veins tightening up and so does angiotensin is the same thing. What's the purpose of those
in a healthy creature? The tightening of some of the circulatory system helps to raise the pressure and get more blood to an area of where the problem is. So it's just one of many emergency functions. And in general, I think it's appropriate to think of these inflammatory things as wound healing agents. If you have a hole punched in you, these are very appropriate for making the organism direct its healing efforts to the place where the wound is and accelerating
the cell growth and attracting cells to the area to repair it. But when you have them spreading out from your lungs, for example, into the whole organism, the whole organism is suffering because that particular type of repair system can be so damaging when it takes place in the lungs. Yeah, so it's an ecology and it's only supposed to be present for a short time while it's doing its emergency work. Yeah, I kind of understand that. And histamine, how does that fit in?
It tends to be any injury causes it to be released. And the experiments with coronavirus show that it sensitizes the tissues to histamine. So any injury that's releasing histamine becomes more harmful in the presence of the virus. And estrogen is something in the background of all of these. And angiotensin increases, activates aromatase to make estrogen. So estrogen is coming up in the background of any of these injuries and stress. And estrogen increases production, attracts mast cells that make histamine, and activates its release. And that
intensifies the oxidation of fluid into the lungs, for example. And one question I had from last week before we get into these other questions, a few from listeners, is that you said that in the angiotensin cycle, why don't you describe briefly the cycle again of how angiotensin is made and then how its inflammatory syndrome is stopped? Well, first, the renin enzyme is one of the starting things. And angiotensinogen, stress and things like estrogen make the liver produce more angiotensinogen, which is a protein cleaved by renin, the enzyme
largely from the kidney. And the product of this is called angiotensin 1. And then an enzyme, ACE, angiotensin converting enzyme number one, produces angiotensin 2, acting on the product of the renin. And angiotensin 2 is the one we commonly think of as angiotensin, which leads to all of these inflammatory things. And the enzyme, ACE 2, is it, I think its main function is to destroy angiotensin or angiotensin 2. I see. So, ACE 1 produces the big inflammation promoter, ACE 2 destroys it. Yeah. And so, coronavirus
attaches to and inactivates ACE 2, leaving ACE 1 producing angiotensin and its inflammation. Oh, I understand. Because you said, ACE 2 is a sign of a youthful person. If you have a lot of that in your system, it means you're keeping that stress hormone or stress. Is it a hormone, angiotensin? You could call it that. It's a peptide. It signals something. Yeah. Yeah. Okay. So, if you have a lot of ACE 2, that's a sign of youth. But the coronavirus is able to attack that. Yeah. ACE 2. I see. Yeah. They now know in detail
how it attaches and changes that protein. So, in my mind, that begs the question of how come young people are not affected by the coronavirus since they have more ACE 2? Yeah. If you have enough of it, it outweighs whatever the virus does. A healthy young person can sacrifice some of their ACE 2 to the virus without succumbing to the symptoms. I see. So, they can show the infection, but they still have the anti-inflammatory ACE 2 in reserve because all of the components of good health, it seems, vitamin B1, progesterone,
aspirin, a lot of good things help to keep your ACE 2 up. I see. Okay. That's very good to know. And now I'm going to go to some questions from people who were kind enough to send them in. And the first one is a finishing up one from Ines Marx. He said, "In a very recent interview, Professor Dr. Christian Drosten, one of the leading virologists in Germany, said that some of the patients studied in Germany did not have neutralizing antibodies, which they found surprising, but have recovered despite their
immune system not reacting correctly." That's in quotes, immune system not reacting correctly. What does Dr. Peat think of the role of neutralizing antibodies? And this is in regard to the coronavirus. I think the healthy young person without too many vaccinations has an immune system that reacts correctly and doesn't bother with getting to the antibody stage. But there has been a kind of underground, gradually gaining recognition in the immunity field. Jamie Cunliffe in England and Polly Matsinger, I think she has worked her whole career at NIH
in this country. And they have the danger theory of immunity or the damage theory, as Cunliffe's terminology, in which the immune system, in their view, isn't on the outlook for so-called pathogens. The antibody theory is based on the idea that we form a picture of the evil germs and then create antibodies specific to that image of evil. In this other picture of immunity, the organism has a picture of itself that it wants to preserve. It knows what it is and where its parts should be. And when it experiences damage,
I think that's a better terminology than Matsinger's danger. The damage is recognized because the organism knows itself and knows when part of it is out of place. When an organism does damage, what is recognized is the damage. And in the process of correcting the damage, or the pathogenic cause of the damage tends to be recognized and eliminated. But the emphasis is put on maintaining or restoring the image of the body rather than learning images of potential invaders. Yeah, I suspect that's a more realistic approach.
About 20 years ago, someone was studying an encephalitis virus. And they were aware that a specific brain antibody was formed. And people were thinking of that antibody as an autoimmune perpetrator of the encephalitis condition. But in this experiment, they suppressed the production of that specific antibody and found that the animal proceeded to die, got much worse when the antibody was removed. And they found that the antibody was serving the purpose of repairing the brain, not causing the damage. And that is the view of Cunliffe and
Matsinger, that the immune system is there to repair the damage. And if you have autoimmunity, it's because something is prolonging the repair process. You want to give it more energy to complete the repair rather than trying to poison the system that makes the autoimmune antibodies. And does that relate to what you've mentioned before about retroviruses? Maybe indirectly. But some people say that as much as 50% of our genome might be retro elements. So when you stir up damage, like poisoning the liver, for example, you release thousands
of things that can be identified as like a retrovirus. And so if you look for a particular virus-like particle in a stressed organism, it looks like you found the agent. But really, it's probably one of the repair processes. Barbara McClintock showed that we can move genes around under stress. Stress causes the mobility of genetic elements to increase. And these retro components seem to be emergency spare parts that you don't see unless you're under severe stress. Yeah, I related that to your saying that when you suppress the antibody,
the organism, which was trying to repair the brain, you were saying. So I was thinking of it as doing repairs. But this is just another level of repair and revising the system, even at the genetic level. Okay, I'm going to move on to another question. And this one is hard to read. I sent it to you by email, Ray, because it's got a lot of questions of nomenclature that I don't understand and probably can't read. I don't know if you saw it or not. I didn't. Okay, let me just
try to simplify it. A paper published in Nature looked at 16 patients with COVID-19. The paper found that among the differentially expressed functional molecules, the levels of interferon, and then there's a bunch of letters, and T cells were lower in the severe group than in the mild group, whereas the levels of the granzyme B and perforin CD8 T cells were higher in the severe group than in the mild group. And this data indicates that COVID-19, similar to some chronic infections, damages the function of the CD4 T cells and promotes excessive activation and
possibly subsequent exhaustion of those T cells, of the CD8 T cells. Together, these perturbations of the T cell subsets may eventually diminish host antiviral immunity. Could Ray offer an interpretation of these statements and comment on the effects of aspirin in this context? I would have to read the article, but my first guess would be that the interferon and TNF, did the question say that they were increased or decreased? They were lower in the severe group than in the mild group. I'm not sure how to interpret that. Apparently, something has killed a part of the
T cell repertoire, and I would have to look at it closely to figure it out. Okay. All right. The next question is, do you think all the nonsense created by the coronavirus outbreak is a reaction to the anti-vax movement that's been increasing in the last few years? It'll be a good excuse for suppressing them more actively. Yeah, and I think it'll raise the peer pressure from the scared public to actually introduce vaccines for this sort of thing. Yeah, and the internet is being biased against them communicating with each other in the public.
Yeah. Here's another one. I've been reading about the health risks from 5G and RF radiation from cell phone towers, Bluetooth, and cell phones and Wi-Fi. Some of the health risks are the same as coronavirus. How much are these cell phone towers and cell phones triggering the virus and/or suppressing the immune system? Thank you, Jason. The kind of damage done by chronic exposure to that kind of radiation does weaken the basic, quiet immune system, and so it would predispose you to the inflammatory kind of reaction, anything that is a chronic weakening influence.
Let's see. Can you ask Ray about the confusion between people suggesting things that decrease ACE2 and things that increase expression of ACE2? Since ACE2 is known as the entry point of the CV, I see people suggesting to decrease anything that may increase suppression. Yeah, go ahead. I think that was an argument published in Lancet magazine against aspirin or anti-inflammatories, but I think those people just hadn't read the relevant things that, in fact, increasing ACE2 goes beyond what the virus infects and has a protective effect rather than a target effect.
Okay. And he adds, "When you look at the research, it seems that things increase expression of ACE2 like losartan are most helpful for people with coronavirus. Can you suggest other things that can increase the expression of ACE2?" I think those that I already mentioned, progesterone, aspirin, vitamin B1, I think the anti-serotonin agents probably do that. I'm not sure. Okay. And what are your thoughts on social isolation being a remedy in keeping this virus contained? It does limit the spread of viruses, but that would be helpful in any flu season.
But I think the harm done by the pressure to enforce isolation is greater than keeping the incidence of respiratory infections lower. I see. Since it doesn't seem like the contagion is that serious. So far, that's my impression. Yeah. The website of a British nurse has some contrary information about the nature of the pandemic and use of NISADs. What does that mean, Ray? Yeah. Non-steroidal anti-inflammatory drugs. Thank you. Aspirin. "As your friend said, most people will not die, but as it spreads undetected without symptoms in some and only
after many days in others, tens of millions of people will be exposed as is happening. 1% of 50 million globally could mean 500,000 deaths. Add to that everyone who for other reasons needs hospitalization but could not access it as the system overloaded to keep alive the 5% who need critical care and you have additional deaths. Both diet and general health are not optimal across this planet. So look to the poorest to die in large numbers. An occurrence the Bilderberg group types would not be concerned with. Your friend is right. This virus is similar, but the
novel aspects that allow it to spread and contrary to his assessment, trigger an immune response that itself becomes life-threatening. It is also now killing people age 40 plus and younger if your immune systems are compromised. Lack of sleep, stress, bad diet, drugs, air pollution, which we are free to experience because of their freedoms. I wanted to mention that the approach to killing the virus is almost always worse than the result of the effect of the virus. Three of the most often mentioned antiviral remedies, chloroquine, acyclovir, and
another of the nucleoside analog types, can't think of the name right now, but these three most frequently mentioned are aimed at killing the virus by damaging its DNA or RNA or ability to replicate RNA or DNA. And these also happen to damage human DNA and at the expense of mutating millions of people. There are recommendations to try to slow the virus replication. But I think that's another thing besides crashing the economy to increase the amount of poverty in the world, the damaging nutrition and increasing stress
and stress. These most frequently offered protections are really very serious harms. They actually poison you? Yeah, well, they damage the gonads and the retina, for example, anywhere that cells have to replicate and reproduce themselves, you're interfering with their DNA replication. And you create some sickness in the individual, but also the risk of mutated descendants. I see. Yeah. Great. There's a solution. And I think I have one more question. I'd like to get Ray's thoughts on claims that vitamin C can increase interferon and cause a cytokine storm, cytokine release syndrome. The few studies
I've seen show the benefit of vitamin C for improving immune response, but some health experts are warning against it. Thoughts? That has been my personal experience. In 1956, when vitamin C became cheap, the tablets were 500 milligrams instead of 50. I had good experience with the 50 milligram tablets in 1953, but I took one of the 500 milligram tablets and immediately got cold symptoms. And over the years, I had that experience until I would get bad symptoms if I would just have two or three milligrams of the synthetic form, which at that time could
be added to bacon or bread or pretzels, almost anything you wouldn't expect vitamin C to be added to. But I ran, because of my own experience, I ran into numerous other people who had had a similar allergy-like reactions to commercial vitamin C. I found that I could consume 4,000 milligrams a day of natural vitamin C by eating, simply eliminating grains from my diet. My intake averaged 4,000 milligrams of natural vitamin C, no problem at all, but two milligrams of the commercial stuff produced the reactions. And a chemist, a free radical specialist,
dissolved 500 milligrams of reagent grade, the purest available, ascorbic acid in a liter of repeatedly distilled water, and then put it in an ESR apparatus to measure the free radicals. And he said that that amount of vitamin C contained enough heavy metals to oxidize the vitamin C into its free radical state, so that the free radical concentration was equivalent to a killing dose of x-ray. I forget, I think he said it was 60, 60 grays, super intense dose of x-ray to produce that free radical activity in water.
- Wow. So that's what you'd inadvertently get trying to be healthy and eating vitamin C. - Yeah. He repeated, he analyzed the traces of heavy metals and picked out just one of numerous heavy metals present as contaminants, and just the iron alone would replicate that reaction. But the contaminants included a variety of toxic heavy metals. - So you should get your vitamin C from fruit, I assume, or you can also get it from meats too, right? - Meats and fruit and even milk. All animals,
except people and guinea pigs and primates, make their own. And so all of the animal foods are generously supplied with vitamin C because the animal makes it. - I see. And you said you got it by eliminating grains. Does that mean you just didn't, you took those foods out of your diet and so you had more room for the vitamin C producing foods? - Yeah. Linus Pauling said we need 4,000 milligrams a day because that's the amount a goat or a chimpanzee would make on a body weight basis. But chimpanzees can't synthesize it,
so they depend on getting it from their foods. And the only food they don't eat that we eat is grains, leaves and fruits and animals. And they get this diet. And the idea that we need a supplement is assuming that we live on bread and cereal and pasta. - I see. But you're not saying that the grains chelate out the vitamin C or anything like that? - No, they're just free of vitamin C. They're the only food that is free of it.
- Yeah. All right. Well, that's good to know. So aspirin, B1, vitamins, not fruit, and any other suggestions for how to keep your immune system up? - Yeah. Vitamin D is one of the most important. It works with thyroid progesterone and H2, for example, to quiet the reactions. And calcium, keeping a high ratio of calcium to phosphate in your diet, works with vitamin D in calming the immune system, holding down the inflammatory reactions. - And vitamin A, is that important? - Yeah. The membranes in particular, all of our surfaces, eyes, nose, lungs,
are dependent on a good vitamin A content for making proteins, largely, keeping the protein turnover at an ideal level. - Okay. Well, great. Is there anything else you'd like to add about a message to people at this time? - No. Looking at those videos that I mentioned or websites, I think will help to reduce the panic. Do you know who David Icke is, or Icky? It's spelled Icky. - You know, I just heard him recently. - There's a recent video of his on the
coronavirus, and I had never thought of him as someone saying anything sensible. But the only thing I disagreed with him in this particular interview was his saying that sugar is immunosuppressive. But everything else that he says in that interview seems okay, although normally, I would consider him a borderline maniac. - Oh, would you? Okay. Well, that might be an interesting listen. And I also would like to talk to you sometime about the importance of keeping your blood sugar at an optimal level in terms of supporting one's immunity, because I
think a lot of people are talking about fasting as a way to boost their immune system. - Yeah. Just 24 hours of fasting is enough to damage all of your functions, energy production especially. And energy is a basic thing for maintaining your non-inflammatory immune system, your health maintenance system. - Okay. So maybe we can go into that in some detail at some point. - Okay. Ray, thanks so much for being on Politics and Science. I really appreciate it, and hope you stay well, and we'll talk to you again soon, I hope.
- Okay, thanks. - Okay, thanks, Ray. Bye-bye. - Bye. - So ends the interview with Dr. Raymond Peat, PhD in biology from the University of Oregon, and this was recorded on the 24th of March 2020. I've been your host, John Barkhausen, and please tune in again next week for another edition of Politics and Science.