Research Update: Part III

All right, everybody, this is part three of our three part series talking about the new COVID vaccine. The CDC guidelines today is going to be more of a 10,000 foot view just to kind of help us think more deeply and meaningfully about what things are going on over the next several months. But I want to ask a few quick questions just to kind of make us think a little bit during this time. Does it seem like the more and more information that we get, the answers are becoming less clear and more confused with each new finding? Do you feel more uncertain about where we're going with COVID And finally, are you uncertain how to think about COVID and the upcoming vaccine? You know, if you're like me, the more and more information that comes out there, it just seems more confusing, not quite as clear. And I'm a principal investigator, I'm a researcher, I'm a physician, so it seems kind of confusing to me. It obviously is going to be confusing to most other people. So our goals with Richmond Engraving Functional Medicine are to educate and encourage and empower and that's where this comes into play, just to kind of educate people more about what's going on to help them make better decisions for themselves and their families. So what kind of trends are we currently seeing with information that's floating around? That's where. That's the way I want to start a conversation today. First, it appears that we're getting further apart and not closer together as far as how to think about the vaccine as well as Covid itself. And we're not getting the answers that we need as more and more information is going out there. So the more and more information that that's put out there, do you really feel better, more certain about a way going forward? And the answer to these is actually not. So do masks work well? Do they not work? The messaging has been going back and forth. Do they work? Do they not work? They work, then they don't work. And when you hear this from the heads of governmental organizations, the cdc, the who, it just causes more confusion. The reality is people have been using masks for over half a century. Surgeons have been using them for, you know, for a long, long time. Masks do decrease the risk for infections. They do not work 100%, but they are very, very powerful tool that we've used in healthcare for, you know, again, over half of a century. Biologics, the medications that are coming out, the remdesivir, the regeneron, these new technologies, convalescent plasma. We hear, oh wow. This study shows it works well. It doesn't work. This study shows it works where it doesn't work. And so we're just not getting really great information that's helping us make better decisions. We're still in a lot of a quality, not sure where to go with things. A great example of, of this I'll talk about in a second is the therapy the president got when he was in the hospital. The focus was on Remdesivir and Regeneron, but there's four other things he got while I was in the hospital that almost no one talked about. And we want to talk about those kind of things because it shouldn't be either technology, vaccines or nutrition, diets, supplements, etc. It should be both. And we should do all things that increase and improve our health and that should be the messaging and the something we can come together on, not something that drives us apart. But the question is why do we have to be either anti vaccine or pro vaccine or antivitamin D or provitamin D? Why can't we be both? I'm a medical doctor, a principal investigator, clinical researcher. I've been checking vitamin D levels on my patients since 2002, 2003. This is not a new thing. Why can't it be both? Vitamin D, zinc, vitamin C, you know, famotidine and vaccination and biologics, et cetera. Why can't this be? Why can't we use all the tools before us? Why can't we use all science based therapeutics? That's my question. And the conversation does not appear to be going that way. We're dividing ourselves in camps and that ultimately is not helpful. When you get sick, a loved one gets sick, you want answers. And I believe we actually do have these answers to make really good decisions. So again, we're not getting closer to consensus, we're getting further apart. So and the thing about another thing is that the quality of information out there that lots of people looking at is for lack of a better word, it's terrible. Great example was a patient sent me a not a patient, but someone on social media sent me a question asking about sterilization with a vaccine. And so I'd never heard about this, so. And evidently it was going viral in the United States. Well come to find out a German person that talked about in the media in English had talked about the vaccine, sterilizing the population and speaking a couple of languages, having traveled around the world knowing how English is used differently in different places, automatically knew the person meant the vaccine was going to use to sterilize the population, meaning remove the virus from the population. What happened? That information was picked up by a blogger here in the United States. They thought, oh my gosh, the vaccine is going to make women not be able to have children. It's going to make men infertile. And that went viral. And that's what we're kind of dealing with, that's what we're fighting against, is all these, this misinformation that clouds the true, the truly helpful stuff. And that's what we're trying to do, is educate you and give you actionable data, things that will encourage you, educate you, and empower you. And if they don't educate you, encourage empower. We just don't talk about them because there's just not room in our wavelength to discuss those things. But the weight of the entire medical narrative right now is on pharmacologics, on technologies. And my question is why? If we know from the Harvard School of Public Health, for example, that 80% of heart disease and 70% of cancer can be prevented by diet and lifestyle, why don't we investigate that? As far as Covid, if we know that 50% of all chronic disease can be attributed to eating processed foods, why is it hard to believe a non drug, non pharmaceutical can have a massive impact on your health? And the answer is it shouldn't be difficult to believe. And we're posting more stuff out there and social media soon, that diet. There's actually studies showing diet can actually change your susceptibility and outcomes in Covid. So that stuff is out there. And these are things that anybody can access from the comfort of their own home. So the way the information is getting distributed, there's just a weight to create more confusion. So, you know, and what happens is we focus on these debates, damask work, they don't work these biologics. And we don't focus on things like vitamin C, zinc, selenium, and there's a whole host of other nutritional things that have a massive, massive, massive impact on people's health. The one thing about masks is masks are not a cure. Wearing a mask will not prevent 100% spread of COVID That's a fact. It does decrease the risk of spread, it does decrease the risk of getting it and make less viral particles available. But it's not a cure, it's a tool. Just like a vaccine is a tool. People can get the flu vaccine and still get the flu. It's just not quite as bad. It's just we have to get to the point where we can look at vaccines, therapeutics, nutritionals, diet, all these things as a combined approach, a combined therapeutic approach. Because that's the way we do it in functional integrated medicine. We always look at things at combined approaches. We never focus on a single magic bullet. And this narrative has been weighed too heavily on, on these things, on these magic bullets. So that now we talk about IV vitamin C which EVMS is using with Dr. Mobik there, and the Math plus protocol, things like IV vitamin D or D which have been used in Spain. You know, when I talked about zinc, famotidine, vitamin C as well as Pepcid, the President of the United States got these when he was admitted to Walter Reed. Well, why aren't we talking about these? And here at the local medical college, when people are admitted to the hospitals with COVID they're actually getting Pepcid as well. So that is huge. And these things actually work really well. You know, I don't know why we have to have two different parties. One is the anti nutrition and one's the anti vaxxers. We need to realize this is a big, big problem that's require more help and more sophistication than, you know, black and white. We need to look at all the nuances of health. You know, why is it that half the people who get this have no symptoms whatsoever? Why is it that 80% of kids who get this have no symptoms whatsoever? Let's focus on those things and try to figure out how we can apply those to the population, population at large. Because that will probably have a huge, maybe potentially a bigger impact than the vaccine. The reality is we won't know about the vaccine results for two years. And that's just the reality of things. So, you know, in the United Kingdom, they're actually giving vitamin D to all the high risk people with cystic fibrosis, copd. They're actually getting the vitamin D sent to their homes. You know, why something like that. So that has a lot of data. You know, one of the posts we put out recently was that 87% of people who died with COVID had low vitamin D levels. That's nine out of 10 people dying with COVID having low vitamin D. That's a simple intervention. Why can't we talk about D and zinc and vitamin C and famotidine and all the other things we've been talking about for the last seven, eight, nine months? Why can't those be part of our conversation? Because they actually work and they're actually fairly, fairly potent. So much so that hospitals are using them. And the top political individual in our country got these therapeutics when he was in the hospital. So the final thing I want to talk about is just how we're questioning what's going on. We're using the Socratic method, a lot of our questioning. What do I mean by that? What I mean by that is Socratic method is not meant to actually get answers. It's to stretch your mind, to think deeper. So you always ask questions. Does the vaccine work? Yes. Well, how I know it works? Well, we have this study showing this. Oh, does it mean you prevent disease? And if you ask questions and ask questions and ask questions, eventually get to a question that you can't answer, and that's where you sit and think. You try to keep on answering these questions. Well, if you get to a question that the CEO of Pfizer can't answer, for example, the assumption is that, well, then it doesn't work. And that's what happened with the interview with the CEO, Pfizer. He was asked a question about the vaccine. Passing it on as a business individual, as the head of a company. His job is not to be a medical doctor and the researcher. His job is to get the business going. And he said very bluntly and honestly, I don't know. Well, that was looked at as if, oh, my gosh. And that's just him admitting that we won't know that for probably a year or two. Not knowing does not mean not working. It just means simply not knowing. And so the narrative, taking things like that and spreading information that, oh, my gosh, we're not quite sure what's going on, that does not help the conversation, only makes things more cloudy and makes people more confused. And our role here is to educate, encourage, and empower. And we don't want to cause confusion. We want to educate so people can make good decisions for themselves, their families, and their loved ones. So another great example of that. People are asking me questions about the Pfizer vaccine, the vaccine. The data was given to the FDA, I think November 23rd, November 20th, as of today, today's the 9th. As of today, they have not reviewed the information yet. Tomorrow there's gonna be a large actually open. Anybody can watch it in the country who wants to, and then they're gonna give out the report. It's kind of hard for me, as someone involved with the vaccine study, to answer questions about the study that the fda, as of today, has not even looked at. And my lack of knowledge of that does not mean that the vaccine is not safe. It's not effective. It's not gonna prolong immunity. It doesn't improve natural killer cells. It doesn't. It's, you know, in the United States to date, there have been no adverse events from the vaccine to date. Even now there's, you know, in the UK that's having some people having anaphylactic reactions. Well, now it's being going out to the general population and some people who have high algae risks, who have EpiPens that may happen. That's just the reality. Taking these little data points and extrapolating them out does not help, does not help our conversation. As I think about the messaging and what's going on, thinking the cure, so to speak, for what we're dealing with right now is to increase our personal health resilience with diet, lifestyle, sleep, nutrition, and also for those that have a high risk, potentially the vaccine. What we have to remember is that 99.8% of people that get this will survive, will live. We have to realize that 50% of the people who get this will have no symptoms whatsoever. So the question is, how can we bend the curve so that 0.02% that will die from this so we can make that less, that more of those people will survive, that the percentage of people who get severe symptoms will have less severe. And that's what we're trying to do with education, giving people interventions they can actually to leverage for themselves. And that's where our conversation needs to be. What can we do to help ourselves, our friends, our family, our loved ones, our community? Ultimately, we as a country are at the tip of the spear of medical knowledge with COVID 19 and everybody's feeling the uncertainty in medicine, we call it practice because there's always uncertainty and we have to get comfortable. Some questions we can't answer, some questions we won't be able to answer. And we still have to move forward. I think that's key. Even if we can't answer all the questions, we still have to move forward. And for me, that means the most important thing with the vaccine is safety, because it's safe today and today it does appear to be safe in the United States. Have been no adverse effects. As it gets deployed to people and as regular people with health issues that are really sick, who have history of allergies and anaphylaxis get it, we'll hear about things and we need to realize that we need to think about it and not and make wise decisions. Hopefully we'll continue to put out information and keep you involved, keep you informed, because again. Our goals are to educate, encourage, empower. Hopefully this video was helpful to you. If you feel like the information was useful, please share with your family and friends. Unless you share it, it won't get out there. Unless you like it, unless you comment, this information doesn't spread. That's just kind of how social media works these days. So if you feel this is helpful, please share it. Anyway, everybody take care, be well and we will talk to you soon.