COVID Q&A - Updates

Hang on a second. And we're on Facebook. Yep. 3, 2, 1, go. Good day, everybody, and welcome to Medicine and Health with Dr. Paul Anderson. That's me. I'm Dr. Paul. And today, uh, we, uh, we're doing a COVID Q&A, COVID updates. And, uh, you know, that's one of those things, uh, I know a year ago I would have told you No, I don't think we'd be doing this. 9 months ago, maybe. No. But I think that a phenomenon that we're dealing with is there's so much information coming at us because whether, you know, you use your smartphone or your TV or you listen to the radio or podcasts or whatever it is that you do or all of the above, there is a firehose-like amount of information coming at us all the time about COVID and the pandemic and the vaccines and all this other stuff. And there's also parallel to that, this giant kind of vacuum of understanding around a lot of things, not because it's not understood generally or not— people don't have capacity to understand, but because the story has changed so many different times since we kind of started talking about this in, you know, late February, early March of last year. Yeah. of 2020. And so one of the things that happens when you have that is you have a lot of questions and a lot of maybe changing of data points and changing ideas about— and you have an evolving problem. And then have all this information just constantly coming at you, some of which is better quality information than others. It's natural that you would have these sort of Gap understanding, gaps are normal, and there's then a lot of effort, especially I think by media, to fill in those gaps. And I think filling in the gaps is important, obviously, because we need to know things, we need to be informed. But one of the things that I think that happens, and certainly like the questions I get, and then when I watch especially news reports, I'll read a news report or Maybe watch a video version or an audio version or something like that. I'll look at it through the lens of knowing a little bit about what's going on, you know, in the world of medicine and the scientific world, and a little bit, you know, maybe a tiny bit behind the scenes. But I'll look at it and think, well, that's, you know, they're getting at a common question, which is part of the job of the media is to answer questions, answer common questions. Um, And they're, you know, doing so that they can kind of put together a story that makes sense regardless of, you know, maybe not having all the information or maybe trying to shorten it up or whatever. So there's a few things I just wanted to get to that have been like the top questions that we've been kind of fielding and looking at and You know, working on some new newsletters, etc., about all of this. And I'm going to try and, you know, get through them here in the next 50 minutes or so, which is usually what we have here on the radio, about 55 minutes. But before we get going, I just want to talk about a couple of things. So one of the things I want to talk about is how is it that a news story would differ from you know, maybe a really deep, say, scientific treatment of a topic. Now, obviously, by nature, we don't always want a news story to go into the depth that a, you know, a science paper would, etc. But I think it's important to know that they, you know, there are some differences that go on. So one of the things that you have to watch when you're, when you're reading stories, whether it's in the news or a press release that's put out Or whatever. And this is not to say anyone, you know, usually people don't have bad intent in writing a news story or press release or something, but those things are made to get you the information in as short and understandable a version as possible and to get it out to you as quickly as possible. Now, unlike the days when you had to wait for the newspaper to be printed, or any other sort of way of getting information around, nowadays, what, you know, we, we get information almost instantaneously. Right. And that's good and bad, I suppose. So one of the things that you have to be careful about, because some of the topics we're going to talk about, such as some of the drugs that have been in the news around COVID care and COVID, some of the diet and lifestyle things that are in the news around COVID care and COVID, viral mutations, vaccines, all of this stuff. One of the things you have to be cautious with is, um, there's a lot of information that's sort of filling in gaps. And by that, I mean, we may have a big part of the story, but we really don't know how the story ends, and we don't know all the little twists and turns of the story. So one way, rather than waiting till we have all of the information, which could be who knows when, a news outlet will often put together something and do the best they can to estimate what the answers ought to be. Based on the available information. Okay, that's pretty common. When you are reading stories or listening to them or whatever, whether— and the most common ones I'm seeing right now are about some of the drugs we're going to talk about, or about the vaccines, or other things of that nature— you need to listen or watch for words such as may. So, this vaccine may, and then fill in the blank after that. Whatever comes after the word may, or another good word is could, or possibly, or we believe, okay, these are all ways of saying, to the best of our understanding, this is how the story is going to go. What they're not saying very definitely because of the use of those words is, this is how we know the story is going to go. And that's not bad. It's just the way language is, and it's the way news stories and press releases especially are. And, you know, when, when we write scientific papers, there's things that are not known, you know, there are conclusions that are drawn, and, and conclusions can be framed in this way, you know, based on the available data, we believe that, fill in the blank, or we believe that this drug may Fill in the blank. And, you know, that, that's something that's done there. So you do have to watch the language that's being used. The reason I bring that up is that some of the questions, especially around some of the drugs and the available vaccines that we have right now and stuff like that, the questions are based on, well, I heard that, you know, drug X or vaccine X is going to do this for us. Right. And when I've gone back and looked and thought, wow, did somebody actually, you know, publish something saying that that's, you know, that seems to be the data showing that? Generally, no, that's not what happened. Usually what it is is a press release by the company that makes the drug or the vaccine or a news story that is putting one of these words in and saying it could, or it may, or it possibly, or it, you know, we believe it will, but They're not really going out on a limb and saying for sure it is going to create X. Okay, so that's a really important thing I think to keep in mind. So it's not bad to you know listen to you know news stories or press releases or whatever. Just just know what they are. One of the things that I have found useful, and I've put it in some of my newsletters. So you know the best way to find the newsletters is is usually to go either Instagram. It's just DRA. A Online, Dr. A Online. I have a Linktree in there with about a million links, but the newsletters are in there and they're linked in there. Or you can go on to Facebook. It's Dr. A Online. They're both Dr. A Online, just, just one's got a period. And you'll see posts in there for the newsletters. But for example, there's a newsletter about COVID therapies, okay, therapeutics. And it goes through what do we know right now and what do we believe and what don't we know right now about things like, you know, drugs we're going to talk about like ivermectin or antibody therapies or the, you know, the, you know, vaccines, etc., etc. And so in those newsletters, Often what I'll try and do is, is look and say, well, here's places you can go, you the consumer of information, and get more information. The purpose when I write a summary or newsletter is to boil it down, and some people say, well, gee, I'd really like to learn more about that from an expert. So one of the things in the newsletters, though, that I pointed to have been some really good videos that are done on particular topics. And I've got links to them in there. There are some that are actually on the CDC website, and they're done by specialists, you know, say by a virologist or an epidemiologist or something like that, where they really get in, they describe, well, this is how this drug would work, or this, you know, we're going to try this drug because we believe it will work this way. But they really get into the, you know, the down and dirty of the information, and they really get that across. So those are some of the, you know, resources I think that are good. That you can take a look at. But one of the things that they will say generally, because they're trying to be as open and, you know, what I, what I try and do here too, just be as open and honest with the information as possible and say, we know this stuff. We kind of know that this is emerging information about the outcome. This stuff over here, we don't know. We're guessing. We're making educated guesses, but we're guessing about this over here. And one of the things that, you know, you look at some of these that we're talking about, the vaccines, for example, and I bring this up in the COVID Therapeutics Newsletter. One of the experts who was speaking on some of the CDC videos was saying, you know, right now we believe these are the statistics, we believe that these are going to be the outcomes, but right now we're dealing with only press releases. We don't have any published data or peer review data to say that this, you know, this press release is going to turn out, it's going to pan out. And that's still going on because so much stuff is coming at us and so many things are happening so quickly. So the last thing I'll say about that with especially news reports, press releases, and things of that nature, there's a lot of things that'll go back and forth, and I'll lay them out specifically when we talk about The agents and things that are coming up here, where the, the press release or the news story may say something such as, this treatment will reduce the amount of transmission of the virus. It will usually be said as, this treatment may, or we believe this treatment will. It doesn't mean that that after another, you know, year or after another, you know, 5 million doses or whatever, that that's how that's going to turn out. That's just the nature of numbers and humans and something as widely variable as a virus like this. So, and I didn't pick these in any particular order, but the first thing I wanted to talk about was drugs in the news. So probably, I think because of news stories, the Drug I've gotten the most questions about in the last four to six weeks is ivermectin. Now, ivermectin is traditionally used; it's used a lot in veterinary medicine. So if you have you know horses or cows, you've probably given it to them. But ivermectin is it's a very multi-use drug. So one of the things that blows people's minds about some of these drug categories is you have a drug that's maybe for helminths, for worms, let's say, or parasites. Well, that doesn't mean that that's the only thing that that drug does. Same thing with some of the drugs that are traditionally used for bacteria of certain types. It doesn't mean that's the only thing that they do or the only thing that they kill. So that's kind of the ones I want to focus on today are these ones that have these other benefits potentially. But ivermectin has been much more in the news. And to the degree that I've had people, you know, contact me and say, should I start taking ivermectin? you know, as a preventive or something of that nature. Now, what I want to say is ivermectin— I want to describe the reasons why ivermectin probably is helpful with COVID And if you look at newer data, and there's a lot of really great newer data that's coming out about ivermectin, it's being used around the world, it's relatively inexpensive, and it's quite useful. Well, there's a number of reasons ivermectin may be very useful. In COVID. The first thing is its mechanism allows for it, believe it or not, to have an antiviral effect on COVID replication. So it's a drug that's traditionally used for worms and parasites, and yet it also blocks COVID replication. So it's now known as an antiviral as well. What else does it do? It probably has this beneficial effect, which we talked about a long time ago of other drugs, of being a zinc ionophore, where it takes zinc and helps it to go inside the cell. And then the zinc inside the cell helps to block the replication of the virus. So it's got this antiviral replication ability. Now, if you are getting sick, or if you've been infected and you're in the early phase of being sick, Blocking viral replication when you have a viral illness is one of the big endgames for antiviral therapy. So if ivermectin can do that, then that would be very, very useful. There's another thing that ivermectin does, and this is something that we have used in the side of my work where I work with cancer patients. And there are what they call repurposed drugs. Some people call them off-label, and in oncology we call them repurposed drugs because they're drugs that we just repurposed for cancer. Well, ivermectin is one of those drugs, and it's part of a small family of drugs that actually has anti-cancer benefits through a lot of immunologic manipulation that it does. Now, if you think about cancer being a way for these abnormal cells to start replicating, you know, in, in contradistinction to your immune system and all that, if we can shift the immune playing field, sometimes the immune system has a better chance fighting back. Turns out ivermectin is one of those drugs that can do that as well. Now, in COVID patients, probably based on what we know about ivermectin's ability to shift immunology, ivermectin is one of those things that might be able to help so that the person infected with COVID not only has the antiviral effect, but they have a more level immune playing field when the COVID viremia is going on, and you're less likely to get bad side effects. That's another possible effect with ivermectin. There's another really interesting one with ivermectin, and that is that some of the research shows that people who have underlying infections they don't know about— though most of us carry around some infections that our immune system has shoved in a corner, it's no big deal— and some people even have infections that have gone to sleep. They're latent, dormant infections. Well, if you have something like that, especially if it's a lung type of an organism, and a lot of these latent infections are lung type, organisms. If you get a bad inflammatory viremia like COVID can have, you can wake up those infections. Well, ivermectin has some anti-infective ability against a lot of those co-infections or collateral infections that go on. So ivermectin has a bunch of reasons it might be useful. It's directly antiviral. It has this immune balancing effect. As I said, it's, it's Specifically, probably a zinc ionophore. And then it has the ability to cut down on some of the infections that might cause a comorbid situation, extra illness, basically. So one of the questions I get is, you know, well, should I just take it all the time and use it? Well, like most drugs, you know, ivermectin is not something you just, you know, want everybody taking. Some people, most people don't, but some people have a lot of liver inflammation with it, so you have to be monitored, you want to be careful with that. The times where we have used it prophylactically, so preventively, have been people who had no other option but to, say, do an international flight to get back home from somewhere where they were, you know, stuck, and they knew they were probably going to be more exposed being, you know, on the plane and other things of that nature, or people who had an early positive test in the family. And they were exposed to them and they wanted, you know, that was close enough proximity. So while their testing was going on, they wanted to get going on it. Things of that nature, you know, where either you have someone who just can't get around the exposure or is, you know, probably exposed enough, say, with a family member that they need something prophylactic. When you may not be being exposed. The other thing to know is that ivermectin in many countries is being used as the first strike agent when people get exposed, usually with a couple of other medications. Now, the other one that has gotten— it's like a lot of things, unfortunately, especially when the news and and science and politics all collide. Sometimes you get these really confusing news stories. And this one, HCQ, hydroxychloroquine, we talked about that way back in March. It's one of those where it's kind of like ivermectin. It has this zinc ionophore activity, it's anti-infective, and it's immunomodulatory. Initially, you know, it was like, that was really great. And then there was all this, well, maybe it's not so good and it doesn't work. And, It turns out in the study, in real human studies that we look at now, even according to the CDC, and by the way, CDC moved ivermectin up to the, they moved it from the don't use list to the use it if you need to list, which is a pretty good move. Even the CDC, you know, saying, well, hydroxychloroquine probably has a place in treatment, et cetera. Now, a lot of times hydroxychloroquine is used with an antibiotic, azithromycin, which also has other non-antibiotic antibiotic activities. And there— excuse me— there's a lot of good reasons for that. But again, that's not something you want to be taking because that's something that would be used if, you know, you and your doctor felt that that was right for your situation when you had the infection. Another one that was published just last week or 2 weeks ago is a really broad-acting drug, again, that has immunomodulatory activity. And we think of for bacterial infections, Doxycycline. Now, a lot of people have taken doxycycline when they had pneumonia, or, you know, sometimes younger people will be given it for, you know, for acne and skin problems and things of that nature. It does a lot of different things biochemically. But it turns out, based on this research that came out a couple of weeks ago, that doxycycline is actually also antiviral and can affect COVID infection. Now, what's interesting with doxycycline is in addition to its ability to be immunoregulatory and potentially an antiviral, its main job as an antibacterial of note in a COVID infection also covers a lot of lung organisms. So it could be one of these where it has multiple ways in. Doxycycline is generally well tolerated by people, and of ivermectin and hydroxychloroquine. If you get to doxycycline, doxycycline is probably something, you know, that your doctor has prescribed thousands of times because it's such a commonly used antibiotic. Now there's other drugs, the antibody cocktails that they talk about, you know, such as the pre-made antibodies that have been given, those are Useful. We talked about those separately on, on one of the things, and in the COVID Therapeutics newsletter, I go into those. But the idea there with the, the pre-made antibodies is that you're going to get them, they're going to be usually infused intravenously into you, and then they are going to kind of give you antibodies that your body hasn't even made yet, so it can kind of go through and block up the virally infected cells, etc. So those are, those are gaining some traction. Some of the other antivirals kind of plus and minus, and I think that it's, it's good that we have some of these other things coming out with, with good data to be used. Another area that has come up a lot, and I get questions about, is, are there any updates around the nutrients that you talked about? So, you know, early in March, April, May, You know, we had different podcast topics about nutrients, and I did a whole newsletter devoted to nutrients and COVID. And, you know, things to keep in mind are there was a lot of, you know, news and a lot of effort put into looking at vitamin C and COVID early on. That's still held up when When we have real sick people in hospitals and they can do the intravenous vitamin C protocols, we're seeing that help many patients in that setting. There's research coming out to back that up with COVID patients. The other one, though, that has come out and just got more and more and more science behind it is actually vitamin D, D like David. Now vitamin D is different than vitamin C. So vitamin C is sort of Biochemically, they're almost opposite in that we don't make our own vitamin C and it's water soluble. So whatever we put in today pretty much leaves us today. So we also have to keep filling the tank with vitamin C. Vitamin D is not water soluble, it's fat soluble. So it can build up and it can create some inflammatory activity and things, you know, if you get it out of balance, et cetera. But early on, if you can Consider that most studies with people in most parts of the world, especially North Americans, their average vitamin D levels are on the low end or low. You can take vitamin D for a while as a preventive before you really would overdose on it. Now, medically speaking, when you're managing somebody and you're giving them vitamin D, normally you, you do a test at the beginning and then you test them, you know, in 12 weeks or so. And then you test them as you go along, because at a certain point you kind of reach a— Plateau. You know, the level you want to be. But if you're starting low and there's a virus going around where vitamin D status is important, it might be good for you to get your levels up. So with the caveat that number one, I'm not giving medical advice. I'm just telling you what's out there in the research and what people are talking about in the scientific world. But the caveat also that if you're going to do any nutrient therapy, More than acutely, you should check in with the healthcare provider who does that sort of thing for you. Vitamin D is now being shown in more and more studies where the higher the vitamin D level, the lower the mortality of the COVID patient and other similar things. Basically, more vitamin D equals less trouble with COVID There were early on some conjecture that maybe the vitamin D, you know, if we got the levels up, it would be preventive, you know, an actual preventive, you know, against the virus settling in. And we've seen that with other viruses, certainly. And a lot of people, there's a lot of backlash about that. People saying, well, you can't say it's preventive and all this. But in the newer research that's coming out, it does appear that in addition to having a protective role, if you do get the infection, infection, vitamin D also has potentially a preventive role as well. And it's one of those things where, you know, again, kept within reason and doses within reason and monitoring if you need it, it's a very, very low potential side effect agent. So vitamin D, you know, as opposed to say taking ivermectin every day, which wouldn't be a great idea, preventively taking enough vitamin D to keep your levels up, you know, in the upper portion of the normal range is a very, very low danger sort of an intervention. So vitamin D is certainly something, and vitamin C, as we talked about before, you want to have that every day kind of moving through you. Other things that haven't really changed since we've talked about them in the nutrient area are the trace minerals. Now zinc gets the most play on the news stories and things, because if we get zinc into the cell, like with a zinc ionophore type of drug or a therapy. There's natural things like quercetin, the bioflavonoid, helps get zinc inside cells too. But zinc is, is, is a big one. I've always mentioned that zinc, if you, if you go and you've never taken it, you can get really sick to your stomach taking zinc. So I always take it in the middle of a meal, you know, literally eat half the food, take your minerals and eat the other half of the food, and that helps it digest. But the other thing I've usually been recommending to people is that you can get a multi-mineral because minerals all come in balance. And you'll have a multi-mineral, it has a— they'll generally have a fair amount of zinc, but then they'll also have things like selenium and chromium and, you know, other trace minerals that you've heard of that are useful as they go along. And one of the things with zinc, like short-term it's not such a big deal. Long-term, if you're taking a lot of zinc, zinc and copper kind of work with each other, but in a balance. And so if you just take zinc for a long time, copper levels can go down. Now, some people already have enough copper, some people don't. That's why I say short-term, it's not such a big deal. But if you're taking it for years and years, you normally— if you look at a multi-mineral, it's got zinc and copper in a proper ratio. So that's usually why I just have people get a multi-mineral and take that again with food. Another one that's come along, which again, there's a lot of crossovers with viral immunology, viral interventions, and then sort of repurposed drug type of use in cancer. And another one that comes up is melatonin. Now we think of melatonin as the stuff our brain makes at night to help it go to sleep, which is true. But melatonin is also used in higher doses as an immunomodulatory substance. It does all sorts of things with the immune system. And there are studies now showing that, you know, the use of melatonin would be another thing that would be beneficial, especially if you become infected. And you can certainly look at that. And then there's some other things from the plant world. These 2 things I'm going to mention are also used a lot in the world of cancer. But the reasons that we think right now that they're probably useful in COVID are around a couple of things. One is this zinc ionophore ability, the ability of zinc to move into the cell and be antiviral. And then the other is being immunomodulatory. Because remember from previous podcasts, one of the biggest problems with COVID is if it gets too— whips up too much of an inflammatory activity, that's when you start getting clotting, you start getting extra mucus, you do all the things you don't want with the infection. So immunomodulation is not a bad thing. And the 2 that have really come up and keep showing themselves as useful are quercetin, I mentioned earlier, which is a bioflavonoid, and then a part of green tea called EGCG. That's the initials. It has a very long scientific name, but EGCG and quercetin are also quite useful. And In people that I've consulted with who have had active infections and they were already doing vitamin C and D and zinc and, you know, maybe melatonin and all the other things we've talked about, I would make sure that they added quercetin and/or EGCG. Some people, for example, if you drink green tea and you get an upset stomach or it doesn't just sit well with you, EGCG as a supplement can be a little irritating to the stomach. So I would just have those folks do quercetin. If EGCG and zinc don't bother, and/or green tea don't bother you, then go forth and use EGCG. But those are just some that are out there. I think that the thing that I've seen though is things like vitamin C, the more data we get on it with actual COVID patients, the better it looks. Vitamin D, same thing. Melatonin looking like it's going the same direction, etc. Now, another thing that's come up a lot in the last few weeks, and I think is really important, is the— this is a global lifestyle factor, and I think it's really important, and that is blood sugar control. Now, we talked about this every time we talked about COVID and lifestyle type of things. Now, there's 2 things around blood sugar control that, you know, I want to point out. So one is, because COVID is in the world right now and people are, you know, wondering about getting exposed and all of that, if you're already, say, insulin resistant, diabetic, something of that nature, you can't make yourself suddenly undiabetic, you know, or insulin resistant. You work on it, but like, that's a project, okay? But the thing that you can do if you have blood sugar dysregulation problems, type 2 diabetes, even with type 1 diabetics, is be in as good control as possible. Now, if you're a diabetic, you're already aware of, you know, you're going to be checking your blood sugars and you're going to be, you know, you might be on oral Oral medications, you might be on oral medications and insulin, or some combination thereof. Sometimes people early in insulin resistance are just doing dietary changes, but they're still monitoring their blood sugar. The most important thing is, if you're already monitoring your blood sugar, what you want to do is go for the best control through the day. So you're not having to chase your blood sugar really up high or certainly down low. Because as an independent factor in surviving COVID infection, blood sugar control is one huge independent factor. Now, blood sugar control is, of course, predicated on a number of things. So part of it, though, is how you're eating. If you are in a time where it's much more you know, high stakes that you have your blood sugar very well under control, like around COVID, what you want to think about is if you— whether you're on a little, just diet, a little medication, or a lot of medication for your blood sugar issues, doesn't matter. But you know what your pattern is, and you know the foods that will trigger you to more blood sugar swings. So the better you can be about your diet being regular and Blunting the blood sugar swings that go up and down with the dietary part, the less work your body has to go through, and that actually is going to be associated with your immune system having less stress on it if you do get an infection like COVID. So beyond everything else, and of course, if, you know, you use medications to control and keep your blood sugar level with your diet, you don't want to be missing medications, you don't want to be, you know, underdosing them, or, you know, that sort of thing. So just being as careful as possible. Now, if you don't knowingly have a blood sugar problem, a lot of people are pre-diabetic, they don't realize it. You still, if you're trying to, you know, do lifestyle things that'd be the best for you and the most helpful, the last thing in the world you want is to be spiking your blood sugar. So things that would run your blood sugar up are simple sugars, simple carbohydrates, having meals that are not well balanced between protein and fat. fat with whatever carbohydrate you're getting, but especially, you know, high glycemic index foods. So you all have the internet or you wouldn't be seeing and hearing me right now. You can just plug into your search glycemic index and it will have low foods and high foods, big list. You can look up anything on there. And so if you're looking for carbohydrates, you want to look on the low end because they have a lot of fiber, they have a lot of other nutrients in them. And they don't make your blood sugar spike as much. If you go over to high glycemic index foods, they're going to spike your blood sugar. That's not going to be associated with you living a long time and having really good immunity. So blood sugar though is something that's come out, and it's not like this is new information, but I think there's been some new publications. They've really taken off in the news, and it truly is, as we would have expected from the beginning, one of those things where it's a direct correlation as it's coming out between the better the blood sugar control, the better the survivability of COVID if you get it, and also probably a number of other good things too. Now, before we get to another topic that seems to be just, you know, it's ragingly moving around in the news and on social media and everything else, which is vaccines, I want to talk just briefly because it's related, and there's a lot of information, some of which is really good and some of which is really sketchy out there about it, about this topic, and that is viral mutations. Now, viral mutations are just what it says. You have a virus, there's, you know, billions and billions of the virus, and as a virus moves along through its cycle, And remember, viruses are sort of machine-like. They're not really alive. So they're, you know, they're either working or not, basically. Viruses like to go through and they need a host. And so hosts can be us as humans, they can be animals. And often what viruses do is they go through. So we use one that's not that old, at least its last occurrence, the swine flu, as it was called later. We called it by its number. But what these viruses like to do, and in, in at least in previous days, they would get a name like that, like swine flu, is they would leave the human population, they would go out to an animal population like pigs, and they would pick up new Resistance tricks and mutate, then they would go back to the people and they would be able to infect the humans again. Now think about it from the point of view of a machine that is going and needs to keep replicating. What does a virus normally do? Virus normally gets into a cell and hijacks the nuclear material of the cell or the replication processes, makes more viruses instead of making more people cells or pig cells or whatever, and then it's Released out into the host, and then it does it again and again and again. That's why it needs a host. So it's not of a benefit to a virus to not be able to infect you or whomever the virus is going on. So if you look at it, you know, you look at the swine flu from the '70s, then there was swine flu in the early 2000s, I think was when it came back around. Same basic virus, but it had mutated yet again. There's avian flus that do this. They leave the human population, they go into birds, and then they come back to us and they get us again because they're, you know, that way. Well, the SARS family, which is part of the, you know, coronavirus family, the SARS, SARS-CoV, SARS-CoV-1, we talked a lot about that in previous episodes, how one of the reasons that it probably didn't become Pandemic level like SARS-CoV-2, the one we have now, did is with SARS-CoV-1, you got sick really rapidly, and so you knew who those people were. With SARS-CoV-2, it sort of goes out and lingers in populations and moves around, and some people have very low symptoms and some have high, and so that's the perfect way to get around, right? So as a mutation, SARS-CoV-2, SARS-CoV-2. related to SARS-CoV-1, but not the same virus. Well, all viruses of any kind mutate. That's part of the way that they get around, even when they're just still in people, for example, although we know SARS-CoV-2, the COVID agent, has been to many other animals, and we're not sure what that means exactly, but we know it's been in animals already. So, but to keep in mind, even back in February, March, when we looked at the SARS-CoV-2, what we now call that, it already had 3 main mutations going then, and the 3 main mutations had a bunch of submutations, so this is not a new thing, these mutations. The other thing that you really want to keep in mind when you hear about mutations and everyone's getting scared about mutations is, number one, that's what viruses do. Number two, most of the mutations don't mean anything different. It's going to be the same kind of virus. But number three, we have right now at last check looking at the science probably four thousand mutations. And like I said, most of them are not going to be you know different pathologically; they're just ways that the virus changes genetically. But what and this is something that there's a lot of news stories about that are either trying to scare you. I don't know if that's a. what they mean to do, trying to scare you or trying to get you upset or whatever. What we don't know is, what does this mean going forward, a mutation? Many times when a virus mutates, it actually becomes weaker. Okay. Now, there are apparently in the viral genome with SARS-CoV-2 what we would call gain-of-function aspects, and gain-of-function is just what I was talking about, how a virus, you know, replicates and stays in the population, stuff like that. And so there's concern, but totally unknown, that maybe these new mutations may be easier to get. And it looks like from some of the bigger mutations, the ones that mean more, yeah, their ability to like get onto the right receptors in the human and get inside the cells faster is probably probably being developed, but we don't know that yet because we haven't tracked it enough to firmly know that that is the direction. Most of the time what the mutations do is they go through and they— you can think of it as sort of leveling out and broadening the viral exposure, but normally the virus is exposed and experienced at a lower level as time goes on. This can be part of what helps to develop herd immunity. So we hear about our next topic, vaccines, and that's the way towards herd immunity. Vaccines are one way to herd immunity. The other way is people having the illness, and enough people have had it, and then it's like, well, it's not, it's not going to get around that much anymore. So you want to remember that viruses mutate. Do. Normally, over time, most mutations within the time period of a pandemic make it maybe more transmissible but less deadly. And the long-term mutations that would be years from now, say if this virus leaves us and goes out to some animal, those would be upgrade gain-of-function mutations. So if it came back around, then it may be more of a problem later. Okay, but one of the things you can think of is with respect to, say, the influenza virus. There's different categories of influenza, but the bad flu that we try and, you know, make up immunizations against every year, though immunizations against influenza are anywhere from 0% effective to 50 or 60% effective because You're guessing what the mutation that's going to come back around next year is going to be, and that's just the name. So you have influenza, but it's really a different virus when it comes back around to you. It's also why the, you know, the common cold is a group of viruses, but we don't really have immunizations against them because they're, they're always shifting and changing. And you can literally have a new cold virus every year, or sometimes multiple. Because they mutate that fast. That's just what viruses do. Okay, now we got a little bit, a few minutes left here. I wanted to save a little bit of time for vaccines. Now, this will not be a super in-depth vaccine discussion, but I want to hit a couple of questions I think were really good that I got in the last couple of weeks. And so the first one was the vaccines that are available right now. So again, if you're watching in the future, this may not apply because there may be different things. And again, in the COVID Therapeutics newsletter that I put out, I talked about how there's, you know, over 150 vaccines in development right now, and we have emergency use authorizations for just a couple, you know, different countries have different ones. So there's potentially in the future, there could be a lot of difference, but what we know today, as of today, this is February 4th, 2021. So if I say something that doesn't match your experience. It could be 2 days from now and it could be totally different. The ones right now are these mRNA vaccines, and what, what we see with those is the first thing is that while it is injected into you in the arm, like a flu shot or another vaccine you might get, the mRNA technology is not really the same as the vaccines you got for polio, or, you know, measles, mumps, and rubella, or even tetanus or something of that nature. Now, the thing that you want to think about with vaccines Is traditional vaccines are taking a part of a virus, and they, they'll call them, you know, attenuated virus, meaning it's still partly viable, or, you know, inactivated, killed type of virus like the Salk vaccine. And they take that and they grow it. And so you've got these little chunks of virus that are not full virus injected in the person, immune system goes and they see that and they do what's called antigen presentation. And then they present that to your immune system and say, hey, if this comes along, make a memory of it. And then the B cell and T cell side, so the cell-mediated and antibody immunity side, makes a memory. And then if you get, you know, presented with this virus in the future, your immune system has a running start, goes after it, right? So that's the kind of the biological Trajectory of how traditional vaccines work. What these mRNA vaccines do is they work more like a biological drug. Now, biological drug is something that you give to somebody. We use these in cancer and autoimmunity and certain other types of conditions, more conditions all the time. They're the— biological drugs are the fastest growing sector of the drug market. They're also the most expensive sector of the drug market. What a biological drug does is it goes in and it interacts with a biological process or pathway, and you could think of it as, you know, a key-lock system or speeding something up, but basically what these mRNA vaccines do is they take in little packets, and these are very small packets, of course, inside the injection, because if they weren't in these little packets, the enzymes in your system system would tear them apart and there would be no mRNA to go do anything. So they go in, and the hope is, is they interact with one of your cells, and then your cell takes the mRNA in, and then that codes for the formation of pieces of the SARS-CoV-2 so that you have this, and then you get an immune response against If you talk to or listen to people's reports about their experience, many people with the mRNA vaccines will have, you know, a day or so where they feel really tired, they might get a fever, they may be sore, they're having a viremia, and what the viremia is, it's not really a virus there, it's the immune system being told to activate against this particular trigger. So you do want to know that these are not like the traditional vaccines you've had. Now there is, there are traditional types of viral vaccines in development for SARS-CoV-2, but those aren't available right now, at least in the US. Right now we have the Pfizer and Moderna versions, and those are the mRNA types. The other thing that we have to be really cautious and mindful of, and this is This is not to make you think one way or another about this particular type of vaccine. It's just, this is the way it is, and you need to be aware. Normally a vaccine comes out after it's finished phase 3 trials. I've talked about this before. The vaccines that we have now, the mRNA ones that are out there in the US and Canada, have not finished phase 3 trials. You are the phase 3 trial. Okay. There were phase 1 and phase 2, or earlier entry-level trials. Phase 3 trials are broader trials. trials in humans, and normally we'd do the broader trials in humans before we took the vaccine to market. So the thing you do need to keep in mind is there's a lot of questions that would normally be answered at the end of a phase 3 trial that are being answered by any of us humans who are getting the vaccine right now. Now that's neither good or bad, it just is what it is, and we need to be aware that that's part of what's going on, so there could be side effects and aftereffects and stuff that come out a year or 2 years or 5 years later, you won't know because you're part of the group that, that's going to find out in 1, 2, 3, 5 years. So just make sure you do your due diligence. But I'm about to get the electronic hook here. And so I need to get off the radio for today. That has been my pleasure speaking with you. And we'll circle back to all of these, I'm sure, because COVID isn't going anywhere. And certainly news stories aren't. So it's been a great pleasure to speak with you today, updates on COVID. I'm Dr. Paul Anderson for Medicine and Health with Dr. Paul Anderson, and I will see you all on the radio next week. Thank you.