Dr. Paul Anderson answers questions about the Delta variant, explaining how it's detected, why cases are rising from recent lows, and that it's more transmissible but less severe than earlier strains. He reviews vaccine effectiveness data, the three types of immunity, and discusses supplements and antivirals like ivermectin and artemisinin.
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And on TuneIn.com, Hang.fm, and UpSnap Mobile. Contact TalkRadio. Welcome to Medicine and Health with Dr. Paul Anderson. This is a show about opening up the often mysterious world of how doctors think. The goal? To empower the listener to gain access to the best healthcare possible. Good day and welcome to Medicine Health with Dr. Paul Anderson. That's me, I'm Dr. Paul. And today, uh, the show that I, I said last week I probably wouldn't do, uh, we're doing today, uh, because I got so many questions after, uh, the Delta variant update part 2. And, uh, if you have that on, you know, either your PodBurner or on the CTR feed, or you go over YouTube, go to my YouTube, it's over there. Somewhere or another you can watch that if you want to. There was a previous one which was a month prior, and one of the things with these emerging variants and viral activity and everything is things, you know, change rather rapidly. I could legitimately do a, you know, a July update on Delta and then didn't really have to change a lot for the August update, but there was just more information, which is great. Also in that one, I spent a lot of time, about half the time, on pediatric effect because I had gotten a lot of people who were, you know, really concerned obviously about children and Delta because it seems to be much more transmissible. So today what I did is I collected a group of questions that were common questions. Many of these, many of these I got more than once. You know how when there's something like this, it's on everyone's mind, so a lot of the same questions bubble up to the top. So I kind of collated them together and into what I hope will not go over or under time for our program today for the hour that we have. So the first one I put as the first one because it's a little bit— it's sort of a separate topic around Delta. And what I mean by that is it's it's just sort of its own thing. You know, the rest of them kind of have a lot of synergy between the questions. But got a really good question on— it was either a comment on the YouTube or it was a social media comment somewhere I got this. And someone wrote in and they said, you know, I heard that they throw all the COVID swabs away, so how do they test them and know that it's Delta? Because the person asked a prior question and they said, well, when they do that swab on you, does that tell you right away if it's Delta? And I said, no, the swabs, depending on what type of technology it is, tells you where's the presence or absence of the virus through PCR or the antigen, et cetera. What they have to do is they have to genomically sequence some samples to— oh, it's no longer Alpha, Beta, whomever. This is the— now, one of the things, and this person apparently is somebody at, you know, at a lab or something, that's always good information. But the person at the lab said, well, you know, we don't send any of our swabs that I know of to the the Public Health Service. And so how are they getting this information? So the first thing is there's sort of 2 layers of, of this testing business. So one is the peripheral testing that maybe you do at home, maybe you go to a drive-through, maybe you go to your doctor's office, maybe you go to your local lab or your Public Health Service lab. Those tests are just, is it COVID positive or not? The next layer of testing is done by the state departments of health, and they take representative samples of these peripheral tests, and they keep track of statistically sequencing them genomically for variant traits. So, for example, they might take 100 or 300 test samples that they have, and there might have been, you know, 10,000 samples done, but they'll do a sampling of usually hundreds, and then they will genomically sequence them. And the genomic sequencing winds up telling you, uh, what variant it is. So is it Alpha or Beta? Is it, you know, Gamma, Delta, Theta, Iota? Uh, all of those are possible. So when they say that, you know, we have a rise in Delta, it's the state health departments putting this information together and then that going to the CDC, and then they track those numbers. So is it every single test that's done? No. But it's usually a reasonable statistical assessment of the tests that are being done. So your lab, if you, if you go to a non-health department lab, they may not be sending forward samples, or they might have some that they send forward that the techs don't know about too, but a lot of times a commercial lab may only do that periodically. The state health department labs will process a lot of these. The other thing is that they're connected to big labs like university labs, and those will coordinate and do that as well. So yes, your particular lab may throw away all the samples and the swabs. But that doesn't mean everybody does, and it's the State Department of Health's job to get that first layer of data over to the CDC regarding, you know, what variant is out and about in the population. So I hope that helps. Now, I was going to say this is the top of the hour, but remember a couple big things. One is never take medical advice from anyone who is not your doctor, healthcare provider, healthcare team, and certainly don't take it from, you know, YouTube or the radio or a podcast or anything else like that. We are here and we give our opinions on these things, and everything I say today is my opinion, and it's my opinion based on facts and resources that I have found. Now, this worked last time, and so I'll do it again this time. We're doing this as a live feed right now if you're watching live on the live feed or listening. So when we move this over to YouTube, uh, on the YouTube channel, you will find this and you'll find in the description— so there's a little chevron usually on the lower right corner, click on that, it opens up the description— I will put the references, uh, that I am talking about today in there so that you can access them and find them. Uh, on the first Delta I did, uh, I had— I read them out verbally, but that's a little rough. Uh, second Delta one, I put them in the description. People much happier with that. This one, I'm gonna put them in the description. So I've learned my lesson. I've got them there for you. But I really do try to— although everything is my opinion that I say, obviously— I try to base it on as much information as I can. Now If you're looking backwards at some, you know, disease has been around a long time, uh, let's say bacterial pneumonia, you know, strep pneumoniae pneumonia or something, there's a lot of research that you can pull from. There's a lot of long-term longitudinal data that you can get your facts from. It's going to be really well entrenched and fairly well vetted over that amount of time. This is different. in that we're all watching this unfold in front of our eyes, same as everyone else is. So one of the things, and one of the things I appreciate about some of the, you know, other, you know, scientists and doctors I've heard is when they'll say, if, if someone is telling you that they know everything about Delta and they know what it's going to do, they're lying to you. Okay. And they may not mean to be lying to you, but if anyone tells you it's for sure going to do that, No. Okay. Uh, if you go back, I was listening to a CDC update the other day, and, uh, the, the guy doing the update said it was something like they did 28 models of where the virus was going to go in January, and 26 of the models were totally inaccurate. So if the CDC can't even figure out where the virus is going, you know, us talking heads, uh, really Probably aren't going to either. But what we can do is look at data from two two main points. Now there's many places you can get it, but one is something that somebody has you know peer reviewed and published. Not a lot of that, but because of COVID there's a lot of fast tracking of data. So we have some of that. The other are interviews with people who are doing research who can give us an insight either into what the numbers look like or something like that. And then the other government sources where you know I'm going to talk today about some of the United Kingdom government. government sources about Delta because they were ahead of us with Delta. And I'm also going to obviously reference some of our own CDC numbers and CDC information. So that's where all this stuff comes from. I will put it— it won't be here on the live stream because we're doing this live, but when we get it over to the YouTube channel, you'll see it in the description box, those references and resources. Now, My YouTube channel is growing, but it's not reached the place where YouTube certifies it, and I can—it's easy to like advertise the name. It's just DRA Online, but that's really hard to find. There's like a bunch of other stuff with those letters in it. So the best way to do it is go to my website, DRA Now, Dr. A Now, DRA Now. There's a You know, it's got the Instagram and Facebook and YouTube links, and you can just go over there, or you can follow me on Instagram or Facebook, and both of those are DRA Online. And you can get the links there too. So what was the next question? Now that we've put this swab idea behind us for the moment, the next one is, is Delta COVID Delta surging, as we, we hear a lot on the mainstream media. And I was just doing an in-service, uh, with some physicians today, uh, just a, you know, a little doctor-to-doctor thing. And there was a particular therapeutic and COVID and all this stuff we're talking about it. And one of the doctors said it's just so frustrating right now because you get these news stories that are making all of these assumptions and not using a whole lot of science to do it. And yet they're telling people this is a good thing or a bad thing when really it's neither. It's probably useful, but it doesn't mean it's a panacea. Uh, and it's one of those things where if I actually say the name of what that is, you know, I could get this taken down, so I won't. Um, I, I had to do a, a challenge to YouTube, uh, where they said that I, I had done something wrong, and, and I, I told them the background and the science, and they said, oh well, you didn't do anything wrong, sorry about that, we'll take We'll take the warning away, but you have to be really careful about what you talk about, for better or worse. So is Delta surging? Now, surging is relative. Timeline. Is COVID Delta higher than we were when we were in that trough, kind of spring, early summer? Yes. Is COVID Delta as high as it was, say, a few months ago in the earlier upswings of COVID Answer is no, it is much lower. Okay, now this— and again, this will be in the, uh, in the notes there in the description, um, but this is an actual— and I'm sorry if you're listening online, uh, you won't see this, but I'll put the link there— this is an actual chart of cases by age. That's the different colors, and it goes over time. And what you see is on this side, you're a long time ago, and on this side, you're recently. And so the earliest, I think, is— it's a while back. I apologize. I'm reading. There we go. I got the large print version. Goes back from about April 2020 and goes all the way to last week. Okay, so that's a while. Now you see this big surge here in the middle. Well, that is October through about March of this year. Actually, no, October through February. March is over here. December, January is the high peak. What do we see there? It's the biggest surge that we've had this year, and there's rain on it. And then over here, when we, we had this nice trough, then we have this upswing here. Where delta has— Look at that numerically. The peak of the big surge was about 6,300 cases of hospital— hospitalizations for COVID-19. And the surge right now is at about 2,300. Okay. So relative to time of the last year, COVID is surging, but at a lower amplitude than it had in the past. Now there's a number of reasons for that, but one thing I want to make really clear, because there's this sense, and I've talked about it a lot on the other 2 updates, that, well, COVID appears to us scientifically to be easier to transmit to other people. So it's got its evolutionary change that it had, its variation, hence variant, makes it easier to give to other people. That's a nice variation to do if you're a virus, right? Helps you. But it appears to be less pathogenic, less dangerous, and that's based on what we see from the Netherlands, the United Kingdom, etc., where, um, yes, they got a lot more Delta, but they had a lot lower amount of, you know, death and other things. And I talked about those stats on the previous 2 programs, so I'm not going to go into those. But something that I want to say, because I think people are hearing, okay, so it's not as deadly, that's good, that's like happy news. You don't want to miss the part about it's more transmissible. So unless it does something very different than it did in Northern Europe, which we're pretty similar to Northern Europe here in North America, unless it takes a real left turn, What you are going to see is a lot more cases of COVID Delta variant. You're going to see a big upswing. And remember from the prior 2 programs, you're going to see that upswing across the age spectrum. So that means that more kids are going to get it, more young adults, more, you know, middle-aged folks. It's going to be across the spectrum. It's not like before Where, you know, the, the transmission was, you know, kind of missing younger people and all that. So you are going to see more. Now we talked a lot about— we talked half of the program last time, Delta Update 2, about pediatrics and a lot of specific things about pediatrics. So I'm not going to get deeply into that, but you will see more people getting COVID positive. I was at a medical event about going on almost a month ago, and there was— there were people that were asymptomatic, and they had— they were, as we talked about last time, you can be vaccinated but have the same amount of virus in your throat as an unvaccinated person. were like that, and turned out they were asymptomatic but spreading a lot of COVID There was a whole bunch of breakthrough COVID cases that came about after that get-together. And nobody, no one has died. Nobody that I know of has been hospitalized. But it showed that like that is a It's a really good entree into getting a virus around. When you don't get symptoms, it's easier to transmit a virus. Remember, we've talked about in the past SARS-CoV-1, big SARS that we had a number of years ago. You knew you had that almost immediately, if not immediately. You were very, very ill. You were isolated in a hospital. You were not walking around. sharing that with many people. Now, it did have spread because people flew on airplanes, so you had China and Toronto and other places around the world, but it didn't go, uh, you know, circle the globe as, uh, as this one has. So one of the things— and I'm not saying this to be a downer or anything like that, but I'm just saying you do have to be mindful that, um, asymptomatic people, even those who are vaccinated, can carry enough virus for at least a few days to transmit it to you. So this is one of the reasons, and I know this is— I'm not making a political— I'm just going to say what's going on in the world. You make up your mind how much you like or don't like it. But this is one of the reasons why recommendations have come back, well, you should, even if you're vaccinated, you should probably put your mask back on if you're around other people. Now, there is some logic that you should bring to that. If you're sitting alone in your house, you probably don't need it. Sitting alone in your car, You don't need it because there's no way that the virus is going to get to you. But if you're in close quarters with a bunch of people, you might consider it because you might not be the problem, but someone else may be coughing or breathing that in your direction. Kind of the same as on airplanes and stuff like that. So the closer you are to people, the more you think maybe, you know, that might not be a bad idea. Now, are masks perfect? Absolutely not. You know, but if, if I'm coughing and I have mask over my face, it reduces the amount that's going to get to you, and that's really what, what they're going for. So again, I'm not making comments about whether that's good or bad. That's why the recommendation has resurfaced, much to the chagrin of most folks. Now, There we go. I hit the mute button temporarily. Um, next question kind of relates to that. Am I more likely to get it? Yeah. If it continues to move through the population, the number of people vaccinated, unvaccinated who may get infected with Delta is going to go up. The other side of that coin is it is very survivable. You've got survivability data from the UK I've given in the prior 2 things. And unless you have, you know, the wrong collusion of underlying symptoms and other stuff, which if you do, you need to be in the hospital and being treated. But unless you have those things, your chances of, of, you know, having bad symptoms or even dying are very, very low. And I've talked to a number of people now who are vaccinated, full double vaccinated, who had these breakthrough infections, and they were, you know, some were not ill at all and some were sick for about a week, and that was with, you know, full vaccination. People unvaccinated that I've seen with Delta, they have been ill for around a week to 2 weeks depending on, you know, how sick they got. Many people, it's a lot of fatigue, you feel really horrible, you're achy, and there's a lot of this upper respiratory, you know, kind of cold and flu-like stuff going on. Now we talked last time about pediatrics and how they have such small little airways and tiny lungs. You have to be careful with children the younger they are, and so you do want to, if you're— if you have children or you're around children, if they start to get you know, any respiratory stuff— and we talked about RSV and other stuff that's going on— you, you just want to make sure you check in with their physician or their healthcare practitioners to get them checked out, uh, because the sooner you get on caring for the child, the, the better. And again, I went into a lot of that before. Um, another question was, uh, you know, I hear it's real bad and a lot of children are dying. Well, Anytime you have an upswing that affects a different population, meaning children, you're going to have more kids go to the hospital. So in the beginning, you know, a week ago, 2 weeks ago, what we saw is more and more kids going in the hospital. But if you look at the numbers from the bigger children's hospital, again, I did this in the last one, most of the kids are being sent home with just supportive care. So it's, yes, more kids are being infected, but more of everybody's being infected, but we have a lower amount percentage-wise of morbidity and mortality, so bad things and death, of course. Any amount is bad, but that's just the way it is. That's just the facts. Another question was, is there any update about the countries that had Delta before we had Delta? I spent a lot of time talking about UK and Netherlands mimics UK and There's a lot of homology there between the two. And indeed, they are all in a place where their numbers are falling. Even India, where they were having up to 400,000 new cases a day, they're now down under 40,000. So a tenfold decrease. So yes, they have these big scary upswings. No good, no good, no good. And then it just sort of extinguishes and crashes. And this is one of the reasons I posted a link to another YouTube doctor's thing about Delta, where, you know, his whole thing was it's, it's going to be here and then it's just going to fizzle out and go away. Now, what does that mean though? Because everybody Not everybody, but the majority of people are sort of sitting back hoping this eventually— it's like if we kind of keep our heads down long enough, it's just going to go away and we'll never hear about this COVID stuff, coronavirus, COVID-19, SARS-CoV-2 specifically, ever again. What almost everybody is saying is don't wait for that. That's not going to happen in your lifetime. What will happen is SARS-CoV-2 will mutate and become variants, and it will be a part of probably wintertime cold and flu season, but who knows. It'll be a part of the local epidemic outbreaks of colds, flus, and viruses for the rest of your life. Okay. And that's just how it's going to be. Now, that's not the greatest news in the world, but that's also probably the closest to the truth that anybody looking at the numbers and looking at the function of virus over time. But what's maybe a silver lining there? The function of a virus over time is to continue to mutate, normally mutate so that you have transmissibility, but less death and less disease. Why would a virus do that? Okay, now a virus is essentially a biologic machine, so it's not probably sitting there thinking of why it does this, but it's just a pure altering biologic machine that uses your cells as a way to replicate itself. If you're a virus and you come in strong on the front end and you kill everybody, you will no longer have a place to be because all of your host is dead. And you kill people so fast that the outbreak is very, very short-lived and quick. Think of something like Ebola, right, or something. If you're a virus like SARS-CoV-2 where you're fairly new to humans at least in this incarnation, you're going to go in and you're going to be really nasty for a while in the first couple of years, and then you're going to mutate and mutate to where you're very transmissible, but your level of disease-causing pathogenicity is lower and lower and lower. And so what most of the people modeling look at is, you know, it will be here forever, but it's going to be more like a, you know, respiratory bad cold or something of that nature. So still no fun, But there it will be. So that's kind of the, the background. Now, what I want to do— and again, this comes from resources I'll put in the notes when we put this over on YouTube— but I want to read from some of the United Kingdom data, some of the CDC data, and then some other science experts who have been doing research in this. and reporting around this whole thing of are we more immune, are we not more immune, etc. Before we get into that, one concept. In that previous, uh, example that I just gave, you have the virus mutating so it's more transmissible but less deadly and less nasty. That's one part of the coin. Why doesn't a virus just do that forever? Well, the other side of the coin is you build up immunity, herd immunity in the population. And we want to remember that there's 2 avenues towards immunity. There's native immunity, which comes from you being infected with something, and then there is acquired immunity from you having immunization. Okay, and in some cases there's hybrid immunity, which is you've been infected and got immunized. That's, that's a 2-for-1 there. Okay. So how does that work? Well, the bigger that your immunity percentage goes, the less active targets there are for this virus, even if it's more transmissible. So as time goes on, until it leaves humans and mutates out in an animal again or something, as time goes on, you are less and less and less likely to have it be any problem at all. Okay, so you want to remember that the immunity pushing back on it is another big force here. Now, yes, as I said, we brought up in Delta Part 2, um, the study done by the CDC showed that the people with double immunization had just as much COVID virus in the back of their throat as people with no immunization. But what they also saw on the other side was, uh, they had, if they got sick, it was a lower quantity of illness, less likely to be hospitalized, all that business. But you do wanna remember that you can be very transmissible of the virus early on. So looking at our paired part of the world, Northern Europe and North America, the United Kingdom had some good data that came out, and it was basically, uh, the, the headline in the report about the data was, uh, fresh UK COVID-19 data boasts or boosts hope that Delta variant can be held in check. And the holding in check is largely by this pushback of natural immunity in the population. And this was published, uh, August 11th. So, and again, link below. Um, so the UK had the big Delta-driven infections way earlier than North America did, and so they've had a lot more time to see how it played out. The other thing that I mentioned, you— and you might notice that I used UK data in the last 2— was there— the UK keeps a lot more data, um, even than we do in more specific areas. And this is something that I've heard heard, you know, a lot of people in and around the CDC say that, you know, we're— in order to properly track and kind of see where things are going, we're not always keeping the right data here in the US. And that's, of course, not, not my job. That's just what I hear. But what they're saying here also is that, you know, the UK had more data to make conclusions from. The other thing is that they say somewhere between 90 and 94% of British adults have some type of immunity. Okay, that's a lot, 90 to 94%. And so what they're saying is we have this big mass immunity in the population, Delta came in and hit us hard, and then it fizzled out rather quickly. So what kind of immunity do the people have? Well, they have 3 kinds basically. Uh, you could maybe add a 4th one. One is, uh, native immunity where you've already had COVID. A lot of people have that. The other is partial vaccination. The other is full vaccination. And now you'll see later they're adding in hybrid, which is some vaccination and some natural post-infectious immunity. Okay, now the other thing, which, you know, anytime you bring this topic up, it's— you can get in all sorts of trouble. And, you know, I really do try and just stick to, you know, just the facts, like on Dragnet. If you're not old enough, look Dragnet up, Jack Webb. You know, just the facts, ma'am. So I'm just trying to report what I see, what the data is showing, and you get to make your own. Remember, don't take medical advice from us people who are on radio, TV, or YouTube. That's a supremely bad idea. These are my opinions. You talk to your healthcare team about this. But what did the UK government find out when it was looking at blocking hospitalization with vaccination? Well, when they looked at their data, the Pfizer had about 96% against— so blocking hospitalization of the 2 doses. AstraZeneca Oxford, 92%. after 2 doses. Um, and that was pretty much the same as what they saw with the Alpha variant. So people get sick, remember, they can get sick and transmit the virus, but they have a lower level of transmitting or being hospitalized. Now, the other thing to keep in mind is, um, you know, how many people did they look at? And so what they looked at was A little over 14,000 cases of Delta variant, and of those, only 166 were hospitalized. So here's the other thing to look at. Um, if you got 14,000 cases of Delta and 166 are hospitalized, and I don't have the finer parsed numbers get into this. Uh, I just tried to dig into it, but a lot of this I just was able to pull up in the last 48 hours for you. Um, but the, the first thing to keep in mind is 14,000 cases, 166 people— that's a huge differential. So regardless of where they got their immunity from in these 14,000 cases, whether it was past infection or some or all vaccination or whatever, and then you got this little tiny 166 people who are hospitalized. They're looking at a really tiny fraction of people who got hospitalized to say, you know, did it help or not? The other thing that did not this particular report, but some of the other reports show, of course, is you could say, well, why didn't they look— so they looked at 2 of the vaccines, why didn't they look at natural infection? immunity, so people who've already had COVID. Well, others have looked at natural immunity, and basically what they report is it's about the same as, uh, as the vaccine, really. And we'll talk about that in just a moment. Now, another one was an update from the National Institutes of Health, and it was talking about, do people who have had COVID before and have recovered have good immunity. And so a collaboration of the National Cancer Institute and the NIH did a study published on January 6th in the paper Science. And again, I'll list the link to the report about the study, and then you can link to the study from there if you want to. And basically it said in people who had had COVID and recovered, they had antibodies. So spike protein antibodies were found in 98% of people after 1 month. And although there's a lot of variety one person to another, but anytime you study people for things like antibodies, there's going to be variety. But this same group of people, when they followed them out to 6 to 8 months, they had a fairly stable amount of antibodies after 6 to 8 months. So you see a lot of reporting that's kind of scary that says, oh, you know, all these people that had COVID don't have any more antibodies, and, you know, they, they absolutely have to get vaccinated because they have no antibodies. Well, there's a whole bunch of reasons why that's probably not true, one of them being this study, uh, the other being the way that immunology works. And if you go to my YouTube channel, you can go back and look at, uh, post-COVID T and B cell response. I did a whole show on that that was pretty popular. But the bottom line is, when they looked at this and they did the study, although not everyone had 100% of memory to everything, they had a majority of memory. So the majority of things you could have memory to, they did have memory to, and that was up to 8 months after infection. Now, why not a longer study? Well, because we haven't had COVID around long enough to track people. For much longer than that. Now there's another thing to consider. This is also from Nature, and they reference 3 or 4 different papers. Again, I'll put those in there. And they basically say that many people have been infected with SARS-CoV-2 will probably make antibodies against the virus for most of their lives. Researchers have identified long-lived antibody producing cells in the marrow of people who've already had COVID-19. And they go on and on to describe this. And again, they list, you know, 4 different resources that went into this Nature publication that, you know, they're talking about. So I think it's important to, you know, mention that and say, well, you know, if you have had COVID, remember, Pushing back against this virus, you have to have immunity build up in the population somehow. And what we're seeing is that past infection is probably equal to immunization protection as far as building the wall. So when we have SARS-CoV-2 in our population now for going on 2 years, probably 2 years or more now. In reality, we have a lot more people— remember, there were no vaccines for a long time, so a lot more people who got sick and got over it and have native immunity, natural immunity. And now we have more people with immunization immunity, and we have similar sort of long-term immunity outcomes from that. So wherever you come down on, you know, getting sick or getting vaccinated or whatever it is, that's again, it's between you and your healthcare provider. You do what you're going to do. But that is the biggest way that your population immunity, your herd immunity pushes back on a virus is getting immunity one way or the other. There's the good old-fashioned way, like, you know, when I was young and you had childhood diseases and we didn't really have a lot of the immunizations that there are now. We just got sick with them and then we developed native immunity. Now it's sort of a different story, but then is then and now is now. So we have sort of a microcosm of that with SARS-CoV-2, where you have the whole people on the front end getting this type of viral infection and there wasn't anything as far as immunization. So you have a lot, a lot of people with just native immunity, and then they bring in vaccine immunity, and that just adds on to it. So that's, that's the idea behind all of that. Now, um, there is a paper— again, I will, I will reference this as well— and This comes from the Journal of the American Medical Association, also known as JAMA. And this was just published very recently, and what they talk about is that there was a team that looked at people with antibodies after infection and They looked at people who had natural infection who were not vaccinated, and they basically showed that in time 0 and 6 months, so 6 months in, they maintained antibodies from 0 to, you know, from infection to 6 months at a pretty stable level. They also had similar amounts of neutralizing antibodies, and there's different types of antibodies over that amount of time. And over 6 months, their memory B cells, so the plasma cells that make the antibodies, their memory B cells were only slightly lower than at the beginning of the study. And the other thing is, is that their own memory B cells had evolved within their body to produce a broader and more potent range of antibodies. Now, what they did find is that in their plasma, they had less neutralizing antibody against some of the variants, but those variants have already encircled the world and they are less likely to recur at least in the short term. Now, the other thing that this was published in JAMA that this group looked at was if you look at people with no vaccine and people with 1 or 2 doses of vaccine, is there a difference in their antibody levels? And at this early stage, the vaccinated patients had even more antibodies. than the native immunity people did. The other thing is that they're looking at— and again, this is looking at a brand new phenomenon, this hybrid immunity idea— but what they're saying as well, that the vaccine may, you know, jump up the immunity in the person who has already had, you know, COVID infection. Now, you probably know that for the— now, this is not true of everything, but for many, many things, if you have already had a viral illness, a lot of times if it's the kind that's sort of stable, you don't— you're not usually recommended to get a vaccine against what you've already had. I think what they're going for in this data is, you know, you're doing pretty good if you've already had the disease. But what they're trying to show is, you know, we could probably enhance your antibody levels with the vaccine. Again, there's a lot of intricacies to when and where and how somebody, you know, gets vaccinated and all of that. And you do want to, you know, keep an eye on that and discuss that with your physician. So, for example, in, you know, in the world of otherwise healthy people who only go to their doctor for a checkup and just make sure everything's working okay, you're going to get one set of advice. If you, for instance, go to certain medical specialties a lot because you have a rheumatologic and autoimmune disorder, something like that, you're going to get different types of of information about what you're supposed to do. The bottom line is, is that, you know, your decision about vaccinating when, where, and how, and what age, and all that stuff— bottom line needs to be with your healthcare provider and with the best amount of information that you can bring together from it. So, um, again, that's not the point of what we do here, is to tell you what to do or not to do. Uh, but it is encouraging to me to see that Number one, if we look back at, um, at this chart here, that while we had this big, um, upswing early in the year, uh, and then we've dropped, dropped, dropped, dropped, dropped, the upswing with delta is still rather mild. Now again, don't be, you know, lulled into a sense that, well, delta is nothing. Because Delta transmits easier, and I believe that what we're going to see is a bloom of people getting infected and more broad age groups of people getting infected who didn't before, like children, etc. They're going to survive it better based on all the data, but more people are going to get infected, so you really do need to be mindful of that. So environmental controls are still important. Washing your hands, you know, I know we started all this out with telling everyone to wash your hands a lot. Keep doing that, you know, be very, you know, careful about that sort of thing. Um, if you are around people that you know are infected, um, everyone should be, you know, wearing a mask and doing all sorts of precautions. You know, if you ever go into a healthcare setting and you there are people with either suspected or known infections of any kind, there's going to be a lot of things, whether it's isolation or masks and all sorts of things going on. So just, you do want to be careful. The other phenomenon that we have seen, and now we have verification— go back to installment number 2 because this is installment number 3. Installment number 2, I talked about where the data came from. The CDC did a study, but now we have data that you can be fully vaccinated and the back of your throat will have just as much virus as the unvaccinated person. Now, we did talk about why that is. The short version is the way the vaccine works, it doesn't build up the type of antibodies that are in our respiratory system. They are developing vaccines that do that, but right now we don't have them, so that's just the way it is. So the concern with that, remember, is we have a much more quickly transmissible, albeit safer virus— quickly transmissible But also we have the ability of vaccinated people to spread it without knowing it, because a lot of these people didn't know that they had all that virus in the back of their throat. That's how it happens. So the closer you are with other humans, the more you want to be mindful of this. Now, does that mean you have to run around, you know, and be afraid of everybody? No. Your chance of getting Delta even using perfect precautions is still a lot higher than it was with Alpha or Beta. So you do have to be mindful of that when you're around. And if you're in a, you know, serving or helping profession, you— it is wise for you to, you know, do as much protection as you possibly can because the people around you, even though they may look healthy, can be transmitting virus. It's just the way it is. So in the time we have left, there was a couple of other things. One was you talked about in the first 2 Delta updates, what about viral uptake inhibitors? And so I've talked about those, put the reference to the scientific paper about that, but basically these are things that help slow down the uptake of the virus into the cell. So there's some interesting things such as a plant medicine that became a drug that we use in cancer research and infectious disease called artemisinin. Artesunate is one of the drug names, and then there— it comes from the wormwood plant. Turns out that it's used for malaria. Turns out that helps to block the uptake of the virus. Hydroxychloroquine and ivermectin and a number of other drugs like doxycycline have also been studied and shown to do this. Are they perfect, and are they going to protect everybody all the time? No, but nothing is going to do that. But they are certainly in other countries using these drugs much more to help, and we are finding our way with those drugs in the United States. The other thing that we had talked about prior, and someone said, could you go back over the nutrients you talked about for support? So— You just want to be really clear on the front end here. Nobody knows, you know, it's very hard to prove prevention unless you have a lot of time and a lot of people to study. So prevention is an elusive topic. But if you had the choice of doing nothing or doing things that would at least support your body through the process, I would pick doing things that would support your body. Now, I heard on a CDC interview, you know, someone said, well, you know, should we still take vitamin D and exercise and sleep and, you know, eat right? and everything. And they said, oh yeah, you know, I mean, that doesn't go— the idea of doing the right things doesn't go away. Their point was, well, you know, it's probably not going to stop Delta, you know, as far as a big surge. But the other side of that coin is we don't have mass quantities of people doing these things. So just really quickly, and I'll put a link into a newsletter that goes way deep into this. So if you want to look at this, the things that help probably the most. Number one is— these are just taken by mouth— vitamin C. And you can look in the newsletter for dosing and ideas around that. Vitamin D, as we mentioned. Also vitamin A, like alpha. Now minerals. Zinc is the real, you know, hot one that everybody looks at, and that's great. But minerals tend to run in groups and work together. So I normally give zinc in a multi-mineral that's got some of its friends with it because selenium is also important. So is other copper, et cetera, et cetera. So those minerals are very important. Vitamin D and A, vitamin C. Then there are things that you might have used for other purposes like quercetin. It's a bioflavonoid that can be very helpful along the road. Green tea extract actually can be very helpful. And quercetin and green tea extract help to move zinc into the cells, which is a really nice thing if you're fighting viruses. Uh, and there's a number of other nutrient and supplement kind of things that can be used. As always, I recommend that you work with somebody who does that. Um, and it is no, no slam on your family doctors, uh, because I was one of those at one time. Uh, but you know, a lot of times that's not their thing. You know, there's not a lot of training in supplements and nutrients, and they're just not used to dealing with it. So you might want to get some advice from someone who does that specifically. That would be my advice about that. And then, you know, what we call hygienic things— sleep. Sleep is one of the best things for your immune system. It's very, very necessary. And in all of this world of stress that we're in right now, and unknown, and, you know, this sort of You know, good news, bad news podcast I just gave you. Hey, it's the truth as I know it today. People aren't, you know, their sleep-wake cycles are not great. So attending to that, moving your body, you know, everything about moving your body around, whether it's taking a walk or going up and down the stairs a few extra times or doing your normal exercise, everything about moving your body around is good for you. And it's still good for you. for helping you to be a lower target. Now, what else do we see? I've seen a lot of people who get COVID of one variant or another. They're doing all this stuff and they're eating right, exercise and sleep and everything. They still get COVID. But most of them, it is a better trip. Like, they are, you know, they might be knocked down for a little bit, but they rebound better. Now, is that always true? No. But is it, you know, true that not doing anything to help your body is a great idea? I don't think that's true either. So you have to do this with, you know, with some sort of wisdom and thought through it. Get some help, look at some stuff. The newsletter, as I say, will be down below in the links. And again, the links are— once we get this up on YouTube, it'll be down in the description box. Mm-hmm. And that's where I want you to look. If you're listening live, thank you very much. If you listen on the podcast, it's not going to be in the show notes for the podcast. I'm sorry, but you can go over to the YouTube description. Now, quickest way to find me and all these links and all that business, go to dranow.com. That's my main hub website, and you go to the social media links, and that'll get you to the YouTube. If you go hunting through the YouTube, you'll notice there's, there's the Delta updates, but there's also this like B and T cell Delta immunity and descriptions of other things, including things not having to do with Delta. I don't, I don't just talk about Delta. It's just been on everyone's mind here the last few weeks. Well, getting to the end, need to get off the air so next folks can come on. It's been my pleasure speaking with you. I'm Dr. Paul Anderson, Medicine and Health with Dr. Paul Anderson. It's been a pleasure talking to you, and I will see you all on the radio in one week. Thank you.
