In this hour‑long podcast episode Dr. Paul Anderson (host of Medicine & Health) examines the flood of media coverage surrounding the SARS‑CoV‑2 Omicron variant and contrasts it with the underlying scientific data and real‑world experience. He begins by noting the rapid global spread of Omicron and the prevalence of sensational headlines. He reviews a pre‑print suggesting a mouse‑origin for Omicron, explaining how genomic surveillance (CDC, Health Canada, etc.) works and why the exact animal source matters less than the fact that the virus can acquire mutations in non‑human hosts. He then details how Omicron is far more transmissible but considerably less severe than Delta, citing a roughly 60 % lower hospitalization risk and explaining the “proportional model” that shows case numbers can soar while hospitalizations rise only modestly. The episode explores why hospitals appear overwhelmed: staff shortages due to vaccination‑mandated furloughs and sick‑leave, and the large proportion of “incidental” COVID admissions (patients admitted for unrelated reasons who test positive). He highlights data showing a 40 % over‑estimate of pediatric COVID hospitalizations, again due to incidental positives. Dr. Anderson critiques public‑health messaging, describing the White House’s shift from a containment stance to a “manage‑the‑blizzard” approach, and stresses that the pandemic is moving toward endemicity. He offers practical advice—basic hygiene, early‑treatment options (monoclonal antibodies, remdesivir), and a suite of nutraceuticals (zinc, quercetin, vitamins, lysine, cinchona bark) supported by a small 20‑week prophylactic study. He introduces the term “FluRona” to describe co‑infection with influenza or other pathogens and stresses treating co‑infections. Throughout, Dr. Anderson urges listeners to consult their own clinicians, avoid sensationalist headlines, and recognize that exposure to Omicron will likely confer broader immunity, even as the virus becomes a permanent, flu‑like presence. The episode ends with reminders to subscribe, share, and contact him via his website.
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Good day and welcome to Medicine Health with Dr. Paul Anderson. That's me, I'm Dr. Paul. And today our topic is COVID Omicron. COVID Omicron news versus reality, or what we assume to be reality. So if you've been watching before, thank you. And if you're watching on CTR Radio, uh, live or livestream on Facebook or on one of the many podcast burners or on YouTube, thank you for all of that. Please keep doing that— subscribe, like, share, comment, etc. Uh, we love it. But here at Medicine and Health, what I try and do is break down topics that people have interest in, and Omicron is you know, beset upon, uh, those of us in North America. It's been in Europe longer and Southern Africa longer, and it's basically making its way around most of the world right now. And, uh, as is usual with things like this, we get a lot of news reports that are— let's just call them interesting. So what I decided to do today, uh, was take a look at some of the interesting headlines that we're seeing around COVID the pandemic, Omicron, and try and sort out, you know, what's, what's probably clickbait, what's being sort of overstated, or otherwise known as puffing, what's real data, is there a way we can tell the difference. And we want to go through some, some very important things, I think, because You know, one of the more important things I think that's important for doctors, healthcare providers, etc., part of our job is to teach and to also allay fears and explain things. And when I read the news, and, you know, keeping in mind I mostly only speak and read English, so we're speaking of English news, I really can't speak to other, other countries or languages. But when I read the news, especially the online news sources, it's just sometimes insane what we're seeing on there. And the way that stories are written and the way that people writing a story can play with the facts or not even use facts is, is incredible. The other thing is, is that you can very easily sort of hype a story by telling a part of the story, um, and then, uh, you know, maybe forgetting to tell the other part of the story or leave— you know, leaving parts of it out. So what I want to do today is go through, uh, just a few things from, uh, the, the latest news. So, and I always say this, but if you're watching, uh, on or you're listening on one of the podcast, uh, pod burners, whether it's, you know, Apple Play or Google or whatever, or if you are listening right now as a live feed, all of the references I'm talking about will be coming, but they won't be available in any— this gets converted to a YouTube show tomorrow or the next day, and I put them down in the description box. So if you've been following along, you know that. If this is your first time, thanks for listening. But references to anything that we talk about will be down there so that you can read them yourself. Because, you know, one of the things that I'm trying to do for everyone is I will give you, you know, my read on what's going on. And sometimes it's news stories about medicine, sometimes it's actual medical research, sometimes it's a combination. But, you know, as most of us say who try and do this particular job, you shouldn't take any of our word for this. You should really look into it yourself if you really want to, you know, get behind the headlines and take a look. So I try and leave those, those references and, you know, sort of a breadcrumb trail for you there. So when you get to the YouTube description box, which again is where all the references and stuff will be, the first 3 are going to be the last 3 YouTubes I did about Omicron specifically. So I did an Omicron data update. I did clarifying facts on Omicron and disease states. And then I did what to do when you have COVID. And right now, if you're most places in the world, that's probably Omicron. So we've covered those things before. But the first bit of news that you may or may not see, I'm not sure, this is a publication that's sort of in process. It's gone to peer review and it's in the peer review process, and it's in the Journal of Genetics and Genomics, which many of you probably don't subscribe to. It's a, it's a very thick, heavy journal. And if you go back in the, in say the YouTube or the podcast archives, you'll see COVID and Genomics I did about a year and a half ago. And a lot of these things, of course, nothing's changed from that except we know more now than we used to. But the reason I want to bring this one up first is it's, it's a a newer news story that I saw, essentially, and it says— so the article says, evidence for a mouse origin of the SARS-CoV-2 Omicron variant. And it's sort of, you know, interesting. We heard a lot originally about bats, and then we heard, well, maybe it was made in a lab, and then we heard maybe it was a little bit of both. We don't No, really. There certainly are a lot of lab-manipulated viruses. We as the US put a lot of money into that every year and for a long time into bioweapons and development and stuff. And to think that people are going to come out and say, oh yeah, whoops, we did that, we admit it. you know, you're likely not in your right mind. Um, so who knows? Uh, because I do get comments and people say, well, this was lab-made and you're talking about it like maybe it had something to do with animals or whatever. And, you know, whatever, it's here. Um, there, there, it definitely was being studied, you know, or at least its predecessor was being studied in labs. But what happens when these viruses get out? So let's say however the virus got to us in the first place, And so on one hand you could say, well, it was, you know, a lab leak or, or it was, you know, animal vector, whatever, who knows. However it got there, it's here and it's had a lot of genetic mutations over time. And so one of the things that comes up that I get asked a lot about is, well, how do they know? Because I had a lab person say, you know, at my lab we take all the COVID swabs and we throw them away in the biohazard. So who's checking those? Well, no one's checking those. There's a CDC surveillance system, uh, that takes samples from around the country in the US, and I think Health Canada does the same thing, and each other country does the same thing. Um, and, and so what happens is, um, they take these samples and then you get a, say, a PCR test and it says you've got COVID, right? It doesn't say you have Omicron or Delta or whatever. They take those same samples and they know that it's positive, and then they genomically sequence it, uh, for, um, the— for these variants. And so that's what gets reported on. And later in the, uh, show and later in the, uh, notes, I'm going to show you a link you can go on and see the CDC, and they give you the actual numbers and stuff like that. But what I wanna get to is not so much about mice, because it's just interesting. This is what happens. So you hear about like swine flu or avian flu or whatever. So influenza goes out, leaves the human population, goes to an animal vector, it learns new things in the animal, comes back to humans, and it's more transmissible or less deadly or more deadly. It's some changes that's gone on. What they show in this particular paper, and I left a link there for you in this particular journal article, evidence for mouse origin is essentially the reason Omicron is taking over and displacing Delta, which is very good because Omicron will not kill you as much as Delta would, and Delta wouldn't kill you as much as previous ones, is because it spreads faster and it has an easier entry. The upside is it's more upper respiratory like most coronaviruses. It's not mostly lower respiratory. Okay. But the interesting thing to me, regardless of whether this turns out to be mice or whoever, whatever animals is. It can go out, it can learn new things being in a non-human animal, and then it can come back with what it's learned and it can infect better and faster. And so that's the idea of animal vectors. But one of the things, and I've got the link for this in there, so this is a genome map of— there's Omicron down there at the bottom, and here's what we believe the original genomes, and then you go Alpha, Beta, and then all the Delta variants in there, right? But if you look here, Omicron has a common lineage, but it is not part— it's not an offshoot of most of the others. So it's not like Delta mutated in the animals. So if you want to go read that, I'll just warn you, it's a very thick read. Genomic papers are that way. But if you're into that sort of thing, it's kind of interesting. But the other thing about it is, if this is Omicron and it's totally separate from like all this Delta mutation and even the Alpha and Betas now, what we're seeing is the genetic shifting of a virus, which is what viruses do, to a place where they're very effective, but they don't kill their host as much. And that's what we've been hoping for. Now, could there be new variants that come up that are worse and all that stuff? Yeah. But in order to beat Omicron out, what they're gonna have to do is they're gonna have to infect faster. And so even if they're more deadly or whatever, Omicron will remain the, the main variant, uh, as long as it does what it does right now. So that's one thing. Now the other thing is, is, and you can read that the last 3 shows I've done have a lot of data on, you know, why is this good? It's because Omicron is very unlikely to kill you, uh, very low level of disease for most people, not everybody. And they're looking at it really as a way to gain immunity. It's like getting your own vaccination or a booster, only you're going to get actually probably better immunity from Omicron because you're getting the full complement of viral factors. That takes care of the mice thing. Hospitalizations. Now, this is one that's been just driving me crazy since the very beginning. I just have to, you know, kind of take a deep breath when I see most of these news stories, because I will read news stories and they'll cherry-pick, uh, uh, you know, quotes from people at hospitals and things. And, and, and the news story, if you read it, you would believe that suddenly we have no beds left in the hospitals and there's all these new hospitalizations and all of this. Now, to a degree, we do have more hospitalizations for a lot of reasons, and we have some, uh, shortages in hospitals for other reasons, but Omicron is driving a piece of that but not all of that. And the other thing is, I read one story, uh, with something like, you know, COVID hospitalizations among U.S. children soar, schools are under pressure, uh, you know, all this incendiary sort of language. It was talking about levels of ventilation and disease in children that frankly were completely made up. And, you know, I guess that's one way to write a news story. But I want to go through some hospitalization and some, some of the evidence around what's really going on, because most of the news stories I'm reading I'll put some links in here to some of this stuff, but most of the— especially like the things that, you know, you'll see on your smartphone and they pop up with a thing and, you know, they really want you to get in and/or subscribe or whatever— those would be like, you would just be sure that everybody and every child is dying immediately and everyone's going to the hospital and everyone's dying. And it's actually just not the case. Now remember, And if, boy, if you didn't see these graphics when I used the Lego models of, uh, of proportional spread, right? I had 3 different big Lego, uh, pads that I was showing, and I showed how with the little one— this is from the first COVID one if you want to go look at that— you know, if you have something that's the size of, you know, a business card and 10% down there in the corner is who gets hospitalized, then that's what it is. If you double that, you're gonna have to double hospitalization. If you quadruple it, you're gonna have to quadruple a hospitalization number because it tends to be proportional. Okay, but one of the problems that we're seeing with hospitals is the hospitals are starting to be overwhelmed with people clogging up the emergency rooms getting tested because the out— the testing is so slow right now, and people are getting in lines to be tested when they don't have symptoms. There's all sorts of stuff going on. Well, the first thing is, if all you need is to be tested and you are not having severe medical symptoms, you really probably shouldn't— you really shouldn't be in the emergency room to do that testing. Okay, but the problem is that we have the whole country is, you know, overwhelmed and lots of people are getting sick. So that's number one. Number 2, remember that that proportional model that I showed you will go up rapidly and then come crashing down. And, uh, according to an interview done on NPR, uh, things are grim now, but America's COVID situation could get better in 6 to 8 weeks, according to an interview with Bob Wachter, MD of UCSF. He's the chair of Department of Medicine there. Um, and they asked him, could the US really, really be in pretty good shape in 6 to 8 weeks? And he said, with the caveat that you never know, 'Cause there's always a left turn somewhere. We could get a new variant or who knows what. With the caveat though, that Omicron's gonna spread like wildfire. There's not a thing we can do about it. Everybody's gonna be exposed. Lots of infections, lots of immune activity in people. And it's infections whether you're immunized or not. If you are believing that the immunizations and your boosters that you have right now keep you from actual infection, That's not the way it works. And most of the people, except at the higher levels of government, are pretty clear about that. They'll say, look, the purpose of immunization is not to protect you from that. Now, we've gone through that before. I've got links to that in the prior things. So I'm not going to really drill into that anymore. But everybody's getting exposed. In places like Denmark, their first close to 1,000 cases they looked at, 80% of them were double or triple vaccinated. So know, it's like, that's not the point there. Now, there's some protection later on, maybe with vaccination, but not on the front end. So this is not about that. So, but what Dr. Watcher says from UCSF is, uh, the virus being so transmissible, but now as we understand it, being much milder than prior COVID variants, could turn out to be very good news but will give us a very awful January. Now, if you go back to the last 3 talks that I've done here last 3 weeks. What I said was that most of the statistical people and the people looking at spread from Africa to Europe to over here are saying, you know, probably by the end of January, 100% of us will be exposed. Okay, you can't do it. You can't run, you can't hide. Now, there are people who have isolated in other areas, and they're still trying to figure this out, like how this is happening. But there are people who literally have isolated and, and, you know, done all the precautions and still are positive with Omicron. So who knows? There you go. Um, so then they asked this doctor, what are you seeing as far as case rates? Well, cases are exploding. Okay, we know that cases are going to go up because with this proportional increase with a rapidly trans— if you've got 100% of people being exposed, that's the largest amount of COVID ever gone around with Omicron. Um, and so it just— it transmits very quickly. Excuse me, I get very excited to start coughing. Transmits very quickly. But what this, uh, doctor from UCSF says is we are not seeing the same relationship between cases and hospitalizations. So if we go back to that little Lego model where you have a block in the little corner of its hospitalizations, now the hospitalization corner is smaller. This is exactly the opposite of what most news stories are saying, but this is a, you know, a real live chairman of Department of Medicine at a medical school, so I would tend to trust this person on this. So we're not seeing a relationship between case and hospitalization. So the average case of Omicron has a 60% lower chance of landing you in the hospital than that even of Delta. Delta was lower than Alpha in the wild time. Now, why are the hospitals filling up? Well, that's a very complex question, and we get into it. I'll leave some, uh, you know, again, I'll leave these links in the YouTube down below. Again, if you're watching on YouTube— YouTube— YouTube, like, share, subscribe. comment, please do all of that. I really do appreciate it. It helps the channel out a lot too. Um, so when you get this suddenly, you know, we go from Delta, which is infecting a smaller group of humanity, and then Omicron, which is going to circle the world. It's already done that. And it's going to affect 100% of us pretty much for all intents and purposes. Now, some places may escape it. Um, but once you have something like Omicron that spreads this way, it's a two-edged sword. On one side, you have a mass infection, which means you're going to have more hospitalization and more of everything, but your chances of sickness, as he was saying, are about 60% lower— sickness that makes you stay in the hospital. So that's great. But your other side of the sword on that is because of the mass infection, you're going to get infected and this thing will eventually burn itself out. go down to an endemic status instead of pandemic status, which it's fairly rapidly doing. Now, the other part about the hospital thing is, and this is why the CDC partly changed their guidelines and just pissed everybody in the world off about CDC guidelines changing, is that there's a lot of hospital staff, doctors, nurses, everybody else, everyone's vaccinated, but they're getting sick. And so we've got 2 staffing things at the hospital. The first thing is, is that the hospitals, we let go of anybody who didn't get vaccinated, pretty much. I mean, there's exceptions. So all, all of the people who didn't want to get vaccinated, you know, get furloughed or fired or whatever. And so we're left with fully vaccinated staff, and now the, the Omicron is burning through the vaccination. People get sick. And they may not get real sick, but they have to isolate. Okay, and depending on the rules, 5 or 10 days. So if you start having a lot of people testing positive, your hospital staff numbers go down. So we've got 2 reasons for hospital staff numbers to go down, one being, you know, we eliminated people who didn't get vaccinated, the other being the current vaccinated staff are getting sick and having to take time off. Um, So you're kind of in a pickle there with your hospital staffing. Um, I do know just anecdotally of, you know, people— I know people in hospitals all over, and I know people who have not been vaccinated, but they've been called back in, you know, basically on emergency status because they're out of— they're out of help. Um, now the other thing is That whether you have had a vaccine or not, if you're unvaccinated, Omicron is likely to give you natural immunity if you get it, which it— that's how things work. And go back and look at my videos on T and B cell immunity with COVID It works the same way. Those will be down below. And if you have, like these hospital staff currently who have to take, you know, 5 days off or 10 days off, because they got COVID Omicron, that they're considering, you know, would be like a booster. So, you know, in the end, this is win-win. But in the short term, it's just going to be a mess, 6 or 8 weeks more. And the only upside is, as he's saying, you know, 60% lower chance of you going to the hospital, but we have a bigger number of people going to the hospital. So one of the things, and I've done this graphic a couple of times now, and I always say, you know, this is why, you know, probably I don't do a lot of graphics here, but if you look at the outside, that's the number of infections. That's the biggest field here, right? Well, if you look at the number of infections, that's big, but we'll never know that number. They're saying, you know, it's going to reach 100% of people. If you are exposed to Omicron but you have pre-existing immunity that keeps you from getting it, You may have a brief infection that you don't know about, or no infection, but infections are always the biggest number. And then we have cases. Cases are the next number. That's people that we did a test on, and now we have a number of the infections who are cases. So cases is always a bit smaller. But when they say cases are on the rise, it sounds like everyone's dying, and you, you've got to— we have to stop thinking that about this. Omicron is a much lower virulence variant. It's a much less dangerous disease. It's uncomfortable for many people. It's unfortunate, but the hospitalization rates are low. Now, you may go to the hospital, especially if you have underlying other diseases, or if you have other problems that we're going to talk about, but the cases are still not the same as— then symptomatic cases are lower. So you could be a positive case and say, I, I don't feel bad at all. You're still going to be positive. You need to stay away from people for a bit. That would be wise because you can still spread it even if you're vaccinated. You can still spread it. Okay. So symptomatic cases are smaller, and then we get down to hospitalizations. And, and now, so like, this is proportional to like Delta, uh, hospitalizations would be an even smaller number here, and then deaths are the smallest amount. So we need to remember when we're reading these news stories, they say cases are soaring, cases are on the rise, cases, cases, cases. Sure, the more we test, the more cases we'll find. And I guarantee you, just consider 100% of everyone's going to be exposed. So of course cases are going to go up. But what happens when everyone's been exposed? And they're going to drop. So they're going to go sky high and then they're going to drop. The thing that we need to remember, because otherwise everyone's going to think everyone's going to die, is the cases going up that high does not mean that the hospitalization is proportionally going up like it would in previous variants. That is because, as this doctor from UCSS says, you have 60% lower chance of being in the hospital than any prior variant was. Who are the people going into the hospitals? People going into the hospitals largely have Other comorbidities and other risk factors. Age is a big risk factor. Diabetes, cardiovascular, pulmonary disease, obesity, number of other risk factors. Even CNN was talking about, oh well, there's you know maybe we should tell people to live healthier and lose some weight and stuff like that. Well, you know sure. And what I usually say is sure. I mean, can you lose weight today? No. But you could start to be healthier and that will actually do something for you. So it's a thought. Now, I also put in here, or will put in, in the YouTube description box, there's a lot of hospital, you know, sort of literal disarray with Omicron. And it has to do, as I was saying, with, you know, more staff who are vaccinated getting sick, having to take time off. to isolate. And then the other problem that's going on, okay, and this has been from Southern Africa through Europe and now into North America, is when you read reporting, you have to be very careful to look because there is up to 2/3 of the people, quote unquote, hospitalized with COVID aren't there for COVID. In fact, they're not even symptomatic for their COVID. So why in the world are they hospitalized for COVID? Up to 66%, 2/3 of people are hospitalized and they get labeled COVID, but they're there for some other problem. Okay, so this is another thing that you really have to be careful with, with these numbers. And they say, well, hospitalizations are going up. No. it's a reverse problem. If you have asymptomatic people, up to 2/3, up to 66% of people go in the hospital who didn't think they have COVID, but they went in because they broke their leg, or they went in because they had a heart attack, or they went in because they had some other medical problem. 100% of those people get swabbed, and if that swab comes out positive, then they get labeled as COVID, but they're really there for some other reason. Now, why would you have no symptoms but a positive PCR swab? Well, this is one of the reasons why they're— even the CDC, even Dr. Fauci mentioned it, other people have mentioned it. Why would this be? It's because the PCR test is so very sensitive that it picks up dead virus and live virus, and it can't tell. difference. So that means I could have had Omicron, thought I had a cold, gotten all better, then went in the hospital because I broke my leg or something and they swabbed me. I'm still going to be positive for a number of weeks after, potentially, on the PCR swab. So we have to be very careful about that. So these people are non— they're not symptomatic. Um, we need to be very careful that the numbers You know, it'll say COVID cases, but if up to 66% aren't there for COVID and they don't have a COVID disease that's being treated, they're not there for COVID. That's how it's being reported. And it's a nice news article there about all of that. Now, another thing, and I put in a, a really nice, uh, YouTube link to a British doctor who does a lot of reporting, and he does a really good breakdown of, of the European and the Southern African data around, are they in there due to COVID, like from COVID in the hospital, or are they just there with COVID but they're there for other reasons? So you can look at that. But it goes into the fact that a lot of these people are what are called incidentally diagnosed, and that's what I was saying where You know, I, I break my ankle, I go into the emergency room, they swab everybody for COVID while you're there, and I'm positive because I'm in the convalescent phase of it, you know, of Omicron that I didn't know I had. I thought I had a cold or something like that. Now there's another one that I think is even more, in a sense, sinister in the news. And what that really is about is this reporting around children. Um, and there was a report that I saw earlier, and I read through it, and I was trying to find out where their sources were, and they didn't list any sources. Um, and it was all by inference, you know, well, we talked to this person or that person, and, and everything's, you know, all the kids are going to the hospital and they're all on ventilators and dying and stuff. And it's just Crazy, crazy, crazy. Um, so I, I put in 2 studies, uh, and, and basically they both come up with the same conclusions. You can read them if you want to, um, but they both were published in American Academy of Pediatrics, main pediatric journal, one of them. And, um, The summary really is that there's about a 40% overestimation of children's COVID cases going— being admitted to the hospital. Now, this happened also with Delta, and in fact, there was one hospital system that said it was a typographical error, which probably it was, but they overestimated by a factor of, you know, tenfold. So it was sort of like 90, it was 900 or something that got reported. Well, in this review done in American Academy of Pediatrics publication, what they're saying is it's about a 40% overestimation when you look at pediatric COVID hospitalization. About 40% of those shouldn't be counted as COVID. Now, this is not coming from a news report or anybody. This is people looking at the actual data, looking at the actual hospital admissions and what the kids really had. And again, why would they, why would they be put in the COVID bucket? It's because all of them that went in get swabbed for anything. And so if they had lingering or positive PCR but negative viral load and all of that stuff, negative live virus load, they're gonna swab positive for COVID, but they're not there for that and they're not being treated for COVID. That's a real important thing. So both of these come out and you can read them again, but you're plus or minus about 40% on children, and this is just what we know right now. I think with Omicron that number is going to be even bigger. Okay, and so when they when you start reading, I literally read a story earlier today, and I I'm saying I forget where I read it. I remember where I read it. I just didn't want to put it in because I didn't want to give it any any traction or time. It was total fabrication, had nothing to do with anything, and it literally As a parent and now grandparent of lots and lots of little people, you know, if I read that and didn't know any better, I would be scared to death for my children. And it was just complete fabrication, it was completely made up. So I think that we just have to be careful with that, and it's really easy to get into this you know, the fear mindset, uh, because everyone's been sort of entrained to that. But the data is just not showing that. And yes, we have a hospital crisis due to a lot of things, some of it due to COVID, some due to many, many other things. And there's a lot of people in hospitals trying to get tested that are clogging the system up. There's a whole bunch of things, but Is a minor part of the problem, and it's not what's being reported. Now, one of the things I think I reported last week or the week before was some, you know, White House statements. So I don't know if you're— there's some changes at the White House. I don't know if you remember the White House putting out a statement: you will have a winter of severe illness and death if you're unvaccinated due to Omicron. So you can look at the last YouTube and some other stuff. So the first thing, and I'm just going to put this in because it gets into the ethics and the statistics of it, and I don't have time in this program to do it, but I'm putting a YouTube link into a physician who's an MD, MPH, Master of Public Health, and works, I believe, in drug development and oncology, as I have done in the past. And they go through, is it really a pandemic of the unvaccinated at this point? And at this point, the answer basically is no. And even if it is, it doesn't really matter. Okay, and I will let him get into that if you really want to go listen to it, but it really brings some clarity, I think, around this point. Now, my personal feeling at this point is, you notice on the program I don't I don't— I will tell you, your vaccination and status and everything is up to you and your healthcare team, your doctor, whoever you work with, because it's not anybody's business to point out to you what you ought to do, et cetera. It's very clear what people feel about this. It's very clear what the messaging from the public health world is. And so at this point, what I'm finding is people have decided to do one thing or the other, and there's not much you can really do about that. So you do you, you do what you're going to do, protect yourself the best you can. Um, so I'm not going to get into that, but what everybody is saying and what I brought up in the, in the last 3 and now this one is it, it almost doesn't matter at this point. if you are or aren't, you're going to be exposed to Omicron, vaccinated, unvaccinated. You're going to be exposed and either contract the disease and then work the disease through, or you're going to have enough residual immunity that it goes, it goes past you. Okay, so the White House now has gone from a week or two ago saying that you're gonna have disease, literally severe illness and death, a winter of severe illness and death. Really positive move there. Now Politico comes out 2 days ago, says White House embraces a manage, not contain Omicron game plan. I'm only laughing because that's kind of been what it's been the whole time. You need to manage things like that from public health. You can't contain it. Something like this is not containable. We talked in previous shows about, can you vaccinate yourself out of the pandemic? Well, in theory you can, but in reality you actually can't. I shared statistics and kind of the mechanics of that. This is a bad idea to do it. No, it's always try, right? But you just can't do it. Uh, so in this Politico, and I give the link to this, but I think there's a couple important statements. So, uh, in the beginning, you know, a year ago, uh, the president said he vowed an all-out federal assault aimed at vanquishing the virus. So there was like this, you know, zero-COVID idea. A year later, the administration is kind of stepping back and just hoping that they can manage around it and fight it out to a draw. So you have this fast-spreading variant, and the White House and the advisors and everybody back there— I'm paraphrasing, you can look at the article if you want— And they're basically saying, well, there's nothing at this point we can really do to slow this train down, and there never was. So what we need to shift to now is what can we do to support the medical system out there? Now, there's a lot of things that I talked last week about. If you do have COVID, what do you do? And so I started out with what we call hygienic things about taking care of your body, and then I started out with nutrient supplements and other things with talk more about that today. Then I went to early treatment. And so there's standard early treatments like monoclonal antibodies and, you know, maybe remdesivir if you go to the hospital and maybe a few other things. And then we talked about— and there's all these other things that you can do, like treating your co-infections and using multimodal anti-infectives that cover both virus and bacteria and other stuff like that. So I went into that last week if you want to look at it. The point of view of the CDC and the White House a little bit different than what I was talking about, which is much broader, but we agree in theory anyway. So, and they make a quote here: the new reality has further darkened the mood among White House aides who are already frustrated by lack of progress towards ending the pandemic. Yes, because they were never going to do it anyway. They couldn't. It's also accelerated the administration's pivot towards preparing people to live with the virus indefinitely. Yeah, that's what most of us have been saying, and I've said it, you know, here over and over. The virus will never leave us. This will— the SARS-CoV-2 family will keep here. It will be endemic, and it will circle the globe, uh, kind of like influenza does, common cold. And if it does leave us at some point for a while, then go to an animal vector and learn new tricks, it might be like when bird flu came out or swine flu or whatever. We all may be exposed and become sick again, but basically this is something you have to live with. We need to develop immunity as best we can. Now, the upside with Omicron is you're going to get exposed probably whether you want to or not, and you will develop immunity. either on top of your vaccination or maybe even on top of your native immunity. Um, so the officials at the White House described the next few weeks as a triage operation. You know, so triage is to divide up, you know, small, medium, and large problems, uh, containing the reverberations of the surge well enough to avert breakdowns in services. So now we're looking at how do we support the industry? Well, the first thing is, if you don't need to be in the hospital, uh, don't go. Worst place to be most times is hospital, unless you have to be there anyway. So just don't go. Um, if you are not having, you know, breathing problems and, you know, you don't have the other comorbidities and you've communicated, please, with your doctor— remember, I'm a doctor, I'm not your doctor. Uh, never take advice from Talking heads on YouTube or podcasts or any other place, because that would be dumb. Talk to your healthcare providers about all this stuff. But generally speaking, you know, what they will tell you is, okay, if you feel yucky, you got a fever, you don't want to move, you get flu-like symptoms, if you're breathing okay and all these other things, please just stay home. Don't clog up the system, but also stay away from other people. Which would be the same advice as if you had a bad cold or the flu. You're, you know, we're not going to tell you to go out and mix it up with a, you know, bunch of people who aren't sick already. Um, so let's see, uh, any other things down? I'm summarizing here. Health officials inside and outside the administration, meaning at the White House, privately acknowledge that there's very little left for the federal government to do but hold on and hope the worst is over soon. So these are epidemiologists, virologists, and public health people, and that's essentially— it's been a small quieter voice, and now it's just getting louder, that, that you are not going to end this. This is something you have to manage your way through, and we have to manage it like a public health crisis that it is, and we have to support people. Okay, now, um, an epidemiologist at the University of Minnesota, Dr. Osterholm, quoted saying we're going to have another 2.5, 3 weeks, maybe 4 weeks of this viral blizzard where we'll see one challenge after another. And then basically there is nothing at the federal level that will ever change that. So the next 3, 4, 5, 6 weeks are just going to get worse and worse and worse with respect to, you know, the spread and people being sick. And then it's going to truncate in fall over the top and then you'll be done. One of the questions I asked earlier and I checked with the CDC and I put a link in, Omicron is now almost 96% and Delta is at 4%. I do want to point out because I want to talk about some treatment stuff and all that, Delta isn't totally gone. People who maybe got sick a number of weeks ago who might be hospitalized may have Delta. What we're seeing is those people have worse type of a disease than the, than the Omicron folks. So Delta was better than the prior, and Omicron is much better as far as not killing you. But the Delta that's residual, the 4 or 5% that's residual, there's still people in the hospital now, probably it's Delta that they have, and they may never know, but that's the way it is. So, um, Current patient experience, what I'm hearing from feedback, like we talked about, bad cold, maybe flu symptoms, a lot of very, very profound fatigue, potential for headache, potential for cough, fever. A lot of people are reporting, you know, that achiness where they just don't want to move. And what we talked about last week was that's great, go to bed, stay in bed, you know, or heat yourself up and go back to bed, do whatever you have to do to take care of the pain. But generally speaking, because it's an upper respiratory invasion and not lower respiratory, these people are not progressing to pneumonia and needing to, you know, be in the hospital, etc. Now, if you had other diseases going on, say you had pre-existing lung disease or diabetes, etc., etc., much more chance of, uh, of maybe needing some help because it's the same. And this is where we're at the point where now Influenza is probably more deadly than Omicron. This is why people get sick and die with influenza. It's because the influenza creates this inflammation and they get this pneumonitis, and then other bugs come in. And what am I always harping on? Co-infections. One of the things that I do with people, my current patients, is I'm worried about their COVID, but I'm more worried about bacterial and fungal and other co-infections, and we put them on medicine for that so that they, they don't develop more of those. Now, as a segue from last time, we've got a few minutes left here. There was a new study, I put a link in here, a 20-week study of the clinical outcomes of an over-the-counter prophylactic therapy. A lot of these things are things that I mentioned last week in the natural products world, but this actual study, and basically what it showed, they took about 100 subjects and the group that was taking these supplements, 4% had flu-like symptoms but 0 developed COVID. Okay, whereas 20% of the control group, the people who weren't taking the supplements, developed flu-like symptoms And 15% of those were COVID positive, or 15% of the whole control group were COVID positive. So most of them. So it's a small study, it's interesting, and it kind of goes to what I was talking about last week. They were using zinc, quercetin, vitamin C, vitamin D3, vitamin E, and then lysine. Lysine we use with some viral illnesses. It blocks the uptake of arginine and other— those are amino acids. And arginine creates nitric oxide, which on its own is fine. We need that. But nitric oxide surges, the nitric oxide gets oxidized, and that creates a lot of the inflammatory problems. So with, you know, a lot of the common HHV viruses and other stuff like that, we use lysine as a protective agent to lower that. So They did that. Again, if you want that, the link to that paper is in there. And if you— it's not too long of a paper, but page 4 has the list of what they did. Now, they also added in, in addition to the zinc and the quercetin, which I was talking about, a quinoa bark, which is a cinchona bark alkaloid, which I've talked about in the past. And I usually didn't recommend people did that because the quercetin does just fine as a zinc ionophore, but the quinoa bark or cinchona bark also will do that. Now, I don't recommend— you only do that with the help of a doctor because cinchona alkaloids and cinchona bark, cinchona bark, can create something called cinchinism, and you should not be dosing it on your own. It can create tinnitus, ringing in your ears, and dizziness, and all sorts of things you don't want. But other than that, this was obviously— doctors were controlling what was going on with these folks. So, um, So they were under the care of a doctor when they were doing it. So quercetin, on the other hand, quercetin, the bioflavonoid that we usually recommend, also helps the zinc get into the cell and all of that stuff, and it's far safer than cinchona. Now, I promised I would talk about flu rona, F-L-U-R-O-N-A. I think they first reported this in Israel, and then we We got— I guarantee you it's been all over the US, but we got a case in Los Angeles. And the bottom line with fluorona is it's like everything else. You're allowed to have more than one disease at a time. And so if you have coronavirus, even Omicron, but then you get Mycoplasma pneumoniae or you get influenza or you get whatever else, we don't come up with a cute name for it, but fluorona they did. It just means you got 2 infections at once, which— whatever. All of the time for the last almost 2 years here, coronavirus, every time we look at a study, there's 1, 2, 3, 4 other infections that go along with the sickest people. So you need to protect yourself, treat it. The nice thing with FluRona is all the same stuff that I told you to do last week for corona will help your influenza status as well. And then, and I left the Fluorona link, but Fluorona is all over the news. It's just a— it's a nice clickbait made-up thing, and it doesn't mean anything other than we should be looking for and we should be treating co-infections. We don't have to give them all names, we can just treat them. And then I've got a link there to, you know, how the, uh, endemic COVID will come about. Now, I did want to say, uh, that we have, um, currently— I was telling you last week about, you know, it's had a few families who treated, uh, kind of early, uh, treatment for, uh, COVID. One of them, I believe, probably was Delta, and the whole family did the pre-treatment, you know, with the medications and the natural supplements and everything else. Did great. One member of the family did wind up being hospitalized. They're still in the hospital. We're working to get them out of the hospital now, but they're still there. And the main reason was not because of what we gave them, but that person was patient zero in the family. They're the first patient. And they really delayed starting doing anything about it. Now, it's no harm, no foul. That's what happens. But if you are getting sick and you are getting febrile and you feel like you're developing other problems, get a hold of your healthcare practitioner. And if you're having any trouble breathing, get assessed as quickly as you possibly can, because the sooner we can start early treatment, the less likely you're going to be that one person that winds up in the hospital. All right. Well, uh, I've got to go. We are at the end of the podcast. Uh, anytime you want to get a hold of me online, D-R-A-N-O-W, dranow.com. Please like, share, and subscribe, whatever platform you're on. If you're on YouTube, great. Uh, keep the comments coming. That's where I get a lot of ideas for the next shows. But I will see you all on the radio in one week's time, and have a very good week. Thanks.
