OMICRON VARIANT - Why this may be the BEST news of the pandemic.

The goal, to empower the listener to gain access to the best healthcare possible. Good day and welcome to Medicine and Health with Dr. Paul Anderson. That's me, I'm Dr. Paul. And today we're going to talk about the Omicron variant, friend or foe, and related things. So the main reason that I'm sort of chuckling here in the background is Cameron and I were trying to get the audio working on my normal link, and we, we tried everything, we couldn't. So we're on, we're on a backup, and I'm told this sounds better. So let's, we'll just hope for the best. I just give you a little background. I, I was I've had a death in the family this week, and, and I'm traveling and working, teaching out of town. You might notice the background's a little different here, and I was just going to have Cameron do a replay of something, but to be honest, I started listening to news reports and certain groups talking publicly about the Omicron variant, and I got so just disgusted by what I was hearing. Not that, you know, it's all bad or it's all lies or anything, but just the spin that's being put on it that I decided, well, this would be probably a good time to just talk about it like we did when Delta came out. Now, Delta wound up doing like 3 updates on that when I thought I'd only do one, so we'll see how it goes here with old Omicron. But I really, you know, one of the things I learned from one of my mentors long, long, long time ago about being a doctor was that a lot of being a doctor is actually clearing things up for people and providing reassurance. Now, That doesn't mean that, you know, you lie to people. It doesn't mean you tell them things are good when they aren't. But also, a lot of times people have concerns about things simply because they don't know what's, you know, going on on the inside, or maybe they, you know, they read something about their symptoms and they're sure that they're, you know, going to die tomorrow and really they aren't. And so a lot of the job of the physician, you know, docere, doctor, actually means teacher, sort of loosely translated. So, I just thought, you know, why don't we just have a discussion about it? I realize that this is a one-way discussion, but you can type in the comments below, etc., do what you need to do there. But I thought, well, why don't we just have a discussion about it? So I took some time out today for the live feed. If you're on Facebook or CTR Network, great. If you're listening on YouTube, which is probably tomorrow or after, This is live recorded on December 9th, 2021, just for the purposes of the veracity of the sources I'm citing. Please know it's December 9th, 2021. So if you're listening 3 months from now, could all be wrong or all be right. But something I would like to point out is, if you go back or if you're, you know, if you've been listening for a while, and by the way, if you're tuning in on YouTube, Please subscribe, like, share, all of that stuff. It's, uh, it really helps the channel out to do that. It also helps the CTR Network out sort of in a round, round and round way. So, um, if you've listened before, if you go back and you listen to the Delta updates that I did when the Delta variant was new, um, what you'll see is there's very few things that I was either wrong or very far off on. And that's not because I'm so smart or anything like that. It's simply because this is where I try to come from. I try to come from a point of view where I'm really, really, really not trying to give you, you know, my opinion or, you know, push you in a direction or whatever. I'm trying to gather as much information as I possibly can about what's going on, and I try and report about it and let you come to your own conclusions. The other thing that I usually try and do is to provide background resources. Now, sometimes, you know, those are actual links to scientific papers that I may have read, uh, that You may or may not have access to, but there's links so you can get them. Sometimes it might be an interview with somebody who knows, in my estimation, a lot about something, and that can be very useful. And sometimes it may be some other resource too. So you'll find when you go down in the description, open that up, there's a whole bunch of links and they will link to things that we're going to talk about today. That's if in the YouTube feed anyway, there'll be links. So I want to just get into this. So right now, worldwide, the Delta variant is still the predominant variant of COVID that people are getting. And I think we all, you know, kind of, you know, have seen that. One of the things about Delta is, again, it's more transmissible, not as deadly. transmissible more to younger people. We've seen that, not as deadly, all that business. Okay, so Delta is kind of at this point old news. And so some of the research I'm going to share with you is actually based on Delta because Omicron is new and we don't have a lot of, you know, the kind of research that you would do to look backwards over a lot of time. But When I point out something that's Delta-specific or Omicron-specific, I'll try and be real clear about that. So, you know, we're not mixing metaphors. The other thing, though, is, is that, you know, Delta and Omicron are both under the family of SARS-CoV-2 or COVID-19, and they have more in common than not in common, with a couple of exceptions. So the first thing to answer is, what is Omicron? It's a letter in the Greek alphabet, but like Delta, what, what, what is it? Why are we suddenly hearing about this? Well, one of the things that we can do in modern times is actually do genomic sequencing of the different subvariants. So what happens is you get a new mutated virus that has gain-of-function like SARS-CoV-2. So there was SARS-CoV-1 that we just called SARS, right? And then it had a relative called MERS. And then SARS-CoV-2 was a lot like SARS-CoV-1, only it had gain-of-function that came from somewhere. And That gain-of-function allowed SARS-CoV-2 to be much more transmissible. And I've said this before, one of the main differences between SARS, SARS-CoV-1, and SARS-CoV-2, or coronavirus COVID-19, is that you have a little bit longer lead time before you get sick. And also not everybody gets the same sickness with it. Whereas with SARS-CoV-1, generally speaking, if you look at the bulk of people, they got sick very rapidly. They got very sick and/or died very rapidly. It was very easy to sequester and know who those people were. Whereas with SARS-CoV-2, COVID-19, you could be exposed and there could be a latency in developing symptoms, or you could be one of the lucky people that thought you had a cold or a bad cough or something and you spread it to everybody you know. Then they all get it and they all get it in different ways and then it spreads and spreads and spreads. The spread is easier because of the characteristics of the virus. Well, then what happens? Here's one of the first things I just want to point out. I know it gets mentioned, but it gets glossed over a lot, and that is that it is the nature of these types of viruses to mutate. That's what they do. Especially RNA viruses. It's no shock to anybody in the medical community that we have had an Alpha variant and a Beta, and we've had a Delta, and we've had all the other alphabet numbers. Omicron is not like a surprise to anybody. That should be the first thing you should think about. Now, the next thing, and this is one of the reasons why even though Things have not been great this week on my end, and I'm, I'm coming to you through alternative electronic means. Um, why I wanted to talk about this is, um, there's a lot of overstating and hyperbole going on in the reporting around Omicron. And by that I mean, I, I don't know, and I don't think anybody is Trying to lie, certainly, because if you really listen to what they're saying, they, they use a lot of slippery terminology like we think, or it could be, or maybe, or whatever. And remember what I always tell you on these things? When anybody says those words, but especially when scientists start saying, well, it could be, or it might be, what we're telling you is we don't know that. And in some cases, we're actually saying— it could be, but it also is most likely not going to be that way. Right? So, there's just a lot of just, just stuff going on. And I've been listening. And, you know, one of the things I really do try to do to be as, you know, every human has bias. I try to just give you the straight dope with, with as little bias as possible. And I really do try and talk to you, like, you electronic people out there, like I would a patient, you know, sitting down trying to weigh the pros and cons and the danger versus the safety and all of that stuff. And just try and go through it, you know, in a very rational manner. Well, one of the things that I try and do in that respect, even though sometimes it's painful, is I try and listen to people, usually scientists who are invested and knowledgeable, smarter than I am about virology, etc. I try and listen to people on all sides of the argument or as many sides as there possibly are. Now, in doing so, I hear a lot of things on one end of the spectrum that I think That I really doubt that. I— in fact, some of that sounds totally crazy. I hear a lot of other things on the other end of the spectrum, and I also think I get what you're saying, understand why you're saying it. We'll talk about that. But you're, you're painting a picture that is 99% likely not to happen, you know, some huge percentage likely not to happen. So when you get these mutations, so, okay, Delta was going to be the end of the world. It's not. Yes, more people are infected, but that also builds the herd immunity more. So, okay, fine. Now we've got this Omicron thing from somewhere in Southern Africa. You know, they're blaming, you know, certain parts of South Africa, but they don't know. The reason we're blaming certain parts of South Africa is because you could test there, but there's other places in the neighborhood it is. So the first thing is it's a mutation of SARS-CoV-2 where they believe there was a co-infection. You've heard me talk a lot about co-infections. All of us carry other infections with us. Some of them are asymptomatic, but when we get COVID, uh, the other infection kind of activates. Well, the other thing that can happen is you don't have any infection with you, you get COVID, and then you get another virus that says, oh, you're sick, I'll come on in and and replicate inside you as well. So sometimes if you get a sharing of infections, you get a trading of genomic material. This happens a lot in a totally non-COVID thing that I teach about a lot called digestive tract biofilms, where you get a biofilm and you get multiple different organisms inside the biofilm and they start trading genomic material and they become more infectious or stronger or whatever. So it's a very common thing in the microbial world. So there's a lot of— and I've got a really great paper linked if you're into going down rabbit holes and reading a whole lot about genomics of virus and all that. I got that link down below. But the bottom line is that the Omicron variant has characteristics of different common cold virus. Now, as we remember, coronaviruses are one of the things that cause the quote-unquote common cold. Now, the coronavirus SARS-CoV-2 causes COVID-19, which generally is more than a common cold, but its family causes a common cold. Well, there's also rhinovirus, adenovirus, other viruses that do this too. So if you get 2 of them together and they start to trade around some of their genomic material, what you can wind up with is a new mutation of the virus that has a different look to it. And that is a, uh, is a heritable benefit to the virus. So now, not 100% of the time, so please understand, but much of the time with viruses, the way they work from an evolutionary biology point of view is if you're a virus, you don't really want to go and kill all of your hosts. Like, that's generally not your goal because then the host dies and then you go with it, right? If you're a virus, what you want to do is you want to mutate to a place where you transmit to as many people as possible, but you don't kill them. Okay, now that's a grand oversimplification, but it's actually pretty close to the truth. And what do we see when we went from Alpha and Beta to Delta? We saw a higher transmissibility and a lower disease state. Okay, now, yes, people still got sick with Delta, people died with Delta, but the disease state generally was lower. What we're seeing with Omicron is an even higher transmissibility in an even lower disease state, and this is where I take exception with many of the Talking heads. And, and I will just say what I think they're trying to get at, okay? Because public health point of view, uh, they want to make sure they don't cause vaccine hesitancy. They want everyone to get out, get their vaccinations. They don't want to say anything that sounds too friendly to this, this coronavirus, SARS-CoV-2. And so if you get a new mutation that spreads very easily but has a low disease state associated with it, they're worried that then, oh, all you people who didn't get your shots or your booster or whatever aren't going to do it, right? So that's where this— that's my opinion. That's where I believe this comes from. Well, okay, fine. But let's just be honest about it up front. And some of them are. I'll give them that. If you listen, they'll say, well, you know, maybe it won't be so bad, but we should still do the public health stuff. Fine, fine, fine. But then many of these folks will go on and say, well, but we don't know, it could turn into be a really bad variant, it could kill more people. It could be— when, when the data we have shows that's not what it does, does the opposite. And that's where I got upset enough to take a break from everything else to make this video. So Higher transmissibility, lower disease state. But this is just what virus— many viruses, not all of them, okay? Because you can always find an example of a virus that gets worse as it goes along. Now, and you can— so number one, remember, everyone else in the world talks about vaccination, and that's a medical procedure between you and your real doctor. Do not take advice about vaccinations from people on TV or YouTube or the radio or whatever. Your healthcare team and you make that decision. It's whatever, whether it's a vaccination or taking penicillin or any other thing, that's between you and your healthcare team. Please just talk to them about it. We, we don't need to talk about that stuff. Another thing that most people agree with, with a few exceptions of people who authorize them, is in the modern era, travel bans are kind of just window dressing. By the time they made the travel bans now for this Omicron variant, it already had left the area, was already in America. And they said, oh, we haven't found it. And they said, oh, in one state, and then, oh, 5 states. It was already here. It was already all over the world. We have too mobile of a society and we can be in too many places to sequester a virus. So you need to keep that in mind. The other thing that I left some— there's some really great scientists from the UK that I left their YouTube links that you can look at that have looked at the data. And they're actually predicting that, you know, this comes from the southern hemisphere, so the northern hemispheres of the world, especially Europe and North America, are likely to have 80 to 100% exposure to Omicron by end of January. That might make you think a little bit. Okay, so you can't run away from it, you can't get away, it's there, etc. Now, that leads to a couple of other just points I'd like to make, and I will say, you know, that, um, that we have got about 25 minutes left here, and I'm running on a I'm running on battery power, so we'll see if they match up and make it. But I just want to talk about a couple of other little things along the way. And again, this is not— please listen to me, okay? This is not a pro or a con statement about the therapies. This is reality, and you need to know this reality because again, it gets sort of, you know, twisted in, in the popular media. When it comes to vaccinations, one of the reasons that the public health people went back to mask mandates and all this other stuff is that the data came out, and I shared this in the original 2 or 3 Delta updates, but it's still there. There's a couple of things around vaccine immunity versus Natural immunity, meaning I got COVID and so now I have immunity. Okay, so the first thing is we hear about breakthrough, and that means I'm fully vaccinated but I still got COVID. Now, am I less likely to die and go to the hospital if I'm fully vaccinated but I still got COVID? Yeah, yeah, you're less likely to drop dead. Yes, still get COVID. What's the other part of it? you're still contagious. So getting the vaccine does not stop you from getting COVID, and it does not stop you from passing COVID on to people around you. Every responsible public health official that I hear, usually they're the more junior ones, will tell you that straight up and straight out. So that's part of the reason why they went back to tighter environmental controls, you know, around public spaces and all this business. Okay, but a vaccine absolutely— and there's links in the thing if you want to look at them— doesn't stop you from transmitting to another person. It also doesn't stop you from getting COVID. And this is not a scientific study, but I called a number of clinics that I know that treat a lot of COVID patients, and I said, just spitball for me, is it 50/50 unvaxxed and vaxxed that you're treating with COVID Is it 70/30? Is it whatever, and 8 out of 10 said the majority of our COVID patients now are fully vaccinated, they're breakthrough infections. 2 out of 10 were somewhere between the other way, meaning more unvaccinated, or 50/50. Okay? Now, I don't know if that's true everywhere, but it's what I'm seeing, and it's what a lot of clinics that I'm talking to are seeing. So the next part about it, though, is a grand bit of misinformation that has been transmitted in North America just because of some kind of rapidly done and kind of unfiltered data, where one of the governments in North America looked at one state They didn't look at all the states, although they should. They said, oh, well, the vaccinated people have a much higher resistance to breakthrough infections and stuff than unvaccinated. Well, you probably heard, and if you didn't, I've got links in there to it. There's a very large-scale study looking at Delta variant. Again, remember, we've got more Delta to look at, so just go with it. It looked at vaccinated versus people who've already had COVID. Okay, so 2 ways towards immunity: I can get vaccination and boosters, I can have COVID myself. Okay, now there's a middle one where I've had COVID and maybe I get a booster. That's a separate thing. Okay, but the majority of people, it's one or the other. They had COVID and/or they had vaccine. When they looked at people and breakthrough infections, meaning I've got some immunity from either disease— I got COVID and I lived through it, or I got vaccines and I lived through it— people with vaccination had 13 times the— a 13-fold increase In breakthrough infections over non— just living through COVID unvaccinated. So that's not unvaccinated, no COVID, that's previous infection. So if I had COVID already and my brother didn't have COVID but got fully vaccinated, brother has 13 times more likelihood of a breakthrough infection. That was enlightening. Um, the other thing that they looked at was that if you look at prior infection immunity versus vaccination, vaccinated people had almost a 6-fold increase in total breakthrough and a 7-fold increase in symptomatic disease, meaning they actually got pretty sick. Okay, over prior disease. So one of the things that will rage on, and even Dr. Fauci has said, well, we need to look into it, whatever that means, is, hey, if you can prove prior infection— And we have data that shows that prior infection is actually maybe better, and there's a lot of reasons it would be better at immunity than, than the vaccination. we should be allowing both of those things for proof of immunity. So there's that. Okay, now that's a whole thing, and there's a lot of subtleties to that, but I just want to point that out. Like, there's a sort of fantasy, uh, going around that, you know, well, if, if I'm fully vaccinated, you know, I, I, I can't give anybody COVID. And it's absolutely not true. Um, You certainly can, and you certainly get COVID. Will you— are you less likely to die? Yeah. So that's a good thing. Now here's the next thing about this Omicron. Omicron has this variation to it where if you look at— and in the first of the 2 British scientists' reports where they're reporting on the South African data, They go through this, so you can go listen to that if you want. I don't need to rehash that, but, but the, the upshot of it was that Omicron is so mild as a disease that most of the people who got it and they tested them weren't aware they had COVID. Because the primary symptoms were more cold-like— body aches, Maybe a headache, profound fatigue for a couple days, very fatigued. Not a lot of the cough, not a lot of— now, can you have cough? Sure, you have all this stuff. But most of the people just thought they were super tired and they had body aches, and maybe I got a cold. Well, in a sense, you did get a cold because it's a type of a cold virus. It just happens to be COVID-19 Omicron variant, SARS-CoV-2. So you have to think about that too. And what this means— and we'll never have these numbers, they're going to get as good as they can get— but if you take the southern portion of Africa and you were to be able to suddenly test everybody, when you have something that, that is that low of a disease state and transmits fast like Omicron, you probably now have large quantities of people that never knew that they had COVID. that have natural native immunity now and probably are going to be fairly resistant. Now, what does this mean? When— so you hear this on the news, whatever— we're moving or trying to move from a pandemic to endemic COVID. What that means first is COVID-19 or SARS-CoV-2 is never going away. This business about a no-COVID strategy or COVID gone, come on, give me a break. It's going to be probably like the seasonal influenza or some other thing. It's going to continue to mutate just like the seasonal influenza does, and it will visit us either on a cycle or perpetually, but it'll be the kind of thing that we reach an equilibration with as far as our immunity goes. Why? Because what viruses do is they move towards high transmissibility, moderate to low disease state, so they can infect as many people as possible and kill as few of them as possible. That's the goal of these type of— not all viruses, but these type of viruses. So the idea that you're going to eradicate SARS-CoV-2, COVID-19 is kind of a joke. The idea that you're going to sequester countries and keep a new variant from going out, but no, humans travel too much. And by the time they report on where it is, it's already in 10 other places, if not 100 other places. Okay. Even if you look back at the data from China, And and they're you know they're starting to say well, you know maybe it was a little earlier in 2019 than we thought that we had COVID cases. And that's okay, that's reasonable. It's highly reasonable because if you don't know that that's what you're looking for and you don't know that's what you're going to test for, you just think well people there's a bad flu going around or whatever till you sort it out. Well, so China is starting to admit that they. probably had outbreaks way before they were originally saying. Well, that's the same as if you get a new variant. By the time we know what it is and we sequence it genomically, you can't sequester that part of the world. It's, it's too late. People have moved around. And as these viruses get more transmissible, it goes faster. Okay, now when I was talking about I think in the title, maybe the YouTube title and the radio title, Omicron, Friend or Foe? On one level, there is no friendly virus. We live with them all the time. There are some viruses that are commensal with us that we have and aren't a big deal. But when it comes to SARS-CoV-2, if you have the choice, of a highly potentially deadly nasty version or a very rarely deadly moderate to low disease state version, usually you're going to pick the low disease state version. So what a lot of the scientists— if again, if you have to listen to a broad spectrum, you can't listen to the talking heads that are trying to make sure that you still get vaccinated and all that stuff. And, you know, I understand where they're coming from, but that's just— that's the spin that they're putting on. You just have to know that. So, but if you listen to the scientists, they're just sort of dispassionately looking at the data. What they're saying is you can reach near herd immunity if you get a rapidly spreading version that doesn't kill very many people. Omicron fits that. Now, others may fit it too, okay? To a degree, Delta kind of fit it, but Omicron is much more transmissible. And this is why, you know, these researchers are saying the northern hemispheres, especially Europe and North America, are likely to have 80 to 100% exposure to Omicron by January, beginning or end, whatever. Now, so there's all that, and you just have to be realistic about it. There is no way for you to avoid it. Certainly if you lock yourself away and you're never talking to anyone and you never see anyone and never touch anything, maybe, but most people are trying to live and do things and whatever. So you really, you really can't avoid it. It's not going to go away. And we're not going to eradicate these things. It's going to come to an equilibration with the human race. It's going to become endemic instead of pandemic, where it works its way through the population, takes a break, mutates, works its way through again, and we'll probably have it forever. Okay. So What are a couple of things that we can talk about in the final minutes that we have left here, um, that would be on the positive, helpful side? Okay, so need some water. First thing is, and I put a link into this, but I just want to talk about really top-down, you get a lot of what I— what my own personal opinion, what I would call twisted reporting information, when they say, well, you know, the immunity wanes after a while, the waning immunity. And a lot of times they're looking at— instead of looking at both sides of the memory immune system, they're looking at one side only. Now, and I have prior videos on this, and I've got a link to them down below and all that stuff, but here's the bottom line. You have your B cells and they make your antibodies. You hear a lot about antibodies, and they're easy to test. And then you got your T cells and they make cytotoxic, or I'm going to kill you, cells that are targeted at somebody specific. like SARS-CoV-2. And then they both— B and T cells both make memory cells. So let's say you either get immunity from a vaccine or you get immunity from having COVID, and great, you live through it. 6 months later, a year later, you see another SARS-CoV come along, SARS-CoV-2, of any variant kind usually. Your immune memory cells are going to animate, reanimate, and make more immediately antibodies through the B cell side and cytotoxic and other cells through the T cell side. Now the problem is, early on, the B cells kind of go through these up and down waves. Now I shared data earlier that showed that B cells are in the— on people with natural immunity from getting COVID. you know, they're pumping out antibodies, and now we know up to like a year later at least. Some of it always wanes. But here's the thing, the B and the T cell sides talk to each other. The part that they don't report on as much because it's harder to test is the T cell side. And what we're finding is the T cell side has a very robust memory, and the T cell, even if you have zero B cell antibody left to the bug. If you have memory T cells and you see the bug again, memory T cells will jump into action, not just make cytotoxic and other T cells, they will tell the B cells, hey, remember this bad guy? Go get him. And the B cells will reanimate and make some new antibodies. So waning immunity is a variable thing. Now, one of the questions that's not answered and may never be answered, but we see it sort of looking clinically at people, is, is there a difference between if I had COVID and got my immunity that way, or I had vaccines and got my immunity that way? Part of the reason for boosters might be because waning immunity with vaccines. What some of the immunologists that think a lot about this are believing is if you had a natural an infection, you may have more components of the bug, the virus that you're going to have immunity to. Indeed, that's probably true. There's that. Let's spend the final minutes here going through, and I want to talk about— Because when I first heard my colleague in the UK say, hey, by beginning or end of January, probably 80-100% of us who are far, far away from South Africa, meaning all in the northern climates, are going to be exposed to Omicron. I thought, oh, awesome. We know that even if you're fully vaccinated and boosted, you still can get the infection, you still transmit it. But, but you're less likely to die. I mean, which is great. We don't want people dying. So, you know, what's a positive thing we can think about with respect to this thing that we might get all exposed to? First thing, in general, unless you have a lot of other comorbidities— elderly, Diabetic, high BMI, other diseases, etc. You know, the people nowadays dying tend to be in one of those categories—not always—but one of those categories. So, you know, if you don't have a lot of those comorbidities, you are likely to experience like what we're seeing in southern part of Africa and elsewhere, and now. In the US. Um, kind of a bad cold, a lot of body aches, uh, like you get with the flu, a lot of profound fatigue, uh, fever, maybe, maybe not, cough, probably not, but maybe, and headache. Okay, all of that you can live through. Okay. So that's not all bad. The next thing is, what can we do either hygienically or additively to be prepared? Well, the first thing is you want to make yourself a small target. Okay, and so, um, what does that mean when it comes to virology? Well, what that means is we have an immune system. And one of the reasons why people with comorbidities are more likely to get sick and die is their immune system is either run down or it's diverted somewhere else, right? So we have an immune system, and so we need to be very careful with and protective of the elderly, people with other diseases, uh, people with immunologic problems and all that stuff. So if we can do that, put our efforts into caring for those folks, Then the rest of us, we can do things that make our target smaller. Okay, now those things include what I call hygienic things. Okay, so people think of dental hygienists and, okay, they're trying to protect your teeth from falling out and having problems, right? Well, hygienic things are things that you can do with your diet and your lifestyle. The first thing is getting enough sleep. Your immune system recharges when you are sleeping. Many, many benefits of sleep and the immune system. You can look that up easily online. There's a zillion videos and papers and stuff on it. Sleep is huge. Another thing that is huge is skeletal muscle activity or movement in your body. Now, when you feel sick, the last thing you want to do usually— you might want to sleep all the time, but you may not want to move your body around. But as you are preparing yourself for a potential onslaught of things like influenza and Omicron and all this other stuff, moving your body is very important. That's because, and we've talked about this in respect to cancer and immunology, your skeletal muscle that moves your body around, The more you make it work, the more you push your metabolism into a resistant, an infection-resistant state. Now, that's a grand simplification, but that's very true. The more you push your body towards fat metabolism, the more you push it towards an open door. You make the target bigger. So What would you prefer? Smaller target with some movement? Bigger target with no movement? Okay, same goes for our diet. Most people, not everybody, but most people, when they start to feel down and depressed or sick or anything else, and we want to comfort eat, usually we don't eat things that are low glycemic. Usually we eat things that are high glycemic. They drive not only our blood sugar up, up and down, but our insulin levels up. And as we talked about with cancer and other immunologic problems, when we push— keep pushing our insulin levels up because of the way that we're eating, we inhibit our immune activity to a degree. We make the target bigger. So eating a low glycemic diet— so you can go back and look at any of my videos on glycemic index and diet and all that stuff. At the bottom, just look up glycemic index. When you're looking at vegetables and/or fruits, you want to look at things that have the lowest glycemic index, so they're going to be triggering the least amount of insulin activity. Make the target small. Okay, then hydration. So if you are chronically dehydrated, which most of us are, One of the natural side effects of dehydration is that our mucus, which is protective— okay, remember mucus on our mucous membranes, ear, nose, throat, GI tract, genital urinary tract, etc., mucous membranes— the mucus has immune properties, but also it has to move. It's gooey, right? But it has to move around. The more dehydrated you are— have you ever gotten really dehydrated, wake up, you know, middle of night or in the morning and your mouth is dry or you got cottonmouth? That's dehydration. And imagine everywhere where you have these immune cells that, that put their immune product into your mucus. If the mucus is drying up, your target gets bigger, you get more open to infections. So staying hydrated. None of this is new information. They've been telling people during cold and flu season pretty much probably forever to drink plenty of fluids, get your rest, all that. It doesn't make you not have problems, but it makes you a smaller target. If we're going to have a variant that's likely to circle the globe and be exposed to most everybody in the coming times, even though it's not a bad disease maybe to get, you want to make yourself a pretty small target. And the other thing is, the better your immune system is working when it comes in, it'll be a lesser problem. The worse your immune system is when the virus comes in, even a low, low disease state variant, the sicker you're going to get. Okay, so let's do that. Then you have other stuff you can do, like Wash your hands. There have been studies, uh, I'm not sure about with COVID-19, but I know with influenza there are studies that have shown that regular hand washing is almost as effective as the influenza vaccine. Um, and that's not a slam on the flu vax or, you know, plus or minus, it just is true. Um, because we transmit viruses airborne, but also by touching, etc. The other thing is, you know, not being paranoid, hopefully, but if you are not feeling your best or you're feeling like your defenses are down, maybe being around a ton of people is not the smartest thing in the world, right? Especially if we have a, you know, viral variant that's coming, it's gonna, you know, hang out in a lot of people, a lot of them won't know they have COVID because it'll be such a, you know, mildish illness. If you're feeling bad, that's not a time maybe to be around people because remember, it's like the virus can be spread out over 1,000 people. The people who are a bigger target are more likely to get it, and they're also more likely to experience the disease at its worst end of the spectrum. So something to consider there. So just thoughtfulness, avoidance, etc. If you're not feeling well, whatever is wrong with you, stay home. Don't, don't be near people. A, so you don't give whatever you got to them, but B, so that you are, you know, not exposing yourself to other folks. When you're not feeling yourself. Okay, now I put in— because we only have a couple minutes left, I'm gonna go through this really quickly— but in the links below on the YouTube, uh, I have a link to a newsletter I wrote that's got nutrients, uh, to assist making your target smaller, helping your immunity and all that. Do they make you not have disease? No, come on. Let's not be stupid. Do they lower your chances of disease? Emerging data with COVID shows us that, you know, the better your vitamin D levels are, yes, lower chance, etc. So the big thing is, why not? I mean, why not do things that don't hurt you but also probably make you a smaller target? So the first one is vitamin C. I've written a ton about this, published about this. I helped I consult doctors in hospitals about how to use IV vitamin C. I do all that stuff. Oral vitamin C, the biggest side effect is you take too much, you're going to get diarrhea. So we usually start people with 1,000 milligrams with food twice a day. If you don't get diarrhea, you can keep going up to your bowel tolerance. If you get loose stools, back off. It's that simple. And what you'll find is if you're getting sick, you'll absorb more. If you're getting better, you don't need as much. Okay, there's good research, or some research now, on the B vitamins. So you get a multivitamin or B complex and just get all those guys. Um, the fat solubles. The fat soluble vitamins, unlike vitamin Cs and the Bs where they go through you every day, they're water soluble. Fat solubles you do have to be careful about not overdosing on because they'll stay in your tissues. But vitamin D, if you had to pick one, vitamin D is probably the most important. You can look at my newsletter, I'll give you some advice there about that. But again, if you're going to take vitamin D long term, you really want to have your doctor check your levels periodically. Mm-hmm. And what we normally recommend for folks is that if you've not ever had vitamin D and you aren't sure what your levels are, and you can't get in to get checked for a week or a month or whatever, you can very safely take, you know, say 10,000 IUs or 25,000 IUs a day till you can get your levels checked. If you've had your levels checked and they're good, they're like in the upper, you know, third of the range, you can do low doses, you know, 2,000 to 5,000 IUs a day and keep yourself there. But vitamin D is probably the most important. A lot of vitamin D nowadays comes with vitamin K2, and they go together. So if you can get a vitamin D K2 supplement, that's better. Vitamin A, again, it can be toxic, so you really want to work with a healthcare provider that knows about vitamin supplementation. But vitamin A is very good with viral problems. Either N-acetylcysteine, which is harder to get now, but you can, or alpha-lipoic acid, the thiols, You can take those kind of like vitamin C, too much and you'll get loose stools. So just, just watch that. Things that help your, your cells put zinc and other minerals inside ionophores: quercetin, which is found in certain foods, and EGCG, which is found in green tea. So if you're a green tea drinker, you're already ahead. I'm allergic to green tea, so I can't— I like it, but I can't drink it because I get real sick. But you can, you can drink green tea. Drink green tea every day is probably the easiest way to get this stuff. But quercetin as a supplement, or EGCG, which is green tea, part of green tea, you can do that. And then rather than just taking a ton of zinc, what I usually have people do is get a multi-trace mineral that's got zinc and all the other family of trace elements. And you want your zinc, you know, for prevention to be somewhere in the 30 to 50 milligram Always take trace minerals with food. But again, all of that is in links down below. I really appreciate your time. I appreciate you putting up with the unique technology that we put together. I want to thank Cameron for helping me actually get on the air today through other means. And you guys can go and look at the links if you want more information. Again, if you're on YouTube, like, share, subscribe. Uh, thank you so much, but we got to get off the air now, and I will see you all on the radio next week. Thanks.