Second Letter to Whitman Walker Clinic, Washington D.C.

   Dear Whitman Walker Institute, Executive Committee,

            I first met Congresswoman Maxine Waters in the late 1980s when she was chair of the Health Committee in the California State Senate, and I was lobbying for AIDS funding. I got to know her much better when her friend Myrlie Evers was running for LA City Council. I was conducting Myrlie’s polling and attended many fundraisers with Maxine. Unfortunately, Myrlie lost that twelve-person race but went on to be President of the National NAACP. When I mailed Maxine one of twenty-five envelopes I sent to Congressional and Senatorial leaders early in this pandemic, I addressed it to “The Fabulous Congresswoman Maxine Waters.” I will attach that letter for your review.

            Recently I Googled to locate a coalition of progressive health organizations in Washington DC and came up empty handed. I found a Progressive Health Alliance in Brussels for the EU, but nothing listed in the US. Can that be possible? Is there no network of progressive health organizations in DC? Surely there must be one that goes by another name. Although Big Pharma has at least two paid lobbyists for each Representative or Senator on Capitol Hill, and the pharmaceutical industry is the most profitable industry in the world, surely there must be some counterweight that focuses on priorities for ordinary people’s health. One reason I have lived in South Africa so long is reasonable drug prices.       

            If there is no progressive coalition for health in DC, that void begs to be filled. The Congressional Progressive Caucus and the Congressional Black Caucus and various health related NGOs should be interested in my decades long fight against viral disease and advocacy for more selenium research and education. I will work with anyone to advance improved preventative healthcare for Americans, and how we can save lives in pandemics. It verges on criminal negligence when established but not well-known science is not used to save lives. Just because it is arcane does not mean it is ineffective. Selenium has proven to greatly reduce mortality rates against many viral diseases – Hantavirus hemorrhagic fever is a prime example. (Biological Trace Element Research 1997;56:93-105)  

            When I worked in the aerospace industry in Los Angeles for seven years, eventually I was chief cost analyst on the MX guidance system at Northrop Electronics. I analyzed and negotiated prices on defense industry major subcontracts. Once after I had analyzed a two-inch thick computer-generated contract cost proposal for computer chips and already had written my pricing report, Texas Instruments decided they would submit a completely revised set of numbers, just two days before we were to sit down to negotiate. When the Texas Instrument team arrived and I was completely prepared with a revised Northrop Electronics negotiating position, they were amazed I had been able to reanalyze that whole package in so quickly with just a desk calculator. How did I do it? Texas Instruments had a huge computer to crunch their numbers. What did I have? I knew that just a few key numbers drove all the others. If one knows which numbers those are and how they had changed, a person could easily recalculate what the proposal should cost and negotiate a “fair and reasonable” price. The same goes for the immune system.

            How to control the immune system is a subject that has interested me since I started research over thirty years ago. I have read a dozen books and a thousand medical journal articles about it. The immune system is the most complex system in the human body. It is much more so than the nervous system, the second most complex. The immune system is the only system besides the nervous system that possesses a true memory. Like that cost proposal from Texas Instruments, if one studies the immune system long enough, and examines it from enough different angles, and at various resolutions; one eventually understands which are the key factors that drive it. Of course, everyone knows CD4 count and the CD4/CD8 ratio. But where are the buttons and leavers that control those? Where is the rheostat that can move CD4 up and CD8 down?

            Selenium is by far the most influential nutrient affecting immune function, but as a scarce essential trace element, it is also the least available. Selenium is required for all aspects of the multifaceted immune response. One could easily conclude it is what fuels that system, because when selenium levels collapse, both CD4 count and the immune system collapse. I long tried to ascertain exactly where selenium makes that critical difference to CD4 cell production. Is it the thyroid gland that regulates metabolism sending signals to produce more CD4 precursor cells in the bone marrow? Perhaps it is in the bone marrow itself where naïve lymphocyte cells originate before they translocate through the lymphatic system to the thymus. Or is it in the thymus where CD4 and CD8 cells are processed, differentiated, and tested for autoreactivity. For ten years I could not definitively put my finger on the exact spot where selenium determines CD4 levels. It was nowhere in the literature.

            Finally, when I was writing my scientific essay for the 2018 tuberculosis conference in The Hague, I read a lengthy medical journal article that provided the answer. The thymus gland churns out millions of CD4 and CD8 cells daily, the ratio determined by the level of selenium in the body. This relates to selenium’s effect upregulating interleukin-2 receptors on the thymus. That detail is less important than the result, the increase in CD4 and reduction in CD8. The direct action by the thymus increasing CD4 count in response to a higher level of selenium makes selenium by far the strongest, fastest way to increase CD4 count. Increase selenium levels and CD4 increases. Allow viruses to deplete selenium and CD4 falls, and the thymus produces more CD8 cells. (Antioxidant & Redox Signaling.2012;16:7:705-743) It seems so simple. But only if one knows where those control levers are. Thirty years of studying viruses and the immune system and twenty years studying selenium allowed me to have the ah-ha moment I had been waiting for. As Louie Pasture replied when someone said he just got lucky, “Chance favors the prepared mind.” My mind was prepared.

            Years ago, there was an Immune Restoration Project for AIDS. If only they knew more about the immune system, they might have been more successful. Hoping and trying is not the same as doing. One cannot just skim the surface and expect to uncover or understand the secrets of science. My ten years roaming the stacks of medical school libraries allowed me that privilege.  

            It is well known that the human immune system is stronger than any drug. Arturo Casadevall and Liise-anne Pirofski titled their PNAS medical journal commentary, “In fatal COVID-19, the immune response can control the virus but kill the patient.” (PNAS,01December2020;117:48:30009-30011) Of course that is true if the immune system is no longer under control - dysregulated. Why is the immune system dysregulated? Because SARS-CoV-2’s envelope gene genetically encodes a selenoprotein required for construction of protective viral envelops. That depletes selenium. When selenium levels decline, CD4 counts decline. Then the generals of the immune system army – the CD4 cells – diminish and lose control. That is followed by a cytokine storm, sepsis, multiorgan failure, and death. That is simply a chain of cause and effect, starting with selenium depletion caused by viral replication, ending in death. Covid’s ultimate sequence of cause and effect is the same as in AIDS and Ebola, except on a different timeline and with previously existing factors affecting the percentage of people killed. However, there is the same sequence of end-stage progression to death with these three viral diseases.

            If we care about health, how can we fail to focus on the immune system, how it works, how it can be controlled or manipulated, and how we can save lives and improve health in viral disease and many other diseases and conditions? But if everyone is bought off by the self-serving largess of the pharmaceutical industry, no one will care about the immune system or what fuels it – selenium.

            I often rhetorically ask people I talk with, “What is the measure of the immune system?” How does one gage it? The answer of course is CD4 count – or slightly better, the CD4/CD8 ratio. What fuels the immune system? Selenium. Yet nothing is ever as simple as that. But in many respects, in this case, it is. If a person loses 20% of their selenium, they are immune deficient, as with AIDS. It they lose 30%, they are gone. It is exactly the same with water or oxygen - just slightly different percentages. Occam’s razor is correct.   

            Wouldn’t it be nice if Americans could all have better health? Everyone would love that. Everyone but the pharmaceutical industry. That is why they try to buy off everyone and every organization in the health field - to maintain total control of the research and health agenda to the exclusion of others.  

            My uncle was the chief medical officer at Greenville Memorial Hospital in North Carolina in the 1950s. My best friend growing up and roommate in graduate school at UVA is a professor of oncology and hematology at University of Indiana. My cousin is an outstanding neurologist. I have the highest respect for the medical community and have read a dozen books on medical history. I love medical science. I just hate when science is ignored or covered up and millions die as a result. As a nation, why are we ignoring three decades of established science related to selenium, viral dynamics, and disease pathogenesis? Why do we choose to die instead of recognizing and using what works - selenium?                 

            As mentioned in my previous, overly long letter, I would be honored to be associated with the Whitman-Walker Institute. What would I do at WWI? I would network with whatever today constitutes a progressive health coalition to improve national health and to reduce needless pandemic deaths. Then consolidate the project of the Selenium Education and Research Center (SERC) and eventually clone that off as an independent NGO. Certainly, with the right platform to do that – the WWI – that effort could be successful. Currently SERC is working with a research group in Rwanda about to begin a study of selenium against Covid-19. Dr Julius Kamwasiga who in 2015 showed that 200mcg of Se could slow HIV progression to AIDS by 43.6% is heading that effort in Kigali.

            Selenium researchers in America complain that the pharmaceutical industry has cut them off from funding to conduct clinical trials on selenium. That institutional coercion or scientific corruption has continued for years and constitutes an attack on world health. Is this a cover-up? No - more like a block and tackle takedown. What you do not know can and will damage people’s health. Then people need more of the drugs and pills Big Pharma provides – at a price – often much too steep.

            SERC can serve as a coordinating facility to help connect and network international selenium researchers - at Harvard, UNCG, Florida International U, Universities of Hawaii, and Minnesota – and in England, France and Germany. SERC could sponsor a biannual meeting to bring them together in Washington DC at the WWI, or at the Harvard School of Public Health in Boston.

            This is just an idea. But like my idea to start a PAC to support LGBTQ candidates for office that was happily stolen by those I invited to join my effort, or my idea to organize the 1993 March on Washington, the idea is the progenitor of the accomplishment. Who would pay for my WWI fellowship? I will fundraise and pay for it myself. With just a little help, I could raise a minimum of $50,000 the first year to support my fellowship with a modestly realistic goal of $100,000, and a wished-for goal of half-a-million. Others have done it. With a little logistical support and a platform at WWI, it can be done. With some luck, I could exceed those goals.     

            I have spent over thirty years studying how viruses interface and interact with the immune system. My valuable work should not be lost. That is why I am requesting your help to finish my mission and bring my archives from Johannesburg back home to help improve health for all.

            Over twenty-five years ago I helped Michael Weinstein conceptualize how to start what became the AIDS Healthcare Foundation - AHF. AHF is now the largest AIDS care provider in the world. After our mutual fight against Proposition 96 in California was over, Michael requested a meeting, came to see me and asked, “Howard, How do you talk to politicians?” I gave him instructions of how to leverage his idea. He followed those exactly to start his organization and the rest is history. Unfortunately, Michael is personally sci-phobic and enjoys the generosity of the pharmaceutical industry. Like many others, he does not want to or try to comprehend selenium science. Still, I will ask him for a five-figure contribution to support the mission of the WWI. He should give to WWI while he probably would not to me. As for selenium, I have read over four hundred medical journal articles on selenium alone and for twenty years have seen its dramatic results first-hand working in Africa. I understand its power. Selenium at the proper dosage can save almost as many lives from Covid as ICUs. It can cut the dying by half.      

            Sometimes one needs to take a chance on a promising idea. If WWI would honor me by allowing me to be a senior fellow, I will pay my own way by raising money to support my position and SERC. Some philanthropists will have funds they would like to leverage toward a big payoff in improving world pandemic health and preparedness. My acquaintance Maxine Waters and many others may provide fundraising leads. Others must have connections to donors, celebrities, or foundations that would support this work. The next SARS-2 mutation or deadly pandemic may come much sooner than expected. The US and the world need to be better prepared.

            What good is science if we do not use it? Why do we allow people to die in viral pandemics when we could easily have saved half their lives? Why do most people not know about selenium and most doctors fail to use it? Only because it does not require a prescription? How could a small country like Liberia “get this” in 2014 when they tested selenium against Ebola and reduced the Ebola mortality rate almost by half, and the United States get it so wrong in this pandemic? Both loss of learning and failure to even try to learn or test has tragic consequences. We can and must do better.   

            Immunology and virology have made major strides over the last forty years, yet common knowledge has not kept up. Most people still believe vitamin C can help prevent colds when that has long been disproven. (Nutrients.2017Apr;9(4):339) It is incredible the medical community is still largely blind to selenium in the middle of this pandemic. That has resulted in this national tragedy that has unfolded over the last two years. 

            The next pandemic may not be so kind. Living in the Age of Pandemics, we need to change our thinking. We need to understand how to use broad-spectrum anti-virals from day one, and supplement back into the body what viruses deplete. For ideological reasons, not everyone will agree with my analysis, but 100% of what I explain is based on peer reviewed science articles. My scientific rationale is rock solid. Selenium has proved to work against practically all enveloped RNA viruses. How could we possibly have failed to have used it now?

            The Whitman-Walker Institute can be in the forefront of helping the world prepare for the next pandemic, but only if you have a connection to that utilitarian knowledge and insight. You could dedicate yourself to studying these topics for years, or you can use me to gain a handle on their practical medical benefits more quickly. I try to make complicated science both understandable and useful.

            Everyone talks about future pandemic preparedness but almost no one suggests innovative ways of how to accomplish that because they still have not completely learned how to tackle this one. Why have Americans waited for two years for effective therapies to treat early Covid when they have been sitting on the shelf the whole time? What works for HIV, Ebola, Marburg, Hantavirus, and other RNA enveloped viruses will work for Covid-19 too. Working together we can reduce the illness and dying that is so costly to families and society. As a senior fellow I will help WWI accomplish that. If we fail to lead and educate, serial pandemic failure will engender the same personal, economic, and societal losses the next time around.   

            Knowing how viruses interact with the immune system response, how and why they interact, and how to use that knowledge to improve treatments is a giant step toward saving lives during the next pandemic. The time to prepare and educate for the next pandemic is now. I ask you to consider giving me the honor of working with the Whitman-Walker Institute to continue my research, publish three books, and help organize to improve lobbying for progressive health issues and funding for selenium research.

       God Bless you for what you do. Together we can make an even greater contribution to world health.

Scientifically yours,

Howard Armistead

Johannesburg, South Africa