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

Dear Whitman Walker Institute, Executive Committee,

            As with AIDS in the 1980s, it is more than tragic that hundreds of thousands have died unnecessarily of Covid-19 in the last two years, simply due to a failure of the medical community to recognize established but arcane scientific knowledge. This did not have to happen. I sincerely would like to work with the Whitman Walker Institute to rectify a neglected approach to treating viral disease and pandemics.

            I dedicated my life first to civil rights for the LGBTQ community, and then to research and advocating for effective, affordable, accessible AIDS therapies, not just for Americans but especially for people living with HIV in Africa who at the time had none. Now I would like to request the Institute to consider helping relocate my three decades of research archives back to America after I have spent twenty years fighting epi-pandemics in Africa.

            An innovative thinker about how to improve health, I believe LGBTQ, women, people of color, and all American’s health should not be held hostage to a narrow, one-eye-closed-to-science approach that has been pathologically warped by the steamroller of excessive profits and lobbying domination by the pharmaceutical-industrial-complex. They have hypnotized the medical community with new drug development to the exclusion of existing, practical approaches to preventive health and improving pandemic disease treatment.      

            I have long opined, “Nothing was ever discovered by thinking inside the box. However, once one discovers something, the challenge is to drag that understanding from outside the box, over the intellectual inertial barrier, to place it inside the box of human knowledge.” For academics that is seemingly, but not actually simple – publish it in a peer reviewed journal. That is only the start of the task.  For non-academics, a higher obstacle must be surmounted. A book outlining the contours of the theory and practice is required. I have written but not yet published three books to extrapolate my decades of experience in research and work in Africa, including a proven approach to improving antiviral therapy and preventative health.

            I am an AIDS, Ebola, and Covid-19 researcher – the leading autodidactic AIDS researcher in the world. Also the leading expert on the use of selenium against HIV disease in Africa, and by default, perhaps the leading expert on nuclear-factor kappa-binding inhibitors (NF-kBIs) against viral disease in the world.

            I was initially infected with HIV in October 1983 and joined the Multi-centered AIDS Cohort Study (MACS) at UCLA in April 1984. I started AZT on 01 January 1989, and six months later commenced a carefully planned series of self-experimentations, eventually testing three complimentary therapies based on information from three publications that tracked potential AIDS therapies. I used the perfect set of data provided by the MACS study to gauge results. At the end of 1990, the third one-person trial proved a charm when 325mg daily of aspirin (ASA) – a nuclear-factor kappa-binding inhibitor - essentially doubled my CD4 count. This observation followed the small clinical trial conducted by Dr. Donald Kotler of Columbia University who worked with the Community Research Initiative on AIDS (CRIA) New York that showed that 325mg of 5-ASA – Asacol - an aspirin analogue, could inhibit HIV replication approximately 65% as much as ATZ could. Dr Kotler published two abstracts on asacol versus HIV in 1989 and 1990 demonstrating the antiviral effect of 5-ASA, both in vitro and in vivo. I published an abstract based on my above case study at the 1992 Amsterdam AIDS Conference. It reported ASA – aspirin - could significantly increase CD4 count – for a time.         

            CRIA-NY announced a follow-on trial of Asacol would be conducted. When that never materialized, I flew from Los Angeles to NYC to investigate. More than a decade later I learned a top scientist at the Aaron Diamond Institute who was working on protease inhibitors convinced Dr Kotler to abandon his line of research. The scientist argued that protease inhibitors would be a far superior intervention compared to simple 5-ASA, so a treatment approach using aspirin analogues would be unnecessary. This constituted a tremendous loss for humanity. It eliminated a potentially productive prospective investigation into a whole class of drug interventions – NF-kB inhibitors – many much stronger and potentially more effective than aspirin. In 2001, years prior to the introduction of ARVs, I worked with Dr Elopy Sibanda, an immunologist in Zimbabwe to conduct a small aspirin-only clinical trial.  I then compared the ability of aspirin to increase CD4 count in that Zimbabwe trial to similar data from the original published AZT clinical trial results. That comparison revealed that although as Kotler had determined, aspirin was not quite as good at inhibiting viral replication as AZT, it could increase CD4 count twice as high as AZT and maintain it above baseline for twice as long – for one year. Thus, I essentially proved that aspirin was superior to AZT as a drug to treat HIV. It has far fewer side effects and cost a fraction as much. The “disappearing science” of nuclear-factor kappa-binding inhibitors was a great loss for the HIV community in America, but much more so for Africa. It delayed any effective therapy reaching there for a decade. Today that lost understanding of an important antiviral mechanism presents a major impediment to pandemic defense. We have failed to utilize NF-kB inhibitors to reduce the mortality rate of SARS-CoV-2 (SARS-2) because no one was aware of them. Used as early therapy, several NF-kBI drugs could and still can provide major benefits reducing hospitalizations and saving lives in this continuing pandemic.   

            As a consultant to the Ministry of Health of Zambia in 2007, I helped assemble the group and authored the report of the Technical Working Group on Selenium. In July 2014 the Ministry of Health of Liberia asked me to bring selenium to test against Ebola virus disease. There it proved to be the only effective specific treatment against Ebola used during the entire 2014-2016 West African epidemic. Added to the WHO standard of care, 1.2mg of selenium daily administered to Ebola patients reduced the mortality rate by 42.8% compared to the WHO standard of care alone. If the proper dose of 2.0mg daily had been used, the mortality rate should have fallen by 65%. The physician that administered the selenium I brought, Dr Jerry Brown, was named Time Magazine’s Person of the Year for 2014. Neither I, nor our research using selenium was mentioned in that article. Again, breakthrough beneficial scientific knowledge disappeared from the public conscience and history.                                                                                                                         

            Nuclear-factor kappa-binding (NF-kB) is a human protein. It is the primary stimulant to both inflammation and for viral replication in the nucleus of cells. Because it is a human protein and not a viral enzyme it is a constant, unchanging target for antiviral intervention. NF-kB inhibitors work as broad-spectrum antiviral medications against almost all disease-causing viruses. Although the pharmaceutical industry recognizes this cellular mechanism as a target for pharmaceutical action, it prefers the public to be left in the dark about it. Many existing approved drugs interfere with NF-kB. Understandably, pharmaceutical companies prefer to sell the $700 “new” course of treatment instead of the $5 or $10 course that works about as well. The pharmaceutical rouse of AZT versus ASA has been repeated with Covid. Unless we open our eyes to existing beneficial science, this will be repeated with the next, perhaps more deadly pandemic. Profits always come before people’s health as thousands die needlessly. What you don’t know will hurt you. It may even kill you or someone you love.       

            Although physicians have used powerful NF-kB inhibitors to treat Covid-19, no one has mentioned their mechanism of action. NF-kBIs are the broad-spectrum antiviral drugs that dare not speak their name. Doctors never mention how steroid drugs work other than they are strongly anti-inflammatory. Apparently, they are unaware of their antiviral activity, or the existence of the related, much broader class of antiviral drugs. If they were aware, why did they not use them? Technically NF-kB is known as a viral replication factor. The steroids currently used to treat Covid include dexamethasone, prednisone, and hydrocortisone. Doctors mostly administer them once a person is hospitalized. Steroids have a high side effect profile so they can be used for no more than two weeks. Meanwhile weaker NF-kBIs that could have been used earlier and for longer to help prevent disease progression and hospitalization are totally ignored. These include aspirin and ibuprofen, and the somewhat stronger indomethacin and sulfasalazine. Acetaminophen – Tylenol - is anti-inflammatory but does not inhibit NF-kB. Why have we been blinded to this science for the last two years? We missed it with HIV/AIDS - now with Covid. Will we miss it again with the next viral pandemic that may be far more deadly? Serial pandemic failure becomes a dangerously deadly habit. Millions die unnecessarily, including medical staff. Why? It is the failure to appreciate and utilize simple but arcane viral science. A precious few elite scientists are aware of this, but obviously it is not common medical knowledge.        

            The failure to understand or utilize a whole class of safe, affordable, broad-spectrum antiviral NF-kBIs as early therapy against Covid-19 has tremendously increased hospitalizations, costs, and loss of life in the United States and abroad. My old acquaintance Tony Fauci should have known this because I reminded his NIAID deputy Clifford Lane early in the pandemic. I also mailed 25 letters with supporting science to US Senators and Congresspeople. That was difficult from South Africa with notoriously poor mail service. Panicked, they completely shut down the postal service two days after I mailed the envelopes to Congress.     

            Although the essential trace element selenium also is an NF-kB inhibitor, it serves other functions in viral disease and works by multiple antiviral mechanisms, not just as an NF-kBI. It is impossible to fully understand viral disease without understanding the multiple, complex roles selenium plays in viral replication, viral envelope formation, immune function, disease progression, sepsis, and death. When researchers screened 10,000 chemicals and molecules against SARS-2, a selenium-based drug Ebselen was determined most effective. Food and Chemical Toxicology,2120;153:112286. Have we used Ebselen? When South Korean scientists tested for nutritional deficiencies caused by SARS-2 they determined that selenium is the critical deficiency. Deficiency increases by 125% between moderate and severe Covid-19. They found that 100% of patients on ventilation, with severe Covid, or who die, are selenium deficient. International Journal of Infectious Disease,100;2020,390-383. They did not measure the full extent of the accelerating selenium depletion as viral load eventually shoots through the roof and selenium levels fall through the floor. However, they did note that selenium levels make the difference between living and dying with Covid and recommended its use. Has anyone acted to remedy this deficiency – the deficiency that is the common cause of death due to many viral infections? It is incomprehensible why we allow this to continue except we are hypnotized by new drug development as meanwhile barely known life-saving science is ignored. If millions were dying today of scurvy, would we fail to give them vitamin C, and instead wait for new drugs to be developed? 

            Selenium is in every cell of the body. It is the sine qua non for cellular antioxidant formation because selenium forms the active, functional part of antioxidants that clean and detoxify cells. It is also required for the structural integrity of cells, acting like nails to hold fatty protein membranes together. Almost all viruses that make us sick also require selenium for their formation. Thus, viral disease can be interpreted as a war for selenium resources between human cells and the viruses that infect them, in part to mine their protective selenium. Viruses rob cells of their antioxidant selenium resources, damaging cells and tissues, making them and us sick. That helps explain what causes viral disease. According to selenium experts, when a person loses 20% of their selenium, they are immune deficient. When they lose 30%, they expire. Selenium is as essential to health as oxygen or water. Yet we neglect to appreciate the vital roll this essential element plays in health. AIDS can be scientifically reinterpreted more precisely as acquired immune deficiency of selenium. Although viral diseases are different and infect different cells based on their spike protein’s cellular receptor compatibility, their commonality is that they apparently make us sick by attacking and appropriating the element that helps keep us and our cells healthy – selenium.

            Selenium therapy in no way detracts from or replaces ARVs. It simply adds to those drugs’ incredible benefits. They do two different things. HAART therapy completely suppresses viral replication allowing the immune system to slowly recover - probably due to the gradual restoration of selenium levels through dietary means. Selenium acts directly on the thymus to trigger a much faster recovery of CD4 count and immunity. Selenium therapy in HIV disease is additive. It is like adding icing on the cake of HAART.        

            Human cells require selenium for structural integrity and to provide antioxidant activity. Why do viruses need selenium? HIV, SARS-2, Ebola, Marburg, Zika, influenza-A, hepatitis B and C, polio, Hantavirus and others, all need selenium to form part of their protective outer envelopes. Biologists refer to selenium as “the universally protective element” because that is the function this essential trace element provides in biological systems - protection. Most viruses that make us sick genetically encode selenium proteins to form their own protective outer envelopes. SARS-2 uses its protease enzyme to aggressively cut up cellular antioxidants to extract their selenium to use for its own benefit. Once a cell loses its antioxidant protection due to viral selenium harvesting, it loses its vitality – just like when a person suffers immune deficiency.  

            The immune system serves the same purpose at the human system level as antioxidants do at the cellular level. It is not surprising that the cells and organs of the immune system have a higher need for selenium than most cells in the body. Selenium is the most critical element required for immunity and health, not only because it forms the active site for antioxidant activity and plays a critical roll in CD4 cell production, but also because as a trace element it is in such short supply compared to other necessary elements such as zinc. Selenium is essential for all aspects of multiple immune functions, but it is scarce. Most people on earth are slightly deficient in it.       

            By 1997 scientists had firmly established that selenium provides significant benefits against HIV disease. By 2002 more than 32 medical journal articles had been published detailing those benefits, yet larger clinical trials had not been conducted. At the 2006 Toronto AIDS Conference the Nigerian Institute of Medical Research working with a scientist from Harvard University reported that just one 200mcg tablet of selenium added to HAART therapy daily increased CD4 count by 140% more than HAART alone in advanced AIDS patients. Adding selenium tripled the increase in hemoglobin compared to HAART alone. It also improved patients’ sense of well-being and lessened the number of opportunistic infections and hospitalizations. What would doubling that dose to two tablets daily have done? According to a scientific rule of thumb, probably 50% more. In 2015, the journal AIDS reported that 200mcg of selenium daily alone slowed HIV progression to AIDS by 43.6%. Scientists have shown that selenium helps reduce almost every opportunistic infection related to HIV/AIDS. But who pays attention to science? Why do we ignore this tremendous benefit?  Why are African nations – and America - not applying this well-established but obscure science? Ask the World Health Organization. They ignore it and by doing so suppress it for the benefit of their patrons, the pharmaceutical industry. Why does no one advocate for safe, affordable, available complementary therapies for HIV for the world’s poor? Ask pharmaceutical companies. Past failure with AIDS translates into our current failure to respond more successfully to the Covid pandemic. Americans die needlessly due to this scientific neglect. Serial incompetence and ethical laxity have compounded the pandemic death toll on a global scale. Oxygen yes, selenium no, spells immunological incompetence. Patients would require less oxygen if doctors used selenium to reduce oxidative damage to alveoli cells.  

            In 2000 the Lancet medical journal published a review article titled “The importance of selenium to human health” (2000;356:233-41). Its abstract states, “Selenium is needed for the proper functioning of the immune system and appears to be a key nutrient in counteracting the development of virulence and inhibiting HIV progression to AIDS.” It goes on to review eight major health categories where selenium provides proven impact against health challenges. Those include, immune function, viral infection, reproduction, mood, thyroid function, cardiovascular disease, other oxidative stress and inflammatory conditions, and cancer. I would add women’s health to that list.

            During almost twenty years selling selenium to pharmacies, doctors, hospitals, and ministries of health, I have received numerous anecdotal reports of the benefits selenium provides, in addition to those found in the scientific literature. Together with the science, these include significant benefits improving both male and female fertility, reducing menstrual cramps, and benefits in treating autoimmune diseases including arthritis and lupus that women suffer twice as often as men. I am aware of six ways selenium helps in pregnancy. Those include reducing morning sickness and the chance of or severity of viral infection and thus damage to DNA. That results in a reduction in birth defects and miscarriages. Selenium also reduces preeclampsia – high blood pressure during pregnancy – and premature birth. Higher selenium levels are also required during breast feeding, and it likely reduces post-partum depression as it does with general depression. Diseases like HIV and post-Ebola-syndrome can result in premature shutting down of the menstrual cycle. Selenium supplements can reverse that. Anecdotally, I have heard selenium has a major impact in healing fibroids. Finally, I am told selenium “works like a bomb” against menopause. Many scientists suggest selenium slows the aging process at the cellular level, where it occurs.              

            My own review of “People and conditions selenium has some effect on” includes the categories, women, people over the age of sixty, mood, skin problems, smoking and alcoholism, cardiovascular disease, cancer, bacteria and mico-bacteria, immunity, inflammation, critical illness, chronic illness, children/infants, HIV/AIDS, other conditions, and organs. 

            While Covid becomes endemic worldwide and scientists foresee future waves of unpredictable intensity rolling in like annual influenza pandemics, another contagious pandemic simmers in the background with less public attention – tuberculosis. In preparation for attending my first tuberculosis conference in 2018 I wrote an essay titled, “The Tuberculosis, HIV, Selenium-deficiency, Positive Feedback Loop.” In it I explained, “Supplementation with selenium has shown positive effect against numerous symptoms and conditions related to both HIV and tuberculosis. A review of the literature shows these include fatigue, anemia, lack of appetite, diarrhea, wasting, low body weight, disease progression, carcinogenesis, skin problems, pancreatitis, arthritis and asthma.” Although lower levels of selenium have long been directly associated with lower CD4 count in HIV/AIDS, it was only when I was doing research for this tuberculosis essay that I finally learned precisely where this effect occurs. Evidently, selenium levels in the body have a direct impact on CD4 production by the thymus. When selenium levels are high, the thymus produces more CD4 and fewer CD8 cells. When selenium levels are low, it switches to produce more CD8 and fewer CD4. This explains why selenium supplementation is the fastest way to increase CD4 count.   

            The 2000 Lancet review article reports that large clinical trials have shown that selenium supplementation is the strongest thing to reduce the incidence of cancer. Clinical evidence shows selenium can slow cancer development at each separate stage of cancer progression - in some cases, even reversing progression. Leukemia may be especially benefited, as is already established with prostate cancer.     

            Over the years I have accumulated scientific evidence from hundreds of medical journal articles to provide outlines with extended quotes to educate physicians, pharmacists, scientists, and ministries of health about how selenium can assist against disease. These journal quotations are included in, “Scientists Explain How Selenium Fights HIV”, “Scientists Explain How Selenium Helps Fight Ebola Disease”, Scientists Explain How Selenium Affects Cancer”, “Scientists Explain How Selenium Affects Covid-19”, and “Scientists Explain How Selenium Affects Sepsis”. All my work is 100% based in science. However, I do not ignore repeated anecdotal evidence and in my commentary sometimes tie established evidence together based on logic. Africa is a continent that greatly needs improved approaches to preventative health and affordable disease interventions. Americans deserve better too.     

            Another condition that may be impacted by selenium is diabetes. I have never researched this topic, but some anecdotal evidence points in that direction. There is a chance sickle cell anemia could benefit because selenium greatly reduces regular anemia. I would like to work with the Whitman Walker Institute to advance research on these issues, as well as the research agenda identified by the Zambian Ministry of Health in the Report of the Technical Working Group on Selenium in 2007.  

            Selenium is not a panacea. It is not an absolute cure for any disease. However, working through the immune system it can help improve treatment for many diseases that affect our community and others. As I showed with Ebola, it can save many lives from even advanced stages of the deadliest viral disease. It can do the same with Covid – but only if we use it. Selenium can be used from the first to the last day of illness, escalating the dose as necessary. It could be considered a crime against humanity to cover up or obscure the usefulness of this medication. No one should be complicit in that. People deserve the best effective treatments and medical care they can get, with nothing held back or purposefully ignored. Safe, effective, affordable, available therapies should be utilized, and more research conducted. I have seen selenium work wonders in HIV in Africa. Replenishing this essential trace element when it is depleted can bring people back from the edge of death, just as food or water can when people are dying from starvation or dehydration. We provide oxygen to Covid patients when it is low. Why do we fail to provide selenium when it also is dangerously depleted? Have we been conceptually shortchanged by established medical experts who are often in the pay of the pharmaceutical industry? Obviously.       

            I have never asked nor received support for my three decades of independent research and have paid for it out of my own pocket, working first as a real estate agent in Los Angeles and then selling selenium in six countries in Africa. That allowed me to conduct library research and design research protocols for doctors to conduct clinical trials without commercial constraint, based on wherever the science took me. Now due to the pandemic and my success in inspiring deep pocket competitors to sell knock-off, debased selenium products, the business I have depended on is squeezed and I feel my best option is to return to the US, the better to share the universal benefits of my life’s work in trying to improve health, especially the challenge of viral disease and improving health in Africa. Currently my residency status in South Africa is up in the air and the pharmaceutical industry would like to smother my advocacy. I suppose to them nothing is worse than something that keeps people healthy. Like Charles Dicken’s A Tale of Two Cities, pharmaceutical companies are the best of companies, and the worse of companies. They helped save my life with HAART, but they have suppressed scientific knowledge and let millions of others die prematurely. I have witnessed both crimes against humanity and passive genocide.    

            As previously alluded to, before I became a viral researcher, throughout the 1980s and the early 1990s, I played a highly active role in LGBTQ advocacy at the local, state, and national levels. Among numerous other efforts, I served as chair of Californians Against Proposition 96 – opposing the right-wing, AIDS-phobic anti-spitting and biting initiative. Really! In 1984 I was on the executive committee of the West Hollywood Incorporation Committee that incorporated West Hollywood which elected the first majority lesbian and gay city council in America. My greatest accomplishment was, working through the National Association of Gay and Lesbian Elected and Appointed Officials, I initiated the call for and helped organize nationally the 1993 LGBT March on Washington that brought 750,000 people to the National Mall in DC. At the time, that was the largest civil rights march in American history.   

            Although I have self-funded a micro-NGO, the Selenium Education and Research Centre (SERC), being in South Africa I have not been able to project its mission well enough to receive grants to make it self-sustaining. It would be great if that effort could be brought back to America where it could find financial support. Perhaps the Whitman Walker Institute could serve as an NGO host-incubator to help nurture that effort to fruition. Selenium research by qualified, university, clinical research scientists has been squashed by the pharmaceutical industry, much to the detriment of preventative and now pandemic health efforts. Selenium is the cornerstone of preventative health since nothing can benefit overall health as much as actively boosting immunity by increasing CD4 count. There are so many ways Whitman Walker can utilize this knowledge daily to help patients and apply these insights to lobby for improved approaches to healthcare for seniors, women, people of color, those infected with viruses, and preventative healthcare for Washington DC and America. Preventative healthcare saves lives. And it saves money.   

            SERC maintains three websites: winagainsthiv.com, winagainstebola.com and winagainstcorona. com. You can see pictures of me in action in Liberia fighting Ebola in 2014 and earlier in Zambia where I helped organize the first national community-based march against AIDS. I got my friend, former President Kenneth Kaunda, one of the great leaders of African independence, to lead that march. There is a picture of us sitting together at the rally following that march in Lusaka on winagainsthiv.com.   

            I have three books that are 90% completely written. All three could be published within two years or less. The book Understanding Covid is ready to publish now, subject to editing. It includes over 65 essays and letters covering most aspects of the Covid crisis. I started writing about Covid one week after it was announced in January 2020. My essays have been published in major newspapers across Southern Africa including by the Times of Eswatini, Eswatini Observer, Botswana Guardian and Botswana Sun, Public Eye in Lesotho, and Cape Times, Mercury News (Durban), Pretoria News, and Mail and Guardian Online in South Africa. The editors like how I translate complicated scientific issues into understandable prose for their educated readership. I add a storyline and a dollop of humor.    

            I have been writing about my experiences in HIV research for twenty-five years. Some book chapters can be found on the SERC websites. My second proposed book, The Virus Fighter begins at the dawn of the AIDS crisis in Los Angeles when a coworker at the Defense Logistics Agency – DCASMA-LA - was coming down with Kaposi sarcoma and AIDS, one year before it was officially reported to the CDC by Dr Michael Gottlieb. Later, Dr Gottlieb was my own physician’s medical practice partner. The third book Selenium Can Improve Your Health will explain how this essential trace element can benefit many aspects of health.       

            My connection to the Whitman-Walker Institute is cosmically tangential at best. When I was three years old, the baby book my mother read to me was Walt Whitman’s Leaves of Grass. When I was in college I visited the Whitman-Walker Clinic when it operated from in a church on Wisconsin Ave in Georgetown. Volunteer Pete Matlovich swabbed me, testing for an STD.  

            Today I am seventy years old and still vigorous. I have been HIV positive for 38 years and never been sick except when first infected. I must be doing something right. Perhaps selenium plus ARVs? I have attended fifty-seven AIDS and virology conferences worldwide and have conversed with the world’s most famous experts. My essay “Taking the HIV factory tour” was published in the Annals of Tropical Paediatrics (2001;21,191-194) and I have authored essays “How HIV Causes AIDS” and “How SARS-CoV-2 Causes Covid-19”. Those are on the SERC websites.    

            America’s first greatest scientist, Benjamin Franklin said, “If we all think alike, no one is thinking.” Someone needs to think about Covid, SARS-2, and future pandemics differently. What if the next bat-cave- originated pandemic kills 10% of those it infects as SARS-1 did, instead of the 1.5%+/- in America SARS-2 has? Will we again have to wait two years for the seven pill, $700 course of medicine, or will it be the $7,000 course of medicine?    

            When I came out, I learned that lesbian and gay people were the most creative. The ones that thought outside the box – that sometimes questioned authority. In his keynote address at the First Scientific Conference on AIDS in Buenos Aires, Argentina, Dr David Ho, the developer of protease inhibitors pronounced, “It is impossible that HIV causes AIDS by killing CD4 cells because HIV infects less than 1% of CD4 cells, and CD4 cells only live for four days. Something else must be happening.” I attempted to explain what that “something else” is in my essay, “How HIV Causes AIDS”. My research and eventual understanding of viral dynamics grew organically out of my activism in reaction to the initial pandemic onslaught that ravaged our community in the 1980s. I loss 200 friends and acquaintances to AIDS before 1996 and became an AIDS researcher to save my own life. I spent ten years combing the medical school libraries at USC and UCLA reading more than two thousand medical journal articles and eventually over one hundred books on virology, immunology, NF-kB, HIV, disease theory, and the history of medicine, science, disease, and related topics. My three decades of research should not be lost. Please do not allow this to happen.  

            Thus, I kindly request the Whitman Walker Institute or one of your major donors to hear my plea to help bring me and my research archives and books back to Washington DC where they can provide the greatest benefit to mankind. I could serve as a senior fellow at the Institute to complete and publish my books, plus serve as an educator or lecturer, and lobby, or serve in any capacity you find appropriate. I have an African art collection of several hundred pieces valued in the range of $100,000 that I would offer as a donation for the Whitman Walker Institute to auction to help underwrite my position. Most of that collection can be viewed at Armistead African Art Collection on Facebook. I also offer 40% of any royalties I might receive from book publication while I am there.

            I realize this is not standard procedure. But paradigm shifts often call for extraordinary efforts and procedures that are unorthodox but timely. If the Whitman Walker Institute cannot fit my round request into a square hole, perhaps they can refer me to some major donor who does have an interest in the issues I raise concerning preparedness for successfully addressing the challenges of this and the next emerging zoonotic pandemic. The economic consequences of pandemics are beyond astronomical. With SARS-2 now endemic worldwide, exchanging genetic material with other viruses and creating new variants, anything can happen. A much more deadly Omicron in not inconceivable. Our pandemic preparedness is woefully shortsighted when constrained by the narrowly focused, profit-making objective of new drug and vaccine development.

            In 1990, I founded GALAPAC to support gays and lesbians running for office. That inspired the Victory Fund. At the 1990 meeting of the National Organization of Gay and Lesbian Elected and Appointed Officials I initiated the call and effort to start the 1993 March on Washington. The International Project for Affordable Therapy for HIV (IPATH) eventually lead to SERC. In 1990 I thought of myself as a one-person think tank. Today Washington DC needs innovative ideas – effective, efficient, practical ones – as much as it does new drug development. Selenium and nuclear-factor kappa-binding inhibitors do not replace any other therapy. They complement them and make medicine more responsive to the needs of the people both in our community in DC and the poorest parts of Africa. Doctors are only as good as the tools they have to work with. We need to conceptually expand the therapeutic armamentarium to survive in the New Age of Pandemics. We need to learn to coexist more successfully with a pandemic whose embers may continue to burn at a lower intensity for years and may flare up from time to time.  

            I do not pretend to have all the answers. There are too many questions. But I have the answer to several big questions. When we have available, broad-spectrum antiviral drugs, a whole class of effective drugs and a nutritional supplement that can fight viral pandemics from day one, why on earth do we fail to use them? Whatever happened to American ingenuity? As I advise doctors in Africa, “Use what works.” Selenium and NF-kBIs work. Why use steroids and ignore other NF-kBIs? Why give oxygen and not selenium? Only because oxygen is easier to measure, and more people understand it? Why have we overlooked the basic, but almost completely unknown fact concerning the pathogenesis of this disease – that accelerating severe selenium depletion caused by SARS-2 is what leads directly to disease progression and death?

            I pray we can correct the course of a medical paradigm that keeps us transfixed by the promise of new drug development in the future while we allow our relatives, friends, and elders to perish before our eyes. Medical personnel have not been immune. The pandemic puzzle must be solved one piece at a time. There is no one sword that can cut the Gordian Knott. However, if no one is willing to stick their head out and think and write outside the box, solutions for all our health problems will be more difficult, delayed, and costly. The next challenge is long covid. Selenium may be one key to improving health related to that chronic condition.   

            Sometimes things fall apart. I lay myself at your mercy in hereby requesting your help to ship my research archives and the art collection I will donate, back to the DC area. I will work with the Whitman Walker Institute in any way you see fit. My greatest hope is that my decades of research and work trying to find practical, affordable solutions to the challenge of viral disease is not lost to history or to the benefit of humanity. The LGBTQ community deserves not just the pharmaceutical cake served up by the most profitable industry in the world, it deserves the icing on the cake that sometimes can only be whipped up through the ingenuity and genius of our own creative community.                    

            God Bless you everyone. May we all strive for peace, justice, and better health for our community and the world this year. Pandemics are immensely tiresome and expensive. We can do better. But only if we think and act outside the box. Now is the time. Please help rescue this valuable archive of scientific research so the next time a pandemic arrives we will be prepared with a better plan to confront it head on with effective therapies from day one.   

            You can contact me at the above email, or at 0027-82-611-9205, or on Facebook at Howard Steel Armistead.

            Scientifically yours,

            Howard Steel Armistead

            Director, SERC, Johannesburg