Broad Spectrum Antiviral Therapies Versus the Failed Pandemic Research Paradigm

Dear Senator Sanders,

            One simple mistake by the National Institutes of Health NIAID cost the American taxpayer over three trillion dollars. If this repeated failure in pandemic strategy does not change, when H5N1 influenza finally hits America, it will cost multiples of those trillions, plus potentially millions of American lives. It is almost impossible to believe how basic this mistake is, but the NIH continues to commit it pandemic after pandemic. It gets costlier each time. Please take action to End Serial Pandemic Failure by the NIH and reduce economic loses and loss of life.  

            Although it is impossible to totally stop viral pandemics, there is a way to make them less costly in human lives and to the American taxpayer. That is to stop ignoring how viruses kill people. How is that? Simple. Most viruses including HIV, Ebola, SARS-CoV-2, and influenza kill by attacking cells’ selenium, thus making the cells they infect sick. They then deplete the immune system of the selenium resources it needs to function. As selenium levels fall, CD4 cells fall, and immune dysfunction ensues. That results in increased cell death, a cytokine storm, sepsis, multi-organ-failure, and death. Multi-organ-failure includes lung damage and pneumonia, kidney failure, heart attack and stroke. This all occurs due to the loss of selenium that leads to tissue damage due to cellular destruction and cell death. This is so simple, but it does not make pharmaceutical companies billions in profits so it is ignored by the NIH. This is simple science but quite arcane. Few are aware of this fundamental phenomenon.  

            The NIH, National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Disease – NIAID - has applied a failed paradigm to fight pandemics. Their approach is that if there is a novel emerging zoonotic virus causing a new disease, we must develop unique drugs to treat that new disease, whether it is AIDS, Ebola, or Covid-19. They ignore the underlying cause of the immune dysfunction itself, the loss of selenium from cells and organs, including the lungs, kidneys, and the immune system. They also ignore that we have plenty of existing drugs that can inhibit the NF-kB protein that stimulates viral replication and inflammation. If we inhibit NF-kB we reduce both viral replication and inflammation. Many drugs do this, but for the most part we do not use them because they are off-patent, cheap, and no drug company profits excessively. Thus no one promotes them. The NIH turns its back on this basic science so it can help pharmaceutical companies develop new much more expensive drugs. It ignores old established workhorse drugs and serves as the welfare agency for Big Pharma. That is great for Big Pharma. However, it results in hundreds of thousands of excess deaths of ordinary Americans and trillions of wasted taxpayer dollars that could have been used more efficiently to improve healthcare or for fiscal restraint.  

            A simple analogy can explain the failure of the NIH paradigm.

            If one million Americans were dying of dehydration, we would provide them drinking water. If a million Americans were dying from starvation, we would provide food.  If a million were dying from lack of oxygen, we would provide oxygen. But when a million Americans die from the unrecognized loss of selenium from their cells and immune system, why does the NIH fail to provide them with selenium to restore health to those cells and replenish the immune system with the element it needs to operate properly? AIDS, Ebola, Covid-19, and influenza all kill people due to their depletion of selenium from cells and the immune system. Yes, they are all different viruses. They infect different cells, have different effects, and work at different speeds. But their underlying mechanism of promoting disease and death is the same. That mechanism is the viral depletion of selenium from cells and the immune system.

            How do they do that?

            All cells need selenium for both the structural integrity of the cell – to hold it together - and for the cell to function properly. Among other things, selenium-based proteins form the functional core of most of the antioxidants that keep cells clean and detoxified. When viruses infect cells, they attack and destroy those cellular antioxidants so they can steal the selenium they contain to construct their protective viral envelopes they need to survive once they are released into the hostile intercellular environment. Viruses steal the selenium our cells and immune system need to protect us, so they can protect themselves from our own hyper-oxidative antiviral defences. Viruses dismantle our antioxidant system to build their own antioxidant protective envelope. In war this would be like an enemy soldier seizing our soldier’s protective body armour to use to protect itself from our weapons. We can reverse the whole process of progressively more severe viral disease, cellular destruction, immune dysfunction, cytokine storm, and multi-organ-failure by supplementing adequate selenium back into the body at the correct dose in a timely manner. This effective therapeutic strategy can be augmented by using one of more than a dozen NF-kB inhibiting antiviral, anti-inflammatory drugs that we have mostly failed to use during the Covid-19 pandemic. Unfortunately, the Covid pandemic may have served merely as warmup practice for a much worse killer pandemic that is looming on the horizon, H5N1 avian influenza.

            On 03 February 2023 the New York Times published an article by opinion columnist Zeynep Tufekci titled “An Even Deadlier Pandemic Could Soon Be Here”. She reports that the deadly H5N1 influenza virus has finally jumped the species barrier out of birds into mammals including porpoises, bears and minks. Alarmingly, it seems to be spreading from mink to mink on a mink farm in Spain. From minks it could easily infect a farm worker and then spread to the rest of humanity. We may have six months or less to prepare for this approaching more deadly pandemic. Or it could be several times that long. But it seems the genie is finally out of the avian flu bottle. We better start pandemic preparations now.

            There are few known effective anti-influenza medications on the pharmacy shelf, but there are many that are not so well known. Tamiflu does not work well so please don’t waste government funds on stocking it again. Effective therapeutics include the dozen NF-kB inhibitors listed on page 48 of my book Dear Bill Gates, How to End Serial Pandemic Failure, HIV-1 to Covid-19. Using the appropriate strength of a NF-kB inhibitor drug and selenium - depending on the stage of disease – will help save the lives of most people that would otherwise die of H5N1, just as it would have with Covid-19.

            In their single-minded effort to develop new drug therapies for new viral diseases, the NIH allowed hundreds of thousands of Americans to lose their lives to Covid-19. That mistake cost the American taxpayer between two and four trillion dollars in economic support payments and medical support costs for both Covid and the follow-on long Covid. If the government had utilized the known benefits of NF-kB inhibitors plus selenium, it would have cut the dying by half, hospitalizations by half, long Covid symptoms by half, and costs by close to half. Even using only 60% of the 2.0mg selenium dose I recommended in Liberia in 2014, Dr Jerry Brown working with the Liberian Ministry of Health reported that it cut Ebola mortality rates by 42.8% compared to using the standard of care therapy alone. If he had used the correct 2.0mg dose I recommended, the mortality rate would have fallen 65%. That is even without adding an additional NF-kB inhibitor that would have provided additional power to reducing the mortality rate. When we reported this dramatic success of using selenium against Ebola in 2014 to the NIH and CDC in Liberia, they were not interested. They were waiting to test their own new drugs that were still in development in the next Ebola epidemic that would come three years later in Eastern Congo. They dismissed the safe, available, effective, affordable medication so they could test future potential therapies. They could have saved additional lives at the cost of $14 per life saved but chose not to.   

            The National Institutes of Health arose out of the ravages of the American Civil War. With Covid-19 the NIH allowed more excess deaths of Americans due to Covid than died of battle injuries in that tragic war. If they had applied selenium alone at the correct doses, half of those who died of Covid could probably have been saved. If they had also properly applied NF-kB inhibitors, two-thirds to three-quarters of those may have been saved.      

             In his book How to Survive a Pandemic, Dr Michael Greger spends 349 pages scaring the stuffings out of readers about how H5N1 might jump the species barrier and kill over 80% of the people it infects. He spends one page explaining, not so well, how one can avoid that. Zeynep Tufekci’s article in the New York Times gives a mortality rate for H5N1 influenza of 56%. Choose your mortality rate, 56% or 80+%, the danger is real and the United States is totally unprepared with no stockpile of effective, broad-spectrum antivirals and no new strategy. The NIH plays innocent as they provide welfare to Big Pharm but let ordinary people die. How long must Serial Pandemic Failure continue? How many must suffer and die? How much will it cost taxpayers, the economy, and American families?  

            With Covid-19 we dodged half the bullet while leaving millions more than necessary suffering long Covid. The mortality rate from Covid was only about 1.2% of those who were not vaccinated, almost ten times the normal rate of influenza. If we had incurred the mortality rate of the 1918-20 influenza in 2020-22, we would have lost 2.2 million Americans – double what we did. If we had experienced the same mortality rate of the SARS-1 epidemic, we would have lost over nine million Americans.

            Will H5N1 hit the United States in 2023? 2024? 2025? No one knows for sure. But it appears it may strike sooner rather than later. Will it arrive with an 80+% mortality rate or a 56% mortality rate? Or will it mutate to a more sufferable rate like the SARS-1 rate of 9.8% or the 1918 influenza rate of about 2.5%?

            A viral Pearl Harbour will soon hit America. Failures by the NIH in the AIDS, Ebola, and Covid-19 pandemics have set America up for a perfect storm for a repeat of their past failure in this next pandemic. More than a dozen effective, broad-spectrum, anti-inflammatory/antiviral drugs sit on the pharmacy shelf unused as an inverted ideology reigns at the NIH that new viral pandemics demand development of new drugs to enrich the pharmaceutical industry. It took fifteen years of dying to develop effective drugs for AIDS. It took two years of dying to develop one lonely, imperfect drug Paxlovid to treat Covid. Meanwhile a dozen safe, effective, affordable drugs and selenium sat ignored on the pharmacy shelf. What proves that these drugs are effective? Because they inhibit NF-kB, they automatically reduce viral replication and inflammation in Covid-19. That will slow down the rate of infection progression and reduce the damage that the virus, inflammation, and blood clots do to cells, tissues, and organs. If a moderate dose of selenium alone could reduce the mortality rate of Ebola by 42.8%, it could easily have done the same against Covid. The exact same antiviral mechanisms and immunological principles apply. The NF-kB inhibitor drug dexamethasone also proves this point as does plentiful evidence from the scientific literature.    

            Why must the American public have to accept this gross failure on the part of government? They are completely unaware of it. You too are unaware of this global failure of public health policy on the part of government. But the NIH is not so ignorant of this basic science they evidently try to cover-up. It is just not part of their preferred program to boost new drug development by pharmaceutical manufacturers. Saving lives is not their first priority. New drug development is.              

            Today it has become more difficult to develop new antibiotic drugs. Now pharmaceutical companies want to develop new antiviral drugs. Fine. That is no excuse to allow the NIH to continue ignoring the dozen or more nonsteroid and steroid anti-inflammatory, broad-spectrum antiviral drugs that currently exist that can help protect the American people from the devastation that is approaching that originates not from a Chinese wet animal market in Wuhan, but from a mink farm in Spain.

            The pharmaceutical industry can quickly develop a vaccine for H5N1. The technology is old. The genetics of the virus is known. But it still needs to be developed, manufactured, and distributed. That effort should start immediately because it still requires influenza vaccines to be grown in eggs. If we start today, it will take nine to twelve months to vaccinate the nation against H5N1. However, flu vaccines are reportedly only about 85% effective. They will save many, perhaps most lives. But with an up an 80+% mortality rate this would still be stunningly catastrophic. Even with a 9.8% mortality rate as with the original SARS-1 and we use effective drugs to cut the mortality rate by half, more than ten million could die.       

            Before Covid-19 hit, America was supposed to be the most pandemically prepared nation in the world. Due to the ideology of the NIH and CDC that ignored the basic science of what viruses want from our cells and how they attack and cut up the selenium found in our antioxidants and subvert our immune systems by depleting the selenium the immune system needs to run, the protection these two agencies claim to provide the United States is wholly inadequate. If they had been generals in the Civil War, Lincoln would have fired them.   

            You may find some of the answers to how to solve this coming pandemic challenge in my book Dear Bill Gates, How to End Serial Pandemic Failure, HIV-1 to Covid-19. The answer to how to reduce morbidity and mortality is as simple as providing adequate selenium plus either steroid or NSAID NF-kB inhibitor drugs. Why must hundreds of thousands, even millions of American die in the next pandemic just because top scientists ignore the science that they should be using to protect the American people? Unfortunately, they have turned their backs on citizens and the American taxpayer so they can seek unsightly profits for the pharmaceutical industry at everyone else’s expense.

            The American people should not be crucified on a cross of golden profits for the most profitable industry in the world. It is an an anti-humanitarian ideology perpetrated by the pharmaceutical industrial complex promoting new drug development at the expense of everything else.

            Everyone wants the pharmaceutical industry to produce new improved drugs to treat disease. But the NIH should not focus solely on that while covering up the existence of safe, effective, available, affordable, broad-spectrum drugs to treat viral disease. The most profitable industry in the world should not be the most harmful to the health of people during the first years of pandemics.

            This issue needs to be thoroughly vetted and investigated at the highest level. I will assist any way I can to put an end to this American tragedy and finally end Serial Pandemic Failure in America.  

            Scientifically yours,  

Howard S. Armistead