How to Save Millions of Lives in the Approaching H5N1 Pandemic

 Dear Member of the Congressional Health Subcommittee,

            The next pandemic could kill more Americans than any other disease in American history. Investigating what happened with Covid-19 is important. However we must learn the correct lessons and apply them immediately if we are going to avoid the anticipated avian flu pandemic catastrophe. Focusing on the origin of the virus misses the point. The point is how to start saving lives today and in the future.    

            Covid-19 killed more Americans than all the combat fatalities in all the wars in US history. The approaching H5N1 pandemic may be ten times worse. That projected astronomical death toll easily can be reduced, but the current NIH health policy paradigm makes that highly unlikely. That policy is doomed to fail because it is directed not at protecting the lives and health of the American people, but at padding the profits of the pharmaceutical industry. It seems corporate interests always take priority over people’s lives and health. That is unlikely to change. Regardless of that political irony, let us examine the soon to arrive super-pandemic.     

            H5N1 avian influenza is somewhat similar to the H1N1 flu virus that caused the 1918-20 Spanish flu that killed 675,000 Americans and an estimated fifty to one hundred million people worldwide. The current H5N1 virus genetically resorted in China in 1997 and has infected domestic and wild birds worldwide. Hundreds of millions of chickens have been slaughtered in China and Southeast Asia and at least fifty-eight million here. Today, H5N1 is in the process of jumping from birds into mammals. It has crossed into numerous species that feed on birds including bears, skunks, foxes, and racoons in the US. It has been discovered on a mink farm in Spain, in sea lions in Peru, and even in porpoises. It is only a matter of time before it crosses into humans and starts to spread.

            In fact it has jumped directly from domesticated fowl into humans over seven hundred times over the last two decades but has not developed the ability to spread human to human - yet. However it is only one or two mutations away from gaining the ability to do so. Given that it is now widespread in other mammals, that could happen in three weeks, three months, or three years. The US is not prepared for this because we failed miserably with Covid-19. We should have learned these viral treatment lessons from Ebola in 2014 and HIV disease in the late 1980s and early 1990s but that research was covered up. Ignoring how viruses kill by depleting selenium, and how viruses stimulate their own replication by releasing the NF-kB replication factor in cells is a guaranteed formula for repeated national pandemic failure. That will result in an incredibly high death toll from H5N1.   

            To date, approximately 50% of humans who have been infected with the current strain of H5N1 flu virus have died. The good news is that an effective vaccine can be designed immediately. The bad news is that it will take many months to test, approve, manufacture, and distribute that vaccine. That needs to begin now. [Disregard President Ford’s similar program against swine flu in 1976]. Today more people than ever resist vaccination. Perhaps they will reconsider when they realize the pathogenicity of this new virus. Flu vaccines are only about 85% effective. Scientists say Tamiflu does not work, so do not count on that. Now, let us crunch the numbers.

            If 80% of the US population gets infected with H5N1 in the first three years, as was the case with Covid-19, 264 million Americans will be impacted. With an 85% vaccine effectiveness, if all 264 million are vaccinated, at least forty million will be infected and contagious – a gross under-guesstimation. If the fatality rate sticks at 50%, then 22 million Americans would die. Adjust that upward by the percentage of people who refuse the sound advice to get vaccinated and total deaths could skyrocket.

            While it is almost guaranteed that H5N1 will eventually spread among humans, no one can predict exactly when that will start. No one can predict the ultimate fatality rate. It could easily be one order of magnitude lower than 55% - or much less. Often when viruses mutate to transmit more easily, the mortality rate falls. But RNA viruses are unpredictable so no one should count on that. The mortality rate of Covid-19 was about 1%. SARS-CoV-1 was 10%, MERS was 37%. Spanish flu was 2.5%. H5N1 will be deadly but no one can predict just how deadly. The past rate does not dictate the future. The only thing one can predict with certainty is that the NIH and CDC will fail miserably as they did with Covid-19 when they allowed over one million Americans to die by ignoring available, effective, early therapies. At least half those lives could have been saved by using existing NF-kB inhibitor antiviral drugs plus selenium. In this coming pandemic millions more lives will probably be lost. That is because instead of following the science the NIH  ignores known viral and cellular science, and the American people’s best interests. Instead they focus on new drug development, profits for their corporate public-private partners, and trickle-down royalty payments to the NIH.

            HIV, Ebola, SARS-CoV-2 and influenza A all kill by depleting selenium from the cells they infect and from the immune system. That results in cell death, plunging CD4 white blood cell counts, immune dysfunction, a cytokine storm, more cell death, sepsis, multi-organ-failure, and death. That entire sequence can usually be reversed with timely supplementation of selenium. Just as dehydration can be reversed by drinking water, deselenization can be reversed by taking selenium. A safe, high dose of 2.0mg of selenium daily has been shown to reduce death from sepsis and multi-organ-failure by over 50%. It reduced deaths from Ebola by a similar rate.

            Since the human protein NF-kB is the primary stimulant to the replication of HIV, influenza A, and most other viruses, and to inflammation, inhibiting that protein reduces both inflammation and viral replication. There are a dozen steroid and non-steroid anti-inflammatory drugs of widely varying strengths that are effective. I list those drugs on page 48 of Dear Bill Gates.  Although doctors call these anti-inflammatory drugs, they also work as antiviral drugs. They inhibit the same protein that stimulates both inflammation and viral replication - NF-kB. Why would anyone not use anti-inflammatory/antiviral drugs to try to prevent a viral disease from killing millions of Americans? Ignorance? Greed? A corrupted paradigm? Health authorities completely failed with Covid-19.

            My two books explaining these phenomena are available on Amazon.com. They are Understanding Covid-19, How 500,000 American Lives Could Have Been Saved and Dear Bill Gates, How to End Serial Pandemic Failure, HIV-1 to Covid-19. They explain how the high death toll of Covid-19 mostly could have been avoided, and how we can prevent that from happening again with H5N1 and the next viral pandemic.       

            Do US government health agencies have the capacity to learn from their mistakes? No. The NIH is addicted to the billion-dollar profits of new drug development with its trickle-down benefits to the Institutes and their research principal investigators. Saving lives is not the NIH’s primary focus. New drug development is.  

            Selenium can also help reduce transmission of some viruses.  (Lancet,2000,356;233-41). It retards the viral spike protein’s ability to chemically bind to cellular receptors. This knowledge should be used to complement vaccine initiatives. It does not replace them. As an adjuvant, coadministration of selenium can improve a vaccine’s ability to generate antibodies and perhaps reduce vaccine side effects. 

            We need to start preparation for the next pandemic immediately. We cannot afford to continue ignoring the basic science of how viruses kill people – by rapidly depleting selenium reserves – deselenization. That is just like dehydration or hypoxia, but due to the loss of selenium instead of water or oxygen. All three can kill.

            It is not too late to correct our mistakes, no matter how unlikely that is. It costs nothing more than paying closer attention to the connections between basic cellular, viral, and immunological science as I have done for the last thirty years. Then implement that simple science. When H5N1 is over, will you lose more acquaintances than the dozen I knew who died of Covid or the scores I knew who died of HIV? Tide and the timing of pandemics wait for no one. Pandemics spare few nations that stick their heads ostrich-like in the proverbial sand by ignoring science. It is time to wake up and smell the selenium - fuel of the immune system and strongest immune booster.       

            Once Americans were can-do problem solvers. That is how we won wars in the past. The US just lost the war against Covid-19 – 1.1 million dead and 16 million left with Long Covid. Today we are set to lose the war against H5N1. Will that become 11 million dead and counting? Unpredictable mutations multiplied by a predictably corrupted research agenda will determine the outcome. While government has no control over viral mutation, we can control the focus of research. Will we learn from our mistakes and oversights? Doubtful. As Roman judges asked - who benefits? Certainly not the American people. Good luck fellow citizens. Unless something changes, Americans will need it. The science is known. Why does the US government fail to apply it?  

Scientifically yours,

Howard S. Armistead