What You Can Learn from the Boy Scout Motto - "Be Prepared"

Dear White House Office of Pandemic Preparedness and Response.

            I was infected with HIV in Los Angeles in 1983. After participating in the MACS study at UCLA for many years and then experimenting on myself and noting the effect an NF-kB inhibitor had increasing my CD4 count, in 1990 I became an autodidactic AIDS researcher and eventually attended over fifty-seven AIDS and virology conferences worldwide. In 2014 I provided the Liberian Ministry of Health the only effective therapy for Ebola virus disease discovered during the entire 2014-16 West African Ebola epidemic. When Covid first struck I sent several emails from South Africa to Anthony Fauci’s long-term deputy Clifford Lane to remind him how they could save lives from Covid. However, saving people’s lives with existing therapies was not the priority at the NIH. Developing preventative vaccines and new drug development were prioritized because those two routes led to pharmaceutical patent royalties for the NIH for assisting that research. They ignored recommending available scientific-based therapies against Covid. Confused and uninformed about existing effective therapies, people suffering with Covid and their physicians were left in the lurch, left to their own devices and subjected to disinformation from the hawkers of faux remedies like chloroquine and ivermectin.    

            On the scale of one to ten, the Covid vaccine initiative should receive a score of twelve and the NIH new drug development program a five at best. However the failure of the NIH to educate people about existing science-based therapies that could have saved the lives of two-thirds or more of all those who died of Covid from 2020 through 2022 deserves a score of minus ten – or minus 700,000. The complete failure of the NIH’s response to help those who were symptomatic with Covid was atrocious. It was deadly deficient - a repeat of earlier failures during the AIDS pandemic and the Ebola epidemic. Despite all the PhDs, MDs, and the smartest people in the world, the NIH ignored the two or three obscure virologic details of which few scientists are familiar. Thus they failed the American people in the worst possible way. That is why I have written two books Dear Bill Gates, How to End Serial Pandemic Failure, HIV-1 to Covid-19 and Understanding Covid-19, How 500,000 American Lives Could Have Been Saved. Obviously, we can do much better next time, but not if we continue to fail to appreciate how viruses ultimately cause death. I encourage you to read my two books available through Amazon.com, especially the sections containing excerpts from medical journal articles. Those excerpts support the facts I relate in this letter.

            In his new book, The Song of the Cell Siddhartha Mukherjee starts with a quote from Sherlock Holmes. “Elementary. It is one of those instances where the reasoner can produce an effect which seems remarkable to his neighbor, because the latter has missed the one little point which is the basis of the deduction.” In this case there are two little points of science – NF-kB and selenium – and a third – the composition of viruses’ protective envelope proteins. These three points went completely missing in the public discussion of Covid-19, even though I had sent an email highlighting precisely those somewhat obscure points to Drs Lane and Fauci of NIAID in March 2020. I refer to those critical points as golden needles in the haystack of viral science. Hidden among a million other factoids, they are easy to miss, but critical to understanding viral disease.       

            One definition of insanity is repeatedly doing the same thing and expecting a different result. The same can be said of continually failing to do the humane thing based on science and expecting a humane outcome. The three golden needles in the haystack of viral science compose extremely large pieces of the viral scientific puzzle, without which no one can completely solve the pandemic challenges of AIDS, Ebola, Zika, SARS-1, Covid-19,-25,-31, H5N1, Hantavirus, Marburg, or the future X-virus. Those three missing puzzle pieces are the mineral selenium, the NF-kB protein, and the fact that the viral Env envelope gene genetically encodes a selenium containing protein. Understanding the roles selenium, and the viral replication factor NF-kB play in the pathogenesis of viral infections is key to comprehending how viruses cause disease and death, and how applying simple scientific logic based on those facts can improve antiviral therapy and pandemic preparedness.         

            Imagine trying to cross the Sahara Desert without water. Every Boy Scout carries a canteen because they know they will need water eventually. If a person runs out of water in the desert, the midday sun can quickly dehydrate and kill them within two days.

Just as the sun can quickly dehydrate a person, viruses that require selenium to produce their protective envelope selenoproteins attack an infected cell’s selenium supply, mostly located in antioxidants, and use it as a resource for its own replication. In viral infection as a virus gradually depletes that essential trace element, if a person does not retain enough selenium, eventually their immune system rapidly collapses. One scientist explained that when a person loses 20% of their normal level of selenium they develop immune deficiency, as in AIDS. If they lose 30%, they are finished. That is because all aspects of immune function require adequate selenium. Thus in viral disease a three million count viral load equates to the noonday sun in the Sahara Desert. A three million viral load quickly deselenates a person, depleting selenium from their antioxidants, cells, organs, and immune system. AIDS, Ebola, Marburg, Covid and almost all deadly viruses cause death by depleting selenium. Severe selenium depletion sets off a chain reaction of plummeting CD4 count, massive programmed cell death, a cytokine storm, sepsis, multi-organ-failure, and death. The same downward spiral occurs in the terminal stage of practically every deadly viral disease. However that rapid loss of selenium goes mostly unnoticed because severe selenium deficiency only happens in late stage, terminal disease and is not monitored in standard blood tests. It should be. However if we fail to recognize what happens in end-stage disease, we might as well ignore the whole disease. This severe selenium depletion due to rapid viral replication has been well reported in HIV and Ebola and noted by researchers in Covid-19 as well. Although selenium depletion starts slowly in early Covid, it gains speed and proceeds apace as viral loads escalate exponentially. By the time patients have severe Covid, 100% of them are selenium deficient. Covid patients who retain enough selenium survive. Those who do not, do not.    

            “There is no treatment, there is no cure.” I heard the exact same mantra chanted ad nauseum, first with in the 1980s with HIV, then with Ebola, and finally with Covid-19. Those words may have been true early on with HIV/AIDS, but not with Ebola or Covid. True, there was no cure, but there certainly were effective therapies that could have been used from the start with Ebola and Covid. That is what preparedness is all about. Knowing what works and planning to apply that knowledge efficiently. We need effective broad-spectrum therapies that work against every virus from the first day of infection and from the inception of a new pandemic. They exist. Why did we fail to use them against Covid? Will we fail again next time? Yes, unless priorities change, we will fail miserably again. In pandemics, we need to place people’s lives and health ahead of pharmaceutical profits. Any other formula is far too costly to the nation. Unfortunately we have not done that with AIDS, Ebola, or Covid-19.        

            Not surprisingly, inflammation and viral replication go hand-in-hand in every deadly viral disease. They occur together in AIDS, Ebola, Covid-19, and influenza. Why? Inflammation and viral replication proceed in lockstep because the same human protein is the primary stimulant of both inflammation and viral replication. The NF-kB viral replication factor was discovered in 1986 in the laboratory of Dr David Baltimore who won a Nobel Prize in 1975 for co-discovering the reverse transcriptase enzyme in 1970. If you inhibit NF-kB by using NF-kB inhibitors, you reduce both inflammation and viral replication at the same time. What inhibits NF-kB? Every anti-inflammatory drug, both steroid and NSAID, from aspirin to dexamethasone to Tamoxifen. Thus anti-inflammatory drugs also are broad-spectrum antiviral drugs. Who knew that? From an immunological point of view that is obvious. Why is that not common knowledge? Thus anti-inflammatories are equally potent against inflammation and viral replication because the identical protein they inhibit – NF-kB - is the primary stimulant to both. Dexamethasone is 210 times as powerful as aspirin against inflammation and 210 times as strong as aspirin in inhibiting viral replication. For comparison, in 1989 Dr Donald Kotler showed that an aspirin analogue asacol (5-ASA) is at least two-thirds as powerful as AZT in inhibiting HIV viral replication. That science was ignored by the NIH and contributed to its enormous failure against Covid-19 thirty years later.  

            When will H5N1 avian influenza finally strike? I was asked to advise the Zambian Ministry of Health during the first H5N1 scare in 2005 and was the consultant on the Ministry of Health’s Technical Working Group on Selenium the following year. Unlike in 2005, H5N1 currently appears to be in the process of jumping the species barrier from numerous domestic and wild bird species into over a dozen mammal species worldwide. It already spreads efficiently among ferrets and minks. When can we expect the final genetic mutation that will allow this highly pathogenic influenza to begin person to person transmission? Will it be seven weeks, seven months, or seven years from now? No one can predict. Will the current H5N1 human mortality rate of 40%-50% fall after it jumps the species barrier? How soon might that happen, or will that extraordinarily high mortality rate decline at all? No one can predict with certainty.      

            Are we prepared? If you were charged with the responsibility to plan a program to prevent people from dying of starvation, dehydration, or hypoxia, you would establish strategic stockpiles of food, water, and oxygen to help prevent and respond to those potential disasters. So where is your strategic stockpile of selenium tablets to help prevent death from viral pandemic disease and uranium and heavy metal poisoning? The fact that selenium also helps against uranium poisoning makes it a two-for-one, national security, life-saving medication. Who in your office knows the correct dosage of selenium to provide at what stage of viral disease, or who knows which of more than a dozen NF-kBIs to recommend at which stage of viral disease? If you do not have a selenium or an NF-kBI expert advisor on call, how can you ever attain a fully adequate level of pandemic preparedness? You will never be fully prepared unless you examine these issues more comprehensively. That includes how to reduce inflammation and viral replication, and how to reduce deaths by reversing viral disease as it reaches the point of excessive expression of IL-6, apoptosis, the cytokine storm, sepsis, and multi-organ-failure.

            Albert Einstein suggested, “The formulation of the problem is often more essential than its solution.” It is an even bigger problem when people do not recognize there is a problem that needs to be solved at all, or that a solution exists for a problem that has not yet been recognized. Thus, if you do not ask the right questions, you can never discern the correct answers. As General George S. Patton admonished his general staff in World War Two, “If everyone is thinking the same thing, then someone is not thinking.”

That is exactly what killed 1.l million Americans with Covid-19 - enforced groupthink. To protect pharmaceutical interests, no one was allowed to think outside the intellectual confinement box imposed by the NIH, an institution that had been captured by the industry it is supposed to help regulate. Due to their debilitating conflict of interest, the NIH failed to utilize the common-sense basic science they had refused to acknowledge or apply in previous pandemics. Admittedly, there were many wrong ideas floating in the public sphere, but if we totally suppress all scientifically non-orthodox ideas, we may miss the rare golden needles that finally solve problems. After more than a decade of independent research, by 2000 I had uncovered those golden needles hidden in the haystacks of scientific literature that are effective against viral disease - NF-kBIs and selenium. The reason so many wrong ideas caught on during the Covid-19 pandemic was the NIH miserably failed to provide the public and the medical community with information about available, safe, and effective options for early therapy. They left a therapeutic vacuum that demanded to be filled. It was filled by quasi-scientific hokum that confused everyone and helped no one. That was the result of fatally bad NIH policy. Everyone lost except Big Pharma.     

            If you do not appreciate the basic science I have referred to in this brief letter, you truly do not understand viruses and viral disease pathogenesis. No one can put the complete viral disease puzzle together unless they have all the pieces of the puzzle, understand how they fit together, and comprehend the central roles NF-kB and selenium play in the drama of viral replication and pathogenesis. Unlike with protease and reverse transcriptase inhibitors that specifically inhibit viral enzymes, viruses do not become resistant to broad-spectrum antivirals that inhibit the cellular factor NF-kB. That is because viruses mutate quickly, cells do not.  

            50% to 70% of the 1.1 million Americans who died of Covid during the pandemic could have been saved merely by applying NF-kBIs and selenium intelligently. One NF-kBI alone – dexamethasone - reduced Covid mortality by up to 30%. We could have greatly improved that result if we had strategically utilized the more than a dozen other NF-kBIs that were available. Adding even an inadequate dosage of 1.2mg daily of selenium alone reduced deaths from Ebola by 42.8% in Liberia in 2014. Selenium alone also has been shown to reduce deaths at the point of sepsis and multi-organ-failure by an estimated average of 50%. Yet none of these logical, science-based strategies were used against Covid-19. Why? They did not benefit pharmaceutical companies.

The NIH directed all therapeutic efforts against Covid solely towards new drug development. After two and a half years of research, all the NIH and Big Pharma could produce was one protease inhibitor, Paxlovid, a drug that can only be used for five days early on in infection. Will highly contraindicated, expensive, limited-use Paxlovid help against the next novel pathogenic virus? Maybe, but probably not. However broad-spectrum antivirals like NF-kBIs and selenium will – by definition. They can be used from the first day of infection until the last day of recovery. So why did the NIH shun lifesaving approaches to early and late therapy and only focus on one long lead-time developmental approach to solving the mortal challenge of Covid? Next time the US might hit 1.1 million lives lost in far less than a year. And it may take much longer to discover the next new effective therapy than it took to develop Paxlovid. However today H5N1 influenza vaccines are already being developed based on the current H5N1 variant. Protease inhibitors should also be in development now based on the current H5N1 viral protease. Are they? Although we do not know when it may strike, it helps to know what highly pathogenic virus will confront humanity next. It may or may not be H5N1. Regardless, the US needs to be more prepared with vaccines, protease inhibitors, NF-kBIs and a national strategic stockpile of selenium tablets. Selenium is a basic mineral element that should have a decade-long shelf-life.      

            Will America fail to protect its citizens again when the next novel zoonotic virus emerges? If history is any guide, yes. That is why we must re-strategize following the recent disastrous performance with Covid. What did we learn from the AIDS pandemic, the Ebola epidemic, and the Covid-19 pandemic? Not enough. Some science was politically incorrect. Apparently, we mostly learned how to make pharmaceutical companies pandemic size profits while leaving taxpayers and society with much greater debt burdens. Did 900,000 lives have to be sacrificed to the Covid god of incompetence before we discovered Paxlovid? Was that the sole gain for all those lives lost?           

            Where is wisdom – and human compassion? It certainly is not sequestered at the NIH or CDC or on the floor of the pharmaceutical stock exchange. Perhaps your White House office needs to interview a concerned citizen scientist like I am who soldiered through the War on AIDS from the start and when called, bravely flew to Monrovia, Liberia, and later to Sierra Leon to help the Liberian Ministry of Health find an effective medication to fight the War on Ebola. Yes, American health authorities completely failed in one of the three prongs of Covid-19 pharmaceutical intervention. Despite the fact some physicians independently concluded dexamethasone would help, the NIH misdirected the medical community’s attention towards remdesivir, monoclonal antibodies, and convalescent serum - none of which proved very effective at all. Meanwhile they completely ignored a dozen broad-spectrum antiviral, anti-inflammatory NF-kBIs and life-saving selenium. This is such simple but arcane science that the NIH must be familiar with, yet they ignored it, denied it, or covered it up. Who loses because of that? Who benefits? Who dies or ends up with Long Covid?   

            I encourage you to read my attached response to Professor Philip Zelikow’s fine book Lessons from the Covid War. The Covid Crisis Group raised many questions to which I provided some partial answers in my letter. The bottom-line is that unless we improve our fundamental understanding of viral disease as I have after thirty-three years of research, we may not grasp the golden needles that unlock additional safe and effective methods to treat viral infections, reduce deaths, and reduce Long Covid. Although it is easy to discount my formal bono fides because I do not hold a PhD or an MD degree, I have read over two hundred scientific articles about NF-kB and over five hundred medical journal articles and three books about selenium and have consulted briefly for two African ministries of health. Thus if your office is preparing to respond to future pandemics you might want to interview me, someone who has not only worked in pandemics, but lived a life of pandemics. From the medical school libraries of USC and UCLA in Los Angeles to the Ministries of Health in Lusaka, Harare, Johannesburg, Monrovia, and Kigali, I have been able to conduct self-guided research free from the enforced groupthink of the NIH and CDC. That is why I can point the way toward two highly effective strategies to treat deadly viral pandemic diseases that provide life-saving benefits from the inception of a pandemic and an individual’s first day of infection. If policy makers do not accurately formulate critical questions, they can never arrive at the best science-based solutions. Yes, everyone hopes we never see 500,000 to 700,000 Americans again pass away of a disease from which they should not have died – not to mention those millions left with Long Covid. However, we must demand bureaucratic competency and accountability, unencumbered by the corruption of corporate capture.   

            Your job is to make sure this never happens again. However if you are all thinking the same, some of you are not thinking. I challenge you to think outside the self-serving, careerist, pharmaceutical corporatist box. Put science and the lives of your fellow citizens first. Prepare America for the challenges of the new Pandemic Era. Plan to provide safe, effective, affordable life-saving medications to be available from day one. A strategic reserve of selenium tablets is essential. The next viral pandemic may arrive sooner than expected. Be prepared.

            If there is anything I can do to assist your pandemic strategic planning efforts, please contact me.

            Scientifically yours,

            Howard Steel Armistead    

Attached: letter to Professor Philip Zelikow, Covid Crisis Group, dated 01 June 2023