Strategy to Reduce Needless Deaths in Future Pandemic Wars

Dear General Dr. Friedrichs, Chair of Presidential Office for Pandemic Preparedness

            When faced with a deadly military attack on their country, what general ever thought, “OK, those invaders are killing our people, but in two years maybe we will develop a super anti-protease bomb that will save our lives. It will take a while, but I’m sure, sooner or later our scientists will come up with something like that. Meanwhile thousands will have to die since we currently have no effective early defenses.” That is precisely what happened with therapeutics in the NIH effort against Covid-19. The White House OPPR should stop ignoring long existing but seldom publicly referenced antiviral science. Volumes have been written in the medical literature about selenium’s benefits against a variety of viral diseases. Numerous other almost obvious broad-spectrum antiviral drugs are also hiding in plain sight. Those are not chloroquine or ivermectin.    

            In the history of warfare, nations always used the weapons they had on hand at the start and then tried to develop more effective weaponry as the conflict continued. That is common sense. In the Covid War or Viral War I (VW-I) US medical authorities completely ignored that logic. They ignored forty years of clinical and laboratory research so they could focus on developing new patentable drugs with which the NIH could earn hundreds of millions of dollars in royalties as it has done with Covid vaccines. Thankfully, Operation Warp Speed for vaccine development was an outstanding success. However, for two years the NIH therapeutic program produced nothing. Nevertheless, at first it recommended three therapies that were almost totally ineffective - convalescent serum, remdesivir, and monoclonal antibodies. 700,000 lives could have been saved if those in charge instead had informed the medical community about two other classes of effective broad-spectrum antiviral medications well known to science – nuclear-factor kappaB inhibitors (NF-kBIs) and selenium. The NF-kB protein was discovered in 1986. The benefits of selenium against viral disease have been recognized since the early 1980s and research has advanced each year since. How is it possible that this growing mound of research science was ignored regarding Covid? In this new Age of Pandemics we cannot afford to ignore how cells work, how the immune system operates, or how viral diseases progress. At their core, these all involve selenium. We can no longer afford to ignore basic viral science. We also cannot ignore what keeps thirty trillion cells in the body healthy and the immune system functioning smoothly – selenium. Who is your selenium expert? You need one. I have studied selenium, viruses, and immunity since 1999 and have read over seven hundred medical journal articles on this topic alone. The OPPR cannot afford to continue ignoring this whole sector of science as Anthony Fauci did. That was his historic mistake that cost hundreds of thousands of Americans their lives. We cannot allow that to happen again. It will if we continue to ignore basic science.        

            When things seem askew in the real world and we cannot figure out what unseen factor is causing the distortion, it usually ends up being either politics, corruption, or the profit motive. As an analyst of AIDS, Ebola and Covid-19 research since 1989, I have repeatedly observed distortions in the research and knowledge systems that have ignored known basic science. After Covid struck, Americans waited two long years before the NIH presented their imperfect, double-protease-inhibitor drug Paxlovid to save lives. Yes, physicians were already using dexamethasone, a strong NF-kBI. But that bubbled up from trial-and-error within the medical community, not from scientists at the NIH or a recommendation from the WHO. Luckily SARS-CoV-2 had a mortality rate of just under 1%. The current version of H5N1 avian influenza has an average 40% mortality rate in humans. If we continue to ignore existing broad-spectrum antiviral medications, if H5N1 causes the next pandemic, up to forty million Americans could die within two years. Is the OPPR ready for that worse-case scenario? No one can precisely predict pandemics before they emerge. However H5N1 appears to be edging ever closer to breaching the avian/mammal-human species barrier. Is the OPPR currently prepared to respond immediately to any new pandemic from day-one with effective drugs for a virus of unknown origin?     

              When I was young, I thought about being a CIA analyst. In the end, circumstances self-recruited me into the VIA – the Viral Intelligence Agency. No, I am neither a certified virologist nor an immunologist, but have attended fifty-eight AIDS and virology conferences worldwide and have written two books on pandemic preparedness – 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. The OPPR should thoroughly consider the science and analysis in these books written in a style the general public can understand. I wrote my first news editorial commentary about Covid-19 on 31 January 2020 in Johannesburg, South Africa, warning what would eventually happen and how we could avoid that tragedy. Despite that, one part of the US response was fundamentally flawed, and 500,000 to 700,000 more Americans lost their lives than necessary. If people and physicians had used broad-spectrum antiviral NF-kBI drugs and selenium replacement therapy as I suggested early on, a majority of those who died would have been saved. 

            Every cell in the human body requires selenium for both structural and functional integrity. If there is no selenium, there is no cell. Selenium is as important for health as water or oxygen. Yet few people know or understand this indispensable trace element, including many in the medical community. Physicians often ignore selenium and dismiss it as a mere nutrient because it is not a pharmaceutical drug. Many doctors attended medical school before much was known about selenium’s effects on viral disease and immune health. Yet selenium is the only nutrient that is genetically encoded by the human genome. Over twenty-five proteins incorporate selenium. It forms the active site of most cellular antioxidants, and it is the most important element fueling the human immune response. Selenium is fundamental to human health.  

            In 1977 I finished a master’s program in international relations at the University of Virginia and moved to Los Angeles to work at DCASMA-LA. After that I worked as a cost-analyst on the AAH-64 Apache Attack Helicopter program at Hughes Helicopters, on cruise missiles and night vision equipment at Hughes Aircraft Electro-Optical Division and was the chief cost-analyst on the MX Missile IMU Guidance System at Northrop Electronics. That inertial measurement unit was the first GPS. Afterwards, I went into residential real estate sales in Los Angeles to support my HIV research and travel to national and international conferences. In 2002 I moved to Lusaka, Zambia to help fight the AIDS pandemic in Africa.  

            In 1983 I was infected and in April 1984 joined the NIH sponsored Multi-Centered AIDS Cohort Study at UCLA. MACS was the largest, longest running AIDS research study in history - until 2020. In 1985 I was in one of the first cohorts ever tested for HIV, and on 01 January 1989 started taking the mostly useless drug AZT that I continued taking for almost eight years. I began to carefully, systematically experiment on myself in early 1990, and on my third self-experiment discovered that even a relatively weak NF-kB inhibitor could strongly increase CD4 count. In 1999 Dr Kenneth Bridboard of the NIH Fogarty International Institute, especially invited and sponsored me to attend the Second International Conference on the Prevention of HIV Transmission from Mothers to Infants in Montreal, Canada. He did that because I was the only person publicly promoting the use of NF-kBIs that inhibit the key cellular replication factor that strongly stimulates both inflammation and viral replication. More than twenty years later doctors finally started using NF-kBIs against Covid-19, but they called them anti-inflammatories or steroids. They failed to refer to them by their primary mode of action – that is, inhibiting viral replication and inflammation by inhibiting the NF-kB protein. Who knew that both steroid and non-steroid NF-kB inhibitor anti-inflammatory drugs also work as antiviral drugs? No one discusses this, although from a scientific point of view it is self-evident. How long can we ignore basic science to the detriment of the health and lives of Americans and all humanity?   

            In 2006 Lieutenant General Dr James Simpungwe, the Director of Clinical Care and Diagnostic Services in the Zambian Ministry of Health asked me to organize and write the report of the ministry’s Technical Working Group on Selenium. Then in 2014 the Ministry of Health of Liberia called me to bring the only medication that proved effective during the entire 2014-16 West African Ebola epidemic - sodium selenite. Dr Jerry Brown, Time Magazine’s Person of the Year for 2014 administered the selenium I provided to his patients at the ELWA-II Ebola treatment unit. We showed that when added to the WHO standard of supportive care for Ebola, 1.2mg of selenium daily reduced the mortality rate by 42.8% compared to the basic WHO standard of care alone. 2.0mg would have reduced the Ebola mortality rate by close to 65%. Selenium could have achieved the same reduction in fatalities with Covid-19 as it did with Ebola. Despite several emails to Dr Fauci’s deputy Dr Clifford Lane in March 2020, the NIH ignored selenium and NF-kBIs. Failing to supplement a patient who is depleted of selenium is like failing to provide water, oxygen, or blood to medical patients that require those. It defies logic, science, medical ethics, and human empathy.   

            If you were an army general in Ukraine and faced a massive, aggressive invading force, would you declare unilateral disarmament and ignore your massive warehouses full of artillery shells and missiles and instead inform the nation that you are waiting to develop the super antiprotease bomb sometime in the indeterminate future? Would you assure the nation that “People need to be patient until we achieve that breakthrough. Be assured, scientists are working on it.” How many millions would die before that future hoped for success? Will we lose the coming VW-II as badly as we lost VW-I with 1.1+ million dead? When will VW-II break out? This year? Next year? Or the year after that? Will H5N1 or another influenza starting with a H5 or H7, the more deadly influenza combinations, cause it? Or will the next pandemic be a new corona virus or a novel mutation of SARS-CoV-2 that emerges from India or Southern Africa where many are immune compromised with selenium deficiencies and are human laboratories for viral recombination and mutation. Often caused by viral or mycobacterial infection, selenium deficiency accelerates mutation rates.            

I first met Anthony Fauci at the 1994 Yokohama International AIDS Conference and we last chatted following Bill Clinton’s speech at the 2018 Amsterdam International AIDS Conference. Even if he does not, I recognize the mistakes he made with both AIDS and Ebola. Those led directly to the same colossal mistake he made with Covid-19. If national health authorities are addicted to new drug development as the sole solution to margin disease and refuse to recognize or learn from their pandemic mistakes, the human and economic costs can escalate exponentially into millions of lives lost and trillions of dollars wasted. The major mistake Dr. Fauci repeatedly made is he prioritized corporate and NIH interests in making profits and earning royalties above the health and economic interests of the American people. Unfortunately, maintaining that obvious institutional public conflict of interest is a guaranteed formula for serial pandemic failure. Dr Fauci ignored the obvious potential to inhibit the key viral stimulant NF-kB, and to replenish the element that fuels the immune response but is rapidly depleted in severe Covid - selenium. Fauci was self-blinded to two major therapeutic targets that begged to save lives from Covid because they lacked patentability. As a result the United States and the whole world lost. Ironically, health officials watched with rightful doubt as inexperienced pandemic hunters chased chloroquine and ivermectin up the wrong Covid-19 want-to-be therapy trees, pretending they had scored a triumph. Those same authoritative observers refused to see the trees brightly labeled NF-kB inhibitors and selenium. Tony Fauci was well-aware of those therapeutic oaks, but there was no patentable royalty fruit hanging from them. His sole fixation was new drug development and earning patent royalties for the NIH. That is where the strategic distortion lay. We need to end that costly unifocal royalty mania and return to a simple, true, beneficial application of science for the public good. We should trust science and “Physicians should use what works” – patent or no patent.        

            The OPPR likewise will fail if it continues to ignore over a dozen differently powered broad-spectrum antiviral NF-kBIs and selenium’s immune restorative powers, and instead narrowly focuses on developing specific, unique new drugs for each new virus. The cost/benefit analysis of favoring pharmaceutical profits and patent royalties for the NIH against the resulting costs in health and economic loss by the American people is astounding. In wartime it is either insane or gravely naive not to use all reasonably effective weapons and resources one has at their disposal to defeat the enemy. I hate to criticize the honorable Dr Fauci, but his therapeutic research paradigm priority was corrupted. Placing the patents, profits, and royalties – PPR - of new drug development above the lives of people and the national economy represented a gross disregard for human life. More Americans died in VW-1 than all the battlefield deaths in the history of American wars. If we continue to solely focus on new drug development and ignore existing unused therapies, we will lose VW-II too. If we ignore the last forty years of arcane science, as Fauci did so he could bring us the imperfect, use for five-days-only, highly contraindicated Paxlovid protease inhibitor superbomb, we may end up with only one million dead on the viral battlefield. Or we may end with 20-40 million excess deaths. As General Patton admonished his general staff, “If everyone is thinking the same, then no one is thinking.”     

            In the parlance of former Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld, this science is not a known unknown and not an unknown unknown. It is a known known. The question is, how is it possible that the US government does not know this known science and use it to protect the health, welfare, and economy of the nation?  

            The lowest common denominator among viruses and cells are selenium and NF-kB. They are the steel and jet-fuel of viral warfare. Cells use selenium to create their protective antioxidants. Viruses attack and destroy those antioxidants to steal and repurpose selenium molecules to form their own protective viral envelopes. NF-kB is the jet-fuel cells utilize when they clonally expand. It is the superpower protein that dramatically increases both inflammation and viral replication. Viruses release this cytoplasmic protein into the nucleus to quantumly accelerate their own replication. Inhibit NF-kB and you inhibit viral replication and slow disease progression. It is that simple. It is not a “cure”, only an effective treatment mechanism.    

Early intervention is the best intervention. For almost two years, Fauci falsely and authoritatively informed the American public and medical profession that there were no early interventions to treat Covid-19. In fact there were many such medicines sitting on the pharmacy shelf - NF-kBIs and selenium.   

            The ultimate question is, if we appreciate the critical role food, water, oxygen, and blood play in health, how can we tragically fail to appreciate the central role selenium plays in cellular, immune, and human health? How can we possibly continue to ignore this established science, ultimately to our own national detriment? It is a fateful, fatal decision to do so. The OPPR must end ostrich-headed denialism, examine the underpinning science, and apply it to save American lives. Failure to do so only exacerbates the cost, pain, and damage of the follow-on long tail of the Long Covid pandemic and future pandemics.   

            The strategic question is, will the White House OPPR sleepwalk into VW-II unilaterally disarmed, or will it enter the next conflict with the intelligence and knowledge of how the viral enemy can be slowed from the opening salvo by using existing, safe, effective, broad-spectrum antiviral drugs and save American lives from the start? Are these medicines effective? As a strong NF-kBI, dexamethasone already proved its effectiveness against Covid. Selenium is effective against almost every viral infection it has been tested against. When scientists screened over 10,000 chemicals and drugs against Covid in a laboratory, the selenium-based drug ebselen turned out to be the most effective out of all 10,000. Why did we not use it?

            I wish you luck in the next pandemic. But if everyone is thinking the same orthodox inside-the-medical bag thoughts, then no one is thinking. No one is even thinking about all the known knowns. That is not good enough. Americans and President Joe Biden deserve better. As every Boy Scout knows, Be Prepared – and think innovatively outside the box. The next pandemic may not be as kind and gentle as Covid-19 was. If you need someone with decades of experience as an analyst on the viral battlefield, an independent viral intelligence officer from the VIA who will not shy away from asking questions others are too constrained to ask, I remain at service to my country.  

Finally, the OPPR should not ignore a related national security issue. How large is our strategic reserve of selenium and iodine to protect our nation from radiation and heavy metal poisoning? We should not ignore that security risk either.    

            General Dr Friedrichs, I wish you the greatest success in your new assignment leading the OPPR. Our nation deserves more forthright leadership on this issue of utmost importance for national security. I also wish President Biden another productive term in office. I am a long-time supporter of his calm, down-to-earth leadership style and bipartisanship.     

            Best regards, scientifically yours,

            Howard Steel Armistead

            Strategic Analyst, Viral Intelligence Agency

Enclosed are copies of my two books for your staff to review. Especially, note the sections referenced below that include extended quotes from the relevant scientific literature. Understanding Covid-19 is completely revised. I am in the process of reediting Dear Bill Gates so it is still a bit rough. You can find a list of NF-kB inhibitors on page 48. For an excellent older, review article on selenium read “The Importance of Selenium to Human Health” by Margaret P. Rayman, Lancet 2000, 356;233-41

References: Dozens of scientific references supporting my above statements are in my two books as follows:

Understanding Covid-19: References on pgs. 231. Journal excerpts on pgs. 157, 366, 372, 375

Dear Bill Gates: References on pgs. 176, 196, 207, Journal excerpts on pgs. 214, 251, 253