How Deadly Viruses Kill

              The short answer of how highly pathogenic viruses kill people is, they deplete selenium from the cells and organs of the immune system. That eventually can cause multiorgan failure and death. Killer viruses do this by genetically encoding the selenium proteins they need to replicate. This is comparable to how the sun can kill a person if they try to cross a desert with no water. The sun kills by gradually depleting water from a person’s body. Killer viruses kill by depleting the essential selenium that cells, organs, and the human body need to function. The same principle applies. However, most viruses that infect humans are not highly deadly. Only a few are.

            Adults harbor more than a hundred viruses in their body. Most people are infected by at least one of several herpes viruses. They remain infected for life. While the immune system normally keeps them in check, during excessive stress or in old age, herpes viruses can escape suppression and cause sores. People who had chickenpox, a type of herpesvirus, when they were young, are usually revisited with the revenge of chickenpox in the form of shingles when their immune-based resistance declines much later in life. Likewise, after an initial flulike illness, the immune system suppresses HIV infection for four to twelve years, depending on many factors. Finally, the virus escapes that restraint and eventually subverts immune function to the point of deficiency by depleting the selenium level through unrestrained rapid replication. AIDS is best described as acquired immune deficiency of selenium because that is what it is. But what about the other hundred viruses that reside in a typical human?

            The vast majority of viruses that reside in the human body are bacteriophages. Bacteriophages do not infect human cells. They infect the bacteria found in and on our bodies, mostly in the gut. Today, most people are familiar with the human microbiome, the colony of assorted bacteria or flora that are copasetic and occupy our intestinal tract, helping to digest our food. This microbial flora also resides in other niches of our body including mouths, arm pits, and groins. Although the body consists of over thirty trillion human cells, a person’s microbiome includes more bacterial cells than they have human cells. Our microbiome is symbiotic, helpful in both digestion and in preventing our colonization by unwelcome, foreign, disease-causing microbes. “I got here first” is the slogan of our helpful menagerie of friendly bacteria when they fight off the intrusion of other infectious bacteria that threaten the harmony of our personal colony of cells. We acquire much of our beneficial microbiome when it is transferred to us from our mothers at birth when we passed through the birth canal as we are born.     

2104 in Monrovia, Liberia      

      So, what constitutes a killer virus? The simplest definition is – killer viruses are those that kill more than a tiny fraction of those they infect. Although most viruses do not kill most people, or else just a small proportion of the people they infect and make sick, some viruses kill a significant percentage of those they infect. Those include filoviruses like Ebola and Marburg, the lentivirus or “slow virus” virologists named HIV, and newer emerging viruses like Nipah. Often, the newer a virus is at infecting humanity the more deadly it is. Thus, over decades and centuries the human immune system gradually develops, retains, and passes on the ability to resist the infectious agents it historically has had contact with as a form of epigenetic immune memory. That explains why when Europeans arrived in America where natives had never had contact with smallpox before, the indigenous population was completely devastated by a disease Europeans had long developed some immunity to. A disease that made Europeans sick, wiped-out native Americans. After 1492, tens of millions of American Indians died of European diseases, opening the continent for easy conquest. That did not happen in Africa because Africans and Europeans were geographically closer, sharing many diseases in common and enjoying a high degree of shared immunity.    

1992 in Uganda

            What about today with Covid-19, the threat of H5N1 highly pathogenic avian influenza, and who knows what else – Nipah, Zika, Mpox, West Nile and Chikungunya viruses for example? According to the World Health Organization (WHO), as of the end of June 2025, 1,225,181 Americans had died of Covid-19 - SARS-CoV-2 - and 7,098,155 had died worldwide. According to that count, The United States lost more lives than any other country in the world to Covid, far more than the second hardest hit country, Brazil at 702,916. Undoubtedly those numbers are incorrect because many countries like China undercounted and downplayed their losses for political purposes. Others such as India and many in Africa were overwhelmed, unable or unwilling to accurately record precisely who died of what during the pandemic. Both India and China probably suffered millions more deaths than reported. Current scientific estimates range to more than eighteen million deaths worldwide due to Covid-19.       

            The greatest pandemic in recorded history was the Black Plague during the 14^th and 15^th Centuries that cut the population of Europe almost in half. Caused by a bacteria carried by fleas on rats, it originated in Central Asia. The greatest viral pandemic on record was the 1918-20 H1N1 Spanish flu that started in swine in Kansas. That strain of avian influenza jumped from birds to pigs to humans and was carried by American WW1 doughboys to Europe. Then it spread globally. The 1918 pandemic killed approximately 675,000 Americans and an estimated fifty million or more worldwide. In the U.S. the case-mortality rate was 2% - twice what it was for Covid-19.

            After I was infected by a deadly virus in 1983, I eventually became an independent disease researcher and focused on understanding immunology and virology, and how viruses and cells interact with the immune system. When Ebola broke out in 2014, I contacted two of the affected governments explaining that scientific journals had reported that selenium could reduce the mortality rate of the closest viral relative of Ebola, Marburg virus, and of another hemorrhagic fever disease caused by hantavirus. After the Ministry of Health (MoH) of Liberia asked me to immediately bring selenium to test against Ebola, I flew to Monrovia. In less than six hours after I arrived Dr. Jerry Brown was administering my 200mcg sodium-selenite, selenium tablets to patients at Liberia’s first Ebola treatment unit. In less than three weeks, adding 1.2mg of selenium daily to standard supportive care increased the Ebola survival rate by 54.5%. If they had used the higher daily dose of 2.0mg as I had recommended, the survival rate should have increased by 75%. However, they said I had not brought enough selenium, and they wanted to share it among all the patients. After seeing how effective sodium selenite was, the MoH ordered over 6,000 bottles, one for each Ebola patient they had. During the entire 2014-16 West African Ebola epidemic, no other medicine proved as effective at saving lives as selenium. It is a shame the U.S. and the WHO failed to learn that lesson. They again failed to use broad-spectrum antiviral selenium to save lives from Covid-19 just a few years later even though in January 2020 a selenium-based drug, Ebselen, proved to be the most effective out of 10,000 drugs tested. Loss of learning and failure to learn or apply science caused the greatest loss of life from a sudden pandemic in a century.    

              When the SARS-2 coronavirus emerged from the Wuhan Seafood Market in January 2020, the Centers for Disease Control (CDC), the National Institutes of Health (NIH), and the WHO repeated their standard advisory ad nauseum – “There is no treatment. There is no cure.” That was a lie. True, there was no cure. But there were partially effective, broad-spectrum antiviral drugs including selenium, aspirin and Ebselen. Those were the same phrases authorities used when HIV and Ebola first jumped the species barrier emerging from the virosphere – “no treatment, no cure”. The NIH and CDC falsely told people that no early effective therapies existed. However, if they simply had reviewed the research that had been conducted after the SARS-1 epidemic in 2002 or had not totally ignored broad-spectrum antiviral medicines instead of solely focusing on developing new pharmaceuticals, they would have known that low-dose aspirin, selenium and some other NF-kapppaB inhibitors could have slowed the progression of Covid-19 from initial infection. That probably could have saved over two thirds of those who lost their lives. Instead, people were told to take zinc, and vitamins C and D3. Those supplements did not save lives.

       Viruses do not cause disease and death by depleting zinc, vitamin C, or D3 from the body. Viruses cause death by depleting selenium from our cells, organs, and the immune system. The loss of selenium causes a devastating downward spiraling chain of events that leads to the domino effect of hyperinflammation, cellular destruction, cellular toxin release, sepsis, additional selenium loss, multiorgan failure, and death. At any point, supplementing adequate amounts of selenium, as we did with Ebola in Liberia, can reverse the decline of immune function and save lives. Although I had written an essay about this therapeutic strategy as early as February 2020 and emailed Dr Tony Fauci’s assistant at the NIH in March 2020, medical authorities never recommended selenium, aspirin and broad-spectrum antiviral drugs against Covid-19 – except for the more potent NF-kappaB inhibitor dexamethasone – but only after the disease had severely progressed. These beneficial drugs still are not used as adjunct therapy for Covid. If these broad-spectrum antiviral medications had been used as both early and late therapy for Covid-19 patients in 2020-21, over 800,000 American lives probably could have been saved. Tragically, they were not.     

 

Howard Armistead is author of “The Report of the Technical Working Group on Selenium” for the Zambian Ministry of Health (2007), and the books Understanding Covid-19, How 500,000 American Lives Could Have Been Saved (2023) and Dear Bill Gates, How to End Serial Pandemic Failure, HIV-1 to Covid-19. (2022) Both are available on Amazon.com. Mr. Armistead has consulted for the Ministry of Health (MoH) of Zambia on both H5N1 and HIV, and the Ministry of Health of Liberia on Ebola virus disease (EVD). He has studied the intersection of viruses, cells, and immune system since 1990 and has attended over 57 AIDS, virology, and TB conferences worldwide.