Review of Howard Armistead's Scientific Insights

      A Historic Review of Howard Armistead's Research, from Most to Least Significant     

        The following is a list of Howard Armistead’s scientific insights and contributions to health research. It proceeds from the most to the least significant and mentions a few of the over fifty-seven AIDS and virology conferences he has attended in eighteen countries between 1991 and 2021. Since 1990 Mr. Armistead has primarily attempted to improve the understanding of the cause, pathogenesis, and the effects of pandemic viral diseases including HIV/AIDS, Ebola, Zika, SARS-1 and -2, and H5N1 highly pathogenic avian influenza.

He is currently writing essays on uterine fibroids and on sickle cell anemia. Armistead writes medical essays that translate complex medical science into understandable language. He does not author medical journal articles. His essays can be found on his weblog CloserToaCure.com and on his website Winagainsthiv.com. From that homepage one can click through to Winagainstebola.com.    

1. In the essay “How HIV Causes AIDS”, I was the first person to scientifically explain how HIV does not cause AIDS by infecting and then killing CD4 cells, although that does occur. Instead, HIV causes AIDS by reducing and preventing the production of new CD4 cells – immune cells that, with a few exceptions, live for only four days. This is theoretically revolutionary. It is the opposite of how everyone has taught HIV causes AIDS for the last four decades. 

        In 2001, Dr David Ho shocked the top 3,500 AIDS researchers in the world when he explained in his keynote address to the first “scientific” conference on AIDS in Buenos Aires, Argentina that HIV does not cause AIDS by killing CD4 cells. Ho said, “something else must be happening.” But Ho did not explain what that was. In “How HIV Causes AIDS” I explain what that “something else” is. That is, the HIV virus Env gene genetically encodes selenium containing proteins the virus requires for replication. That gradually depletes selenium levels in cells, the immune system, and the body. The decline in selenium levels reduces the impulse for the thymus gland to produce new CD4 cells, thus causing the number of CD4 cells to gradually diminish, eventually resulting in immunity deficiency. However, because my theory has not been published, except primarily on my weblog, no one knows about it. I plan to include that essay in my next book. The essay “How HIV Causes AIDS” can be found on CloserToaCure.com

         This remarkable insight is important because if scientists want to cure a disease, it is important to   correctly understand how the disease is caused and how it progresses. My essay provides an          opportunity to rethink and understand viral disease in general and suggests how researchers might be   able to improve treatment for other viral diseases, especially deadly respiratory viral pandemics.   

I eventually reimaged the acronym and suggested AIDS is more accurately rendered as         Acquired Immune Deficiency of Selenium instead of acquired immune deficiency syndrome. The    word syndrome is less appropriate because it implies the cause of this complex disease remains    unknown. Now scientists can understand more precisely how the HIV virus causes AIDS. That is by   depleting selenium and reducing the impulse for the thymus to create new, short-lived CD4 cells.    

2. Broad-spectrum antiviral drugs. It seems inconceivable that modern medicine has failed to recognize the existence of broad-spectrum antiviral drugs – also known as nuclear-factor kappaB inhibitors (NF-kBIs). I met Nobel laureate Dr David Balitimore when he lectured at Cal Tech in Pasadena before he became president of that university. Baltimore and his lab assistant Ranjan Sen discovered the ubiquitous human protein NF-kB in 1986. NF-kB is a transcription factor located in every human and animal cell where it plays a critical role stimulating protein production, especially when a cell divides and needs to create new proteins by quantumly greater increments. Besides playing a key role in cellular division and reproduction, the NF-kB protein also is the primary stimulant to both inflammation and viral replication. Baltimore and Sen’s discovery of NF-kB helped explain how anti-inflammatory drugs work. Before that, the exact mechanism of action of NSAIDs was unclear. However, what everyone in clinical medicine apparently has continued to overlook or just plain ignore, is that inhibiting NF-kB and inflammation also inhibits viral replication. Therefore, all NSAID drugs also work as broad-spectrum antiviral drugs. How could the entire medical community have missed that? That is not just one piece of a gigantic scientific puzzle that has been dropped on the laboratory floor. It is the key to the puzzle that helps decipher viral disease. In times of viral pandemics – like Covid-19 – should we continue to allow people to die because health authorities and physicians fail to recognize more than a dozen drugs of widely varying strengths that slow viral replication and disease progression? Or logically, if we want to save lives, shouldn’t we test all those NSAIDs to determine which ones work most effectively against which viral diseases and at what point it is best to administer them? If so, then why don’t we conduct those clinical trials? The reason? There is no profit in it and no research infrastructure exists to support clinical trials of low-cost but often highly effective existing off-patent medications. Logically, we all should ask the fundamental question, why is there no profit in saving people’s lives. However, we can easily resolve that moral and ethical dilemma by conducting randomized controlled clinical trials (RCTs). It is relatively cheap to conduct RCTs for currently approved off-patent NSAID medications. Then why is that research not being conducted? Is something fundamentally wrong with our medical research system that always seems to place corporate profits above the importance of human life? 

Who knew that all NSAID drugs are also effective antiviral drugs – even broad-spectrum antiviral drugs? No one? That is outrageous. It defies logic. Evidently this simple scientific fact has flown under the radar and escaped the attention of the larger medical community since 1986. So, if a few scientists knew but most physicians did not recognize this, why didn’t we use NF-kB inhibitors when we needed them against Covid-19? Are the medical research system and upgrades to clinical best practices and standards of care rigged against patients? Obviously, it is overdue that we finally learn how to utilize NF-kB inhibitor broad-spectrum antiviral drugs by systematically conducting randomized controlled clinical trials. Who will help overcome this inexcusable roadblock to medical progress and improved human health by funding RCTs to help find a solution to one of the greatest dangers to humanity – the perpetual and increasing threat of worldwide viral pandemics? 

3. The creation of SAM Combination Therapy. Based on the perfect chart of serological data provided by the Multicentered AIDS Cohort Study (MACS) at UCLA, my first scientific observation in 1991 was that aspirin can strongly increase CD4 white blood cell count – a least for about a year. In 1999 I similarly observed that selenium nutritional supplements could increase CD4 count and the CD4/CD8 ratio for an extended time, almost continuously. Knowing that there was a second medicine that could increase CD4 count and the desperate need in Africa for any affordable effective way to treat HIV disease, I realized if I could combine selenium and aspirin therapy with a multi-vitamin-mineral tablet to insure general health, that combination could provide the first affordable effective medicine to help fight HIV in Africa and elsewhere. It could also serve as complementary therapy to standard HIV treatment in advanced nations.    

In 1999 while campaigning for improved AIDS therapies on Capitol Hill in Washington DC, Representative Jim McDermott, Ranking Member of the Health Subcommittee of the House Ways       and Means Committee arranged for me to meet with Dr. Kenneth Bridboard Director of the                   Fogerty International Center at the National Institutes of Health (NIH). Dr Bridboard determined who received all the grants the NIH gives for international research. Bridboard was quite taken by my discussion of NF-kB inhibitors because no one else was talking about this cellular “target” to inhibit viral replication. After our meeting Dr Bridboard invited me to attend the Fogarty Center’s upcoming Second International Conference on the Prevention of Mother to Child Transmission at McGill University in Montreal, Canada. He said the Fogerty International Center would pay for my $600 conference fee because he wanted me there “to add to the discussion.” I was privileged to attend that meeting of approximately four hundred scientists and met more than a dozen ministers of health from various African countries. I informally introduced SAM Combination Therapy at that Conference. The next year, 2000, I attended my first AIDS conference in Africa, in Durban, South Africa where I distributed approximately 20,000 pieces of literature describing my combination of selenium, aspirin and a multivitamin tablet to the 25,000 delegates who attended from one hundred countries. I billed SAM Therapy as the first effective, affordable combination therapy for the developing world. It was.      

4. How some viruses cause disease. Although evolutionary biology traces the NF-kB protein at least as far back as the drosophila fruit fly, it traces selenium’s role in cell biology back to the very first single cell organisms. In the primordial ooze, selenium may have been what helped organize the first cells out of a conglomeration of unorganized molecules. Nonetheless, today selenium plays two critical roles in cellular biology. First, proteins that contain selenium – selenoproteins - are the key, active components of most antioxidants that keep cells healthy, clean, and detoxified. That means selenium is key to what one might call the cell’s own miniature immune system - antioxidants. That would help explain why selenium is also the critical ingredient required for the full scale human immune system to function properly. Selenium is concentrated in all the cells and organs of the immune system. Because of the central role it plays in both animal and cellular biology, biologists refer to selenium as the “universally protective element.” 

Secondly, selenium plays an essential structural role in cell biology because selenium molecules perform a connective function, like nails in lumber construction. They join the lipoproteins that compose cellular membranes. Cells collapse instantly if they lack or lose the selenium they require for structural integrity. As a key component of most antioxidants selenoproteins also play a vital role of protection for the oxidant producing mitochondria that power cellular functions.                

In many, perhaps most enveloped viruses, selenium plays an analogous role. The viral Env envelope gene encodes a selenium containing protein that helps form the protective viral envelope. Thus, each time that type of virus replicates, that uses up a tiny portion of the selenium reserve of the cell or organ in which it is replicating. As viral replication and viral loads increase, that progressively depletes selenium from those cells, organs, and the immune system. As selenium levels decline, the impulse to the thymus to produce new CD4 cells declines in tandem with immunity. As the loss of selenium progresses and oxidative damage increases, some cells eventually collapse, spilling out their internal oxidants and toxins. That damages other nearby cells and instigates a chain reaction of cellular destruction that generates a cytokine storm torrent of immune messenger signals. That hyper-cytokine reaction results in sepsis, multi-organ-failure, and finally death. However, in many cases, selenium supplementation has been shown to reverse this entire deadly biochemical cascade and prevent mortality.  

What only a few scientists know or recognize is that the HIV Env gene encodes selenoproteins that constitute the viruses’ protective outer envelope. This arcane knowledge is never mentioned in any conference or other discussion of HIV. It is reported in only a few obscure scientific journal articles. My theoretical application of this extremely esoteric fact helps explain how viruses deplete selenium, cause disease, and how they kill. The Env envelop gene of many viruses encode protective selenoproteins to form their own envelopes. Viruses that replicate faster or require more atoms of selenium and deplete selenium faster, kill faster. That is true of Ebola whose viral envelope is quite large, and it replicates rapidly.            

5. My fifth accomplishment in practical science was in 2014 when I advised the Liberian Ministry of Health that selenium in the form of sodium selenite should help reduce the mortality rate of the Ebola-Zaire virus. I knew selenium should help those with Ebola survive because I recalled reading a letter to a medical journal a few years earlier where German physicians reported that 2mg of selenium daily had reduced the mortality rate to zero in an outbreak of Marburg virus in Angola. Marburg is Ebola’s closest viral cousin and causes a similar hemorrhagic fever disease. In 2014, Marburg was the only other known filovirus. I was also familiar with the science that confirmed that 2mg of selenium daily greatly reduces the mortality rate of the Hantan hemorrhagic fever virus that is carried by some rodent populations. 

After the Liberian Ministry of Health (MoH) asked me to bring selenium from Johannesburg to Monrovia, a member of the Liberian Supreme Court and her military escort met me at the airport and rushed me to a meeting with the Chief Medical Officer of the MoH and her consultant from the Clinton Health Initiative. [You can see our picture together at winagainstebola.com if you access that through the home page of winagainsthiv.com] Within six hours of landing at the Monrovia airport bringing sixty bottles of sodium selenite, nurses were administering that selenium to Ebola patients at ELWA-2, Liberia’s first Ebola treatment unit - ETU. In the end, selenium quickly reduced the preexisting Ebola mortality rate by 43.6%, even though Dr Jerry Brown used a dosage 40% lower than the 2mg daily I recommended. After they witnessed that remarkable result, the MoH ordered one bottle of selenium at $6.50 each for each Ebola patient they then had – over 2,400 bottles. I could have charged more but I did not. Dr Jerry Brown, the physician who administered the selenium to his patients at ELWA-2 was named Time magazine’s Person of the Year for 2014. But our selenium research breakthrough was never mentioned, and attempts were made to cover it up. The US Department of Defense and the NIH had spent tens of millions of dollars developing their own potential anti-Ebola drugs and they did not want another effective therapy competing with theirs, even though theirs was still in development and not ready to test in humans. It is obvious that more people died of Ebola than necessary during that 2014-16 epidemic due to the failure to use selenium therapy more widely in all three of the affected countries instead of just for some patients in Liberia. About 14,000 West Africans died in that epidemic of Ebola-Zaire, the largest Ebola epidemic in history. There is more to this story, but that comes three years later in the next Ebola epidemic in Eastern Congo’s Kivu province when they finally tested those other four experimental drugs. 

    However, at the time, the leader of the Medicines Sans Frontières’s (MSF) effort in Liberia told me at the daily morning Ebola emergency meeting in the Ministry of Health boardroom that he had been fighting Ebola for 20 years in the Congo and had never heard that selenium could help against the disease. However, I had been fighting HIV/AIDS for 25 years and had been reading medical journal articles from medical school libraries – not isolated in the jungle. Thus, I made the connection between HIV, Marburg, Hantan virus, and Ebola, and was able to provide the only significantly effective treatment for Ebola virus disease (EVD) during that entire West African Ebola epidemic of 2014-16.  

6. Ebselen, Selenium, and NF-kBIs Are Effective Against Covid-19. I explained that in my two self-published books, 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.  Given my subsequent research and understanding on how these basic medicines could have been used to save lives during the Covid-19 pandemic, today I would estimate that in fact 800,000 or 900,000 American lives probably could have been saved if American health authorities had done the right thing and used low-dose aspirin, selenium, and other broad-spectrum antiviral drugs from the start of infection and the start of the pandemic. Millions of lives could have been saved worldwide. Many trillions of dollars in public and private expenditure and lost economic output could have been saved as well. 

It is unnecessary to explain that fully here, but because today we live in the Age of Pandemics, it would behoove national and international health authorities to stop ignoring or even denying scientific facts. During the Covid-19 pandemic the world was continuously confused by understandably desperate, but medically semiliterate people who thought broad-spectrum antiparasitic drugs like hydroxy-chloroquine and especially ivermectin could treat a viral disease. Unfortunately, those proponents did not seem to appreciate that Covid is caused by a virus, not a parasite. So antiparasitic drugs probably would not work – and ivermectin is a poison of limited use. However, that misinformed, disinformation spreading ivermectin movement existed only because the NIH failed miserably to offer any, even marginally effective, therapeutic remedy for early Covid infection. Unwittingly, the NIH generated its own nemesis. US health authorities repeatedly, falsely claimed nothing could help treat early SARS-2 infection. Meanwhile the NIH ignored my four emails from Johannesburg to Tony Fauci’s deputy, Dr Clifford Lane in Bethesda that correctly explained that Ebselen, selenium, and NSAID/NF-kBIs work as broad-spectrum antivirals and can be used from the very start of infection to slow disease progression and reduce deaths due to SARS-CoV-2. Copies of those emails are found on pages 122-125 of Understanding Covid-19. [One needs to read the essays attached to those emails, all of which are in the book.] I have met Dr Fauci many times and Clifford Lane on several occasions since 1994, so they should have recognized the source of the emails that Dr Lane acknowledged receiving. 

In addition to ignoring my repeated attempts to point them toward a valid scientific approach by providing early therapeutic interventions against the infection, NIH, CDC, and WHO health authorities also ignored the research that had been conducted following the SARS-1 pandemic scare of 2002. And how could they all have missed the Chinese research published in January 2020 that showed the selenium-based drug Ebselen was the most effective drug to inhibit SARS-CoV-2 replication out of 10,000 drugs tested. Shouldn’t they have followed up on that? In addition, authorities ignored the basic medical principle that early therapy is the best therapy. How could both American and international health officials have possibly ignored all those different sources of solid scientific evidence? One can only assume some entity had been looking to profit from the international emergency, and it was not in their interest to do so. Meanwhile, the Covid-19 pandemic cost the American government and its taxpayers an estimated three trillion dollars, added to the national debt. Who will eventually pay for that? Certainly not those who profited hugely from the pandemic by ignoring beneficial drugs that should have been used to save lives.   

Health authorities failed to recommend even a rudimentary antiviral treatment for early therapy for Covid-19 like the one I had recommended. Then they boldly lied in editorials in major medical journals that nothing could help against early infection. That incompetence and then deception not only caused but then fueled the desperate hope of those who promoted hydroxychloroquine and ivermectin. It also contributed to dissolving overall public faith in government authorities concerning vaccines. The Carnival of Pandemic Confusion was buttressed by the sideshow of antivaxxer Luddites who barked “Vaccine immunity bad. Natural Immunity good!” at anyone who would listen. However, that flat-Earth, anti-science brigade failed to warn their adherents that for most people to achieve natural immunity, many people would have to die, and millions of others would be left to deal with long Covid, including multiple health problems and autoimmune disease, for months and years to come. Thus, there was a heavy price for both government and society to pay for the failure of health authorities to provide a less than perfect solution when they wandered off into the new drug development wilderness in search of the perfect solution that in the end was not really all that perfect either.          

7. H5N1 Influenza and Naproxen/Aleve. In 2024, after I presented Senator Tim Kaine copies of my two books and alerted him to the potential impending danger of an H5N1 flu pandemic, his office called and asked me to write a report concerning that issue. After four months and reading 450 medical journal articles, I sent Senator Kaine’s office a 48-page medical essay that included 145 scientific references detailing the dangers of this highly pathogenic – deadly - strain of avian influenza. H5N1 has been circulating in birds worldwide for several years and virologists say it is only one – very difficult – mutation away from becoming transmissible between humans. In 2025, H5N1 killed thirty-six people in Cambodia alone, with a mortality rate there of 41%. But Cambodians caught it directly from ducks and chickens they ate or were in their yards. H5N1 was not contagious between people – yet. Elsewhere some colonies of mammals such as sealions in Argentina have experienced mortality rates exceeding 90% and seemed to have passed it among themselves. Meanwhile, H5N1 has killed half of all American bald eagles in the past three years. Epidemiologists have suggested highly pathogenic H5N1 influenza might be the next super killer pandemic to devastate humanity – but they might be wrong. It could be a new resistant SARS-2 variant. However, it would benefit humanity to learn how to improve survival rates from all strains of influenza that even in off years kill an average of 36,000 mostly elderly Americans.                    

In my research for Senator Kaine, I uncovered an obscure fact almost no scientists are aware of. Like a golden needle laying undisturbed in a haystack of scientific journal articles, the absolute most esoteric fact is that sodium-naproxen, known as Aleve, is the most effective drug to prevent influenza viral replication. That means naproxen should be the strongest drug to treat influenza. However, this extremely arcane science is totally overlooked and is virtually unknown because it has only been reported once in the literature. Although this was discovered in the laboratory, no randomized clinical trials (RCTs) have been conducted. That is outrageous - or ominous. That critical knowledge should be used to save lives from flu today. It should have been tested yesterday. Are Americans and the world health community whistling past the graveyard again with a potential highly pathogenic influenza pandemic as we did with Covid-19, while at the same time failing to test an extremely effective remedy? Unfortunately, yes. If H5N1 is our next deadly pandemic – a 30% chance in my opinion – many millions of Americans will die. What economic impact will that have? How many trillions of governmental and non-governmental costs and losses will that incur? Yes, there are several anti-flu medications currently available. But the rapidly mutating influenza virus becomes resistant to all of those within five days – but not to naproxen. And naproxen is effective against every strain of flu. Why haven’t RCTs been conducted to confirm naproxen’s powerful effect against influenza and to help prevent deaths? Are health authorities playing with fire or just playing hooky?  

There appears to be a dangerous pattern of neglect and disregard by the Department of Health and Human Services for essential life-saving medical research. How can we overcome this woeful lack of scientific honesty and medical moral courage that appears corrupted by a profit-at-any-cost mentality? America needs to conduct a critically important, life-saving and national economy protecting RCT of naproxen against influenza as soon as possible. And we need to build a cost-efficient research platform infrastructure to conduct such clinical trials against many diseases - the Virginia Institute of Clinical Health Research - VICHR.      

8. The editor of the “wellness” section of the Washington Post has written that nothing can boost the immune system. How wrong she is. She also opined that vitamins cannot cure any diseases. Wrong again. That claptrap is pure medical disinformation. In fact, the first modern clinical trial in 1747 showed that vitamin C can cure scurvy, a major health problem and death threat to oceanic sailors of that era. That first randomized controlled clinical trial was conducted by Dr James Lind, ship’s surgeon aboard the British warship HMS Salisbury. Lind’s discovery became a military secret for fifty years and helped Britian rule the seas for the next two centuries. 

Despite the above “wellness” editor’s opinion, selenium is the strongest medicinal agent to boost immunity. The standard measure of immune function is the CD4 “helper” white blood cell. Selenium supplementation is the strongest medicinal agent proven to increase CD4 count. There is plenty of evidence. But this knowledge is ignored by almost everyone in clinical medicine to the detriment of humanity - especially the poor, sick, aged, and people with immune deficiency. However, there is no incentive for the medical community to recommend selenium. Instead, there are incentives not to. Nevertheless, the failure to use selenium to boost immunity and as both preventative and complementary therapy increases costs and reduces positive health outcomes in the American healthcare system. The governmental and university research systems can and should do better for the American people, but instead they both prioritize the interests of the highly profitable pharmaceutical industry. So how can society break that longstanding logjam of clinical research inertia that could then improve the health of millions? Someone must think outside the box of the standard methodology and raise the funding to establish an innovative clinical research platform that puts the health of people first.     

9. Aspirin (acetyl-salicylic acid - ASA) can increase CD4 count. That was my first discovery, made through self-experimentation in my own body in 1990-91. I was the first person in the world to report that scientific observation in my abstract at the 1992 International AIDS Conference in Amsterdam. Ten years later, working with immunologist Dr Elopy Sibanda in Zimbabwe, my continuing research demonstrated that aspirin alone could increase CD4 count more than twice as high and for twice as long – approximately one year – as the first anti-AIDS drug AZT could. That indicated that aspirin, which costs less than $1 per month, was superior to AZT that costs $1,200 per month. Aspirin also has far fewer adverse side effects than the highly toxic AZT. No wonder physicians in the early 20th Century called aspirin “the miracle drug”. The question is, why didn’t we use aspirin and test many other stronger NF-kBIs against HIV? Was aspirin just too cheap? Too common? Obviously, someone was making excessive profits from AIDS, and they did not want any competition. But people were dying – including scores of my friends and acquaintances. What can we say about the medical ethics and morality of that? What would Hippocrates think? Even he used aspirin in its herbal form, the bark of the white willow tree.

When I first noticed that my CD4 count had skyrocketed after I added one tablet of aspirin a day to the AZT I had been taking, I asked my AIDS specialist immunologist in Santa Monica, California why that had happened. He immediately responded, “Oh. We know aspirin is an immune booster because it reduces prostaglandin E2.” I was shocked that my physician knew something was an immune booster but had not told me. It was my immune system that needed boosting.

  That raises the question if the whole scientific and physician community knew something was an immune booster, why did they fail to use it to treat a disease of immune deficiency? What about best practices and standards of care? Did those prevent physicians like mine from informing their patients of something that should help? Why did AIDS researchers test and use the repurposed cancer drug AZT that inhibits viral replication but barely increases CD4 immune levels instead of conducting clinical trials of the evidently scientifically well-known immune booster aspirin - ASA? I eventually demonstrated that ASA alone could boost immunity twice as high and for twice as long as toxic AZT alone could. Indeed, why was that mistake repeated again with Covid-19 when scientists should have known aspirin is a broad-spectrum anti-viral drug but failed to inform physicians or the public they could use it to slow the initial progress of Covid, or later by helping prevent platelet activation that would reduce or delay the onset of the cytokine storm that leads to sepsis? Again, this raises the question of how and how quickly physician best practices and clinical guidelines can be revised and disseminated during an official international pandemic emergency. Such emergencies require prescient action, not scientific obfuscation or ethical deletion.          

From 1993 through 1995 I attended every monthly meeting of the UCLA AIDS Institute Community Advisory Board – CAB. At almost every meeting I mentioned the topic of aspirin and suggested the HIV community needed someone to conduct additional clinical trials of it against HIV, especially because protease inhibitors had not yet become available. Finally, the director of research there, Dr Ron Mitsuyasu said to me, “Howard, we know aspirin helps against HIV, BUT WE ARE NOT GOING TO TEST IT!” With his admission that I was correct with my campaign to try to get aspirin tested against HIV, and that in fact it is effective, and by extension that other NF-kBIs are, I never needed to attend another UCLA CAB meeting again. Their door was shut to innovative off-patent drug repurposing research, no matter how beneficial. Thus, while Professor John Fahey of UCLA had pleaded for scientists to discover drugs that would inhibit NF-kBIs at the national AIDS Clinical Trials Group Conference in Washington D.C., Professor Ron Mitsuyasu was denying that UCLA would ever test aspirin, a drug that already had shown the ability to reduce HIV replication and improve health in a small trial in 1990 at Columbia University. That also eliminated the potential for testing more potent NF-kBIs. The order of the day at UCLA was cutting-edge new drug development only. That was where the money was.  

That demonstrates the ongoing preference for new drug development over drug repurposing and the desire to seek a subjectively perfect future solution while ignoring a quite beneficial, even if imperfect, currently available one. Indeed, AIDS research demonstrates a Janus-faced split personality that often looked in both directions at the same time. It was willing to repurpose exorbitantly priced toxic drugs that provide little benefit like AZT, but was unable to consider repurposing far cheaper, safer, more effective, common drugs like ASA/aspirin. That has resulted in an international travesty of medical justice for people with HIV that ended with millions of premature deaths.      

10. Uterine Fibroids (UFs), medically referred to as leiomyomas or simply myomas, are a problem that symptomatically affects over one billion women worldwide at any one time. UFs are the leading cause of hysterectomies and the second or third leading cause of infertility, miscarriage, Cesarean birth, premature birth, and low birthweight babies. Myomas cause many additional stressful and painful physical effects and are a major impediment to women’s health and happiness. Working in an animal model, Japanese researchers have shown that selenium supplements can shrink the size of UFs by almost 50%. Because myomas may constitute the underlying cause of many pregnancy complications and those same complications have been shown to be partially alleviated by selenium supplementation, it may be that selenium manifests its beneficial effects in pregnancy, in large part, by reducing the underlying physiological stresses caused by myomas. This should be an urgent subject for researchers to investigate and confirm or refute through RTCs. How long must women continue to suffer, waiting for those studies to be conducted?     

Myomas are highly prevalent in premenopausal women. Over 70% of women develop them by age fifty. However, only about one-third of those with myomas are symptomatic, experiencing physical stress or medical problems. In addition to significant medical problems, symptomatic UFs cause both psychological and financial stress. Those one-third of women with symptomatic myomas amount to approximately thirty-seven million women in the U.S. alone. Based on a review of over 130 medical journal articles on myomas, their cause and therapies – treatments that are currently painful, expensive, and grossly inadequate – I am currently writing a medical essay that will propose a triple combination therapy for SCD that includes vitamin D3, curcumin, and selenium – DCS therapy to reduce the impact of myomas on women’s lives. All three of these nutraceutical therapies are safe and have been shown to provide significant benefits against myomas. Used together they should shrink myomas by 50-60% or more. Yet physicians do not use these medicines because they want to see more evidence. They deserve to see more. What we need to do is test these nutraceuticals separately in RCTs to determine what is the best dosage for each of the three medicines, and how much benefit each agent provides. Then physicians can upgrade their standard of care guidelines by including them to improve women’s and maternal health.        

11. Sickle cell anemia, now known as sickle cell disease (SCD) also is a condition ripe for discovering therapeutic improvements. According to some, SCD is the number one genetic disease in the world. It affects 4,000 Virginians, 100,000 Americans, and eight million worldwide, mostly in tropical Africa. Although an expensive and painful cure is now available at the cost of approximately one million dollars per person, according to my review of eighty-five medical journal articles, a low-cost combination therapy could be cobbled together consisting of vitamin D3, selenium, and low-dose aspirin. It is known that selenium helps against anemia in general. Both D3 and selenium have been shown to provide benefits against SCD by helping prevent or reduce the frequency or severity of the painful crises SCD patients experience. Evidently, aspirin does not help prevent those crises. However, because low-dose aspirin helps prevent heart attacks and strokes, and by preventing platelet activation it reduces the onset of cytokine storms, low-dose aspirin probably provides benefits down-stream of a SCD crisis event, and thus, might reduce deaths. As with myomas, RCTs should be conducted to measure the exact benefit D3 and selenium each provide and determine if aspirin may help improve outcomes down-stream of sickle cell crises.

12. In 2000 I wrote an essay titled “Taking the HIV Factory Tour” to explain how the HIV virus is produced inside a cell. That was conceived based on my experience when I worked as a cost-analyst on several developmental projects in the aerospace industry in Southern California - the Tomahawk missile program at Hughes Aircraft Electro-optical Division, the AAH-64 Apache Attack Helicopter at Hughes Helicopters, and the MX missile guidance system at Northrop Electronics. As part of those jobs, I traveled across both the U.S. and Canada visiting defense subcontractor plants where managers inevitably took me on the factory tour to see how whatever component part I was analyzing the cost of was produced. It was a fascinating job. By analogy, a human cell works like a microscopic sized factory, producing human proteins and assembling them as required to its genetic blueprint. When a virus infects a cell and hijacks its production machinery, the cell begins turning out viral instead of human proteins. It then assembles and releases thousands of viruses into intercellular space.

I distributed that essay at AIDS conferences in 2000. Then, after a friend brought it to the attention of the editor of the Journal of Tropical Pediatrics published at the Liverpool School of Tropical Medicine, Professor Ralph Hendrickse thought his readership would enjoy reading it, so he published it. Dr Hendrickse was later named dean of that school of tropical medicine. However, as I have never faced the academic imperative to publish or perish, that was the only essay I have published in a medical journal. That is because I do not write medical articles. Instead, I write medical essays and self-publish them, hoping to add to the scientific debate. To a greater or lesser extent, I have.

        In broad terms, “Taking the HIV Factory Tour” describes how an HIV virus enters the cell and its nucleus, and how it is produced. It highlights the stimulatory role the NF-kB protein “fuel” plays in the process. Oddly, even though the NF-kB transcription factor is central to HIV replication, it is never discussed at AIDS conferences. That is because unlike the reverse transcriptase and the proteases enzymes, NF-kB is not a viral enzyme unique or “specific” to HIV. Strangely it has not been considered a “target” for therapeutic intervention, even though it clearly is. Instead of a viral factor, NF-kB is a ubiquitous cellular factor that affects the production of most viruses. Unfortunately, scientists have failed to target this critical protein in our fight against HIV and other viral diseases because it is not specific to any one virus. Logically, that is self-defeating. As a result, millions of people perish prematurely compared to a delayed demise if they inhibit viral infection. 

NF-kB is so ignored, yet so incredibly powerful and central to most viral replication, remarkably, it was not discussed even at the Cellular Factors Conference in Pavia, Italy in April 1998. That certainly would have been a natural forum to discuss a cellular factor like NF-kB. Perhaps that omission was because a pharmaceutical company helped sponsor that conference. With only one hundred of the most elite researchers in the world attending, the Cellular Factors Conference was the most exclusive, elite scientific conference I ever travelled to. Half the scientists at the conference held at the historic University of Pavia did not seem to understand what the other scientists were talking about. They left presentations scratching their heads. Surrounded by professors from the Pasteur Institute, the University of Berlin, the Karolina Institute, Harvard and Stanford, although clearly out of my league, like them, I was dazzled by some of the research presented. That included a one million magnification electron microscope photo of an HIV virus extending a fishing line-like filament to hook and latch on to a CD4 cell as the virus floated by through intercellular space.     

Questionably, Professor Jay A. Levy, who I first met at the Yokohama Conference in 1994, did not even mention NF-kB in his standard textbook HIV and the Pathogenesis of AIDS second edition, 1998, even though that protein is critical to HIV replication. At the Bangkok AIDS Conference in 2004 in front of a standing room audience, I called Levy’s attention to his obvious oversight. He promised he would include this critical transcription factor in his next edition. It is regrettable that NF-kB is ignored to the profit of some, but to the detriment of the lives and health of millions, not just in HIV/AIDS but in all viral pandemics.   

13. In 2007 I wrote the Report of the Technical Working Group on Selenium for the Republic of Zambia Ministry of Health Directorate of Clinical Care and Diagnostic Services. Brigadier-General Dr. James Simpungwe asked me to help organize and then write the report of the Technical Working Group on Selenium within his directorate at the MoH in Lusaka, Zambia. General Simpungwe oversaw all government hospitals and clinics in Zambia and thought highly of my expertise in the uses of selenium to improve health. He asked me to help organize a group of top MDs, PhDs, pharmacists, and AIDS activists in Lusaka to review and discuss how selenium could be used to fight the AIDS pandemic in Zambia that had an 18% HIV prevalence rate and was killing 100,000 people – 1% of the nation’s population annually. Edited in concert with three of the most esteemed members of that medically high-ranking committee, the “TWIGS” report was “a systematic, scientifically based review and analysis of the properties of selenium and a description of its various actions.” It was designed “to understand how selenium relates to the immune system, HIV/AIDS and other diseases.” Among the many diseases the report suggested clinical trials of selenium should be conducted against are HIV/AIDS, tuberculosis, various cancers, sickle cell anemia, maternal health and infant mortality, diabetes, gastric ulcers, cholera, epilepsy and meningitis. 

Almost twenty years later, scientists still have not conducted those clinical trials because no    company finds it profitable to do so, and many do not want selenium as potential competition for    their drugs. Like a pharmaceutical Cinderella, selenium is too powerful, safe, and affordable to bring  to the Therapeutic Ball because apparently the pharmaceutical industry thinks it must be hidden away, covered up, and its science disavowed. But scientists who have worked with it and witnessed its   benefits first-hand have enthused in medical journals that selenium is “the miracle mineral”. By strengthening immune function, it literally works wonders in many, sometimes hopeless medical cases.  

In Zambia I witnessed many times when people who were getting sick with AIDS quickly bounced back after taking selenium. In one case I donated six bottles of selenium to Mother Teresa’s Hospice in Lusaka. I returned two months later to ask how people had benefited. Sister Mary explained that one girl about sixteen years old was emaciated, weak, and losing weight when she entered the hospice. Because the girl was young the nurses gave her selenium along with the usual maintenance therapies. Sister Mary told me that after receiving selenium the young girl started to gain weight, “got fat”, and was sent home because she was no longer dying. I personally witnessed many similar examples of rapid recovery from AIDS with selenium. But while people with AIDS petitioned and begged the Zambian Ministry of Health to release selenium from a corrupt government quarantine, higher officials argued that people should not have access to selenium because if they took it and saw the benefits of selenium against AIDS, they might not take AZT and D4t - a drug that soon caused an epidemic of painful peripheral neuropathy.   

14. Understanding the importance of the immune system in preventive health and medical treatment. The NF-kB protein was not discovered until 1986. It quickly became a subject of intense study. At a conference in the early 1990s in Washington D.C. of the NIH’s AIDS Clinical Trial Group – ACTG – that included America’s top university AIDS researchers, Dr. John Fahey, head of the LA Men’s Study arm of the NIH’s Natural History of AIDS Study was chairing the plenary session. Standing alone at the podium, Dr Fahey pleaded to the 250 university AIDS researchers assembled in the room, “If we could just find something to inhibit NF-kappaB!” I immediately moved to the floor microphone and responded, “Dr Fahey, aspirin inhibits NF-kB.” The room fell so silent one could hear a phlebotomist’s needle drop.                                                         

            The immune system is stronger than any drug ever developed. If a person’s immunity fails, they perish. Several years after I joined the NIH sponsored Multicentered AIDS Cohort Study, the MACS study at UCLA in April 1984, and it confirmed I was HIV positive after they developed the test for it in 1985, I started thinking more deeply about the prospect for advances in AIDS research. People were dying. Lots of people. I did not want to. I thought – if we could just learn how to control the immune system we would make progress. I wondered, what are the levers and gears of the immune system - the mechanisms, pathways, and the targets? How do we control or at lease influence them? That became my analytical strategic framework. Thus, through a continuing process of reading hundreds and then thousands of medical journal articles and analyzing the scientific evidence, after more than fifteen years I finally concluded that, if there is any, selenium is the key element for immune health. Later I realized viruses kill by depleting selenium from our cells and immune system, mostly by appropriating it to construct their own protective envelopes. The scientific journal literature explained that selenium is essential to the function of all aspects of the ultra-complex human immune system. As one selenium expert explained - if a person has enough selenium, their immune system will be strong. But if they don’t, it won’t be. Obviously, that is an oversimplification, but it is generally true nonetheless.  

Thus, one of the greatest failures of our medical and healthcare systems – among many others – is that it fails to recognize or utilize that fundamental scientific understanding. Using only pharmaceutical drugs and failing to harness the power of the immune system – and selenium – to improve health and fight disease, is like a surgeon operating using only half his brain, having only one eye open, and with one arm tied behind his back. Pharmaceutical companies apparently fear selenium because if people remain healthy, they will not require so many, often less effective but far more expensive drugs. Unfortunately, that seems to be true. That is a consequence of allowing the most profitable industry in history to dictate all health policy and research efforts. Then less effective but exorbitantly expensive drugs sometimes drive cheaper more effective medicines out of the market. The perfect example was AZT versus ASA – aspirin. The least effective, most toxic, most ridiculously expensive drug won. In 1987 Americans with HIV were desperate, dying of AIDS with no effective treatments available. They would fall for anything that had enough hype and the seal of approval of both the NIH and the pharmaceutical industry behind it. 

            Another example, in 2004 a researcher from Harvard working in Nigeria demonstrated that adding one 200mcg tablet of  selenium to a three-drug AIDS antiretroviral cocktail more than doubled the increase in CD4 count in advanced AIDS patients compared to the increased CD4 count produced by those three ARVs alone. That is why the pharmaceutical companies that produced those ARV drugs covered up the results of that tremendously important scientific breakthrough that could have helped millions worldwide living with HIV. The results of that clinical trial were only reported in a one-hour poster presentation at the Montreal AIDS Conference in 2006. The follow-up journal article that should have been published to inform the international scientific community of those results obviously was torpedoed.  

            In January 2020, when a selenium-based drug Ebselen showed that out of 10,000 drugs tested, it was the most effective at inhibiting SARS-CoV-2 replication, Ebselen was totally ignored by the NIH and the WHO. Then hundreds of thousands of excess deaths occurred in America as researchers took two years to develop another “new” drug that worked - probably no better than Ebselen does. That is Paxlovid. As previously mentioned, the same kind of coverup happened during the 2014-16 Ebola epidemic in West Africa. This serial coverup of the strongest immune booster and effective antiviral medicines threatens the lives of millions in all nations. This is especially true as pathogens increasingly develop drug resistance and some extend their territories due to global warming. 

    Whoever is willing to conduct randomized clinical trials against the many diseases selenium should help against, including sickle cell disease and fibroids, will unleash a veritable flood of positive therapeutic interventions that will not only improve world health but also should eventually lower the cost of medical care in America by keeping people healthier for longer and improving approaches to both complementary and preventative medicine.

15. Improving Pandemic Preparedness. Pandemics are sneaky. They come on suddenly out of nowhere, usually a bat cave in China or Tropical Africa, and descend on humanity like a flock of pigeons. Then viral contagion continuously races around the world for two years, mutating as it goes. They eventually burn themselves out, dissipating into thin air due to increased human immunity, leaving only their long tails of post-viral syndromes like long Covid, long Ebola, and long Zika, and a less virulent residual virus as endemic disease. Although medical historians believe influenza has affected us since humans first domesticated birds, over 200 other SARS viruses reside in cave dwelling bat populations in China alone. Those viruses are lined up, ready to emerge from the virosphere like jets waiting to land at LAX. A few will make their debut in our lifetime or the next. Three different SARS viruses emerged between 2002 and 2019, on average one every six years, so the world may well be due for another. How should we prepare for the next pandemic? Certainly not by ignoring selenium and other broad-spectrum antiviral drugs like we did with Covid-19. 

    Most discussions of pandemic preparedness focus on vaccines. Indeed, they are the sine qua non indispensable intervention to help limit deaths during pandemics. After twenty years spent developing an appropriate research platform, instead of years, it took only 43 days for vaccinologists  to develop the MMR vaccine for Covid-19. Still, it took many months to test, ramp up production, and then distribute vaccines worldwide. Luckily, SARS-CoV-2 had only a 1% mortality rate. What would have happened if SARS-2 had had a 10% mortality rate as SARS-1 had, or a 43% rate like another SARS virus, Middle Eastern Respiratory Syndrome (MERS) has? Then how many would have died while waiting almost a year for vaccine distribution – and waiting two years for new drug development? What are the potential economic costs of the next pandemic for both the U.S. and the world? National bankruptcies? A worldwide economic depression? Famine and mass migration? Or all three? Obviously, available, affordable, effective treatments for people to take from day one of a novel viral pandemic should be as indispensable as vaccines are. But while the U.S. budget prepares the nation for war, it leaves us defenseless against the more realistic threat to American lives of pandemics and the treatments that could help save those lives.   

    A critical question is, if we took twenty years to develop a platform for quickly developing an MMR vaccine, why haven’t we done the same to develop a platform for quickly testing broad-spectrum antiviral drugs? That is what I am proposing with the Virginia Institute for Clinical Health Research VICHR. That research infrastructure can save millions of lives, improve preventative medicine, and bring humanity closer to a cure for many diseases, including pandemic viruses.

Most modern pandemics are caused by respiratory viruses. An exception is AIDS. But mosquito vector born viruses including West Nile, Dengue fever, and Zika are also increasingly expanding their ranges and threat as the world continues to warm. Many viruses share some common characteristics, but they also vary greatly in their cellular targets and effects. The strategic mistake the NIH has made is that for every new virus, it thinks we need to develop a new, specific drug. That went horribly wrong with Covid-19. At least it did for the 800-900,000 excess Americans alone who died but probably would not have if they had been informed how to use safe, effective, available BSAVs from the beginning. Ebselen would have worked perfectly, but tragically the NIH, CDC, WHO and even the British National Health Service (NHS) failed to use it, in part because it was out of production. However, if health authorities had wanted to, they could have placed Ebselen back into production immediately. What about other stronger, broad-spectrum antiviral drugs? Thanks to British NHS clinical surveys, halfway into 2020 physicians finally began treating hospitalized patients with dexamethasone, a steroid anti-inflammatory fifty times as potent as aspirin. But there are over a dozen other broad-spectrum antiviral drugs with widely varying strengths including ibuprofen, naproxen (Aleve), and curcumin. The strongest, Tamoxifen, is more than five hundred times as potent as aspirin. Many of those NSAIDs and their relative strengths are listed on page 48 of my book Dear Bill Gates, How to End Serial Pandemic Failure, HIV-1 to Covid-19.

Here I will coin an acronym, BSAVs – broad-spectrum antiviral drugs. BSADs would sound less charming. So, what is it about NSAIDs? Yes, all non-steroid anti-inflammatory drugs do double duty as broad-spectrum antiviral drugs. That is because the primary stimulant of both inflammation and viral replication is the same human protein, NF-kappaB. Selenium, Ebselen, aspirin, naproxen, and a dozen other NSAID drugs and some steroid anti-inflammatory drugs like dexamethasone all work as broad-spectrum antivirals by inhibiting that stimulatory protein. Why don’t we use them? Why do physicians not even recognize the term broad-spectrum antiviral drugs? They are well acquainted with broad-spectrum antibacterial drugs. Why haven’t scientists tested BSAVs/NSAIDs to see which are most appropriate and effective against each virus? Why? Because virtually all medical research is financed and controlled by the pharmaceutical industry for their own benefit. That industry has no interest in BSAVs or BSADs. They want to develop a new – expensive – specific antiviral drug for each novel virus. That therapeutic strategy might be good for the pharmaceutical industry, but it is dangerous for everyone else, our grandchildren, and humanity. For that, we truly should B SAD.

My contribution to pandemic preparedness is trying to raise awareness of BSAVs, including selenium, and working to establish a research infrastructure to test them, nutraceuticals, immune boosters, and to repurpose other off-patent medicines. That research platform could be named the Virginia Institute for Clinical Health Research, or the Hampen-Sydney Institute for Clinical Health Research – take your pick. Choice is good. 

16. When the Zika epidemic struck in 2015, recalling my success with Ebola in Liberia, I researched and wrote an essay about Zika and contacted the Brazilian embassy in Pretoria, South Africa. But Brazil was going through a political crisis and did not have a sitting minister of health. At the embassy, that was the excuse for their inaction anyway. 

  During my deep-dive research on Zika I found that during a certain stage of embryonic growth, the outline of the developing nervous system is laid down over the course of just a few days. That developing embryonic nervous system requires an abundance of selenium as a key component of its protective neuronal sheathing. The Zika virus is both neurotropic – attracted to neurons, and selenophilic – selenium loving - and competes for and essentially consumes the selenium that is being used to create neurons, destroying them in the process. If a woman is infected by Zika prior to or during the embryonic development of the nervous system, the baby can be born without a brain – encephalitic – or be greatly impaired neurologically. The earlier in pregnancy the infection occurs, the worse the damage is.  

17. It is fascinating that during pregnancy, a woman’s selenium resources shift in her body away from its usual concentration in her immune system and towards the placenta and the developing embryo and then the fetus. Each newly formed cell requires selenium. Thus, a woman needs more selenium than usual both when she is pregnant and when breastfeeding. That is because the white blood cells - lymphocytes - in breast milk transmit the mother’s immunity and with it her selenium to her neonate, to the diminution of her own selenium supply. 

Selenium supplementation provides multiple benefits in pregnancy including reducing morning sickness and helping prevent viral infections that can cause birth defects, deftness, and life-long diseases, especially if infections occur during the first trimester. Selenium helps reduce high blood pressure during pregnancy– preeclampsia - and helps prevent miscarriage, premature birth, and low birthweight babies. I theorize that selenium supplements may potentially help prevent or reduce post-partum depression because selenium works as a slight mood elevator and helps against depression in general. Indeed, it may be that the loss of selenium due to fetal growth and then breastfeeding contributes to the development of postpartum depression. A RCT would help prove or disprove if selenium helps against postpartum depression and also possibly reduces the incidence of postpartum maternal and infant mortality. Many maternal and infant deaths occur during the 60 days following birth, not at the time of delivery. 

18. Improving the prospects of fertility. Section 10 above explains briefly how uterine fibroids may be the underlying condition that contributes to the cause of so many problems related to maternal health, including infertility. However reproductive infertility may be the result of either side of the sexual equation, male or female. According to my shallow dive into this subject, selenium supplementation contributes to improving the fertility of both men and women. Selenium concentrates in testes and increases both sperm count and mobility. Selenium supplementation is widely used in animal husbandry not only to keep herds and flocks of closely sheltered animals healthier and prevent the spread of disease, but also to improve their fertility, gestational health, and productivity, including egg production. It does all that for people too. Thus, it is obvious that selenium supplementation alone may often resolve the problem of human infertility, especially when it is used by both the man and women. In the introduction to my future full essay on uterine fibroids and maternal health, I relate an anecdote about a young couple in South Africa who had been attempting to conceive a child for six years, to no avail. Finally, in less than a year after they both started taking selenium supplements, they were rewarded with what they called their “selenium twins”. What a blessing.

  Although I cannot count this as a personal contribution to science or the scientific debate, I am calling attention to something that is right beneath our nose that we are ignoring, just as we ignore the huge potential of broad-spectrum antiviral drugs. Given the complexities of the reproductive process, it is obvious some couples would still need to rely on extremely expensive invitro fertilization and other advanced fertility methods. However, just like the joyous parents with their selenium twins in South Africa, many couples might be able to overcome the challenges and heartache of infertility simply by both hopeful parents using selenium supplements for several months. Think how much young couples can save by trying that initially for a year, as compared to infertility treatments that cost $30-40,000 per cycle and often take several cycles to conceive.

19. Commentaries in Southern Africa Newspapers During the Covid-19 Pandemic. When Covid-19 struck Southern Africa, it was an amazingly confusing time. Borders were closed, even between provinces. A person could not travel from one province to another without a reason related to health promotion and not without an expensive test to confirm their status as virus free. Those attempts at provincial and national quarantines imposed huge economic costs and utterly failed to prevent the spread of the disease. Even health professionals were confused by the torrential jumble of information and misinformation they were receiving from all corners of the internet. 

I overcame the pandemic babel by reading the New York Times and Washington Post every day, watching PBS NewsHour each morning, and reading the Economist weekly. When newspapers referenced important breaking science, I downloaded and printed out those specific journal articles and retained copies of all significant news articles filed by topic. When I had gathered enough material on any particularly timely subject related to the pandemic, I composed a well-sourced commentary and submitted it to a dozen newspapers in five countries. 

My company, SAM Nutritional Products distributed selenium to pharmaceutical wholesalers in six Southern African countries, so I was familiar with the newspapers in each. Because I had submitted articles about selenium’s benefits in the past and had advertised in some of them, I already knew many of the editors. Thus, when the pandemic hit, many were willing to publish my commentaries that usually ran over fifteen hundred words. The editors were pleased to receive the free, original, well-written, articles I emailed them at least once a month. Not all the papers ran all my commentaries, but some published most of them. Newspapers in Botswana, Eswatini, and Lesotho regularly ran most of the commentaries, and papers in South Africa, Namibia, and Zambia occasionally published some of them. I did not keep close track of which papers published each article but my article about the omicron variant ran in at least eight different newspapers including in five major media markets in South Africa. After I returned to the U.S. I complied many of those commentaries to form the basis of my book Understanding Covid-19, How 500,000 American Lives Could Have Been Saved. 

I was sorry at least fourteen of my pharmacist customers passed away from Covid-19, mostly men over sixty-five who died prior to the arrival of vaccines. One pharmacist told me he had been sick in the hospital but survived because he remembered to take selenium. Pharmacists were on the frontline of the pandemic from the start. Probably even more of my customers died that I was not aware of, but the fatalities appeared to end once vaccines became available.     

20. Making selenium the supplement of choice in South Africa against Covid-19. At the beginning of  the Covid pandemic in South Africa, I wrote several essays on why selenium would be the best medication to treat SARS-2 infection and Covid-19. That was based on selenium’s proven effectiveness as a broad-spectrum antiviral against numerous viruses including HIV, Ebola, Hantan, Marburg and many more that are cited in the medical literature. Plus, the selenium-based compound drug Ebselen had been shown to be the most effective medicine against SARS-2 replication out of 10,000 tested in a laboratory screening. SAM Nutritional Products mailed packages containing several of those essays along with copies of the Lancet medical journal review article “The importance of selenium to human health” to over 1,000 of our pharmacy customers in South Africa. Prior to our campaign educating pharmacists that selenium would be the best supplement to treat Covid-19, many of our competitors were promoting supplements that contained Vitamin C, D3, and zinc. However, my deep dive into the medical literature on each of those turned up no significant evidence for their benefit either inhibiting viral replication or helping significantly against other viral disease. However, the scientific support for selenium was solid and I shared that with customers. 

Several months after I had mailed those packages promoting selenium therapy to our customers, suddenly numerous other supplement companies, many with much greater financial backing, started to flood the market with lower dose, cheaper selenium and added selenium to their Covid focused supplements. Thus, the selenium nutritional supplement market that I had had mostly to myself for the previous fifteen years was suddenly deluged with cheaper products that contained only 50mcg of selenium competing with my full strength 200mcg products. By popularizing and helping make selenium the supplement of choice to fight Covid-19 in South Africa, I sealed the fate of SAM Nutritional Products that soon lost market share and failed financially. By winning the scientific argument that convinced other manufacturers and the public that selenium was the best supplement to treat Covid, I lost the economic battle and had to close-up shop. After twenty years in Africa fighting the selenium-viral pandemic wars it was time for me to return to my native Virginia and suffer the consequences of putting my humanitarian and health science crusade ahead of my personal self- interests. I would not have done it differently if I could. Despite a few ill-fated business decisions I made along the way that might have worked out better if I had decided differently, in the end it was no use crying over spilled Marula.  

My only regret concerning my efforts against Covid-19 is that the NIH ignored my early, correct advice to use Ebselen, selenium, and NSAID/NF-kB inhibitors. I firmly believe if they had followed that solid scientific approach from the start of the pandemic, they would not have saved just 500,000 American lives, they could have saved 800-900,000 American lives that were lost to Covid-19. The number of long Covid cases would have been reduced by 60-70%. Next time health authorities should do better. Next time they should follow the science instead of ignoring it.      

21. Postscript: Although it does not constitute an accomplishment per se, throughout my years of research, activism and as a health research advocate, I framed my educational efforts by using appropriate names and acronyms. I refer to when I worked for the U.S. government as Acronym Soup. When I moved to California in September 1977, I splashed down in a sea of acronyms at the DoD – the U.S. Department of Defense. My first career job after I completed my master’s degree at UVA in international relations (EBT – everything but thesis) was at the Defense Contract Administrative Services Management Area, Los Angeles – DCASMA-LA. In the Multi-centered AIDS Cohort Study (MACS) at UCLA, also known as the LA Men’s Study - LAMS - my participant number was 40623. 4 represented the fourth study site in the NIH sponsored study after John Hopkins, University of Pittsburg, and North-Western in Chicago. I was the 623rd person recruited for MACS at UCLA. MACS ran from March 1984 until March 2020, the largest and longest running study in the world of how HIV is transmitted from one person to another and how it progresses in the body and nervous system. That one study with over 5,000 participants discovered much of what we know about how HIV disease is transmitted and progresses.

MACS provided a perfect history of my serological data that clearly charted my immune status. That provided an accurate gage to judge if my eventual therapeutic self-experiments triggered a positive response or not. On the third experiment on myself with potential complementary therapies – each of which took six months - aspirin finally did the trick. It almost doubled my CD4 count. I immediately started visiting the medical journal stacks at the closest medical school libraries at the University of Southern California – USC – and UCLA, where I soon learned the language of the relevant journals and gradually metamorphosized into the autodidactic AIDS researcher I became. Still, I needed a name and a good acronym for letterheads to present my mostly medical library-based research and analysis. I used a few. First there was PARE – Project for Aspirin Research and Education. Then IPATH – International Project for Affordable Therapy for HIV. Then in 2000 I proposed SAM therapy, and in 2002 incorporated SAM Nutritional Products. SAM stands for selenium, aspirin and a multivitamin-mineral tablet. Finally, after 2014, comfortably ensconced in my larger residence in Johannesburg, I referred to my research office as the Selenium Research Center. 

Who financed my research and educational outreach to the world HIV/AIDS community and my trips to over 57 mostly international AIDS and virology conferences and the hundreds of thousands of educational flyers and informational booklets I passed out along the way, including perhaps twenty thousand copies of the 2000 reviews article in the Lancet medical journal, “The importance of selenium to human health”? At first, earnings from my real estate career in Los Angles covered the cost. After 2008 proceeds from my company SAM Nutritional Products that distributed selenium supplements to over 1,500 pharmacies in six countries of Southern Africa supported my efforts. Altogether I spent half a million dollars traveling to conferences and trying to educate professionals and the public about how first aspirin and NF-kBIs, and then also selenium helps against viral disease. Being self-financed allowed me complete independence in my research and to be able to follow it wherever it led. 

            My passion has always been to assist those who needed it most, the poor and forgotten who live with HIV in the epicenter of the world’s AIDS pandemic, Southern Africa. My upbringing taught me to help the less fortunate, as did the teachings of my religion. But no one else ever provided financial support for my research or educational campaigns. Finally, in 2022 I lost almost all my possessions for the second time in two years. The first was in 2020 due to a foreclosure on a property owned by a former real estate client in Los Angeles whom I had paid for garage storage for almost two decades while I was away in Africa. I received no notice at all that the former client was being foreclosed on so there was nothing I could do to prevent that total loss. I was devastated. Finding out about that loss that included a lifetime of mementos, my activist and research archives, many books, art, and all my family history and most pictures was the worst day of my life. That’s California for you. Then again in March 2022 I had to leave all my beautiful home furnishings, some of my books, and my extensive African art collection behind in Johannesburg when I was barred from reentering South Africa because I had overstayed my visa while I was applying for permanent residency after living there for fifteen years. However, this selenium and now broad-spectrum antiviral drug research and educational campaign is my life’s calling, my mission, and my passion – to improve world health and pandemic preparedness. That mission continues today as I campaign to establish VICHR as the second research institute in the U.S. to study drug repurposing. If someone could just grab the Archimedean lever to help, together we could improve world health.

For me, life has been a hero’s quest to discover a way to improve HIV treatment and to bring an effective affordable therapy to the poor and forgotten of the world who need it most. Innumerable people living with HIV have called me a hero. Along the way I had two websites, winagainsthiv.com, and from that homepage one can click to winagainstebola.com. One can find photos of my former African art collection on Facebook at Armistead African Art Collection, and currently I use the weblog CloserToaCure.com to present my essays. Technical communication, promotion and social networking have been my greatest failure, but research and writing are my passion. My two self-published books speak for themselves. My next book might be titled “A Pandemic Pilgrim’s Progress, My Journey Through HIV, Ebola, Zika, Covid-19 and H5N1 Influenza.” The above listing of my small contributions to health science serves as a tentative outline for that.                   

22. PPS. Despite what it may seem, I do not hate the pharmaceutical industry, nor do I begrudge them a fair and reasonable profit. I appreciate the work they do and personally take a dozen drugs designed to keep me healthy each day. To paraphrase Charles Dickens, pharmaceutical companies are the best of companies, and they are the worst of companies. Although they help save millions of lives including my own, when governments and international health organizations place the interests of the pharmaceutical industrial complex ahead of those of the people they are supposed to serve, research gets covered up or cancelled, and often less effective more costly drugs crowd out just as effective or even more effective cheaper ones. If national and international health authorities do not reassess and rearrange their priorities to place science and the welfare of the people first and new drug development and industry profits second, the next pandemic may be a quantum degree deadlier and more costly than Covid-19 was. That would be a tragedy of gargantuan proportions. Please, let us not allow that to happen.  

Howard Steel Armistead, member, International AIDS Society (IAS)                 3 May 2026