The Virginia Health Enquirer

        The Virginia Health Enquirer

Enquiring minds want to know – how to improve Virginia’s health 

Ignoring Sound Science Was a Tragic Mistake During the Covid Pandemic

            Mistakes in wartime can result in hundreds, even thousands of excess deaths. Strategic mistakes made during deadly viral pandemics can result in hundreds of thousands of excess deaths, just as they did with Covid-19. After SARS-1 in 2002, scientists went to work to discover ways to protect people against future corona viruses. When SARS-2/Covid-19 arrived seventeen years later, that research was ignored. In January 2020, Chinese scientist reported that Ebselen, a selenium-based drug, was the most effective out of 10,000 chemicals tested against the SARS-2 virus. That discovery also was ignored. In March 2020 researcher Howard Armistead sent three emails to Tony Fauci’s deputy at the National Institutes of Health, NIH, suggesting that broad-spectrum antiviral medicines like selenium and aspirin-like NF-kB inhibitors could slow the progress of SARS-2 infection. They ignored those. As any physician knows, early therapy is the best therapy. They ignored that basic medical principle. Instead, health authorities told people there were no drugs to treat early Covid-19 infection. That was a lie. Authorities misled the public so a new drug could be developed to treat Covid. They developed Paxlovid – two years and almost a million American lives too late.     

Penny Wise - Historically Pound Foolish – and Hurtful to Women

          Approximately 500,000 women in Virginia currently suffer from symptomatic uterine fibroids – UFs - that can cause severe pain and suffering, lost time from work, infertility, miscarriage, Cesarean section birth, pre-eclampsia, still birth, and premature birth. UFs are the major cause of hysterectomies, costing $20-30,000 or more. Who pays those astronomical costs? Women pay in more ways than one, families pay, insurance companies and governments pay. Who benefits? Physicians and hospitals? Yet fibroids can probably be reduced by 50% or more using a low-cost therapeutic combination that would cost about $100 annually. Why must women and society bear the immense burden of UFs when the government fails to fund an affordable research infrastructure such as the Virginia Institute for Clinical Health Research – VICHR - that would quickly determine a combination therapy that will prevent and/or reduce the tremendous cost of UFs to women’s health and well-being, and to society?

The Nobel Prize in Medicine and NF-kB – Nuclear Factor-kappa B

            David Baltimore won the Nobel Prize in Medicine in 1975 for discovering the reverse transcriptase – RT - enzyme in 1970. That became the basis of the first class of AIDS drugs – reverse transcriptase inhibitors - RTIs. More importantly, in 1986 Baltimore and his assistant Ranjan Sen co-discovered the human protein NF-kB, the primary stimulant to both inflammation and viral replication. That discovery finally explained how anti-inflammatory drugs like aspirin and other NSAID drugs work. Scientists have described the NF-kB protein as the “master regulator of the immune system, inflammation, and cell survival.”  

            Sadly, scientists and physicians have failed to recognize the basic science that shows that by inhibiting NF-kB, almost all anti-inflammatory drugs also act as broad-spectrum antiviral drugs. That failure contributed to the tremendous loss of life of hundreds of thousands of Americans and millions worldwide from AIDS and Covid-19. NSAID drugs vary greatly in their ability to inhibit NF-kB, from aspirin at the low end, to over five hundred times as strong as aspirin, tamoxifen at the upper end. During the Covid pandemic, dexamethasone, a steroid NF-kB inhibitor fifty times as strong as aspirin, became the mainstay treatment for patients hospitalized for Covid-19. Tragically, the many less potent NF-kBs were not used as early therapy to prevent hospitalization and death. The Virginia Institute for Clinical Health Research – VICHR - could quickly determine which NF-kBIs work best against which viruses and save innumerable lives. That should be done now, before the next pandemic strikes.

Selenium (Se) – Key to the Immune System - The Strongest Immune Booster

            Scientists have called selenium “the miracle mineral” and “the universally protective element”. It is as essential to life as water. Every cell contains selenium. Most antioxidants that keep every cell in the body healthy and detoxified are selenium based.

            Selenium is concentrated in the organs of the immune system - white blood cells, the liver, kidney, spleen, thymus, and lymph nodes, and in the thyroid. It is especially important for the brain, testes, and red blood cells. Many viruses genetically encode selenium proteins as part of their protective outer envelope. As viral replication increases, viruses cause illness by depleting cells and organs of selenium. Supplementing selenium increases CD4 white blood cell count, the basic measure of immunity. In 2014 in Liberia, doctors showed that adding 1.2mg of selenium daily to standard therapy could reduce Ebola deaths by 43.6%. The NIH and U.S. Army researchers in Liberia ignored those findings because they were trying to develop their own drugs for Ebola.  

            In 2004, at the International AIDS Conference held in Montreal, researchers reported that adding a single tablet of 200mcg of selenium daily to a standard three-drug antiviral cocktail more than doubled the increase in CD4 count compared to those three AIDS drugs alone. Not surprisingly, the manufacturers of those three drugs blocked publication of that impressive result for selenium. The results were never published in a medical journal – only in an abstract at the conference. That is how life-saving science is sometimes covered up. Selenium is safe and not contraindicated to any medications. Ask your physician about selenium.                                                       

                                          Howard Steel Armistead, IAS   03/28/26