COVID-19 and Your Immune System

May 14, 2020 COVID-19 Articles

Recently, comedian Bill Maher expressed the following: “I worry that the past two months of quarantine have given people the idea that the way for humans to win our million-year war with microbes is to avoid them completely. And I’m here to tell you… you can’t. The key to beating COVID isn’t dining through glass or never going to a concert or a ballgame again. It’s your immune system. You hear people say COVID-19 is a new virus so the immune system doesn’t know how to handle it. Of course, it does. That’s why the vast majority who’ve had it either recovered or didn’t even know they had it. What do you think did that? The human immune system… compulsively washing, being scared of your own hands… That can’t become the new normal.“[1]

Superficially this crusade against microbes sounds justified, but in reality, it is a war against ourselves. The “call to arms” to fight germs and other micro-organisms is evidence of an unwitting, propaganda-based, misinterpretation of scientific information being used to cow the population into harmful and misguided treatments. The patterns of susceptibility exposed by COVID-19 demonstrate that this “war” is damaging the human immune system, microbiome, and environment and is destroying our health.

“The account of heroic man persevering over a heartless Mother Nature needs to be corrected. Despite all the lab coats and microscopes, the March of Dimes and the Nobel prizes, the enemies were actually our own clever designs the whole time.”[2]

Waging an all-out war against microbes by reducing contact with bacteria, viruses and fungi in the natural environment throughout the human life cycle (excessive hygiene, vaccines, antibiotics, etc.) has backfired by increasing susceptibility to diseases of microbial origin, and escalating the risk of developing a wide range of other illnesses, including those of inflammatory,[3] autoimmune[4] and neoplastic[5] origin. A detailed graphic from The New England Journal of Medicine clearly demonstrates this inverse relationship between the elimination of infectious diseases and the epidemic rise of chronic inflammatory illnesses in our society.[6] The COVID-19 pandemic is just one example of how many modern pharmaceutical interventions have led us into this crisis, and that if we expect to recover, it’s time to face the evidence.

 

COVID-19

If one thing is universally recognized about the COVID-19 virus it’s the fact that it is more likely to be deadly for those who are already affected and being treated for chronic medical problems (obesity, diabetes, hypertension, etc.). According to worldwide health statistics, at least 82% of those infected with COVID-19 will experience mild, moderate or no symptoms whatsoever.[7] Essentially, a “healthy” immune system coupled with a healthy microbiome is sufficient to protect most people from adverse events associated with this virus.

The pattern of susceptibility exposed by COVID-19 starkly demonstrates that reliance on certain conventional allopathic medical interventions may be the single most important risk factor for dying from this virus. This “elephant” hiding in the room has been ignored by the entire news media cycle and every single major medical institution (from the government down). Instead of facing this “inconvenient truth” (that some conventional medical therapies increase susceptibility) the universal institutional response has been to double-down on fear-based propaganda aimed to push the population toward unquestioning acceptance of more of these same interventions.[8]

Samuel Langhorne Clemens (Mark Twain) wrote:

“The glory which is built upon a lie soon becomes a most unpleasant incumbrance. …  How easy it is to make people believe a lie, and how hard it is to undo that work again!”[9]

If an impartial scientifically-based inquiry could be held, rather than the propaganda and fear-based media storm our society is currently engaged in, we would be less likely to welcome the next generation of anti-viral medicines and vaccines and look more favorably on homeopathy precisely because it benefits immunity, sustainably supports the human microbiome and has an impeccable track record of safety treating and preventing diseases of epidemic origin.[10]

Absent from the current media debacle is a level-headed, nonpartisan, science-based evaluation of how our society arrived at this critical juncture, where a significant portion of the population suffers from one or more chronic illness and is now increasingly vulnerable to dying from a mutated “cold virus.”

Disease susceptibility varies between individuals, which is reflected by microbiome science, and is one reason why individualized homeopathy is so effective. The COVID-19 pandemic may be an “act of nature,” but it exposes a very dark and ugly side of conventional pharmaceutical medicine: those individuals who are most susceptible to this virus are the same ones who have trusted and relied most heavily on conventional pharmaceutical drugs and immunizations.

 

Chronic Illness and Cytokine Storms

Roughly18% of those infected with COVID-19 will develop severe symptoms and somewhere between 1-15% will die (depending on demographics and scope of testing). Those who have died suffered from at least one preexisting chronic illness, which is epidemic in Western society. According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) 60% of Americans currently suffer from one chronic illness and 40% suffer from two or more.[11] These conditions (and some of the pharmaceuticals used to treat them) are risk factors for developing complications from COVID-19.[12]

Chronic illness, which is driven by chronic inflammation, is the result of immune system dysregulation and dysfunction that ultimately reaches every organ system in the body. The driving force behind inflammation is the immune system,[13] and the driving force behind the immune system is the human microbiome.[14] There is robust evidence that many forms of chronic illness are the direct result of medical interventions that damage or disrupt the microbiome.[15]

The microbiome is considered the “invisible organ” responsible for regulating the immune system and keeping it in symbiotic balance.[16] When microbiome diversity is high and working in symbiosis with the immune system, inflammation is low.[17] Inflammation is an immune system response to microbiome dysbiosis. Chronic inflammation is the result of chronic dysbiosis of the microbiome. When the human microbiome suffers from loss of diversity, or dysbiosis, the immune system generates both local (acute) and systemic (chronic) inflammation.[18]  When dysbiosis persists, so does inflammation.[19] Conventional pharmacologic management of chronic inflammation suppresses and contains it.

Most of those who have died from COVID-19 (and diseases of similar origin) progress through what is known as a “cytokine storm,”[20] an immune system over-reaction that floods the body with a tsunami wave of inflammatory chemicals, as if a dam had burst and long-suppressed immune inflammatory chemicals were released. The cytokine storm of COVID-19 is more likely if the immune system-microbiome axis has been suppressed and contained by the pharmacologic treatment of inflammatory illness.[21],[22]

 

The Human Virome

Viruses are nonliving organisms, considered the most ubiquitous biological agents on the planet: in nature they outnumber bacteria by more than ten to one,[23] and in the healthy human body there are more than ten times as many latent and asymptomatic viruses (380 trillion) than individual human cells (37 trillion).[24] The overwhelming majority of viruses in the human virome (the total collection of viruses in and on the human body) have never been characterized or named,[25] but appear to be either benign or beneficial to health.

Out of all viruses, only a very small fraction have ever been associated with human disease.[26] In these, the degree of virulence depends not only on the virus itself, but on the milieu of the microbiome and the complex symbiosis between it and the immune system. Viruses, just like bacteria, fungi and protozoa, are largely pathobionts: organisms capable of blending into the microbiome symbiotically or of disrupting it in a manner that causes dysbiosis, inflammation and illness.[27] Pathogenicity and susceptibility to any infection (viral or otherwise) depends on the disease agent and its ability to generate inflammation or establish a tolerant relationship with the microbiome, and the immune system. The vast overwhelming majority of microbiome-immune system interactions are symbiotic or commensal (not pathogenic and inflammatory), even though we have long been led to believe the opposite.

“It goes against dogma to think that bacteria [and viruses] would make our immune systems function better… But the picture is getting very clear: the driving force behind the immune system are commensals.”[28]

Viruses (and other organisms) act commensally, symbiotically or pathogenically depending on the working relationship established between the host immune system and the microbiome. Virus specific factors play important roles, but degree of pathogenicity and susceptibility are largely determined by individual factors relating to the health and stability of the microbiome and the immune system of the host.[29]

 

Susceptibility

Susceptibility to illness depends upon a healthy interplay between the immune system and the microbiome (symbioisis). The epidemic of chronic inflammatory disease currently affecting most developed nations, and the US in particular, is the result of a breakdown in this networking symbiosis between these two essential organs.

Many factors influence the human microbiome-immune system axis and thereby contribute to disease susceptibility. Toxins, pathogens, drugs, and psycho-neuro-endocrine stressors are some of the most common causes, but the history of modern conventional pharmaceutical medicine reads like a textbook on how to suppress the immune system and damage the microbiome, in part because the “germ theory” strongly advocates it.[30]

The US population spends the most on health care, is the most heavily medicated and chronically ill population on earth[31] and has the lowest life expectancy at birth among comparable nations.[32] Not only is longevity declining in the US, but “health life expectancy” is also shrinking. The US is at the forefront of chronic inflammatory illness,[33] and this has put us at the forefront of deaths from COVID-19. This is not a coincidence.

COVID-19 is most destructive (causing a “cytokine storm”) in those individuals suffering from immune system dysfunction and microbiome dysbiosis (the ecological definition of chronic illness), and who are medically managing their condition. Most healthy individuals respond less violently and more tolerantly to COVID-19 allowing it to become integrated into the human virome and the functional symbiosis regulated by the immune system.

Viruses (and other microorganisms) are not the enemies of health, as we have long been led to believe, they are the most crucial agents on the planet in promoting it. Between 40-80% of the human genome is the direct result of ancient viral “infections.”[34] Not only is COVID-19 generally harmless in a healthy individual, but it might even turn out to be beneficial, as a great many other viruses have.

Herpes simplex virus (HSV1) destroys late stage malignant melanoma tumors,[35] reduces the risk of metastatic breast cancer,[36] and along with the “common cold” virus destroys breast, prostate, bladder and brain cancer cells;[37],[38] measles virus destroys breast cancer tumors,[39] ovarian cancer cells,[40] hepatocellular carcinoma[41] and prostate cancer,[42] while reducing the severity of kidney disease;[43] coronaviruses[44] and other viruses[45] are effective in both preventing and treating breast cancer; hepatitis A virus (HAV), [46] measles virus[47],[48],[49],[50],[51] and varicella virus[52] (chicken pox) lower the risk of atopy and allergies; measles, mumps[53] and varicella[54] viruses reduce the risk of dying from cardiovascular disease and stroke by more than 28% in men, and 16% in women.

There is no question that many viruses are intimately involved with promoting and maintaining health, preventing cancer and reducing inflammation throughout the body. We wage wars and avoid these microbiological agents at our own peril.

 

Conclusion

The COVID-19 pandemic provides us with a unique opportunity to examine modern medicine and its role in public health. In the midst of a media driven propaganda-storm of misinformation about health, immunity, safety and illness it is critical to rely on a foundation of science. Facing these “inconvenient truths” about the nature and benefits of the immune system and the microbiological world may throw off the fear-based shackles that have put society on a dangerous trajectory beginning with an epidemic of iatrogenic chronic inflammatory disease and is ending with a population at significantly increased risk of dying from a mutated “cold virus.”

Homeopathy, and the promotion of the human microbiome offer the most sustainable solution to this crisis. Recognizing that the immune system and the microbiome are critical agents that promote and sustain health may limit this misguided “war” against these organ systems. The COVID-19 Pandemic provides ample evidence of this.

Sincerely,
Ronald D. Whitmont, MD

 

 

References

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COVID-19 and Your Immune System