Why Anti-Viral Drugs are Hard to Come By

This post isn't specifically about hydroxychloroquine or ivermectin, but the craziness over using them as a treatment for COVID made me think that it might be worth a quick explanation as to why they, or any other known drug, are inherently unlikely to be anti-viral therapies.

Let's start with antibiotics--the medicine that you use to fight a bacterial infection. How do they work? Put simply, they work by screwing up the molecular processes of bacteria. They are small molecules that bind to or alter important bacterial enzymes. It's like throwing a wrench (spanner, for the British) into a machine, or a broom stick into the front wheel of a bike. Except, here we are talking about specific interactions between molecules because they have just the right shape and chemical properties. Antibiotics screw up the chemical processes that bacteria need to live and grow. The reason that antibiotics don't also screw YOU up is because bacterial enzymes are different enough from ours that they can be selectively targeted. You don't have peptidoglycan in your cell membrane, for example, and the ribosomes in your cells are a little different than those in bacteria. Thus, scientists have been able to find small chemicals that, at the right concentration, can kill bacteria and not you [1].  The same applies to parasites. This general concept is called selective toxicity.

So how come there aren't more anti-viral medicines? Why is it that a doctor will diagnose you with a virus and then usually say there's not much you can do but manage the symptoms? The answer is that selective toxicity is much harder to achieve with viruses. That is because viruses mostly commandeer your cellular machinery for their own purpose. They do use some of their own enzymes, but there aren't that many targets to go after. This is further complicated by the fact that there are dozens of viruses that can infect people, each with different enzymes, and even if you could find a small drug molecule to screw up that enzyme, the virus has a decent chance of evolving resistance. Also, you usually don't know that you are infected with a virus until you develop symptoms, and by then an anti-viral probably isn't going to do much for you anyway (unless it is a chronic infection). Simply put, it is hard to screw up a virus without screwing up your own cells too. That's just the science side of it; the economics of drug development are a whole additional dimension to the issue. So for the most part it is up to the immune system to deal with viruses, hence the importance of vaccination.

So the idea that some random drug that is good for something else would also just happen to specifically inhibit some part of the SARS-CoV-2 replication cycle is just inherently unlikely. Not impossible, but really unlikely. And just because something works in cell culture does not mean it will work in you. Cell culture is a starting point, not proof of efficacy!

But maybe we don't need the drug to specifically target the virus. Maybe it can just perturb some cellular process enough that the virus has a hard time reproducing while the immune system ramps up to take care of it. That's a theortical possibility, but if the drug isn't screwing up your cellular processes enough to cause you some really unpleasant side effects, then it probably isn't doing much of anything to stop the virus either.

In summary, unless approved by regulatory authorities, you should be very skeptical of claims that an existing drug also happens to be an anti-viral. The same goes for any kind of dietary supplement or non-FDA approved therapy. Remember, it takes chemcial sharpshooting to kill a virus without killing you. If you take a drug that isn't approved as an anti-viral, you are probably shooting the wrong target.

Notes
1. The drug, of course, has no idea what it is supposed to target. It just follows the laws of physics and chemistry.

Continue reading...

Time to Clean Up Some Vaccine Information Pollution

There is a viral video going around of a pathologist claiming that the COVID vaccines are toxic. It is a compeling talk, but it is garbage...in a sort of glorious way. Time for cleanup.

First, who is this guy? Dr. Ryan Cole is apparently an independent pathologist in Idaho who has previously attracted the attention of FactCheck.org, and has affiliated with a group called America's Frontline Doctors, which is a group of doctors with...let's say a contrarian take on COVID and public health. The video is of a presentation he apparently gave on July 27 to his like-minded colleagues.

Cole's basic claim seems to be that the Spike protein of the virus is responsible for most of the pathology and disease manifestations of COVID. Therefore, we should not be pushing vaccines that use the Spike protein on people, and especially children, since we don't know what the long-term effects will be. (As if we do know the long term effects of COVID infection?) Also, we should be doing more autopsies of people who die after having had the vaccine in order to determine whether there is a causal connection.

I've stated his thesis using calmer and more neutral language than Cole, and put this way it seems like a reasonable position. When watching the video, I quickly determined that this was a guy with an axe to grind. There's nothing wrong with being passionate, but the way that he derided the vaccines made it clear that this wasn't just a doctor with some scientific concerns. It was almost like he was trying to come up with his best insult. At one point he said, "these are not vaccines," which is kind of a stupid thing to say because they are, in fact, vaccines. (Maybe he has his own special definition?)

Before I address his claims, I need to do a spoiler alert. Just like knowing how a magic trick is done or how a mystery ends can take away the feeling of wonder, what I am about to explain may deny you the opportunity to feel the same sense of fear and indignation toward the vaccines and medical establishment that you might otherwise feel. So if you want to feel the tension build and wonder how it could possibly be resolved, go watch now and do not read further.

---

OK, I'm going to do the big reveal up front, but we'll still go through the journey. Here it is: NONE of the scary pictures of inflammation that Cole shows are from a vaccine. Even worse, some of them are actually from COVID patients. You may find that hard to believe, but stay with me.

Inflammation
If you haven't watched it, much of the talk consists of Cole showing slides of tissues and commenting on the inflammation. You could be excused for thinking that these were from cases that he investigated or experiments that he did. In fact, at the 4:45 mark he says, "We did studies in lab animals." He must have meant the royal 'we' because there's no evidence, that I can find, that he has been involved with any animal studies dealing with COVID. None of the image slides contain references, but thanks to the magic of Google I was able to track them all down. They are all pulled from the scientific/medical literature, or from medical news articles.

I'm going to go through each of them and comment on his claims. Because I am lazy, I don't feel like reproducing all of the images here, so I'll just give a description, where in the talk they can be found, and provide links to the image sources so you can check them out for yourself.

1. (5:20) Endothelial cell mitochondria (black, purple, and rainbow colors) - Claim: The damage is caused by Spike alone from the vaccine, not the virus. Fact: This is wrong. No vaccine was involved. What the researchers did is to make inert viral particles that have the Spike protein and treated endothelial cells (in the lab) with these particles. Yes, they attributed the observed, effects to Spike, but it is a logical leap to say that the vaccine would do the same thing--or be biologically meaningful if it did. In fact, the article suggests that a vaccine would be protective.

2. (6:57) Lung tissue (the image appears to come from news articles, like this one, that describe results that were later published) - Claim: disease is from the vaccine. Fact: Again, no vaccine was involved in the study. The researchers injected part of the Spike protein directly into the trachea of mice. Perhaps it shouldn't be surprising that putting a foreign protein directly into the airway caused inflammation. It's an interesting finding that helps inform us about the disease process, but it's another logical leap to say that the vaccines would cause the same effect. More about this later, but for now the practical takeaway is don't snort Spike powder.

3. (8:16) Brain cells - Claim: inflammation from Spike. Fact: This comes from the autopsy of a man who had the first Pfizer dose but caught COVID 3 weeks later while at the hospital for other health problems. His death was ruled not to be due to COVID infection, since they did not see typical signs of COIVD, but many of the tissues sampled (including brain) had viral RNA and he was well past the point when Spike would have been present from the vaccine. At any rate, it's no surprise that having virus in the brain would lead to inflammation.

4. (8:28) Heart images, myocarditis (scroll down) - Claim: "That's after a shot." Fact: These images are from a public database of radiology images. The case description does not mention COVID or the vaccine. It's true that there are some rare cases of myocarditis associated with mRNA vaccination (but not the Johnson and Johnson vaccine), and it could be that this image is representative of such cases (I'm not qualified to say), but this image is not from someone who had a vaccine. Cole probably pulled it from an online news article that used it as a stock image (like this one) and mistakenly thought it was actually from a vaccine patient.

5. (8:55) Heart tissue - This image does not have anything to do with COVID at all. The top pictures are from an entirely different virus, enterovirus A71.

6. (9:50) Kidney - The rest of the images are shown in rapid succession and can be addressed together since they can all be found in the same article. Fact: All of these images are from people who actually had COVID.
7. (10:05) Liver
8. (10:15) Testes

If you are wondering why Cole would show tissue slides of people who had the disease (or even a different disease) and then claim that this is what the vaccine does, you're asking a good question! I think the most charitable answer I can give is that Cole has taken the data from the mice with Spike injected in their airway and extrapolated to the conclusion that all COVID inflammation comes from Spike and therefore the vaccines (which cause your cells to make Spike protein) cause pathology equivalent to COVID disease. That's quite the extrapolation! And it's plainly false just from a clinical perspective. (Are vaccinated people having to monitor their oxygen levels?) So if you follow Cole's logic, you should avoid the vaccines and instead leave yourself open to becoming infected and getting the types of pathology that he has shown in his slides. (Joke: maybe it's best that Cole's patients are already dead.)

Miscellaneous
The images are really the main story, but there are a variety of other claims and issues that need to be addressed.

First, let's go back to the mice that had Spike protein (actually only part of the Spike protein, S1) injected in their airway. Consulting the paper, the scientists gave the mice 400 micrograms of Spike per kg of the mouse weight. Cole mentioned a Harvard study that measured the circulation of Spike in the blood of people given the Moderna mRNA vaccine. Spike (S1) was only detectable for 9 days or so after the first shot, and virtually not at all after the second shot (consistent with the rise of antibodies). At the peak of S1 circulation, the average amount was 68 picograms/mL. Let's do some math. The Internet tells me that an average adult human has about 5 liters of blood. Let's make it 6 L, which is equal to 6,000 mL. 6,000 mL x 68 pg/mL = 408,000 pg = 0.408 micrograms total. Let's assume a weight of 90 kg (~198 lbs). Divide 0.408 micrograms by 90 kg = 0.0045 micrograms/kg. Do I need to continue in order to make the point that the mouse study used WAY more S1 protein than was found in the blood of vaccinated people?

(7:43) Spike crosses blood brain barrier (BBB). The slide accompanying this claim contains the only references provided in the whole presentation. Note that the slide title, "Spike as Toxin" comes from Cole, not the referenced articles (here and here). Poking around the literature, the focus seems to be on the ability of the virus to invade the central nervous system. I am unable to find any literature that addresses the BBB in the context of vaccination. However, I think you would be hard pressed to show that neurological outcomes of vaccinates are worse than COVID patients, and that's putting it lightly. Perhaps there's a kernal of truth here that could improve the next generation of COVID vaccines, in terms of tolerability or side effects. But that's just me trying to be charitable.

(10:30) Pfizer biodistribution study submitted to Japanese regulators shows accumulation in ovaries of rats, with a 16% decrease in fertility. Fact: First, the study shows that the percent of nanoparticle lipid that goes to the ovary is less than 0.1% of the dose, compared to the injection site (roughly 25%) or liver (~15%). As for the decrease in fertility, I was unable to find a source for this claim in the limited searching I did. But I DID find a recently published study from Pfizer showing that female rats given four doses of vaccine were not different in any way from non-vaccinated rats in terms of fertility, including estrous cycle.

(15:00) Cole makes a variety of claims about immune dysregulation leading to reactivation of other viruses and increase in cancer. These claims are purely anecdotal so they are difficult to address. He mentions a study from Germany and the Netherlands, but that's not much to go on. I suspect that, like his other examples, he is extrapolating data from COVID patients and inappropriately applying it to vaccinated people.

Finally, the CDC asked me to hide this from you, but I'm going to let you in on the secret if you promise not to tell. You can find information on COVID vaccine adverse events here and here, among other places.

Conclusion
I have shown that Dr. Cole's claims about vaccines are not connected to any of the images that he showed in his presentation, and that others of his claims are either false or missing important context. It is plainly dishonest to use images of tissues damaged by the virus in order to argue that the current vaccines are dangerous. I think it is reprehensible, and even unethical, that he would claim that vaccines are ruining the hearts of children, while showing a picture of a heart that was damaged for unrelated reasons. Never does he say that these are just examples of the kind of thing he is worried about. And it is worth stating again: following Cole's argument to its logical conclusion leads to the idea that people are better off facing the virus than being vaccinated. On a population level that is clearly false.

Buried in his screed are some questions and issues that perhaps have scientific merit, but he has overshadowed and distorted them with his sensationalism and misdirection. At a certain point we leave the domain of scientific debate and enter information pollution.

Now that you've taken all of this in, go back and watch the video again and see if it still has the same punch. Hopefully, my cleanup has been worthwhile.

P.S. I've tried to make sure my ducks are all in a row in this, but please bring any errors to my attention.

Continue reading...