COVID-19 Vaccines Are Running Out of Monkeys to Test Them On
Scientists may have to change the way they conduct COVID-19 studies, as the United States is facing a monkey shortage. Non-human primates are usually the last step before products go into human trials, but with over 100 new COVID-19 vaccines, therapies, and drugs in development, there aren’t enough monkeys to go around.
The reasons for the shortage are threefold. First, COVID-19 has created extraordinary demand for monkeys. Second, this coincided with a massive drop in supply from China, which provided 60 percent of the nearly 35,000 monkeys imported to the U.S. last year and which shut off exports after COVID-19 hit. And third, these pandemic-related events are exacerbating preexisting monkey shortfalls. A 2018 National Institutes of Health report had found that NIH-funded national primate centers would be unable to meet future demand and specifically discussed a “strategic monkey reserve” to provide “surge capability for unpredictable disease outbreaks.” A disease outbreak is upon us; the strategic monkey reserve was never created.”
Monkeys infected with COVID-19 are also required to be put in special labs, called Animal Biosafety Level 3 labs. There are a limited number of these labs in the United States.
In an attempt to manage the monkey demand, the National Institutes of Health (NIH) has formed a public-private initiative, Accelerating COVID-19 Therapeutic Interventions and Vaccines (ACTIV), designed to control which products and which companies get to use the limited supply of testing monkeys. This initiative has the potential to save time and move scientists closer to vaccines, treatments, and therapies for COVID-19, but it could also make it difficult for those who aren’t affiliated with the project to gain access to non-human primate trials. A quick look at the leadership organizations involved in ACTIV show names like Merck, Johnson & Johson, Sanofi, AstraZeneca, GlaxoSmithKline, and the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation. In light of that, the decision to control access to the final stages of animal testing feels less like an efficiency or safety measure, and more like a way for those who already have the power to keep it.
Several studies see Evidence of Lasting COVID-19 Immunity
Researchers tracking immune responses to COVID-19 say they’re seeing the signs of lasting immunity months after coronavirus infections have resolved. T cells and B cells capable of recognizing the virus and virus-fighting antibodies are present in people exposed to COVID-19, even in people who experienced mild infections. These studies provide hope that the second wave of coronavirus cases will be met with a natural immune response.
This is exactly what you would hope for…All the pieces are there to have a totally protective immune response.”
Scientists have not yet found definitive proof that individuals who have experienced the virus will have immunity against reinfection. On the other hand, there has been no unambiguous evidence that reinfection is happening. Much of the research and media coverage has focused on the presence of antibodies, but immune responses also include B cells and T cells. In addition to that, low levels of antibodies remain in the blood months after COVID-19 recovery.
The antibodies decline, but they settle in what looks like a stable nadir…The response looks perfectly durable.”
Studies out of Sweden could have the potential to further this research and the public’s understanding of COVID-19 and herd immunity. The country famously did not impose lockdown or mask restrictions, instead asking citizens to voluntarily socially distance. Healthcare officials in the country have indicated that they hope widespread exposure to the virus will lead to herd immunity in the country.
Natural Coronavirus Prevention
It’s important to note that when looking at studies for supplementation to prevent or help treat coronavirus we’re usually looking at research on supplement efficacy for other viruses. We’re dealing with a novel virus with this pandemic. But, the body is a holistic, complex system. Having a body in homeostasis during a pandemic only makes sense. And while coronavirus is new and different, it’s still a virus. And we have a lot of good science on how to help prevent virus infections.
Vitamin C
Vitamin C has long been touted to cure everything from cancer to liver failure. Studies show that ingesting vitamin C supplements does not seem to be the cure-all we’d hoped for but the studies that administer intravenous vitamin C look very promising. If our pharmaceutical industry had our best interests at heart patients who are being treated for severe cases of coronavirus would be administered IV Vitamin C, and many lives would likely be saved.
Regular injections aren’t practical for normal people, and we suspect there might be a few side effects if people use injections regularly as a preventative measure. But Vitamin C injections do show a lot of promise for treating many diseases.
This is not to say that vitamin C supplementation is useless. If you don’t have enough vitamin C in your body when you get sick the vitamin C may reduce severity and duration, but not much. A better way to get enough vitamin C in order to prevent disease is to eat the right foods before there is a health issue.
Zinc helps your immune system fight off infection, helps the body heal wounds, and is needed for making protein and DNA.
There have been several studies testing whether zinc supplements can help treat or prevent the common cold. A comprehensive review of 18 of such studies showed zinc is may reduce the duration of patients’ common cold.
Studies also show that colds, school absences, and antibiotic prescription rates are lower in for those who take zinc supplementation regularly, suggesting that zinc could also prevent colds.
The National Institutes of Health says oysters as the best food source of zinc avaialble. Another benefits of oysters is they have copper in just the right amount to make the zinc more easily absorbed and assimilated (if you don’t have enough copper you can’t get enough zinc). You can also get zinc from red meat, legumes, nuts, whole grains, and dairy.
Zinc has been proven to reduce symptoms of illnesses from rhinoviruses by messing with the viruses’ RNA replication, but there are no studies yet that look at zinc with COVID-19. We don’t know how similar COVID-19 is to rhinoviruses, but it is possible that zinc could mess with the RNA replication of coronavirus in a similar way. Regardless, getting enough zinc to keep your immune system strong makes sense for the other aforementioned reasons.
COVID-19 deaths are usually attributed to a “cytokine storm”, which is a physiological feedback loop where our body creates an excessive release of cytokines, a pro-inflammatory signaling molecule. A new study has evaluated the treatment of two patients with COVID-19 pneumonia who were given IV and orally administered glutathione.
Oral and IV glutathione, glutathione precursors (N-acetyl-cysteine) and alpha lipoic acid may represent a novel treatment approach for blocking NF-κB and addressing “cytokine storm syndrome” and respiratory distress in patients with COVID-19 pneumonia.
Dr. Richard Horowitz is a board-certified internist with a private integrative medicine practice. He is considered to be one of the best Lyme disease doctors and he’s built a practice around combining conventional treatments with alternative, naturopathic methods to treat Lyme disease. Dr. Horowitz has treated patents successfully with glutathione therapy.
“It is a miracle and it’s not,” says Horowitz of glutathione, which he has used on thousands of patients in his medical practice over the past 30 years. “It’s already in the literature—there are published articles on glutathione showing that it has anti-viral activity against herpes viruses, HIV, and hepatitis. The problem is, all of the COVID research is happening through pharmaceutical companies. No one is looking at natural approaches. You hear a little about how low vitamin D might put you at risk, so it’s coming out in dribs and drabs.” And just like with vitamin D, you can be deficient in glutathione—especially if you’ve been exposed to a lot of environmental toxins (which is everyone). Older people are also more likely to be depleted of the compound.
Dr. Rhonda Patrick at Found My Fitness thinks vitamin D may be what those who are getting hit with COVID-19 are missing. Other interesting points include:
People with genetic predisposition to lower vitamin D levels are more likely to die of respiratory disease
People with normal vitamin D levels are less likely to die from respiratory disease
Too much vitamin D can be toxic, though concerns of hypercalcemia tend to be overblown
Vitamin D and Vitamin K increase may increase bone density and prevent hypercalcemia
Don’t be concerned with eating “too many leafy greens” and issues with oxalates, kidney stones, etc.
https://youtu.be/4_ZJ8YDOX6g?t=1935
Gut Health
This is the key. Not just for coronavirus defense, but for our health in every physical aspect of our lives. You cannot have a healthy gut and be low in vitamin D, or zinc, or other nutrients. Gut health is everything. When the best farmers see a sick plant they treat their soil’s microbiome first and foremost. When we’re sick, our microbiome is off. When we’re well and everything is working optimally we have a balanced, healthy gut to thank.
In the first case of novel coronavirus reported in the U.S., the patient reported two days of nausea and vomiting along with diarrhea in addition to respiratory symptoms. In some small studies, researchers have linked patients with gastrointestinal issues to poorer coronavirus outcomes. Poor gut health seems to equate to severe disease symptoms including higher fevers and a greater risk of liver injury.
The suggestion is that the gastrointestinal symptoms are caused by the virus invading the ACE2-containing cells that are found throughout the bowel. This, together with the presence of the virus in the stool, suggests the gastrointestinal tract as another possible route of infection and transmission.
But it’s not just that the virus attacks the gut. Science is on the verge of discovering that our gut microbiome supplies our entire body with its microbiome. And what they don’t yet know, but is nevertheless true, is that a body with a healthy, diverse, and plentiful microbiome is a much less hospitable host for foreign invaders.
The health of our gut bacteria plays a crucial role in how our immune system reacts to every disease, including coronavirus. Diet is crucial to developing and maintaining healthy gut flora. The wider variety of raw vegetables and herbs one consumes, the more diverse one’s gut bacteria will be. And diversity is key to a healthy microbiome.
This article, How To Heal Your Gut, goes into detail about how to develop a healthy gut microbiome and is the basis for ridding the body of and being less susceptible to nearly every disease.
From our sister company, Green Lifestyle Market, here are our top supplement picks for anyone concerned with COVID-19 or just wanting to keep their immune system strong:
But don’t skip the aforementioned gut health article! Diet is far more important than supplements, and if finances are tight, put your money towards healthy food before you purchase supplements.
Those 77 NFL Positive Coronavirus Tests were All False Positives due to Lab Contamination
On August 22nd the National Football League (NFL) announced that COVID-19 testing indicated 77 positive results from 11 teams. While this was big news in the mainstream media there were clues that the testing may have shown some false positives.
The league asked the New Jersey lab BioReference to investigate the results. They were re-examined and all of the test results came back negative. In other words, all 77 were false positives.
Jon R. Cohen, M.D., the Executive Chairman of BioReference Laboratories, testing partner of the NFL, released a statement explaining that these false-positives were due to an isolated contamination in the New Jersey lab.
“On August 22, BioReference Laboratories reported an elevated number of positive COVID-19 PCR test results for NFL players and personnel at multiple clubs. The NFL immediately took necessary actions to ensure the safety of the players and personnel. Our investigation indicated that these were most likely false positive results, caused by an isolated contamination during test preparation in the New Jersey laboratory. Reagents, analyzers and staff were all ruled out as possible causes and subsequent testing has indicated that the issue has been resolved. All individuals impacted have been confirmed negative and informed.”
With the ongoing coronavirus pandemic, major pharmaceutical companies have been working tirelessly to create a vaccine in record time. With the media narrative being that a vaccine is our only hope for life returning to normal, it seems most people are pinning their hopes on a vaccine. Regardless of where you stand on the vaccine issue (pro vs anti), the reality is that vaccines do pose risk. While the obvious task is to develop a shot that immunizes against a disease the bigger challenge is to ensure that such a shot doesn’t injure people.
Researchers from Oxford and the pharmaceutical company AstraZeneca released information from their phase 1/2 trial that shows their vaccine may produce immunity without causing “serious harm”.
While the people in the study may not have suffered “serious harm” from the coronavirus vaccine experiments, the side effects they did suffer were substantial and indicative of a vaccine that could cause massive injury and death on a larger scale.
If journalists don’t start asking tougher questions, this will become the perfect setup for anti-vaccine messaging: Here’s what they forgot to tell you about the risks …
In one “advanced, phase III trial,” people were given acetaminophen every 6 hours for 24 hours after receiving the vaccine to help curb side effects.
Within a group of people that did not receive acetaminophen, one-third of people reported moderate or severe chills, headache, fatigue, feverishness, or general malaise. Around 25% of people experienced moderate or severe muscle aches. Nearly 10% of people had a fever higher than 100 degrees.
In another trial, by the time both doses of the vaccine were administered, every person had signs of headaches, chills or fatigue, with 80% of people reporting symptoms bad enough to keep them from normal everyday activities.
The people who participate in these vaccine trials have to be healthy adults between the ages of 18-55, and not have allergies made worse by acetaminophen. It is likely that someone with unknown and/or underlying health problems could have a much more adverse reaction to a coronavirus vaccine.
Joel Salatin is an American farmer and author. He owns Polyface Farms, which is known for its small scale unconventional farming methods. Months ago I heard Joel on a Joe Rogan podcast and was immediately blown away. It’s not very often that we hear people discuss the gut microbiome on one of the most popular podcasts in the country.
Here’s that podcast. I highly recommend listening to it if you have the time.
Along with discussing the gut microbiome, Joel talked about his farm, Polyface Farms. Polyface Farms is located in Virginia, and they do things a little differently than most. The land that is now Polyface farms was purchased by Joel’s parents in 1961. They’re all about regenerative farming through sustainable practices, like pasture-raised meat, carbon sequestration, and working in a seasonal cycle.
In short, it’s a dream come true for someone like myself who is all about organic eco-friendly agriculture, so naturally, I had to ask Joel a couple of questions.
The older generation is a big fan of talking about life when they were young. My grandfather loves to talk about the fact that he was raised on cow’s milk, and he turned out “just fine.” The difference, of course, is that the milk he was raised on was unpasteurized small scale cows milk. What encouraged you to get into small scale sustainable farming? Does it relate back to how you were raised or did you have some sort of revelation in life? Feel free to comment on how things have changed if you have any thoughts on that.
My paternal grandfather was a charter subscriber to Rodale’s Organic Gardening and Farming Magazine when it came out in the late 1940s. He always wanted to farm but never did. He had a very large garden, though, and sold extra produce to neighbors and corner grocers. My dad received his no-chemical indoctrination, then, from Grandpa, so I’m the third generation in the compost tradition. My Dad was a financial wizard and did accounting work all his life. After flying Navy bombers in WWII, he went to Indiana University on the GI bill and then headed off to Venezuela, South America as a bilingual accountant with Texas Oil Company. His long-range goal was a farm in a developing country and Venezuela seemed as good as any. After about 7 years he’d saved up enough to buy 1,000 acres in the highlands of Venezuela and began farming. The goal was dairy and broilers. My older brother and I were born during that time, and things looked bright. But then came a junta and the ouster of Peres Jimenez and animosity toward anything American; we fled the back door as the machine guns came in the front door; lost everything and after exhausting all attempts at protection, (we) came back to the U.S. Easter Sunday 1961, landing in Philadelphia. Mom grew up in Ohio and Texas and all their family was in Ohio and Indiana, but Dad’s heart was still in Venezuela and he hoped after the political turmoil settled to be able to return to our farm.
With that in mind, he wanted to be within a day’s drive of Washington D.C. so he could get to the Venezuelan Embassy quickly and easily to do paperwork and return. That never happened, but it’s why we ended up in Virginia’s Shenandoah Valley. When I hit 41, I remember thinking: “If I lost it all, would I start over?” That’s what Dad and Mom did in 1961. I was 4. Dad did his accounting work, and Mom was a high school health and physical ed teacher; that off-farm income paid the mortgage and within 10 years the land was paid off. Dad combined his ecology with his economic understanding to create some broad principles: animals move; mobile infrastructure; direct marketing; carbon-driven fertility. I had my first flock of laying hens when I was 10 years old and then added a garden. By 14 years old, I was our main salesman at the local Curb Market, a Depression-era hold-over that foreshadowed today’s farmers’ markets. With only 3 vendors, it struggled but after a couple of years, we had a growing and steady clientele for our pastured meats, poultry, eggs, produce, and dairy products (yogurt, butter, cottage cheese). We closed it down when I went off to college and the other two elderly matrons at the market quite as well so by the time I came home, that market and all of its wonderful grandfathered food safety exemptions were gone forever.
I’ve always said we were about 20 years ahead of our time. Operating that market during my teen years of early 1970s as the nascent back-to-the-land hippie movement germinated was not easy, but the lessons were invaluable when I returned to the farm and started building a clientele on my own in 1980, long before modern farmers’ markets. Teresa and I married in 1980, remodeled the attic of the farmhouse, and lived there for 7 years until Mom and Dad moved out from downstairs to a mobile home parked outside the yard. My Mom’s mother had lived there for 10 years and passed away, making that spot available. As an investigative reporter at the local daily newspaper, I realized every business was desperate for people who would show up on time, put in a full days’ work without whining, and actually creatively think through better ways of doing things all made me highly employable. Living on $300 a month, driving a $50 car, growing all of our own, cutting our own firewood for winter warmth, not having a TV—all these things enabled us even without a high salary to squirrel away half the paycheck. Within a couple of years we had saved enough to live on for a year. I walked out of that office Sept. 24, 1982, with a one-year cash nest egg and the jeering of every person I knew” “He’s throwing his life away.” “All that talent and he’s going to waste it on a farm.” “Don’t you know you can’t make any money farming?”
We succeeded.
While we were watching the podcast you did with Joe Rogan, my dad and I had several “Wow!” moments listening to you. One of us would be in the kitchen, and we would run into the living room where the podcast was playing, and share a look of absolute awe. “This guy is talking about the stuff that we talk about! And he’s on Joe Rogan!” We don’t know many people who talk about gut health the way we do. How did you learn about the importance of the body’s microbiome? Is there a correlation between your knowledge of the microbiome and how you run your farm?
Perhaps the most profound truth in life is that everything we see floats in an ocean of invisible beings. With electronic microscopes, we can now see many of these things, but because we can’t see them with the naked eye, they are not in our momentary conscience. It’s hard to forget the microbes floating in the air, on our skin, in our eyes, nostrils, and intestines. Our farm’s wellness philosophy stems from Antoine Béchamp, the French contemporary and nemesis of Louis Pasteur. While Pasteur promoted the germ theory and busied himself destroying and sterilizing, Beauchamp advanced the terrain theory and encouraged people to think about basic immunity. Rather than sterilization, he encouraged sanitation. He encouraged folks to get more sleep, drink more and better water (much of the water at that time was putrid) and eat better food. Along came Sir Albert Howard half a century later adding the soil dimension to this basic wellness premise.
In general, we believe nature’s default position is fundamentally wellness and if it’s not well, we humans probably did something to mess it up. That’s a far cry from assuming wellness is like catching lightning in a bottle, and some sort of sickness fairy hovers over the planet dropping viral stardust willy nilly. Sickness and disease, whether in humans, plants, or animals are not the problem in and of themselves; they simply manifest weaknesses developed in the unseen world. Every sickness or disease we’ve ever had on our farm was our fault. We may have selected the wrong seedstock, crowded things, created incubators for pathogens. You can stress things a lot of different ways. But our assumption when confronted with non-wellness is not to assume we missed a vaccine or a pharmaceutical, but rather to ask “what did we do to break down the immunological function of this plant or animal?” That leads to far more profound truth than assuming we didn’t select the right connection from the chemistry lab.
The fact that today people actually talk about the microbiome in polite company is a fantastic societal breakthrough. Hopefully, it will continue.
The current “pandemic” resulted in a total collapse of our food chain at big grocery stores. While things have since calmed down and straightened out, many people are now aware of just how weak our food supply chain is. The obvious solution- buy small- scale, buy local. The obvious problem- buying meat the right way, (small scale and local) is expensive. Here where I am in Detroit we’ve got a great meat guy, but a couple of weeks ago I found myself at the Dekalb farmers market in Atlanta. I spent $9 for one pound of organic, grass-fed ground beef. What are your thoughts for people who are concerned about the costs of shopping ethically? On a broader scale, do you have any solutions to this?
Price; it’s one of the biggest and most common questions. So let’s tackle it on several fronts.
1. Whenever someone says they can’t afford our food, I grab them by the arm and say “take me to your house.” Guess what I find there? Take-out, coffee, alcohol, sometimes tobacco, Netflix, People magazine, iPhones, flat-screen TV, tickets to Disney, lottery tickets—you get the drift. Very seldom does “I can’t afford it” carry any weight. We buy what we want, and that includes many folks below the poverty line.
2. Buy unprocessed. That $9 ground beef is still less than a fast food meal of equal nutritional value. Domestic culinary skills are the foundation of integrity food systems, and never have we had more techno-gadgetry to make our kitchens efficient. The average American spends fewer than 15 minutes a day in their kitchen. Nearly 80 percent of Americans have no clue at 4 p.m. what’s for dinner. In fact, the new catchphrase for millennials is “what’s dinner?” not “what’s for dinner?” So cooking from scratch is the number one way to reduce costs. Right now you can buy a whole Polyface pastured broiler, world-class, for less a pound than boneless skinless breast Tyson chicken at Wal-Mart. The most expensive heirloom Peruvian blue potato at New York City green markets is less per pound than Lay’s potato chips across the street. It’s about the processing.
3. Buy bulk. Get a freeze and buy half a beef or 20 chickens at a time. Buy a bushel of green beans and can them. We buy 10 bushels of apples every fall and spend two days making applesauce; it’s cheaper than watery junk at the supermarket and is real food. That’s not a waste of time; it’s kitchen camaraderie. On our farm, we give big price breaks for volume purchasing because it’s simply more efficient to handle a $500 transaction than 25 $20 transactions. This means, of course, that you must have a savings plan. Half of all Americans can’t put their hands on $400 in cash. That’s not an expensive food problem; that’s an endemic and profound failure to plan
Q: Here at OLM we’re a big fan of systems. We also have 10,000 square foot urban farm right in our back yard and are getting chickens very soon. Developing a farm feels a bit like an optimal opportunity to create the “perfect” system. I’m curious as to how the farm is systemized to be self-sustainable. I’m wondering if the farm is carbon neutral or carbon negative? Do you let your chickens work on your compost pile? Do you monitor cow grazing for optimum carbon sequestration? What advice do you have for the many people including us, who have just started growing our food after the current crisis?
Perhaps the starting point is to think of integration rather than segregation. How many different species of things can you hook together for symbiosis? So we follow the cows with the laying hens in Eggmobiles to scratch through the cow dung, spread out the manure as fertilizer, and eat the fly larvae out of the cowpats (this mimics the way birds always follow herbivores in nature). We build compost with pigs (we call them pig aerators). We have chickens underneath rabbit cages, generating $10,000 a year in a space the size of a 2-car garage and making the most superb compost in the world. We see trees as carbon sinks to integrate with open land; industrial commercial chippers enable us to chip crooked, diseased, and dying trees for compost carbon. The kitchen and gardening scraps go to the chickens. Hoop houses for rabbits, pigs, and chickens in the winter double up as vegetable production in the spring, summer, and fall, creating pathogen dead-ends for the plants and animals growing there at different times of the year. Integration is everything.
In half a century, we’ve moved our soil organic matter from 1 percent to 8.2 percent. I don’t know if we’re overall carbon-neutral, but we’ve done this without buying an ounce of chemical fertilizer and using 800 percent less depreciable infrastructure per gross income dollar than the average U.S. farm. That creates resilience. Over the years we’ve installed 8 miles of waterlines from permaculture style high ponds that catch surface run-off and gravity feed to the farmland below. And the rocks and gullies now grow vegetation where none grew before. This is not pride; it’s a humble acknowledgment of a Creator’s benevolent and abundant design; it’s our responsibility to caress this magnificent womb.
Given the scientific evidence of glyphosate toxicity, demonstrating the impacts on human health and the environment, the Secretariat of Environment and Natural Resources (SEMARNAT) has taken important steps to gradually reduce the use of this chemical until it achieves a total ban in 2024.