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.
The Open Air Method: What We Might Be Missing To Treating COVID-19
During the Influenza pandemic of 1918, it was common practice for sick patients to be treated outside in tenets or open wards. This is known as the open-air method. The English physician John Coakley used the open-air method in 1791 to treat children suffering from tuberculous.
A combination of fresh air, sunlight, scrupulous standards of hygiene and reusable face masks appear to have substantially reduced deaths among some patients and infections among medical staff.
Sunlight increases vitamin D levels, which boosts the immune system. Additionally ultraviolet light renders viruses like COVID-19, and the flu, inactive. During the Influenza pandemic, in a typical hospital that had 76 cases, 20 patients would die in a three day period while 17 nurses would become sick. Adopting the “open air” method brought fatalities down from 40% to 13%.
Today, our modern hospitals are severely lacking in the “open-air” method. It’s been estimated by several different studies that a large portion of COVID-19 cases are being contracted within hospitals. Numbers from NHS England indicate that up to 20% of hospital patients with COVID-19 became infected at the hospital.
Nurses and other staff have inadvertently passed on the virus to patients because they did not have adequate personal protective equipment (PPE) or could not get tested for the virus.
In Wuhan, China it’s estimated that hospital-related transmission is associated with 41% of cases. In the U.S., it’s estimated that 1.7 million healthcare-associated infections occur in hospitals each year. In past outbreaks, SARS, which is similar to COVID-19 has been said to be a “super spreader” in Ontario in 2003, 77% of SARS cases were contracted in a hospital.
Dr. John Loannidis recommends not going to the hospital with COVID-19 if your symptoms are mild. Many people are able to spread COVID-19 to those who are immune-compromised. A study analyzed the mortality rates of 5,700 patients in New York City who were placed on ventilators. The mortality rate of these cases was anywhere from 76.4% to 97.2% depending on age.
If you’re worried about COVID-19, having a healthy gut is the best thing you can do to avoid getting sick, and of course sunlight and fresh air are great too.
High Blood Pressure and Diabetes Shown to Raise Your Risk of Dying from COVID-19
A new study has shown that high blood pressure increases your risk of dying from COVID-19. Doctors in China noticed a pattern when treating patients – nearly half of those in critical condition were also suffering from high blood pressure. A total of 2,877 patients were analyzed, where 29.5% of people had a history of high blood pressure. Data showed that those patients who had higher blood pressure had double the risk of dying from COVID-19.
Additionally, patients with diabetes also had worse symptoms than those without. In the U.K., data showed that 19% of those hospitalized with COVID-19 also had diabetes. Only an estimated 6% of the U.K. population has diabetes. Those with Type 1 diabetes were worse off than those with type 2.
Diabetes and high blood pressure contribute to 5 out of the 10 top leading causes of death according to the CDC.
The Food and Drug Administration has announced that it will allow certain impurities in alcohol-based sanitizers to meet the public health demands during the COVID-19 pandemic. The relaxed guidelines will directly affect fuel ethanol companies that began making sanitizer at the beginning of the pandemic.
The FDA is working with industry to ensure that harmful levels of impurities are not present if ethanol is used in these products. Based on careful review and consideration of available data, we are specifying interim levels of certain impurities that we have determined can be tolerated for a relatively short period of time, given the emphasis on hand hygiene during the COVID-19 public health emergency and to avoid exacerbating access issues for alcohol-based hand sanitizer.”
This announcement is in direct contrast to the agency’s position in April, when it told several fuel ethanol companies that their sanitizers didn’t meet safety standards. Two ingredients under particular scrutiny are acetaldehyde, a carcinogen, and benzene.
A small cohort study in China found Sars-CoV-2 in semen, suggesting that coronavirus transmission could occur through sexual contact. Researchers tested the semen of 38 men who had tested positive for COVID-19 in China. Twenty-three patients had achieved a clinical recovery, and 15 were still in the acute infection stage. Six semen samples tested positive for COVID-19, with four positives coming from acute cases and two from recovered patients.
If it could be proved that SARS-CoV-2 can be transmitted sexually in future studies, sexual transmission might be a critical part of the prevention of transmission, especially considering the fact that SARS-CoV-2 was detected in the semen of recovering patients.”
This is a very small study, and the implications of the results are unclear. Other similar studies haven’t received any positives in semen. It is also not unheard of for semen to test positive for other viruses.
However, we should not be surprised if the virus which causes Covid-19 is found in the semen of some men, since this has been shown with many other viruses such as Ebola and Zika…”