Australia’s Four Existential Problems
by David Archibald
15 July 2024
These are the four big existential problems that Australia faces near term.
1. Covid
We previously reported that the Cryptosporidium parvum outbreak on the east coast is now running at eight times the level seen in 2023. Victoria is also reporting an increase in Mycoplasma pneumoniae infections, but haven’t quantified the level. A Dr Nicole Higgins recently said:
We’ve got a respiratory bug soup at the moment….. Mycoplasma is one of them. At the same time we’re seeing increasing cases of influenza, Covid and RSV. We’re also seeing increasing cases of whooping cough.
Year to 30th June, whooping cough cases in Queensland are up 79-fold compared to the same period in 2023. While whooping cough tends to be cyclical, similar outbreaks are occurring in the US and UK. Before antiretroviral therapy, HIV patients had a higher risk of infection by Cryptosporidium associated with the degree of immunosuppression. In fact, cryptosporidiosis was one of the first Aids-defining illnesses — and as such had a higher rate of death than other Aids-defining illnesses.
Covid shares some attributes with HIV. One is that it infects immunoprotected tissue such as the brain, bone marrow and lymph tissue around the gut. And from there attacks the CD4 cells of the immune system.
In healthy people the CD4 level is from one to two billion cells per ml of blood, with the normal range extending down to 500 million cells per ml. There is another kind of immune cell called CD8 cells and normally the CD4 level is twice the CD8 level.
Early on in HIV, before there was a test for live virus in the blood, it was realised that if the CD4 level was below the CD8 level, that meant that the HIV disease burden in that individual was increasing. This is called an inverted CD4/CD8 ratio and means that you are on the way out. In HIV, untreated, it was an average of 12 years from infection to death. Freddie Mercury, for example, was likely infected in 1975 and died from bronchial pneumonia in 1991.
We are four years into covid and the damage to the immune system is happening on schedule. HIV doesn’t kill you directly. It weakens your immune system so that other things kill you — like cancer, bacteria, funghi and other viruses.
That is what we are seeing in the Cryptosporidium outbreak. My interpretation is that all the increase over normal levels is due to those people having covid in immunoprotected tissue. They would have low CD4 levels.
Cryptosporidium is a notifiable disease. That means the state governments have the name and addresses of all the people who have been reported with Cryptosporidium. What I strongly recommend is that the great and the good in Queensland Health Department, and the health departments of the other states, have at least a couple of hundred of those who have had Cryptosporidium in the last six months tested for their lymphocyte panels.
Find out what their CD4 levels are, and also their CD4 to CD8 ratios. The CD4 level will tell us how far along the disease is. What that looks like is shown in the following panel of lymphocyte results:
They are all patients with either an initial covid infection or suspected long covid. Patient No 1 is normal with plenty of CD4 cells and a CD4/CD8 ratio of almost 4:1. Then the CD4 level falls away with patients 2 to 4. The CD4/CD8 ratio goes below one, which is unnatural and unhealthy. In HIV, before there was a test for live virus, an inverted CD4/CD ratio (less than 1.0) was indicative of HIV infection. The same thing is now seen in covid. This graphic illustrates the sort of annual decline in lymphocyte levels in the early years of a covid infection:
The first result was in May 2023 and the second result was in May 2024. This individual had a Cryptosporidium episode while he had a CD4 level in the 700s, well above the bottom of the normal range of 500. In HIV, Kaposi’s sarcoma starts appearing at a CD4 level below 500 and Burkitt’s lymphoma below 200.
It is likely that a lot more people have a persistent covid infection than is commonly realised. The term ‘long covid’ refers to people showing symptoms. There will also be a large contingent of infected who are asymptomatic, but who won’t show symptoms until their lymphocyte levels fall further. The sooner these people are identified, the sooner treatment can start.
There is another problem with covid. It is a lot more inflammatory than HIV, so it will cause more cancers, more fibrosis and more blood clots than seen in HIV. The anti-mullerian hormone level in females, AMH for short, which indicates a woman’s ability to conceive, drops with each covid infection. If a woman gets a covid infection once a year then that will likely half the amount of time she has left to have children. So that a woman of the age of 20 would only be fertile to the age of 30, not 40 as is normal. Covid may be contributing to the drop in Australia’s birth rate seen over the last couple of years.
There is a solution, and it is the same solution that has worked for HIV. The palliative, because it won’t cure it, will be a once per day cocktail of molecules to stop the virus from replicating. This will allow people to lead normal lives. In HIV, the once-a-day tablet containing nucleotide transcriptase inhibitors allows women to have babies with only a one per cent chance that the baby will be born with a HIV infection. There is likely to be a solution, but someone had better start figuring out which molecules are going to go in it.
Every day counts. A big chunk of those presenting with Cryptosporidium are toddlers — two and three year olds. Left untreated with an ongoing CD4 decline, those children are unlikely to live long enough to see high school. Let’s see what their CD4 levels are. As soon as possible.
Covid is Australia’s biggest problem. Most of the solution will be a once per day pill. Those who have never had covid will take it to stop being infected. In HIV this is called PrEP which stands for Pre-Exposure Prophylaxis. The balance of the solution will be better ventilation, UV lamps at 222 nanometres to kill the virus in the air and vitamin D and zinc supplementation to help the immune system.
It is also important that people with a fresh covid infection kill off that infection as rapidly as possible. This is to stop the virus from finding a home in immunoprotected tissue. To do that, people should take big doses of ivermectin, zinc and a form of vitamin D called calcifediol once they are aware they have a fresh infection. The form of vitamin D that people use as a supplement takes a couple of days to be converted in the liver to the active form, which is calcifediol.
If you take calcifediol it starts working in a couple of hours and that is important when every hour counts. The dose of calcifediol you should take is 40,000 international units. In weight that is one milligram. Which is a problem because of the Therapeutic Goods Administration’s ongoing war against vitamin D. Under the conditions that we evolved with, our bodies might make up to 20,000 IU of vitamin D per day.
But the TGA has limited the amount of vitamin D to 1,000 international units in a capsule, which is possibly only five per cent of what you might produce in a day — almost nothing. And they have limited the amount of calcifediol in a capsule to 400 units. Which is one per cent of the dose you need to be taking on infection to help kill covid as soon as possible. The TGA is a big part of Australia’s problem with covid. Some politician has to take an interest in cleaning out the Augean stables, so to speak.
2. China
Australia’s second biggest problem is China, which, like Japan in the 1930s, wants to take over the world. China is an immediate problem because President Xi wants to have his war while he is young enough to enjoy winning it.
But Australia’s position isn’t as dire as most people think. Even if no other country was involved in a war with China, Australia alone could stop a Chinese invasion fleet from reaching Australia. That is because the evolution of electronics over the last 20 years has favoured the defence, which is what we will be doing.
Air-launched ballistic missiles can hit ships five thousand kilometers north of Darwin. The cost of sinking a Chinese destroyer might be as little as one per cent of the cost of building it, and might average five per cent of the cost of building it.
Back in the 1960s, Israel with a population of three million held off the Arabs who then had a population of 300 million. And that was with a land border.
At the moment, China’s real economy is about five times larger than Australia’s and we have the benefit of a 4,000 kilometre-wide moat of oceans and seas. If we spend five per cent of what the Chinese are spending in building their navy, we have a good chance of stopping any Chinese ship from coming south of Indonesia.
But we do have to make enough of the right missiles and the planes to fire them from. The United States has realised this too and recently made an air-launched version of their PrSM missile, optimised for hitting ships at sea and with a likely range of beyond 1,000 km. Israel recently released an air-launched version of its LORA ballistic missile. No doubt air-launched versions could be made of South Korea’s Hyunmoo ballistic missiles. We should make all of them, under license, in Australia, because we are going to need plenty.
3. Net Zero
Australia’s third big problem is Net Zero. Net Zero is built on a lie, which is the carbon dioxide theory of global warming. The truth is that carbon dioxide is not as potent as the models suggest. When we dig up all the rest of the rocks that can be burnt, and burn them, that will only raise the temperature of the atmosphere by 0.3˚C. Nobody is going to notice it.
In the meanwhile we are wrecking our power system with solar panels and windmills. This is forcing up the cost of power, and in turn is closing whole industries, as predicted by the Fisher Report of 2019. In turn, this makes the task of defending Australia more difficult and might result in a lot of Australian dead, and the loss of our country. It is that stupid.
There is a Net Zero coming in our future — which will be when our coal runs out and we have to source all the carbon we need from biomass. We should prepare for that day by getting used to building and maintaining nuclear power stations. Because you can’t afford to make solar panels with power produced from solar panels, the future will either be nuclear power or the extreme poverty of horse-drawn carts.
Let’s do a thought experiment. The solar panels we see around us are made using cheap power from Chinese coal at five cents per kilowatt/hour. Under ideal conditions out in the Australian desert, solar panels sourced from China produce power at 20 cents per kilowatt/hour. So if you used power from solar panels to produce more solar panels, what would be the cost of the power they produce? My calculation is one dollar per kilowatt/hour. And so on to infinity. The solar panels and windmills we see around us are neither renewable or sustainable. The are artifacts of cheap Chinese coal power.
The political argument is not between nuclear power and renewables, it is between nuclear power and horse-drawn carts –- an easy choice.
4. Fuel Supply
Our next big problem is fuel supply. We produce and refine only a fraction of the one million barrels per day of the diesel and petrol we use. Worse, the oil we produce isn’t the same as the oil we refine. The ships carrying our oil and the ones carrying imported diesel pass each other on the open ocean.
Our continued existence, from day to day, relies upon the kindness of strangers in sending us diesel. We have the ability to fix that problem if we choose to. The solution is building coal liquefaction plants using the Bergius process. This is commercial at today’s oil price with our current tax structure.
Making our own liquid fuels instead of paying for the imported stuff would also make us wealthier. We could supply our friends, such as the island countries of the Pacific who, without fuel, would otherwise starve because they wouldn’t be able to go fishing.
We are now in a count down to a possible Trump second term, which would see the carbon dioxide theory of global warming thrown out as the basis of public policy. Nations won’t fear trade retribution if they abandon the charade of reducing carbon emissions. We should prepare for that frabjous day.
David Archibald is the author of The Anticancer Garden in Australia.