Covid and Cancer

by David Archibald

15 July 2024

 

Covid causes cancer in two ways:

1. 1. Directly, by causing mutations
   2. Indirectly, by degrading the immune system

There are other viruses that also cause cancer, including human papilloma virus, which causes cervical cancer and hepatitis B and C, which cause liver cancer.

Covid causes inflammation, which in turn is a cause of cancer. Inflammation caused by covid in the lungs results in fibrosis, which in turn causes neoplastic changes. Covid also causes ground glass opacity in the lungs. This is whiteness, like ground glass, in the lungs on x-rays during a covid infection, and is indicative of increased likelihood of cancer.

Most people have realised that covid was made in the lab in Wuhan and didn’t spontaneously arise from the wet market there. If it is artificial that means it was designed. If it was designed, what was it designed to do? Nobody involved has told us yet.

The bloke behind the science is Ralf Baric of the University of North Carolina. Baric spent the 1980s and 1990s researching how to cause heart disease in rabbits. He published his last paper on causing heart disease using a corona virus in 1999.

• Why choose a corona virus? It is because they mutate too rapidly to produce a vaccine for them. So Baric wanted to create a highly infectious disease you couldn’t vaccinate against.
• Why heart disease? Because heart disease doesn’t necessarily kill people straight away. Something that causes heart damage can produce deaths spread over decades. Perhaps he was inspired by the Spanish flu, which caused an elevated rate of death from heart attacks into the 1930s, twenty years after the flu epidemic.
• Why rabbits? Killing rabbits by giving them heart attacks doesn’t have a commercial application. But they are cheaper to experiment on than chimpanzees and closer to humans than rats. So rabbits it is. In hindsight, Baric was trying to create a virus which, like the flu, wouldn’t cause enough short-term problems which might drive society to eradicate it but would cause a higher long term death rate. Baric was and remains a psychopath.

Then a couple of things came along which changed the direction of the project. It was realised by the mid-1990s that HIV worked by killing the CD4 cells of the immune system, and that the HIV-afflicted died an average of 12 years after infection. The initial infection from HIV was so mild that a lot of people didn’t realise they were infected until years had passed. Sounds perfect for a psychopath. But HIV was hard to transmit and really didn’t leak over into the heterosexual population.

Then in a lab in the United States, a cage-full of ferrets died on the other side of the room from an experiment on a virus. The scientists realised that they had created a lethal airborne virus, getting over HIV’s transmission problem.

SARS had been developed in 2002 but killed people too fast, so it was easily shut down. The same with MERS — too easily traced by the deaths it caused.

Then in 2005, Baric developed a gene-splicing technology, which meant that he could create a witches’ brew of a virus to order. He dialled back the case fatality rate from 35% in SARS to 0.6% in covid. Covid and the covid vaccines cause plenty of heart problems. Given how many years that Baric devoted to making rabbits have heart attacks, perhaps he wouldn’t want to see that effort wasted.

Covid’s main killing mechanism remains the same as HIV’s – depleting the immune system of CD4 cells. This will let everything rip. Freddie Mercury, for example, died from bronchial pneumonia in 1991 after a long struggle with HIV.

Currently 50% of people in western countries are diagnosed with cancer at some point in their lives and about 25% die from it. The proportion dead from cancer in a covid-infected world is likely to rise — because cancers, normally slow growing, won’t have the immune system holding them back. Thus, the current phenomenon of covid causing turbo-cancers and patients presenting with what would normally be considered late-stage disease.

That’s the problem. Now let’s go on to the solution. Cancer treatment involves three things.

The first thing to do is maximise the immune system. That is going to be difficult if the covid virions that have burrowed somewhere in your body are still whacking your CD4 cells. So the first thing to do is to stop the covid virions from multiplying. This is the solution that  worked for HIV. Some of the same molecules that worked for HIV are likely to be useful for covid — such as tenofovir disoproxil fumarate, which is the foundational drug for the HIV treatments Truvada and Biktarvy.

Several antivirals have been found to have an anti-covid effect. For example, a husband and wife presented to their GP with bad covid infections. The husband responded to ivermectin but the wife didn’t. But she responded to Tamiflu, which is an antiviral based on the molecule shikonin from star anise. There are a number of anti-worm drugs that are also antiviral.

In the four years since covid appeared almost nothing has been done to test molecules and combinations of molecules for their antiviral activity. Australia needs at least three BSL-3 labs devoted to doing the basic work before human trials.

To maximise immune function once you have the underlying covid infection under control, add vitamin D, quercetin as a zinc ionophore and vitamin D receptor activator, zinc glycinate, omega-3, melatonin, and nicotinamide. Turkey tail mushroom (Trametes versicolor) also increases immune response. Mushroom extracts alone have been known to kill off cancers simply by boosting the immune response.

The next step is to increase the production of pro-apoptotic proteins. To put that into context, each cell has the continuous option of living or dying, depending on the balance between pro-apoptotic and anti-apoptotic proteins. Most cancers result from a cell overproducing anti-apoptotic proteins, which stops the cells from dying. An important consideration is that each of the body’s organs evolved differently in their response to cancer, so each type of cancer requires a different treatment.

This is how chemotherapy and radiation treatment work. They hold up division of the nucleus so that it gets annoyed enough to send signals to the cell surface to put out more death receptors. A molecule circulating in your blood called Fas ligand attaches to the death receptor, which then sends a signal into the cell to start the apoptotic cascade of the caspases. This kills the cancer cell and chops up the cellular structures so that the remains are carried off in the extracellular fluid instead of just rotting in place.

There are a few molecules in nature that do this, mainly in the bark of trees so that insects don’t eat them. For example the chemo drug taxol is from the bark of the Pacific yew tree.

Chemo is usually given at a dose just short of what kills you, to reduce the chance that the cancer will mutate around the drug and become chemo-resistant.  A solution to that problem is to take a cocktail of molecules so that the cancer can’t mutate around all of them simultaneously.

There are a number of molecules that can be used, prescription and non-prescription, that combine good efficacy and minimal side effects. These include the antibiotic doxycycline, the anti-worm drugs ivermectin and fenbendazole, the antifungal itraconazole, and the diabetic drug metformin. Plus whatever you might be prescribed by your specialist.

Another thing that works by this mechanism is injections of vitamin C. The body can only absorb between 250 to 500 milligrams of vitamin C orally per day. Vitamin C at that level is an effective antioxidant. But at high blood concentrations of vitamin C, that effect is reversed in cancer cells because of their high demand for sugar. The vitamin C causes the generation of reactive oxygen in the mitochondria of cancer cells, which causes them to die and then the cell dies. The body can take up to 90 grams of vitamin C intravenously at a time.

The next thing to do is to reduce production of the anti-apoptotic proteins. This is a last line of defence against cancer that Nature has build into our cells. It is founded on the expectation that the right plant molecules are constantly arriving in our diet to trigger receptors.

For example the anti-apoptotic proteins cFlIP and XIAP are made using energy from the NOX receptor on the external membrane of cells. No molecules bind to the NOX receptor on normal cells. A cancer cell though converts 40% of the NOX receptors to a tumour form called tNOX. A number of plant molecules bind to tNOX, shutting off its energy supply for making anti-apoptotic proteins. This allows the pro-apoptotic proteins to overwhelm the anti-apoptotic proteins, and the cell dies.

The reason why we have a high cancer incidence in Western countries is because we eat mostly comfort food which lacks the right sort of molecules. Thus, Vietnam has one fortieth our prostate cancer rate and Thailand has one sixth our breast cancer rate.  The difference in cancer rates is from diet, not genetics.

 

As with lung cancer, prostate and breast cancer are largely self-inflicted. And that is caused by what we don’t eat.

 

Breast cancer has a warm and fuzzy image in Australia and we are all told that it is a noble thing to fight breast cancer. But nobody is told that if they just changed their diet a bit, breast cancer could be nearly wiped out in Australia. From an anticancer effect, the best meals to have are Thai salad and Vietnamese salad.

I am not discouraging anyone from having chemotherapy. Chemotherapy works for a number of types of cancers. It is just a bit crude because it also affects normal cells that are dividing, thus the hair loss and nausea, and it has to be given at a dose just short of what kills you. It will be ever thus with chemotherapy.

Chemotherapy would be made more effective if it was combined with the right molecules that reduce the over-production of anti-apoptotic proteins. There are plenty of lab experiments showing that the right plant molecules enhance the efficacy of chemo drugs. The right molecules change with each type of cancer.

Cancer treatment would be made more effective again if we did everything to maximise immune response. That includes vitamin D and Turkey Tail extract, and everything in between. Some types of cancer over-express vitamin D receptors, which help them tip over into apoptosis (programmed cell death), which is what they want to do. Some cancer types also over-express β-glucuronidase, which cleaves off the glucose molecule that has been added to plant molecules by the liver so they can be excreted by the kidneys. This allows the plant molecule to regain its activity within the cell and activate the receptors that are going to help kill the cancer. If the cancer cells are asking for all this stuff, we should help them along by providing it.

There is a lot of work still to be done in terms of optimising the combinations of molecules for each type of cancer. The path is clear thanks to the work on cancer that has been done over the last 30 years.

We have a tsunami of cancer cases coming from covid and we do need to make cancer treatment more effective.

 

David Archibald is the author of The Anticancer Garden in Australia.