Submission to the Senate Inquiry into Long Covid

Submission to the Senate Inquiry into Long Covid

by David Archibald

31 October 2022

 

The Australian Senate is currently running an inquiry into long covid. This is the submissions page.

But first, the big picture view of the situation from a virologist commenting on Twitter:

China’s zero CoViD policy doesn’t seem too dramatic when you read this. In a few years they will be healthy and we’ll be sick, disabled or dead.

The Chicoms know this too. In this video a Chinese business consultant in a Ted-style talk justified justified the Chinese zero covid policy, by saying that in 10 years the West will be brought to its knees because of long covid. It will decimate most of the Western labor force.

Covid has a lot of modes of action, operating over wide range of time frames. One of the big ones, enhancing the effect of all the others, is suppression of the immune system. This paper found that “Immunological dysfunction persists for 8 months following initial mild-to-moderate SARS-CoV-2 infection” (Eight months was the period of the study – it doesn’t mean the immune system recovers after eight months). That opens people to other infections. We have already had a case of covid causing Kaposi’s sarcoma, the disease that led to the discovery of AIDS forty years ago. Lethal fungi get in on the act too. At the moment, there is an outbreak of Candida auris in pediatric patients in southern Nevada with 42 deaths in 536 cases so far.

To give an idea of how quickly long covid could close down the country, this graphic shows the total incidence of long covid under different probabilities of long covid per infection:

 

 

If you assume three infections per annum, the lowest rate of incidence, just 5%, has half the country incapacitated in seven years. The NDIS and our health system will be long gone by then.

The notion that covid escaped from a lab has gained traction recently. Eventually that will lead to people realizing that if it came from a lab, then it was designed to do something. So what was it designed to do? The Chicoms may have been too clever by half. Covid outbreaks are still occurring all over the place in China. Covid burrows into immunoprotected organs such as the central nervous system and the gut-associated lymph tissue. That is why sampling of sewage found Delta still being shed when it had been completely replaced by omicron in nasal sampling. So anyone ever infected may be a future spreader. Genetic profiling of outbreaks would determine if that is case.

The Senate health committee labelled my submission to the long covid inquiry as correspondence, so that it would not be accessed by the public. Here it is, by terms of reference:

 

3. Research into the potential and known effects, causes, risk factors, prevalence, management, and treatment of long COVID and/or repeated COVID infections in Australia

With respect to potential and known effects, it is hard to treat this disease without first understanding what it was designed to do. In January 2021, Dr Steve Quay published an exhaustive analysis that concluded beyond reasonable doubt that covid was not naturally created but instead is laboratory-derived.1 He followed that with a seven page document in plainer English.2 While Jeffrey Sachs recently called for an inquiry into the origins of covid,3 evidence for a laboratory origin has been found in the covid genome. Professor Kundu and his co-authors found four inserts in the spike protein that were copied from the HIV genome.4 All four inserts are at binding sites on the spike protein of covid. No doubt the Wuhan scientists did this to give covid the disease attributes of HIV.

Balamurali Ambati and his co-authors found that the sequence containing the furin cleavage site of covid was copied from a Moderna cancer patent.5 How these matches were found is explained online in plain English by Dr A.K. Syed.6 As well as the direct evidence of a laboratory origin for covid, there is also indirect evidence. In 2017 a pandemic exercise at John Hopkins University predicted that the next pandemic would be caused by a derivative of the SARS virus, but with its case fatality rate reduced from 30% to 0.6% — which is exactly what happened two years later.7 The John Hopkins people either have extraordinary powers of prediction or they were told what was going to happen. The convocation at John Hopkins in 2017 wasn’t about mitigating the health impact of the pandemic coming, it was more focused on overcoming vaccine hesitancy.

The reason why bioweapons researchers chose these two viruses — SARS and HIV — to create their ideal weapon is because SARS is highly infectious by airborne transmission, while HIV attacks the immune system. As a virologist friend who worked on HIV vaccines in the 1990s puts it: “Nobody died from AIDS in year one, everyone was dead by year ten”.

With respect to covid’s near-term effects, a passage from a paper on the sequalae of covid is an efficient summary of the disease’s effects:8

A wide range of viral entry mechanisms, as well as immunological and pathological changes, have been identified in humans with COVID-19 post-acute infection with SARS-CoV-2. These include an imbalance in angiotensin-converting enzyme-2 (ACE-2) and its regulation and altered immune response and inflammatory processes (innate and adaptive immune response, autoimmunity, severe inflammation, and host-specific factors). While the pathological changes reported in these patients are predominantly in the lung, multi-organ failure has also occurred in almost all cases.

It is likely that the HIV inserts in covid were put there to suppress immunity as the spike protein wreaked havoc on any tissue with ACE-2 receptors — which is everything touched by the blood, though some organs have more receptors than others.

For those who survive that phase of the disease, including the long covid cohort, the covid viral load will retreat to immunoprotected reservoirs in the body, primarily the central nervous system and the gut-associated lymphatic tissue.

Then disease progression will become more like AIDS as covid virions in the immunoprotected reservoirs wear down the immune system.

In June 1981, individuals started presenting to emergency rooms in US hospitals with nonspecific pneumonia and lymphopenia. It turned out that they had been infected with HIV in the early 1970s. This graph displays the progression of the disease:

 

Figure 1: The progression of a HIV infection in terms of CD4 count and viral load.

 

In HIV, the viral load (red line) peaks at about week six before declining again in week nine. But it never completely clears the body. It burrows into immunoprivileged organs — mainly the central nervous system and the lymphatic tissue associated with the gut. With respect to the gut, HIV causes a loss of Intestinal Barrier Function. The Intestinal Barrier Function allows the uptake of nutrients while restricting pathogenic molecules and bacteria. As the Intestinal Barrier Function declines, lipopolysaccharides from the gut leak into the blood stream. The consequence of intestinal contents making their way into systemic circulation is constant immune system activation. Eventually the immune system is degraded.

HIV enters the body by infecting CD4 T cells, which are part of the immune system. So in the graph above, the CD4 cell count falls to a low at about six weeks before recovering to some extent in week 12 of the infection. It then starts a long decline measured in years. At about year eight of the infection, diseases start appearing as a consequence of the weakened immune system. In the early stages of the AIDS epidemic these included Kaposi’s sarcoma and Pneuocystis carinii pneumonia. And the HIV viral load increases again as the last of the CD4 cells are wiped out.

So do covid virions enter the brain? In a study of the results of autopsies of 44 covid patients, covid virions were detected in 79 of 85 anatomical locations including brain and lymph tissues.9 Covid virions enter the brain using tunnelling nanotubes in the same way that HIV does.10 And covid infects CD4 cells, just as HIV does.11

The parallels between HIV and covid in mode of action flow through to disease effects. Covid is known for causing brain fog. So does HIV — the brain impairment test is called ‘HIV-Associated Neurocognitive Decline’ (HAND).  In a study of 22 patients with covid, 13 met the diagnostic criteria for HAND and a further seven were found to have asymptomatic neurocognitive impairment, which precedes a HAND diagnosis.12

The medical industry tried and failed for decades to develop a vaccine for HIV, before giving up in the late 1990s. The initial drugs purposed for HIV tended to kill the patients quickly. In 1995 a combination therapy was developed which significantly reduced mortality. Since then antiretroviral cocktails of drugs have led to lower toxicity and better tolerance. However, “HIV persists in the body due to the early establishment of reservoirs, which cannot be eliminated with any of the current antiretroviral regimens”.13 Those infected with HIV are on antiretroviral therapy for the rest of their lives.

The covid epidemic has been going for nigh on three years now which, if the parallels with HIV continue, leads to an important point. In HIV, “the strategy is to militate against Central Nervous System reservoir expansion and the resulting neurological manifestations through the onboarding of antivirals as quickly as possible, ideally before the one year anniversary of an individual’s Estimated Date of Seroconversion.”

The term seroconversion means the production of antibodies against a disease. So antiretroviral therapy should start within a year of being infected with HIV, in order to head off cognitive decline and the progression of the disease. Maintaining a CD4 cell count greater than 200 per ml is important to viral suppression. There are other complications of course. Impaired kidney function means that the body is less able to clear the toxic products of antiretroviral therapy, so a test called estimated globular filtration rate is used to predict how a patient will respond to antiretroviral therapy.

And the kidneys have plenty of the ACE-2 receptors that covid uses to enter cells. The implication of that is that kidney damage should be militated in the initial infection as much as possible, in order to be able to use antivirals in long term treatment.

At the beginning of the covid pandemic, knowledgeable virologists predicted that there would not be a successful vaccine for covid because it is a coronavirus and those things mutate too fast. And so the prediction has come to pass:

 

Figure 2: NSW hospitalisation rate for covid by vaccination status for epidemiologial week 30 per million vaccinated in each cohort.

 

Figure 3: NSW hospitalisation rate for covid by vaccination status for epidemiologial weeks 17 to 38, per million vaccinated in each cohort.

 

Figure 4: NSW death rate for covid by vaccination status for epidemiologial weeks 17 to 38, per million vaccinated in each cohort.

 

The vaccinated have a higher infection rate than the unvaccinated, with hospitalization and death rates proportional to the number of boosters — see figures 2 to 4 above. Some people believe in vaccination for influenza, another coronavirus, despite its efficacy being much lower than that of simple vitamin D supplementation.

The subject of vitamin D raises the issue of what could and should be done for long covid. In Australia a big cohort is moving to their first anniversary of seroconversion, which, if covid continues paralleling AIDS, means that the opportunity to halt disease progression with antiviral therapy will begin falling away.

The first thing to do is to adopt a commercial blood test for covid virions, not just antibodies. Live, wriggling covid virus in someone who had covid 18 months ago will point to a reservoir in the body that is shedding into the blood stream. And quantification of viral load is central to treatment.

Secondly, everyone who has had covid should have their CD4 count monitored. A normal level is about 1,100 cells/ml but can range widely. So it is important to establish an initial level for an individual, and see if there is a trend. On the subject of CD4 levels, a study in HIV found that every 1 ng/ml increase in the blood vitamin D level was associated with a 3.3 cells/ml CD4 increase.14

If that relationship holds for covid, someone going from a vitamin D blood level of 25 ng/ml (the average for Melbourne in winter) to 85 ng/ml would have a 198 cells/ml boost in their CD4 count. And as stated above, “Maintaining a CD4 cell count greater than 200 cells/ml is important to viral suppression.” So, what happens when you don’t preserve your CD4 population? It’s back to 1981: Kaposi’s sarcoma and Pneuocystis carinii pneumonia.

That said, anecdotally a person may be infected with covid despite a vitamin D blood level of 89 ng/ml. So vitamin D isn’t the silver bullet. It needs help from the rest of an antiviral cocktail.

Vitamin D’s mode of action in HIV is likely to be the same in covid15:

Vitamin D induces antiviral gene expression, reduces the viral co-receptor CCR5 on CD4+ T-cells, and promotes a HIV-1-restrictive CD38+HLA-DR+ immunophenotype in in vitro assays, leading to HIV-1 infection inhibition in T cells. Likewise, Vitamin D reduces the ability of TNFα to upregulate the transcription of HIV RNA from latently infected CD4+ cells. Thus, low levels of Vitamin D are related to high HIV viral load in plasma, decreased CD4+ T-cells in peripheral blood, rapid AIDS progression, and lower survival in HIV- infected patients.

And vitamin D is cheap. It is made on an industrial scale by irradiating lanolin from sheep’s wool with UVB.

Online you can buy it from Chinese manufacturers for US$20/kg. A human under ideal conditions makes about 250 millionths of a gram per day in half an hour of sun exposure. There are 40 International Units (IU) to a millionth of a gram so that is 10,000 IU. Adults could take a supplemental dose of vitamin D at that level to the end of time without ill effect. At that rate one gram of vitamin D would last 11 years for US$0.02 at the wholesale cost.

 

Figure 5: Vitamin D levels: 50 ng/ml is equivalent to 125 nmol/L

 

A protocol for multiple sclerosis developed in Brazil, the Coimbra Protocol, has used an averaged dosing rate of 33,000 IU per day for over a year without developing calcaemia or other side effects. Practitioners of that protocol don’t measure their patients’ vitamin D levels. Instead they test for parathyroid hormone, which is a hormone that regulates bone turnover, as vitamin D does.

The amount of parathyroid hormone produced by the body starts rising once the vitamin D level goes below 25 ng/ml. Viruses, bacteria and autoimmune diseases chew through vitamin D stores, so the parathyroid hormone level is telling us when the body has enough vitamin D for all its normal functions as well as fighting whatever ails the body.

Vitamin D has been fighting viruses for so long that some viruses, such as Epstein-Barr, have evolved to inactivate the vitamin D receptor. Fortunately there are vitamin D receptor activators, including quercetin and resveratrol. Quercetin is also a zinc ionophore, pushing zinc into cells from the intercellular fluid. Zinc is antiviral. So too are magnesium and selenium.

What else is needed in the cocktail is something that approaches vitamin D in its covid-killing activity but with a different, and thus synergistic, mode of action. The prime candidate for that role is ivermectin, still banned in Australia in order to protect the profits of the vaccinators. The vaccinated need ivermectin more than anyone else because they will be dying faster due to their higher rate of infection, and re-infections tend to be worse than the infections that preceded them.

 

4. The health, social, educational and economic impacts in Australia on individuals who develop long COVID and/or have repeated COVID infections, their families, and the broader community

Individuals who have contracted covid and contain the covid virus in immunoprotected reservoirs are likely to have a disease progression similar to AIDS. If that comes to pass then these once-infected people will start dying in greater numbers from about 2028. Some people have already been infected four times, irrespective of vaccination status. With respect to vaccination, it has been said that ‘Getting four shots in 18 months is an IQ test, not disease prevention.’

Anecdotally, subsequent infections are worse.

The first hard data on this effect is from a paper using data from the US Department of Veterans Affairs.1 From that paper, this is a table of consequences (sequelae) of covid infection by number of infections per one thousand people in each cohort:

1 infection 2 infections 3 infections
Hospitalization 169 209 677
Cardiovascular 52 94 146
Coagulation and Hematologic 39 57 96
Diabetes 29 65 94
Fatigue 82 77 150
Gastrointestinal 33 72 105
Kidney 52 57 117
Mental Health 87 264 352
Musculoskeletal 20 65 86
Neurologic 33 148 180
Pulmonary 73 95 168
Total of sequelae 501 993 1494

Graphically:

Figure 6: Cumulative risk and burden of sequelae from covid infections

 

What is apparent is that there is no immunity. Prior infection is just a pre-existing condition. Each infection, on average, gives you half a sequela. Some of the damage each infection gives the organs would be subclinical, and thus the hospitalization rate rises faster than total sequelae.

There is no flattening out in the statistics to date.  There is just a steady march to death by covid. The number of infections to get to that state is likely inversely correlated with age. But at a certain stage in their collecting sequelae, people will drop out of the workforce and become a burden on society.  The health system will collapse first and then the rest of the economy will follow.

The logical conclusion is that for Australia to survive we have to go zero covid.

In some countries the excess death rate is running at about 15% above the normal death rate. And in those same countries, the birth rate is now running at about 15% below normal.

Covid has a negative effect on fertility. The level of Anti Mullerian Hormone (AMH) is a good indication of a woman’s ovarian reserve and thus ability to conceive. The graph following shows how that changes from the age of 26 to 43:

 

Figure 7: AMH levels from age 26 to 43 (source: Repromed NZ)

 

A study published in 2021 found that a case of covid, on average, reduces a woman’s AMH level by 0.7 ng/ml, which is equivalent to aging by about 10 years.2 Note that the graph above is in picomoles per litre. Repeated covid infections are likely to render females infertile.

 

5. The impact of long COVID and/or repeated COVID infections on Australia’s overall health system

Covid, unless Australia adopts zero covid, will cause the country’s health system to collapse due to four things:

  1. The progressive increase in the number of infected requiring treatment.
  2. The loss of staff due to death by covid and those incapacitated by long covid.
  3. The cognitive impairment caused by covid in those manning the health system.
  4. The increasing expenditure on health caused by covid as the economy shrinks due to an increasingly incapacitated workforce.

 

6. Best practice responses regarding the prevention, diagnosis and treatment of long COVID and/or repeated COVID infections.

Prevention

The best practice in prevention is for the whole country to adopt zero covid. There is no herd immunity for covid. The current crop of vaccines for covid don’t work. There is unlikely to ever be a vaccine for covid that is worthy of the name. A prior infection is merely an existing condition, and does not provide any level of immunity for more than a couple of months.

Western Australia, until that state decided to let the virus rip, showed that it was possible to retain a zero covid status relatively cheaply by closing its borders. Now that covid is endemic in the whole country, the first thing to do to reduce the viral load on the community by boosting the immune systems of the whole population with a cocktail of vitamin D, ivermectin, quercetin, magnesium, zinc, and selenium.

People should be encouraged to wear N95 or better masks when in public. Simple cloth and surgical masks do not stop transmission. Public places should be irradiated with 222 nm UV. The air through air conditioning systems should also be irradiated at that wavelength.

Contact tracing should be adopted to track down and isolate individuals shedding virus.

The sooner that zero covid and prevention of infection is adopted, the safer the country will be. The rapidly mutating covid virus has not become weaker with time, it has become more infectious and more damaging with each new variant. There is no reason to suppose that this trend will not continue.

Some countries, and provinces of countries — such as Uttar Pradesh in India — are doing far better at controlling covid than Australia. And very cheaply. Uttar Pradesh sells at cost a prophylactic kit containing ivermectin to all its citizens. Australia should investigate the best practices from other countries, and then adopt them. And not wait for the results of randomised controlled trials in doing so.

Diagnosis

As well as testing for antibodies, Australia needs to use a test for covid viral load. This is necessary for tracking treatment efficacy.

Testing for CD4 cell count should be adopted also. This will indicate the state of an individual’s immune system.

As vitamin D is the most cost-effective antiviral, vitamin D levels should also be tested to keep the population vitamin D blood level above 60 ng/ml (i.e. 150 nmol/L).

Females of childbearing age should be tested for their AMH level.

Treatment

The current practice of waiting until people need to be hospitalized before giving them any treatment for a covid infection is wrong. It maximizes organ damage for the survivors. As soon as anyone has a confirmed covid infection they should be given:

  1. A bolus of up to 2.0 mg of calcifediol (the form of vitamin D produced in the liver as the precursor to calcitriol) depending upon weight to rapidly raise the blood level above 50 ng/ml. This would be followed by a maintenance dose of 250 µg (10,000 IU) per day for an adult.
  2. Ivermectin at the rate of 0.5 mg/kg of body weight for five days or until recovered.
  3. Vitamin C at 250 mg per day orally or a larger dose if injected.
  4. Zinc at 14 mg of the element per day.
  5. Quercetin at 500 mg per day. Quercetin is both a zinc ionophore and vitamin D receptor activator.
  6. Melatonin at 6 mg per day.
  7. N-acetyl cysteine at 600 mg per day.

 

Summary Recommendations

  1. Undertake at least three different studies to determine the purpose of the artificial inserts in the covid genome. Treatment of covid will be aided by knowledge of what the virus was designed to do.
  2. Stop offering vaccination for covid, as hospitalization and death rates rise with the number of covid shots taken.
  3. Adopt zero covid, as China has done, to ensure Australia’s survival.
  4. Develop and adopt a test for live virus in the blood to aid in disease management.
  5. Start measuring the CD4 levels of anyone who has ever had covid.
  6. Start measuring AMH levels of females aged from 18 to 40, to determine covid’s effect on fertility.
  7. Remove the ban on import and sale of ivermectin, and make it available over the counter. If 1.3 billion Indians can survive with ivermectin being available over the counter, Australians can too.
  8. Remove the Australian Health Practitioner Regulatory Authority’s (APHRA) ability to censor/silence doctors on any subject. Silencing doctors will slow down improvements to covid best practice.
  9. Provide free blood tests for vitamin D.
  10. Provide a prophylactic supply to the whole population containing at least vitamin D, ivermectin, quercetin and zinc to reduce viral load and viral transmission.
  11. Actively monitor covid treatments and prophylaxis in other countries to guide best practice.

 

References

Inquiry term of reference 3

  1. Quay, S., 2021, “Bayesian Analysis of SARS-CoV-2 Origin”, online:
  2. Quay, S., 3rd August, 2022, “Written remarks to accompany the testimony of Steven Quay, MD, PhD” in “Revisiting Gain of Function Research: What the Pandemic Taught Us and Where Do We Go From Here” Senate Committee on Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs.
  3. Harrison, N.L. and J.D. Sachs, 2022, “A call for an independent inquiry into the origin of the SARS-CoV-2 virus” PNAS, Vol. 119, No. 21.
  4. Pradhan, P. et al, 2020, “Uncanny similarity of unique inserts in the 2019-nCoV spike protein to HIV-1 gp120 and Gag” bioRxiv.
  5. Ambati, B.K. et al, 2022, “MSH3 Homology and Potential Recombination Link to SARS-C0V-2 Furin Cleavage Site” frontiers in Virology, Volume 2, Article 834808.
  6. A.K. Syed, 28th December, 2021, “How to BLAST your way to the truth about the origins of COVID-19” https://arkmedic.substack.com/p/how-to-blast-your-way-to-the-truth
  7. Schoch-Spana, M., 2017, “The SPARS Pandemic 2025 – 2028”, The John Hopkins Center for Health Security.
  8. Paidas, M.J., 2022, “Long-Term Sequelae of COVID-19 in Experimental Mice” Molecular Neurobiology, volume 59, pages 5970–5986.
  9. Chertow, D. et al, 2021, “SARS-CoV-2 infection and persistence throughout the human body and brain” Research Square https://doi.org/10.21203/rs.3.rs-1139035/v1
  1. Pepe, A. et al, 2022, “Tunneling nanotubes provide a route for SARS-CoV-2 spreading” Science Advances, Vol. 8, No. 29.
  2. Davanzo, G.G. et al, 2020, “SARS-CoV-2 Uses CD4 to Infect T Helper Lymphocytes” medRxiv preprint
  3. Apple, A.C., 2022, “Risk factors and abnormal cerebrospinal fluid associate with cognitive symptoms after mild COVID ‐19” Annals of Clinical and Translational Neurology, doi: 10.1002/acn3.51498
  4. Dugger, D., 2022, “Millions Of Americans Would Give Anything To Have SAND Between Their Toes, Instead It Is Between Their Ears” Researchgate.
  5. Coelho, L. et al, 2015, “Vitamin D3 supplementation in HIV infection: effectiveness and associations with antiretroviral therapy” Nutrition Journal, 14, 81.
  6. Jimenez-Sousa, M.A. et al, 2018, “Vitamin D in Human Immunodeficiency Virus Infection: Influence on Immunity and Disease” frontiers in Immunology, mini review.

Inquiry term of reference 4

  1. Al-Aly, Z., B. Bowe, Y. Xie, 2022, “Outcomes of SARS-CoV-2 Reinfection” Nautre Portfolio, https://www.researchsquare.com/article/rs-1749502/v1
  2. Ding, T. et al, 2021, “Analysis of Ovarian Injury Associated with COVID-19 Disease in Reproductive-Aged Women in Wuhan, China: An Observational Study, Frontiers in Medicine, Volume 8, Article 635256.