Jefferey Smith (08:56):
Let me see if I can summarize with an analogy here. Typically when you have a computer program, you get updates. You used to call them patches, sometimes--you need a patch so they could work with these little pieces that fix the system. And what you're saying is that the virome, or the universe of viruses, carries genetic information where when it comes in it provides information--a sequence that acts like a patch or a computer software update--and that in order to handle it properly there is a system which determines whether to accept that because it's needed, or reject it. The CDC /WHO concept is to not allow the body to gain that capacity on its own, but to pretend that a virus can be killed, and that viruses are now demonized. Did I miss anything in that piece there?
Dr. Zach Bush (09:38):
That's perfect. That's exactly the mechanism that you've got there. The updates are interesting in that the higher the stress you put on the environment, the more updates that are needed. This is pretty obvious that as we pour more and more Roundup into the environment, we do higher and higher damage to the microbiome, and therefore the multicellular organisms within the soils--within their environment around us--we force an increase of speed of viral adaptation. Four years ago it was the first time I delivered this talk that was predicting that the next big pandemic was going to come out of the Hubei province, central area of Asia. Last year I gave more detail at the Sun Valley Wellness Festival, and last June and July around how that was going to occur was through the agricultural--the combination, the use of glyphosate in both the agricultural environment--as well as antibiotic usage in the pork industry, in Hubei province.
Dr. Zach Bush (10:07):
As soon as COVID hit I knew exactly what was happening with the very first thing it said: Hubei province, there's a new virus, blah, blah, blah. Well, that was totally predictable. But now the question was, what is the adaptation? What has the microbiome produced here? And interestingly, this coronavirus has a new RNA strand--at least that's what we think so far. There's a lot of intense work that needs to be done over the next year or two to really detail out this RNA strand within this new variant of the coronavirus. But what it’s starting to look like is we have gotten an adaptation from the extreme stress state of the microbiome of central Asia out of the toxicity of our farming industry and agricultural systems there, that is now allowing a resilience to occur.
Dr. Zach Bush (11:08):
I'm very excited to be putting into place some large clinical trial dollars from an impact investment fund (it's called the Pandemic Fund), working with this group out of New York to channel this money towards clinical trials to show that this viral update has actually been beneficial to mankind. Remember that more than 60% of the people that were exposed to this virus never had any symptoms--meaning we took this virus in, we integrated into our genetic experience, and in some cases into the genetic matrix itself. Then in some cases we had mild symptoms. Probably in the 80% to 90% range of people exposed either had no symptoms or very mild symptoms with this genetic update. Then a very, very small section becomes critically ill and even a smaller section of them die. So we're out of mortality maybe around 0.1 - 0.3%.
Dr. Zach Bush (12:09):
We're in a pretty bad flu season kind of level of mortality here. This may be one of the top 10 most deadly kind of flu season type respiratory viruses that we've seen in the last decade. But it's certainly nothing like catastrophically above anything we've ever seen. It is very much in line with what influenza is capable of doing from a mortality standpoint. So why is it killing anybody? If this is just a genetic update, why is anybody dying from this virus? And it turns out that the answers are right in Hubei province again.