Public Health Messages… Immune Function Still Matters

An integrative approach

Now, this week, I introduced you to an Integrative Psychiatrist, Dr. Sanjeev Sharma. And over the last couple of years, I’ve kind of connected you now with Integrative Gastroenterologist, Dr. Pran Yoganathan, Integrative Cardiologists in Dr Ross Walker, Dr Jason Kaplan, Dr Thomas Levy, a host of Integrative Doctors, Dr Christabelle Yeoh, we’ve got a wonderful episode coming up next week with Dr Sarah Myhill from the UK and so many other wonderful practitioners. 

An integrative approach is a holistic approach, one that looks at how things we’re doing in our life affect our health. It’s not just symptom-based

If you are suffering from some sort of in this week’s episode mental health issues, there are many things to do, to consider, and an integrated approach considers many of them and it was a great episode with Dr. Sanjeev, and I’d recommend you have a listen to it. 

I just loved his energy. I loved what he was talking about. It was a really great conversation, but it raised the issue of mental health, which we covered before on a few different podcasts. Dr. Martin Whitely did a great podcast with him on Overprescribing Madness, and that dovetailed into the conversation with Dr. Sanjeev Sharma as an alternative to that.

Mental Health Awareness

Mental health is a huge and growing problem, but it’s an opportunity for us to reflect, and I’ll leave you with the thought of going and looking and listening to that episode. I just wanted to talk a little bit because this week’s episode was entitled A Philosophy for Life. 

I think one of the things about this pandemic is that it has been a great opportunity to reflect on life and a wonderful opportunity for us to see just how our public health system works and particularly the priorities that our health system and our governments place. One of the things and I’ve said from the very beginning of this pandemic is that it is a wonderful opportunity for us to focus on public health.

A rather disturbing statistic is that 96% of deaths from this virus have occurred in people with comorbidities, with somewhere between three and four comorbidities. So yes, some healthy people have died, but less around 4%. 96% of people who have died have been suffering from other comorbidities and comorbidities made cardiovascular disease, heart disease, diabetes, autoimmune conditions, obesity, vitamin deficiencies.

Let’s focus on public health and improve it

Interesting article which showed that those people who die and people with a Vitamin D level over 50 generally do not succumb to the complications of this disease. I kind of have seen this pandemic as a wonderful opportunity for us all to focus on public health and to improve.

We’ve got a captive audience quite literally, not just metaphorically, but quite literally. We have a captive audience and an audience globally that are focussed on health. So wouldn’t you have thought that this was a wonderful opportunity to encourage public health? 

Sadly, one of my biggest disappointments in this have been the complete lack of focus on public health other than vaccinations and social isolation and wearing masks. We could be and we should be doing so much more.

In the first week or two of the pandemic. I shared with you the information that came to me, which I already knew really from the Orthomolecular News Service, which I would recommend you look at. I have the honour of being one of the 50 honorary editors on the advisory panel there. 

But really, I’m humbled to be in the company of so many of those practitioners, and we’ve interviewed many of those people, Dr Henry So, Professor Michael Gonzalez, Carolyn Dean, Thomas Levy, there have been some great interviews there that I’ve had the opportunity to do. All of them have promoted public health and particularly encouraged you to take some supplements to protect yourself.

Vitamin D is an important supplement

Vitamin D, a critically important supplement, and I personally am on somewhere between two and three thousand international units of Vitamin D a day. I’m trying to keep my Vitamin D level above 90, ideally over 100. I know the normal ideal range is said to be between 40 and 90, but I think that is just normal and I don’t and or average if you like in our society. 

I think what we need to be is better than average, particularly when confronted by a respiratory illness like COVID. Vitamin D, now, interestingly, there was an article in a Journal of Endocrinology in 2013 which identified that those people in ICU somewhere between 40 and 70% of people in ICU (Intensive Care Units) were deficient in Vitamin D.

Now, one might have thought that an article like that would have prompted the health authorities to embrace a very simple intervention like Vitamin D. But no, I was honoured to be President of the Australasian College of Nutritional and Environmental Medicine in 2019 and 20. 

When this pandemic started in 2020, I was asked to co-sign a letter to the health department to AMA (Australian Medical Association), to the NHMRC (National Health and Medical Research Council), to the TGA, encouraging them to embrace Vitamin D as a very simple and effective way of protecting the population.

I was co-signing that with one of my mentors, the very wonderful Professor Ian Brighthope, who I also have done an interview with on this podcast, and we received a reply from the authorities saying there is no evidence to support the fact that Vitamin D will have any impact on COVID, which was a bit of a shock because of undergraduate healthcare. 

Anybody doing an undergraduate degree knows that Vitamin D has a huge impact on immune function, but that was the response we got and rather soberingly in the following week. An antiviral drug that has just come on to patent and we’ll come back to that word ‘patent’ in a moment, was given TGA and approval at $3000 a dose, and it had one clinical trial. 

What effect it did have was it reduced your time in intensive care from 14 days to 10 days. That apparently was readily embraced by the health authorities, but apparently the simple intervention of Vitamin D there wasn’t sufficient evidence, and the same was true for Zinc, which we know has very important antiviral functions, not enough evidence, according to the health authorities.

So this has been rather disturbing I have to say for myself, I’ve been following the story of the influence of the chemical, food, and pharmaceutical industry on all levels of health care. I started this journey very early on in my career, but I particularly focussed on the bigger picture of health care from about 1995 onwards. 

None of these came as a huge surprise to me that perhaps industry was exerting an undue influence on public health messages. I’ve written about it in my book: A Life Less, Stressed. In fact, the whole first section of my book covers this topic. So it was certainly not news to me. But I got to say there are a few things that have surprised me, shocked me, and I’m almost speechless.

Pharmaceutical Industry

It surprises me how many people have become marketing and compliance officers wittingly or unwittingly for an industry that has repeatedly been found guilty of fraud and illegal marketing? And by that, I’m talking about the pharmaceutical industry. The people that have become marketing and compliance officers that have just are pushing that vaccination is the only way forward in this pandemic that there are no other interventions. 

In fact, any mention of any other intervention could seriously get you into trouble and shut you down on social media. This is a very disturbing trend and it is equally true of the use of off-label drugs like hydroxychloroquine, like ivermectin. You know, these are drugs that are off-label. They are literally the tablets are measured in cents, not dollars, and they have been proven to be safe and effective.

I’ll just mention the ivermectin one as an example. It has been marketed or dealt with, and you will see media outlets that I used to have a great deal of respect for. I mean, that’s even possible. I used to think The Guardian and The Sydney Morning Herald were good papers, but they refer to ivermectin as a horse medicine. 

Now, it’s sobering to learn that this supposed horse medicine won a Nobel Prise for medicine in humans in 2015. It has been given four billion times to humans, and the adverse reactions are counted in the thousands. I think there are 5000 if you go on to the World Health Organisation site, there are 5000 adverse reactions to four billion doses and it was awarded a Nobel Prise in medicine. 

While it’s anti-parasitic, it is also been used extensively for antivirals, but not only has it been referred to as horse medicine and promoted by social media and right-wing nutters. It also happened to win the Nobel Prise for medicine in 2015, and it is also not on its own, but in combination with other things like zinc, like aspirin, like doxycycline the like few other things quercetin, we could go on and are very effective at dealing with the virus.

So that is now been made illegal by the TGA for a medical practitioner to prescribe in Australia, a drug that is cheap, effective, accessible, and safe is now illegal by our highest authorities. And what is particularly unnerving about that is, and I’m not sure I’ll get the pronunciation of this correct Molnupiravir. 

Molnupiravir, which is made by the same manufacturer Merck, is now being ordered, embraced. The clinical trials haven’t even been completed, but the TGA has not only accepted it but has embraced it as a potential anti-viral drug and the research if that counts for anything in this day and age. The research actually suggests that while it is somewhat effective, it is not as effective and from a cost perspective, the course of Molnupiravir costs something like three or four hundred dollars. And of course, ivermectin costs two or three dollars. So there we are. 

Why do we need to get vaccinated?

That is a source of great frustration for me. We have become marketing of not we, people, governments, health authorities, media, doctors, even people who know very little about this promoting the narrative, the vaccines are the solution, and anybody who thinks they aren’t is an anti-vaxxer and actually should be a pariah in our society.

I think we should remember that the vaccines that we are taking in and I have to say I’ve had a vaccine, so I’m not an anti-vaxxer. I’ve had the AstraZeneca vaccine, but I was very aware that I was part of a clinical trial. And I did this because I’m part of society and I want to support society. 

I know many people in hospitality, entertainment, education, in tourism, and it was very apparent to me that unless we all achieved a certain level of vaccinations, that would not open up. But the Gold Coast always seemed to be moving. 

So that’s why I took it and I took the AstraZeneca one because I felt that the messenger RNA that required dry ice to get it to my body must have been a very fragile compound and I knew that both the AstraZeneca and the Pfizer are novel type of a delivery system for a vaccine.

If you’ve had measles, mumps, rubella, hep b whatever. I’ve had them all. I’ve had a lot. They are all the old-fashioned protein viral vectors. But those two, Pfizer and AstraZeneca, were the first to find their way into a human cell that’s never been done before in a vaccine. So I knew that when I went into it and I prepared for it by being well-supported nutritionally and good sleep and a whole range of other things. So I knew what I was getting into. 

But the number of people who have become marketing and compliance officers for an industry that they know nothing about truly shocks me and I would ask people to reflect on that. You get a vaccine to reduce your risk of complications. That’s it. You can still be infected and you can still transmit. So the only reason to get a vaccine is to protect you, whether someone else has a vaccine or not is, to me, quite irrelevant. 

Other than the social, you know, we have to reach a milestone because that’s what is mandated to get these industries up and running. I wasn’t going to be petulant about it and think, well, I’m not going to do it because but at that time, I did it because I wanted to see those industries get back into the business. Because another rather worrying statistic is that I read the other day that something like 3.5 trillion dollars has been lost to ordinary citizens globally.

Now you think about people working as waiters, as ushers, as tourist operators, as in the airline industry, at the airports, you name it, you probably know more… education, education and I just wanted to get those people back to work, and that’s why I took the vaccine. 

The companies that are producing these vaccines have time and time again been found guilty of fraud and illegal marketing and if you doubt that you need to start reading about it, Deadly M-edicines and Organised Crime, a book written by one of the founders of the Cochrane Collaboration. Peter Gooch, a must-read written in 2013 outlining finds that Pfizer, that AstraZeneca, the Johnson and Johnson, that Sanofi, you name it. These are drug companies that have not only been found guilty of fraud but have literally cost tens of thousands of lives perdue.

If you are interested, the oxycontin or the Oxycontin Epidemic in the United States, the Opioid Epidemic, sorry, I’m getting too worked up. The Opioid Epidemic, which started in 2000, and with just around the late 90s, we really hit the ground. Around 2000 2001, it was labelled by the FDA, by the Federal Drug Authorities as a non-addictive opioid, unheard of in the history of opioids.

Non-addictive, the FDA granted Oxycontin, a special label, because the manufacturers said it was that this is non-addictive. And unlike any other drug, opioids, it was granted FDA approval. This opioid is non-addictive. The officer that was head of the FDA at the time that granted that went on to become a senior executive at the very company that produces Oxycontin. 

That drug has cost literally hundreds of thousands of lives in America to this very day is still costing lives in America. If approved, promoted by the American Medical Association by the American Pain Society, promoted by lots of advocacy groups advertised widely on TV. Yes, it was fined. 

Eventually, it was fined, I think, a total of $5-6 billion. It’s a privately owned company with the family that owns the Sackler family with assets of $13 billion or more. Many of these fines, whether it’s Pfizer, AstraZeneca, might be fined $2-3 billion. These are just seen as marketing expenses. 

What’s disturbing about the current pandemic is that they have received a EUA which means Emergency Use Authorities and emergency use authorities absolve the companies of liability. So how good is that? They do not have any responsibility for a totally novel virus that has hijacked the narrative around the world. 

Having media previously thought journalists, I thought journalists did journalism, but they are practically just parroting the PR that is coming out of these companies, which have no liabilities. And people, I sit at dinner parties and I sit and listen to people that are passionate about vaccinations. 

Remember, I’ve had a vaccination but am passionate and those people that are not vaccinated should be put in jail or isolated. so I think these marketing compliance officers, which they’re not even aware of they are marketing and compliance officers. You may know many of them. You may be one yourself, I don’t know. But that is what is going on.

4 Ps – (Profit, Power, Patent and Politics) or 5 Ps including Public Health?

I’ve identified 4 Ps in this pandemic that I think is the driving force behind this and that is in order of priority, in order of importance, Profit is the number one P, Power is the number two P, Patent is the number three P, and this is still an order of priority, Politics number four. 

You notice I haven’t got the public health. If I had a lawn, I draw it a long way down because the fifth P is Public health, but that’s the order in which we’re going here. This brings me back to this week’s podcast, all about A Philosophy for Life, all about focussing on immune function. 

The purpose of this podcast, the purpose of our wellness programme, which is coming in 2022, the purpose of the book that I have written, and the purpose of everything that I do is to encourage you to take control of your own health and be the best you can be. I’m grateful that Western medicine is there as a safety net. I really am.

When crisis calls, it’s good to be there. Are we in a crisis? Well, if you follow the narrative, it’s a terrible crisis, but if you read a little bit more and listen to some experts, which I hope to have on in the new year, it’s a different perspective. At the end of the day, the 5 Ps are the driving force, are you a marketing and compliance officer for companies that have been repeatedly found guilty of fraud and cost tens of thousands and in some cases, hundreds of thousands of lives? I wonder. 

But I would encourage you to focus on immune function. And this week’s episode, although it didn’t deal with the pandemic, dealt with the philosophy of life. And that’s brought it back to why we’ve done this Healthy Bite today. I hope this finds you well. Until next time. This is Dr Ron Ehrlich. Be well.

This podcast provides general information and discussion about medicine, health, and related subjects. The content is not intended and should not be construed as medical advice or as a substitute for care by a qualified medical practitioner. If you or any other person has a medical concern, he or she should consult with an appropriately qualified medical practitioner. Guests who speak in this podcast express their own opinions, experiences, and conclusions.