Coronavirus, immunity, and vaccines (part 3)

00:00 Welcome to Politics and Science, I’m your host, John Barkhausen. This week we’re having, again, Ray Pete, Physiologist and Science Historian from Eugene, Oregon. We’re going to be talking about the unfolding coronavirus crisis here in the United States and around the world. And this was recorded on March 31, 2020. It’s not intended as medical advice, just an independent analysis of the situation. Also, the following show presents the viewpoints of its producers and participants, and does not necessarily represent the viewpoints of any other person or organization. Here we go. Once again, I’m really happy to have Dr. Rayman Pete on my show, Politics and Science. And Ray has a PhD from the University of Oregon, and he specialized in physiology. And you also worked in hormones, is that correct, Ray? 01:00 Right. At the age-related reproductive hormones. And we’ve been having a conversation the past few weeks about the ongoing coronavirus, so-called pandemic, swept the globe, and is scaring the riverbeddy, especially in the United States, where the news reporting is particularly sensational. Do you watch mainstream news, Ray? I don’t usually, but I’ve been checking it out lately. It’s just plain scary. Talking about bodies piling up in the backs of trucks and New York City, and it sounds horrendous. And we’re going to talk about the actual data about this disease, and we’ve been tracking it over the last couple weeks. They’ve been predicting huge numbers of mortalities, and do you see that yet, Ray? No, no. 02:01 I haven’t seen any numbers that convince me that anything unusual is happening, according to virus mortality. Can I ask you, where do you go for data? Google mostly, and somewhat on PubMed, when something on Google isn’t available, I often find backup material on PubMed. And so where are we in the figures of, maybe first give us what a normal flu year would bring again, and where we are now? A little over a year ago, the CDC announced that the 2017 to 2018 flu year had killed at least 80,000 people, but then several months later, they revised it down to a little over 03:04 60,000, which it’s interesting because it shows how wildly approximate their estimates of the deaths are. But they say that the average has been a little over 40,000 for the last 10 years or so. I just saw an article on HuffPost from 2014 by, I think, Lawrence Solomon was his name, quoting CDC people in 2004, saying that they had had contact from the vaccine industry worrying about their weak sales. They had decided to rouse the public by convincing them that something dangerous was happening and that they should get vaccinated. 04:05 That follows long after the 1976 swine flu fiasco where they supposedly had a pandemic, but only one person died in the U.S. But in this program, they started in 2004, it was to get media excitement going on the number of flu deaths. And so even though the verified actual immunological evidence from people dying of respiratory diseases and showing that there was an influenza virus or particular other viruses present, that showed very, very few documented cases of flu just because they weren’t doing many 05:07 tests. But despite that, the national statistics based on death certificates showed several hundred people recorded as dying of influenza. With those, on the order of maybe a couple dozen documented and several hundred with doctors’ statements on a death certificate without expressing whether they had tested for the virus, with those very small numbers, they didn’t have a good case for mass vaccinations. So they started including pneumonia deaths with influenza. 06:07 So they called it influenza-like diseases. And that’s how they managed to get up in the tens of thousands of deaths every flu season. So they started including a broader category of illnesses and put it under the heading of flu. Yeah, that way they could get approximately 10%!o(MISSING)f everyone dying, well, 6%!o(MISSING)n the average year was closer to everyone dying during the four months of the flu season. They could classify it as flu. But the old people, that’s probably just about the normal proportion of very old people dying, they’ll get respiratory problems. Their breathing and circulation are failing, and so the lungs fail to work, and so they 07:10 accumulate water. And so they can put down pneumonia as a cause of death or respiratory problems. And when the lungs are slowing down from old age and circulatory and other diseases, the flow of mucous, which normally runs up the tubes and to the area of the mouth and the mucous gets swallowed, that flow of mucous slows down. And so the bacteria that are always falling into the bronchial tubes from the air, they stay in place longer just because the cellulia aren’t sweeping them out quickly. And so as you’re dying from heart failure, liver lung failure, and so on, the mucous allows bacteria to accumulate, and so you’ll very likely have an infection, superimposed 08:12 bacterial infection on top of whatever is happening. And a viral infection also slows the cilia movement, and let’s see, the mucous and aerial bacteria accumulate. So a typical viral infection also ends up with a bacterial infection, which the bacteria can cause all kinds of damage and are pretty sure to kill a person off if they aren’t getting antibacterial antibiotics. But that doesn’t mean that the bacteria was the cause of the infection, or even that the virus added to bacteria, added to circulatory problems. Then you can choose any one of those to blame it on. 09:13 Sure, yeah. So basically their body was shutting down to begin with, and that’s why they got infected. So with the new improved statistics, where they went from several hundred people actually dying of the flu to 40,000 to 60,000, if I have that right, per year, which is an extraordinary increase, considering those numbers, how many now have actually died officially of coronavirus, where we stand today on the 31st of March? I think it was probably yesterday that I looked at it, and it was about 2,400 at that time. And just today it had gone just about doubled, so it was going up fast. But since about 10%!o(MISSING)f the people dying of flu, you would expect to have the coronavirus, because what they were doing, the samples of people with respiratory diseases, they would 10:16 see about half the people had no identifiable cause, and then the rhinovirus would be maybe 30%!,(MISSING) the flu virus, maybe 15%!i(MISSING)n the coronavirus, maybe another 15%!,(MISSING) something like that. So just on the basis of samples from previous years, you would expect maybe 10%!o(MISSING)f the dead people to have an identifiable coronavirus in them. And so if 45 people are expected to die, then 10%!o(MISSING)f those you could say, anywhere from 5%!t(MISSING)o 15%!,(MISSING) but 10%!w(MISSING)ould be 4500 expected dead people containing the coronavirus. Not that it killed them, but it was identifiably present as they were sick with respiratory disease. 11:21 I see. And they actually got tested. Of all the people who died of the flu, and they say 50%!(NOVERB) of those are unknown flu causes, does that mean they haven’t tested them, or they just can’t identify the strain? Couldn’t identify it. It could have been bacteria or just simple heart disease. So what you’re saying, and I think what you said in the previous shows, was that people are dying, they’re testing them for coronavirus, which they come up positive, but it’s not necessarily what killed them. True. If you have a limited number of tests, and you use them mostly in hospitals at first, people who come in, I don’t know why they bother testing sick people coming in, as if they had something special with which to treat the coronavirus. But most of the tests people have said are really for any coronavirus, 12:25 not this particular strain. But since they don’t really have anything effective for coronavirus, why they should be testing sick people coming into the hospital? It isn’t very clear. But when you test only sick people, then you’re going to have a very high percentage of the tests showing positive, just because of that known figure from previous years, that 10%!o(MISSING)f the respiratory infections averaged coronavirus. And therefore, of the people who die, there is also going to be a very high percentage, because you’re testing primarily the sick people. Then as you go out into a broader part of the population and start testing healthy people, the mortality rate per infection shrinks. That happened in China from something like three and a half or four percent, 13:32 shrank down to around 1%! (MISSING)And South Korea had a very big testing program, and so they had only a six-tenth percent mortality. And I don’t know if that’s the situation in New York, Spain, and Italy where they’re having a high percentage of mortality. But you can’t know at all what the numbers mean unless you know who they’re picking out to test. Yeah, that makes sense. But I think the reason they’re testing the people who come in is because they’re worried about the disease being such a fatal one, and they’re trying to determine whether these people need to be isolated or not. Except they didn’t have any meaningful figures on which to assume it would be fatal. Right. Since they’re talking about these preliminary tests on sick people. 14:36 I see. But it seems we’re operating on the assumption that it is fatal right out of the box because of what they see. Go ahead. It looks very much as if they were inclined towards that presumption by the fact that the World Economic Forum and the Gates Foundation and Johns Hopkins University organized this pretend pandemic in October of last year. What to do, how to prepare the government and hospitals to respond if a deadly coronavirus were imported and threatened to kill tens of millions of people. So they had this in everyone’s consciousness, invited people who were in influential positions politically and economically around the world and had them run through this program in October of last year. So everyone had this 15:44 implanted fear. And so at the first meaningless numbers that I think inclined people to jump to fear that this was an imaginary virus that they proposed could be important from South America. So basically they had a dry run for this back in October. And maybe you could explain to me what the Gates Foundation, what is its relationship to the World Health Organization, which I thought was a multi-country, basically all the countries in the world, where they get together and decide mutually on how to approach health issues. The Foundation is pouring a lot of money into reorganizing the world. For example, African agricultural programs. I read that I think it was compared to the United Kingdom donations to 16:51 that United Nations Fund. The Gates Foundation was giving 14 times as much money as the whole United Kingdom. And so they’re pouring money into changing the economy, focusing on Africa. Privatizing the economy, the economic farming and such, and the healthcare system. So they’re not just pouring money into the WHO. You’re talking about actually pouring money into specific countries in Africa? Yeah. Okay. And so their vision of what should happen in the world. They were also, I’ve heard that at the last meeting of the World Economic Forum, there was also a discussion of this program, what to do in response to a pandemic. 17:51 They discussed that at Davos. That’s what I’ve heard, as well as the same people at this New York dry run. I did read something about the WHO never used to take money from private persons or organizations before. But now they are, I guess as just a few years ago, they started accepting money. And I think they’ve increased their budget or their income anyway, or revenue, because they’re supposed to be nonprofit, by a large percentage. But I don’t know what that is. Do you know that? I read that, but I forgot the numbers. Anyway, so they’re now open to private funding. And does that mean that basically they’re open to funding from the pharmaceuticals as well as NGOs? Yeah. I think the pharmaceuticals are probably the biggest source of money. And do you have any specific worries about that? Yeah, the drug companies would be happy if everyone took a flu vaccine, but the trouble is 18:59 the flu vaccines contain multiple antigens besides influenza, or if they get a coronavirus antigen, they contain adjuvant and junk antigens, such as what they grew the virus in, the cells they were using in their culture process. So it’s a very complex and highly inflammatory material that they use just to promote the immune reaction for whatever the vaccine is. And the trouble is that the viruses mutate so quickly. After one or two or three years, they are very likely to have disappeared and might never come back. But it takes a year and a half or two typically to make a vaccine. And in 1975 and 76, the CDC’s man in charge of overseeing flu 20:07 vaccines kept telling his bosses that it was futile to try to get a vaccine in time to catch these rapidly mutating viruses. And they ignored him and went on with the program. And finally he went on television and got fired for it. But he exposed the basically fraudulent idea that you could have an effective, not only effective, but harmless flu virus. He was emphasizing the uselessness of it. But there’s also the harmfulness of it. The potential damage. Yeah, we’re only one person died of documented swine flu supposedly. 21:12 It was about 300 deaths were reported to the government and thousands of paralysis cases were reported following the flu virus or vaccine injection. Yeah, so the flu vaccine shot that everybody gets every year, I know a lot of people would just go get it as a matter of course. And they recommended for older people now, because you’re more at risk if you’re old for the flu. That’s considered a vaccine, is it? Yeah, I looked at the annual, I think was the flu deaths per year. And there were dips, of course, occasionally 2004, 2012, and I think 2016 there were noticeable decreases from the previous year. And I looked at the vaccine supply. And I saw that there was 22:18 a big shortage of vaccine in 2004. And the biggest surge of vaccine production and distribution was preceding the 2017 to 2018 flu season. And that was the season that they first estimated 80,000 deaths from. So it was interesting to see the historic peak in sending vaccines around the country and the number of people dying, even though they refused or revised it down a little bit, till the correlation between more vaccine and more deaths. Now that’s interesting. Is there any way to judge the efficacy of a flu shot? I mean, does anybody try to do that? Yeah, they were supposed to test it first on animals, which now they’re trying to bypass the process. But they aim to get an antibody produced in first 23:30 the animals and then in the people. They test it and validate that they’re producing specific antibodies. And the trouble is that the antibodies are they have some generality and overlap, but they are fairly specific for a particular strain. So they’re not much good for the next strain that comes in around the time that the flu vaccine becomes available. And the real part of the immune system, which it’s really prior to the vaccines, and is, I think, a more important part of the immune system is the so-called innate immune system. But it has been known for at least 20 or 30 years to be trainable or applicable the same way the adaptive antibody system is. So 24:37 the fundamental whole body processes that catch viruses in many ways and reduce the harm they do, this just isn’t attended to because the vaccine companies can demonstrate that they’re producing antibodies, but they can’t really clearly show what’s happening in the innate system because it involves changes in the whole body. Starting with, for example, the surfactant protein in the air sacs of the lungs and the nature of the composition of the mucus and the surface of the cells, and that applies to the nose and the intestine as well. And the coronavirus, when they’ve 25:43 looked for where in the body it ends up, it seems to be equally distributed between the small intestine and the lungs and bronchiol. So it really gets pretty dispersed. And those are all surfaces where a surfactant is supposed to be present to protect you. Yeah, many factors on the surface. The mucus is, healthy mucus is a very powerful protector, especially if the mucus is being swept constantly out of your lungs. And then once in the cell, there are many layers of other innate protectors. And since the viruses, the coronavirus in particular is known to activate all of the inflammatory processes, including 26:49 tending to stop the flow of mucus out of your tubes, and changing the circulatory pattern, releasing histamine, serotonin, antrotensin. Everything that is harmful is activated by these infectious things. And that’s fairly general for viruses, but coronavirus is very powerful at activating immunity, activating inflammation. I see. And this particular coronavirus is supposed to be more transmissible than others. Do you think that’s true? I don’t think there have been any good situations for accurately judging that. I mean, it sounds like a lot of these viruses, these flu viruses, they come and go every year and a lot of people have them and 27:51 never even know they had it. That’s the same with this. When one is tested a broader section of people, not just the sick ones, they find that something like 85 percent didn’t know they had anything or anything serious. Maybe we could talk about how, as a country, we can move forward and approach this problem rationally. I think that’s the important thing, because they’re deliberately getting people scared so that they will next season be ready to get vaccinated. But that panic that they’re creating, our whole generation going back at least 50 years, has been heavily indoctrinated to go to the doctor after, like 1950, they were putting out instructions. How do I identify 29:00 cancer at an early stage, training people to recognize the signs of cancer? And there are these various programs designed to get people to go to their doctors regularly for checkups. If you’re having a regular checkup for heart disease, for example, that’s supposed to be protective. So people are trained to think of the medical profession as protective, but there’s really no objective evidence that that protects against anything. And in fact, when you look at the studies that try to be objective, there are two publications I know of that looked at the hospital deaths alone. And one group said at least 220,000 deaths are caused by accidents caused by the medical staff. 30:10 Another group said 440,000 deaths per year caused by medical mistakes. And still, there were surveys asking doctors whether they had seen deadly mistakes made in the hospital without reporting them. And that’s another reason that the numbers might be bigger than 220,000 or 440,000 because many doctors said they saw the accidents and didn’t report them. And then there are the mistaken things that doctors do because they’re taught to do them that have no valid scientific basis. And my next newsletter is going to be on some of those points. That probably will make the hospital mortality caused by medical mistakes 31:17 of various kinds bigger than those numbers that have been published. But those numbers already put deaths caused by medical mistakes in third place behind heart disease and cancer deaths. And that wasn’t including hospital-acquired infections which amount to around 100,000 deaths per year. And when you look at just those numbers, going to the hospital should be a very last resort like when you want some repair that you know there’s an appropriate treatment for a broken bone or a cut blood vessel or something. But since there’s nothing safe and effective against the virus, people are going in the hospitals with very little examination or putting them on ventilators. 32:25 And one of the common practices when people come in with respiratory infections even before they go on a ventilator, they might get aerosolized antiviral such as ribofirin even though there’s no published evidence showing that that reduces mortality. Since they know it works in vitro, it’ll reduce the virus in cells in a culture dish. But there’s no proven evidence that protects the person against the virus in the living state. That’s still a common practice in hospitals that or several other viruses. And these viruses or hydroxyquinoline… Is this antivirals you mean? Yeah. So so-called yeah. They’re classified that hydroxyquinoline is classified as an anti-malarial 33:27 and anti-inflammatory for rheumatoid arthritis and such. But these the nucleoside analogs or nucleotide analogs or the hydroxyquinoline categories, these are all recognized as hazardous mutagenic, possibly carcinogenic drugs. They damaged the RNA or DNA of the virus, but they also damaged the human DNA and RNA. And so they’re known to be very toxic. And if they are figuring that the person is beyond reproductive age, then they minimize the effects of mutating their DNA. But especially in people who might still reproduce, it’s not good 34:31 to give them mutagens. And the ventilation itself, if they have to stick a tube down your wind pipe, that tends to activate inflammation just by the mechanical damage it does. And they are typically using 40 to 60 percent oxygen supplements. Sometimes it’s just air. But if you speed the respiration with just ordinary air, and especially if you double or triple the amount of oxygen in the air, you’re necessarily going to reduce the amount of carbon dioxide in their lungs and bloodstream in general. And carbon dioxide is a major anti-inflammatory defense against the damage that the viruses are doing. So scientifically, there’s a lot of evidence 35:38 to show that what they’re doing very quickly when someone gets to the hospital panicked over the coronavirus, what they’re doing is very, very dangerous. And you would assume that it’s increasing the speed of… Yeah, not what they’re intending to do, but possibly what’s happening. They’re telling us not to go to the hospital unless you’re extremely sick. So you’re… That’s the best advice Yeah, that’s very good advice, turns out. And I was just wondering if you do have some respiratory problem and you’re having trouble breathing, just going off what you just said, it seems like that would naturally increase your CO2 as a response to that. If they would more generally use carbogen, which is 5%!c(MISSING)arbon dioxide added to oxygen, that will give you more oxygen actually than just hyperventilating a person with an ordinary ventilator. The carbon 36:45 dioxide is anti-inflammatory and has many pro respiratory effects that helps to deliver the oxygen into moving it from the blood into the energy producing cells. And it opens up capillaries that have been constricted by such things as angiotensin produced by infections. And so if you wanted to instruct somebody how to do it, you’d say if you had to do the ventilator, you’d do… Or breathing tent probably is less invasive than a ventilator. Would it be 35%!(NOVERB) oxygen and 5%!C(MISSING)O2, or what would you suggest? Oh, with 30%!,(MISSING) I think even 1%!C(MISSING)O2 would be a big help. Okay. And then it would not be so dangerous, you think? Yeah. All right, that’s good to know. 37:48 And are you isolating at home, Ray, or are you going out? Oh, I pretty much always stay at home. Oh, yeah. Got to buy milk and gasoline. Yeah. Well, it’s kind of the same here. We haven’t noticed too much difference, except I did notice going to the grocery store, which I did yesterday, people actually seem quite traumatized. A lot of people have masks on, and they look furtive, and nobody’s stopping to chat, at least not for very long. Yeah, I think infected people if they wear masks when they go out in public, but I don’t think masks are helping people who are not infected, because if it’s floating in submicroscopic particles, they’ll get around the mask. I was wondering, do masks increase your CO2 levels? I feel like it’s like breathing into a bag. 38:49 Not very much. Oh, they don’t? Yeah, the carbon dioxide doesn’t stay in place. Oh, I see. So breathing into a bag is much more effective. Yeah, because you’re just recirculating it over and over again. That brings me to the subject of anti-inflammatories. On our radio station here, we carry a show that I think is carried on a lot of community radio stations. It’s called Time of Useful Consciousness Radio with Mariah DeLardin, and in my opinion, it’s usually an excellent show. This last week, she carried an English doctor named, I think his name was John Campbell, and most of his show was talking about how important isolation is, but he concluded the show by saying that there’s a reason that we get a fever, and it’s important, especially with coronavirus, and he quoted some French medical 39:50 ministers as confirmation of this, that with the fever of coronavirus, it can cause a lot of negative complications if you use anti-inflammatories of any kind, non-steroidal and steroidal. And I was wondering what your opinion about that is. I saw that, but I also saw his video on vitamin D. The vitamin D talk is very good, and what vitamin D is doing is profoundly anti-inflammatory, but he recommends vitamin D, and vitamin D, and aspirin, and vitamin B1, and progesterone. Their benefit is in this situation largely by lowering the antiotensin receptor, a very central basic thing in anti-inflammatory 40:51 protection. So vitamin D is one of our central anti-inflammatory things, and very protective against all kinds of viral infections and other infections as well. I would be curious to know if the coronavirus has a hard time surviving in humans in sunny places, where there’s more vitamin D? The trouble with that correlation is that, for example, in the Islamic countries, women in particular cover up, and I’ve had friends in Mexico who, even though it’s high altitude and very sunny, they had very low vitamin D levels because they don’t want to get over suntanned, and so women in particular go out in the sun with parasols or hats 41:53 and long sleeves, and so surprisingly living in a very sunny climate, a lot of people, especially women, are deficient in vitamin D. Yeah, good point. And going back to John Campbell’s talk about fever being important and not getting in the way of the fever’s work to kill off the coronavirus, do you feel like aspirin would interfere with the fever, or what’s your feeling about fever in general? Aspirin can often increase your thyroid function and cell respiration so much that it doesn’t affect your fever, but it can lower the need for a fever since angiotensin overproduction is a basic harm factor of any infection that you have. 42:54 You’re stopping the mechanism of the harm, and that is what is lowering the fever. It isn’t just mechanically turning off heat production. It actually increases oxidative metabolism, and at least temporarily will increase thyroid function. So when it reduces the fever, I think it’s most often because it’s remedying the thing that is causing the fever. So the fever basically hinges on the inflammation. If aspirin lowers the inflammation, then the fever is no longer necessary. And it happens to be an antiviral agent in itself. It’s been tested against four or five major viruses, all of which I think it ranks up with the toxic chemicals that they sell 43:56 for the purpose of killing viruses, but it happens that just as a side effect, aspirin itself interferes with the reproduction of viruses. Yeah, well, why use something cheap like aspirin when you can use something actually that’s exciting and dangerous? Yeah, the idea of something really strong to kill the pathogen and virus aspirin, even though there’s evidence that it is very effective at stopping viruses, they don’t think of it as a deadly toxic agent. Same with cancer. The ideology is that you have to kill cancer cells, but in fact cancer cells are weak and defective and don’t live very long. But the problem is they’re being replaced so fast. If you just work on flowing whatever it is causing their replacement, 44:58 then you don’t have to worry about killing them because they just naturally died because they’re defective. Yeah, and going back to the fever from the coronavirus, does the fever actually, is it capable of killing the virus? It activates various parts of your immune reaction. So I’m not sure whether there have been studies on this particular kind of virus, but the ability to produce antibodies, for example, is increased with the fever and white blood cells can eat faster at a higher temperature. So in general, your resistance is increased with the fever. I’ve always associated that the fever is basically, you know, you’re getting hot and miserable and having hallucinations, but it’s killing off the bug inside of you. So in a way, it is because it’s enabling your immune system to rev up. Yeah, it’s revving up your whole system. 46:04 It might even make some germs more energetic too, but the thing is it gives your body the greater advantage more than it does for the speed of replication of the germs. I mean, how hot can you get before you can’t survive anymore? Is it like 106? Yeah, 106 is when they treat people with cancer, sometimes they keep them at more than 106, up around 107 for a few hours, and people seem to, didn’t tolerate that. You mean they give them something to raise their body temperature? No, put them in a hot tub or a box with heat lamps, just their heads sticking out, and they put thermometers, now that they have thermometers that you can swallow, 47:05 but they used to just give a rectal thermometer and oral thermometers and take care not to go over 107, and they found that several major types of cancer would die after multiple treatments of maybe five to 10 hours at a time. Is there anything we didn’t cover that you wanted to? A lot of places, warning about anti-inflammatory drugs, they’re extending it to aspirin, and they’re generally getting confused thinking that the ACE2 enzyme that is the target of the coronavirus, thinking that that shouldn’t be increased because it would increase 48:06 the chance of catching the coronavirus, and they’re even confusing it as a cause of hypertension and so on. It’s complicated enough that it’s hard to explain it, even the doctors, because they get fixed ideas. Yeah, it is hard to understand. So maybe that’s what John Campbell was talking about, and that’s what the key is, quoting those French. Yeah, and there was an article in Lancet that said basically the same thing, stop taking anti-inflammatories because they’ll increase your ACE2 enzyme and make a bigger target, but there had already been half a dozen very clear papers saying that the virus decreases your ACE2 enzyme, increasing the pro-inflammatory and potential production, and so what you need 49:10 to do is get your ACE2 back in production to destroy the inflammatory mediator. Okay, well that’s great to know. I was reading an opinion piece by Scott Atlas, and he was working off of the statistics or the epidemiological analysis by Dr. John Ioannidis. Is that how you say his name? And he was saying it doesn’t make much sense to lock everybody up forever. In terms of physical distancing during this pandemic, he thought it would make much more sense to only try to isolate those who are most vulnerable and let the rest of the population build up immunity because 99%!o(MISSING)f everybody’s symptoms will be just minor. They’ll get sniffles or nothing at all. 50:13 That’s very reasonable. Sweden has basically done nothing resembling the United States program. The government there so far has told old people and sick people to stay home and everyone to wash their hands and basically just behave sensibly and not shutting down businesses. Yeah, that does seem to make a lot of sense. But I think we’re operating on the premise that this is a deadly disease that even 30-year-olds are dying. And I have heard reports of 30-year-old nurses or 50-year-old nurses who are in hospitals and the explanation is that they’re just, even though they’re wearing some protective gear, they’re just getting exposed over and over again. And finally, they’re succumbing and a couple of them have died even though they’re not old and with no known existing conditions, 51:17 pre-existing conditions. And what do you make of that? First, I would have to see what drugs they were being given and whether they were being respirated. But it’s possible that the virus actually is more deadly than previous ones, but there’s just no statistical evidence of that. Yeah. So we started this show talking about the statistics and we find out. So an average year of deaths, the way the CDC is now counting deaths, has been 40,000 average year. And do you know what is the four-month flu months? Is it December through April? That’s five months. Well, it really starts halfway 52:23 through November and usually ends in March, but it’s variable every year. A slightly different December, January, February, and March are the most, historically, have the most respiratory infections. But with small, very small, relatively, sicknesses, even starting in November and October and going through April and tailing off very faintly. And do you know what the current total is for flu deaths in the United States for this season? What I saw yesterday was, oh, total. So far, no. I haven’t seen it. In the case of two years ago, it took them about a year or two to revise that 80,000 estimate down to 61,000. 53:28 So I don’t think they’ll even come out with their general estimate, which will include all kinds of pneumonia. Yeah, I was just wondering if we could tell where we were on the, you know, compared to the average at this point. But there’s no way to know that. No. Well, the number that they are blaming on coronavirus is less than what you would expect if it’s normally 10%!o(MISSING)f the flu deaths. For example, if it was in the 60 to 80,000 ranged as in 2017 and 2018. And if the variation was 15%!i(MISSING)nstead of the average 10%!c(MISSING)oronavirus, 54:34 then you could say that just a statistical fluctuation based on the last five years could be 15,000 deaths this year from coronavirus. So I just went to the CDC page about flu. And so for this year, they’re estimating 24 to 62,000, which sounds like what you’re saying is, you know, a light year range to a slightly more than normal year range. Yeah. So that’s a little puzzling. And the figures that Wolfgang Vodarg gave showed a range from 5 to 14%!o(MISSING)f the respiratory diseases being coronavirus. So if this year coronavirus happened to be a larger percent, then that could be about 55:37 one seventh of 50,000, for example. So 7,000 would still be not outside the recent history figures. All right. Well, I guess we’ll see what happens. And I very much appreciate your analysis of the situation. You had a quote in one of your newsletters, the recent one, in fact, context for vaccinations. And I think it was fear of terrorism and fear of disease or marketing tools. And it does seem like at least the media is certainly hyping the fear factor. And another thing to take note of is that the biggest advertiser in the United States and maybe around the world are the pharmaceuticals. They advertise more through the media than any other type of business. Yeah. And the CDC is being their most cooperative spreader of their 56:46 ideology, advertising ideology. Yeah. They do seem to work hand in hand. Just to sum up, Ray, if you wouldn’t mind going over again, all the things one can do to keep themselves healthy and keep an immune system working well, sleep would be one of those. Isn’t it? Yeah. And a good diet is necessary for sleep. Vitamin D and the associated calcium work together. Vitamin D is anti-inflammatory, but it works by lowering parathyroid hormone. And it can’t do that if your phosphate intake is very high relative to calcium. So cutting down on your beans, nuts, and meat, and fish, and increasing cooked green leaves, cheese, and milk will improve the function of the anti-inflammatory, anti-infective vitamin D, lowering the parathyroid 57:50 hormone, and all of the associated pro-inflammatory things that it does. Well, that sounds good. Let’s see if we can work on that. And even if it is a worse flu year than other years, we’ll beat that back and make it to summer and get our country back online again. Yeah. Okay. Well, Dr. Raymond Pete, thanks so much for being on the show today. And I really appreciate getting your analysis. Okay. Okay. Take care of yourself. Thanks. Okay. Bye-bye. You’ve been listening to an interview with Dr. Raymond Pete, a PhD physiologist from Eugene Oregon. If you want to know more about Raymond Pete, you can go to his website, raypeat.com. That’s R-A-Y-P-E-A-T dot com. The preceding program presented the views of its participants and producers. They did not necessarily reflect an official opinion of any other person or organization, and it was not intended as medical advice. You’ve been listening to Politics and 58:54 Science. I’ve been your host, John Barkhousen, and please tune in again next week for another edition of Politics and Science.