We also cover Zach’s ideas in the feature, Is it, or Isn’t It?
Editor’s Note: This was originally published May 8. Planet Waves FM – Pacifica Radio Network has taken the liberty of preparing a rush transcript of the conversation.
Participants:
Del Bigtree (DB), host of The Highwire
Zach Bush, MD (Zach), physician and educator
Intro by DB: My next guest is so important. I have had the opportunity to interview Zach Bush. I’ve also seen him speak many times as we’ve shared stages before. Zach is a renowned multidisciplinary physician of internal medicine, endocrinology, hospice care. His education is highly the need for a radical departure from chemical farming in his ongoing efforts to providing a path for consumers, farmers, and mega industries to work together for people and planet. If you care for your health? The health of your children? The health of your grandparents and future generations? If you care about this earth? If you want to know what’s going on? Then I hope you will take the time to listen to every moment of this interview because I believe this is a discussion that leads us into our future. That brings light where there has been darkness and as that powerful emotional statement by the nurse we just saw said, solutions. There are solutions ahead. I believe a great world is ahead. I hope you enjoy this incredible interview with Zach Bush.
DB: Hey Zach, I want to thank you for joining me and taking some time out of your day. I know we wanted to get together and do this in person. I found out I’m going to have to be quarantined in Hawaii if I go out there, for like fourteen days and then…
Zach: Ah, you would hate that.
DB: Yeah, to be stuck in a Hawaii would be just awful. But it’d be hard to this show and keep doing the work that we’re doing and of course we looked into it and because you can’t come straight to Texas which would have been just fine. You have to come through California or Washington. You were going to get quarantined for fourteen days so we just decided to do this this way. But I wanted to thank you for taking the time.
And you know? One of our most watched interviews I’ve ever done on the HighWire was when we really got into discussing the gut biome and our interaction with bacteria and viruses in the world. So, I really wanted to reach out to you.
But for people who are unaware of your work. I’ve been around and you’re this person it seems to have understanding of oceans, of coalmines, of hospice care. Can you just give me a sense of how those different stories are all encapsulated in your background? How would you describe your expertise?
Bush: I just stumbled up on an awesome term in permaculture writing that is something like the perfect meandering of nature. And I think that’s the best description of my career, the perfect meandering. My career has meandered a lot. When I first explored the university system, I decided I was going to be an engineer. Then in only the drama that an 18-year-old can create, I had a heart break over a relationship I’d had. The first girlfriend I’d ever had. I decided I was so heartbroken that I needed to take a year off of college.
And so, shortly after deciding that an aunt called me up and she invited me to come to the Philippines and work at a midwifery clinic and I had never done anything medical in my life. The closest thing I had done was build roofs on orphanages in Mexico and stuff like that. So, I had seen medical facilities before but that was about it.
And so I showed up in the Philippines and within two weeks the woman who was in charge of the fourteen day old checkups was swept away on a family emergency back in Canada. And I was put charge as a 19-year-old kid for fourteen-day neo natal checkups in the squats of the Philippines. And that’s when I found the miracle of life and got really addicted to this journey and to the human biology. And after six months of seeing children born into this world there was no way I could go back to robotics and engineering as I had wanted to and just thought I’d be a surgical PA or something like that. And as I was going down that course somebody said, “you know what Zach, there’s another year for you to become an MD and then you’ve got all this flexibility and all this.”
Well the person who told me it was going to be an extra year had no idea what they were talking about. And 17 years later I finally finished my medical education as I went through a few different subspecialties. So yeah, after medicine at the University of Colorado, which was an extraordinary journey. I loved medical school. I loved school for the very first time. The first experience was gross anatomy and it just exploded my mind. I suddenly knew, I felt like I couldn’t forget anything. I felt like everything made sense suddenly because I had, I could see down to the fiber tissue and the exquisite… When you dissect a human body for four months, you imagine that, you’ve learned every vein, you’ve learned every artery, you’ve learned lymphatic systems, you’ve learned every nerve in that body. And then the last thing you unwrap interestingly is the hands. And you unwrap the hands and it is the most overwhelming emotional experience that you’re no expecting because you just skinned a face and you thought that was the most intense thing you’ve ever done but for some reason a human hand has so much humanity written in it and it is a an overwhelming thing.
And so my medical career I believe can be mapped back to the human hand of the 82-year-old woman that I dissected. And her hand was like an archeological dig on human wisdom. The folds of that hand and everything else. And it inspired me to ask deep questions and stay very curious about what it means to be human, what it means to be wrapped in these realms of tissue. And so I went into internal medicine and internal medicine I thought was going to give me the whole matrix of understanding of the human being. It’s the study that is the founding of all of our specialties; cardiology, renal, all of these different specialties.
And at the end of that journey of internal medicine I became a chief resident, which is a faculty position at the University of Virginia and I taught for a year. And in teaching internal medicine I realized I was just scratching the surface of understanding how biology actually happens. I had learned a lot about disease but I didn’t understand why life was happening. And so then I heard about the endocrine system early on and that kept in the background of my mind as maybe the secret, maybe the language of the human body as these hormones that coordinate 70 trillion cells to ignite life. And so I did that and at the end of that journey, it’s been cancer research and developing chemotherapy. And then came to the realization that there had never been a case of cancer in history caused by a lack of chemotherapy. And so I realized I was going down a dead end path that was never going to take me to a root cause solution.
And so then I went into hospice and palliative care thinking that maybe there I would do no harm and I would meet my hypocritic oath and I would learn something of life and death. And it was a beautiful bookend to my experience of birthing babies in the Philippines. And there’s definitely a second birth that happens.
And that journey took me out of the hospital system because I started to realize I wanted to know more about life, and to know life I figured out I needed to know nutrition. And so I started a nutrition center ten years ago and started my own biotech laboratory on the microbiome eight years ago in realization that it is not the endocrine system that is the language and coordination system of human biology, it’s the microbiome. It is the bacteria and fungi that we live within that is the communication network of life. And that’s been my exciting journey of the last eight years is to dive into life itself there in the microbiome.
DB: I really wanted to reach out to you because we cross each other’s path here and there when we are speaking but you just don’t seem to be someone that is tooting anybody else’s horn. You really have your own perspective. And I was hoping you could sort of just give me your perspective on Covid19. I know you’re a busy guy. I doubt you watch my show. I haven’t been aware of what you’ve been saying publicly. So, I want to just open because you’re someone that I really have watched put thoughts together in a way that seemed to resonate. What is your perspective of Covid19 in this experience we’re all having on a global level?
Bush: I think to answer that effectively I need to just back up away from the current situation. The virus is going to move through the population and just like every other coronavirus that we’ve seen that’s resulted in widespread death, it’s gone within two years. The first one was SARS, no vaccine, no anything. We just about heard immunity or adjustment or the actual biological pool for the production of that virus disappeared. And so that was gone, in 2002 it happened and by 2003 it was gone. MERS happened 2012, by 2013 it’s gone, no vaccines. And so these things are sweeping through the environment and we make a news story out of a few of those; SARS, MERS, Covid. But if you look back to like 1976 when we saw this huge uptick in viral syndromes, around 1976 is when we started to see species jumping viruses that were really starting to do weird things genomically. We’ve had 12,800 recorded new viruses in that time and that’s only the ones that we managed to record and find and categorize. There’s probably 100 fold that, or 10,000 fold that, or 10 million fold that that we haven’t understood. The amount of genomic information in the atmosphere in the and soils and water systems is beyond our supercomputer power to analyze.
And so, when somebody comes along and says there is a new virus, my first thought is how the hell do you think that’s new? What is the data that you’re basing that on. Have you screened the genomics of the viruses on the planet before? And that answer is absolutely you can’t. There’s 10 to the 31 viruses in the air. There’s 10 to the 31 viruses in the ocean water. There’s 10 to the 30 viruses in the soils. And so, we are surrounded, we are literally absorbing, we are breathing, we are through our skin, through our ears, through our eyes, through our systems, we are absorbing machines for genomic information since our origin and far beyond our origin was this genomic milieu that we flow within.
And so I think we need to be very cautious to say that there’s anything new under the sun because it’s unlikely that the earth has never seen this before. It’s been through six great extinctions. We’re in the midst of the sixth one. It’s seen cataclysmic events on the planet. It has seen the rise and fall of continents. It’s seen extraordinary shifts in climate. The whole planet covered in ice at one point, pretty much. And then you’ve got the reabsorption of that ice and the rise of oceans. And you’ve got massive volcanic events that cover the sky in sulfur compounds and toxic acids. This earth is a history of cataclysmic events. Right now, humankind is the cataclysmic event on the planet.
And so we should be aware of our role right now as a force of destruction and a force of manipulation of biology at its foundation and we should be far from startled that we see the collapse of our own health. It is the most predictable thing scientifically that you could possibly do. Our group is tiny. I’m a self-employed scientist. Self-fund my little laboratory. We keep doing what we do because it’s interesting. And even if we’re going to go march into extinction with the rest of humankind, let’s do it with our eyes wide open and celebrate the beauty that we are in. Life is extraordinarily beautiful. And I would include the virus as perhaps an extraordinary showcase of the beauty.
There is a genomic language on this planet that we have termed viruses and then we termed them, I think mistakenly as part of the microbiome and then we made them our enemy. And so we told an extraordinarily damning story of a language of genomics, a language of life. And the story we need to retell is that life is freaking beautiful and it is adaptive, and it is regenerative and it’s always looking for the next solution. And the way in which we look for solutions and adaptability is through viruses. That’s how we do it. That’s how life has always done it. And so if you damn a virus you have just damned the language of life itself.
DB: I mean that’s confusing I think for your average person. What do you mean by… we’re being told viruses are the enemy. Vaccines stop measles. We’ve stopped polio, we’ve stop smallpox, there’s reasons. Those things killed people. What do you mean viruses aren’t the bad guy? I mean, when I think about it. What are you going to say about Polio del? What are you going to say about these deadly diseases that medicine has stopped before? How can you say that viruses are beautiful? What does that mean? How do they interact with my body that I could see any beauty in it whatsoever?
Bush: Yeah so, when we see an infection. In other words, whether we are talking about HIV and AIDS or we are talking about a little bacteria called Vasilis? that then can cause tuberculosis. Or this Covid situation is a great example of it. When we interact with the microbial world, what we are describing is a terrain or an ecosystem of experience. And it is a vast ecosystem when it is in a healthy state. And that ecosystem is always adapting and adjusting to stressors. When we see a microbe become endemic in an area, and Polio is a great example of this. HIV is a great example of this now, where we have endemic areas where the virus is simply in the environment at such a level that it’s very likely that we’re going to see manifestations of adaptations of the humans in that environment are going to absorb that microbe. And so some of those people living in endemic Polio areas will manifest a disease that we call Polio. But many many people outside of that small population that are getting sick are being exposed to that Polio through their water systems and the like.
And so these have been natural elements within the environment. HIV looks to be extremely underdiagnosed. There’s a really interesting study that screened 8,000 healthy people with no history of infectious disease, had screened negative through blood banks and stuff like that and they did genomic analysis for a couple hundred viruses that are known and they found 42 viruses in the bloodstream of these patients that were totally healthy and asymptomatic with no history and had screened negative by antibody testing and the like for things like HIV and things like that. They found an extraordinary amount of HIV and Hepatitis C and all these conditions in this asymptomatic population, which suggests that these microbes are part of our normal daily biologic experience.
Occasionally we will find a syndrome of immune deficiency which is not a human experience. We can go into what is the human immune system in a minute, but what’s happening is there’s an imbalance that can suddenly happen where all of these microbes, and there’s so many in the human body. You know, you’re at 30,000 species of bacteria and who knows how many of the 5 million species of fungi and who knows how many of the 300,000 species of parasites. We have done such a poor job of really understanding what the healthy terrain of the human body does, but looking at the hunter gatherers in Africa right now with the American gut project with Jeff Leach, you can see that the American is now walking around with about 10 percent of the microbiome of the gut that we should have.
And so we’re 90 percent deficient. When you become 90 percent deficient in the ecosystem, you’re going to get weeds. And the weeds come in and will overgrow an area just like they do in your backyard. If you go and rotor tail your backyard, destroy the balanced ecosystem of a meadow, you’re going to immediately get weeds that come in that weren’t evident when the biodiversity was there. But their seeds were in the environment enough that as soon as there was an opportunity for them to come into their niche, they would do that. But we need to look to the farmers here who are doing regenerative agriculture to find out that the weeds are never the problem. The weeds are the symptom of the collapse of biodiversity. And I would say that same thing for Polio, for HIV, for any of these infections that when the biodiversity is there we can reach a homeostatic state where hundreds of thousands of species of grasses and plant life in a jungle maintain an eco-balance and there’s no opportunity for disequilibrium or unbalance or dis-ease in that environment.
If you go through and dump a bunch of agent orange in that environment or it’s close cousin roundup or glyphosate and you destroy that jungle, then you’re going to see a very unbalanced system and the weeds come up. But the weeds are not the problem. In fact, they are part of the solution amazingly. And so the weeds we now find out in regenerative agriculture is part of nature’s way of regenerating the ecosystem. And so the weeds have these important early niches in reforming the networks of mycelium and intelligence within the soil that can then rebuild the micro-ecosystems for the bacteria and fungi and then ultimately the seedlings and the biodiversity come back up out of the seedbank that’s deep in the soils and express itself again.
And so when we stop disturbing soil and let it return to its native state; where we stop plowing, we stop spraying and we let nature do its thing, we can see native grasslands that we thought extinct for 200 years come back in, no seeding necessary. It comes oozing back out of the matrix of the soil. It is life itself and biodiversity itself and it relies on the stepwise progression of weeds and its biodiversity. When we have an unbalanced microbiome of a human, where we take them out of their native balanced state of hunter-gatherer system, balanced with their ecosystem, an extension of their ecosystem and we force them into a village where they have water that’s contaminated with feces. They can’t touch fresh water. We destroy all the grasses and grassland diversity within their village. They’re now walking on dead clay and they have huts that are trodden down clay. They’ve lost any touch with that microbiomic soil. That’s the beginning of endemic disease. That’s the beginning of where we see these imbalances. And Tuberculosis is phenomenal example of a condition that didn’t spring forth until we created the industrial revolution and suddenly in London and New York we had endemic problems of Tuberculosis happening in the cities because we were so divorced from that ecology of balance, that ecology of harmony there.
And then you zip forward back to that regenerative farm and you say, well okay, so Tuberculosis or Covid or any microbe you point out. Lyme being a great example right now. Isn’t Lyme just the weed. It’s just the organism who found its niche in a damaged ecosystem and is on the way back towards. It’s doing its role in getting us back to biodiversity. And yet as physicians we’ve been taught to kill it. As farmers we’ve been taught to kill it. And so we rush in and kill all the weeds and then we wonder why the weeds are worse next year and why our crops are doing worse the next year so that we have to put in more nitrogen fertilizers and chemical inputs and all of this. And the plants are weaker so they’re more prone to pests, so it’s more herbicides, more pesticides and we get into this vicious cycle. And then we wonder why our children have gone from 1.2% of chronic disease to, by most recent Medicaid screens, 52% of children with a chronic disorder or disease. 1.2 to 52% since the 1960’s. And so what in the last 50 years has created this epidemic of biologic diluting or biologic loss in the farmland? And the answer is a war against the microbiome. And so when we see the emergence of something like Covid or something like HIV we can be confident that the HIV wasn’t the problem. It was our lack of intelligence at the soil level of our bodies, or in our gardens, or in our farm fields. We have been destroying that microbial diversity that would lead to a balanced ecosystem. So we call them pathogens. We call them these dangerous germs but in fact they’ve been here since the beginning of time in some shape or form.
And this whole concept of militarizing things. Humans can’t even touch the speed of biodiversity, the biodiversification of the virus. They are so fast in replication and they are so fast to shift their genomics. We can’t keep up with that. There is no laboratory that can do it as fast as nature does it. Nature is an adaptive beautiful machine.
DB: Well, that would lead me to my next question, right? It’s really coming up now in the media, these questions. Was this created in a lab in Wuhan? Or in a lab in North Carolina and moved to Wuhan? Is it an escape? Is it a bioweapon? Is this manmade? You know, I’ve heard scientists say that they are replicating and evolving these viruses for scientific research. There’s questions on whether it should be being done. Gain-of-function is this thing we are hearing a lot about now. Creating these gain-of-function viruses. I heard a scientist yesterday in a piece say they’re using these gain-of-function and they’re evolving these pathogens at 8 million times the speed that nature would do it. And it seems like you just told me the exact opposite. What’s your perspective? Is this manmade, potentially? And is that why it’s maybe more deadly or not? Where are you at with that conversation?
Bush: Ah, well all the public health statistics from the CDC’s website on respiratory death is probably the best place to go. Do we really have a pandemic going on right now? And what we can say with great confidence from the CDC’s own data there is that this has been a very mild respiratory death season. It’s one of the more mild ones in the last seven years. And so where we ran into severe problems by respiratory death was 2017 and that was from influenza. It was a bad influenza strain that went through the world. We had 7% mortality. The CDC announced the 7% mortality in January of 2017 and said this is going to be a catastrophic flu season. And it was. Like you can see respiratory death just shoot up that year, well above baseline seasonal changes that we see. And that was across the board of pneumonia and other pathogens in addition to influenza, but influenza accounted for the huge spike. We did not see that spike happen this year. There was no spike of respiratory deaths beyond our baseline seasonal changes that we see. And so every year there’s pathogens that cycle through that will lead to the end point of pneumonia and respiratory death. And we don’t discover what it is. We don’t genomically take the effort or have the laboratory intelligence to go find that thing.
And so I would say, first of all, there’s not any evidence by respiratory death in the United States that we have some massive new thing that has happened that’s a bioterror weapon. If someone created this virus we don’t need to fear them because they did a really bad job. The flu three years ago did a much worse toll on humanity than this thing. So if this is a biologic weapon, they’re not very good at it yet. Did it kill some people? Maybe? People certainly died with Covid in their bloodstream, but like I said, if you look at the genomics of the bloodstream of 8,000 healthy people, you’ll find 42 common viruses including HIV to relatively common in that population. So, when we go and test the bloodstream and say there is PCR evidence of DNA of Covid in your bloodstream, all we’ve said is that this is part of the garden. Covid is now part of your terrain. Is that Covid responsible for the downstream syndrome, it’s impossible by our own assessment because when Harvard analyzes death from Covid it’s actually air pollution that predicts better than any other thing in the environment. Better than the presence of the virus, your prediction of death is how many micrograms of air pollution smaller than 2.5 nanometers is in your air that your breathing. That’s what you’re going to die from. And it’s so powerful that it’s every one micron.
It turns out that a year ago I was at Sun Valley Wellness Festival and I showed everybody where the next pandemic was going to happen, right out of central China. And I showed the spraying map of Roundup in China and said, it’s going to come right here because that’s where we’re putting the most pressure on biology. And so, when a scientist yesterday says, these labs are doing this 8 million times faster than nature, nature can do this at any speed it needs to do. Nature is way more adaptive than our laboratories are capable of. But I would say that nature has had very little reason to really rapid genomic shift over that last few thousand years, until we’ve scaled industrial agriculture to the level we have. And with now 4.5 billion pounds of antibiotic being poured into our soils every year, we’re putting extraordinary pressure on the microbiome. And so I believe the microbiome is accelerating its genomic generation of genetic material that we call viruses now because it needs to adapt faster than anytime in the last 55 million years. There is a force of nature happening that we call extinction that is forcing massive adaptive information stream to come out of biology itself.
And we need to realize that we are producing that to. Our stress produces huge genomic information out of us. Do we call that viruses? No, we call that exosomes and there’s different ways we kind of categorize those things but really it’s just lexicon. Biology that’s under stress expresses new genomic information and we do that by the second. Every second I am expressing different micro RNA and my micro RNA exudes out of my body. My micro RNA is carried in these tiny little exosomes and it’s not a full protein coding gene. It’s tiny little messengers to the genome around me, to the microbes around me, to the family members around me, to the pets, to the people I walk by, to the plants that grow around me, I’m expressing genomic information out there as to what my stress level is.
And so every organism on the planet is generating this. Now imagine 7 billion humans expressing genomic information. Now imagine 1.4 quadrillion bacteria on your body expressing genomic information. At least 30% to 50% depending on which system you’re in of the viruses coming into the environment are being made by bacteria. We call them bacteriophage. And so bacteria are making this genetic information. The human cells are making this genetic information. If we’re not making genetic information that’s an exosome of a virus type thing than we’re making these micro RNA signaling devices. We are literally exuding this. Now how can a lab say they can do it 8 million times faster than that host of complexity. They simply can’t. I would just argue that all day long. That’s physically impossible for a lab to do this faster. Can they do it in one strand of DNA faster? Sure, but they have to bet that what they’re doing there is going to interact with the environment in some intelligent fashion.
Let’s think about a pile of pig stool. This is my favorite kind of mental exercise. One of our highest uses of antibiotics right now is in pigs in the protein production meat industry. And the stool of pigs is now considered a hazardous waste. It’s illegal to transport it across state lines. So in North Carolina where we have the largest swine facilities in the country with Smithfield and the like down there, they have literal lakes of pig stool. They build levies to contain these hundreds of millions of gallons to pig stool that they can’t transport. They can’t put it in the ground either because it’s a hazardous waste. All they’re allowed to do is contain it in these massive swamp pools of pig stool.
In that pig stool you’ve got somewhere around 10 to the 15 viruses per spoonful. And so, 10 to the 15, there’s a lot of zeroes after the one there. So you have this massive viral transcription factory of hundreds of millions of gallons of stool full of bacteria, bacteriophage, and all of this virus generating machinery. In a lake full of stool like that, you’ve got a factory. A viral factory. A genomial shifting factory of quadrillions and quadrillions and quadrillions of cells that are generating new viruses, checking, misspelling them. Creating genomic shifts. Then a new protein gets adapted and now you have a new virus, or a new viral genetic makeup. And then you shift that again through misspelling.
And so the speed of which the pig stool is doing this is ultimately at this staggering figure and this staggering rate of capacity. And so I would very much love to sit with any government official or laboratory expert and really challenge them to bet on: is your laboratory really better than a pile of pig shit? And I just think we’re going to find over and over again that it’s better. You can’t compete with nature and its adaptability. We think we’re doing all this genetic modification, so we think we’re really clever because we genetically modified one gene into corn, or soybean, or this or that. Are you kidding me? 50 percent of the human genome is virus. We were made by viruses. 10 percent of our genome is at least from retroviruses like HIV. We were built by the machinery of the virome. And so don’t tell me you figured out one gene and now you’re at the co-creative capacity of mother nature. We’re scratching the surface of what genomic modification really looks like. And nature does it at a speed and without a capitalistic determination behind it. When you add money making schema to genetic modification, now you’ve changed nature again. Nature does this without an ethos. nature’s whole goal is biodiversity and sustaining life. The planet is proof again and again that it wants biodiversity, and it wants to do life for as long as time exists.
We have put ourselves against that nature that has proclaimed itself the champion of biodiversity and life on earth and we are destroying that.
DB: So take me now, with all of that…we’ve covered how were here. Viruses make us up. We’ve got great lakes of pig feces. Take me to Covid-19 then. You know, you said a little while back that you predicted over a year ago somewhere in central China – I guess you’re meaning Hubei province or somewhere in that area – that there would be a virus. Or that the next pandemic would come from there. So many people are saying it’s just too ironic that we have a level four lab there.
In your mind, what would be your best theory for what happened in the middle of China? Is that where this comes from? And what is it about Covid-19 compared to other viruses that we’ve looked at before?
Zach: So, the science on Covid is rapidly emerging but to say that we know anything about it is erroneous, which is why I am so frustrated with the government and with the regulatory groups in medicine like the CDC, and NIH, and John Hopkins University getting in on this now. We have universities that are declaring knowledge of how many people have died from Covid. That is scientifically impossible that they can say “this many people are dying of Covid.” We have a lot of people that are dying of bizarre respiratory conditions all of the time.
There seems to be a syndrome that is familiar with Covid. And that syndrome hearkens back to another coronavirus of 2001 and 2002, which was SARS. And the description of SARS is so incredible in the literature. When you read the initial scientific studies coming out in 2002, 2003 around SARS, it literally says the patients turn blue, and then have to wait until their lungs eventually fill with fluid, and then they die. The course of events there are very important. They first turn blue before their lungs have fluid in them. And so there’s not a respiratory failure that leads this thing, and then with fluid eventually in their lungs they develop pneumonia and then they die.
This is exactly what’s happening with this Covid strain. So another coronavirus presenting with hypoxia, which is a loss of oxygen and tissue, so the patients are presenting blue and with these remarkably low numbers of oxygen in the blood stream. A lot of them look pretty comfortable: they’re not breathing fast , they’re not in any distress. And so the doctors are freaking out trying to figure out why is this patient sitting here talking to me with an oxygen level this low, blue in the face, and going into multi-organ failure – liver is the number one thing when they screen. There was a nice article that showed what is the initial laboratory of 5,000 patients presenting with Covid-like symptoms in New York: of those 5,000 patients, the vast majority didn’t even have fever. The average temperature was 37 degrees Celsius which is normal body temperature. So they don’t have fever, they don’t have any signs of respiratory distress. Yet, they have bump and liver enzymes. This is the only laboratory finding that seems to be consistent. Their white blood cells aren’t elevated as if they have a virus. they don’t have a shift in triglycerides suggesting some inflammatory event.
There is nothing in that article I am pouring through, and like, show me the evidence that this person is having a viral infection. Show me the evidence that there is some sign in the immune system or otherwise that there is a virus afoot. Instead, they’re dying of hypoxia. They have loss of oxygen at the tissue level. And their tissue is being starved of oxygen. And it turns out when you have a hypoxic injury, loss of oxygen in the lung, you get something called ground-glass reaction. You get fluid that starts to accumulate in the lung because of that hypoxic injury: a lack of oxygen. In the vascular system you start to get dysfunction of the endothelium where you can no longer make vasodilatory effects, and you start to lose the mechanics of venous supply and venous drainage and all of this, and that leads to stasis which, you can get blood clots from stasis. So the whole body from liver, to blood stream, to your other organs are showing signs, including the lungs, of a loss of oxygen. This looks as if you suddenly put this person on the top of Mount Everest and took them from sea level to Mount Everest in five minutes, and that’s what the patient looks like. So that happened in 2002, and it’s happening again, so what is going on if there’s no signs of a viral infection? What is going on and why are we finding Covid in some of these bloodstreams?
What seems to be happening whether we’re to look at SARS, MERS or this is a constellation of events that are happening in the bloodstream to induce a high altitude-like injury or hypoxic injury to the whole system. And then eventually if we don’t fix that problem, they’re going to fill their lungs with fluid because we didn’t reverse the hypoxic thing. If you put them on a respiratory machine you actually just made the situation worse because forced oxygen is very noxious, and high pressure oxygen is very noxious to the tissue of the lungs. If you push oxygen in and the bloodstream still can’t find it, you haven’t fixed the hypoxemic event. And so you’re pushing an oxidative injury, which is an inflammatory, onto a tissue that can’t absorb the oxygen at the tissue level. So we know we’re seeing extraordinary rates of death, 80% of people on a respiratory in New York are dying. Nowhere else in the world did we see levels that high of mortality. So we are part of the problem when we keep thinking that we have a respiratory failure event. SARS to now – 18 years of science has shown us that this is a hypoxic injury. Not a viral infection type thing.
So if it was a virus that was overwhelming your system, you would see your immune system respond appropriately. Fever can happen downstream in Covid, but it’s not at the beginning of this infectious process. It’s actually in week two that you tend to see the fever spike up and all that. Again, 5,000 people presenting in New York, their body temperature as a population is stone cold normal at presentation. It’s not until days later when their lungs have filled with fluids in a hospital environment, and now they have secondary bacterial infection that they get the fevers. And so there is downstream signs of overwhelm to the system, hypoxic injury, and an accumulation of infectious-like symptoms. But that’s not the presentation. And so as soon as we come to terms with this as a medical community, I think we’re going to save lives really rapidly. We need to treat this like a hypoxic injury, and we have a lot of interesting data out of there. And I’m making a film right now of what I think is going on, and what I think is probably very incomplete because my clinic is not allowed to be open right now, which is so ironic. If you think you have a hospital overload capacity, then don’t close all the clinics, like, don’t say that all the clinics out there that aren’t associated with the hospital are suddenly non-essential. If you don’t want an overloaded hospital system, keep the clinics open. But that’s an aside.
I haven’t been able to treat those patients with this, but I offer it to any physician to start to explore this is – we need to treat this as a hypoxic injury similar to cyanide poisoning. And so we need to start to put in the pieces to change the shape of the hemoglobin, which we can do. We know how to treat cyanide posioning. Cyanide poisoning happens to present exactly like Covid syndrome which is non-febrile, blue patient with signs of liver failure and hypoxemic injury to the organs developing later into respiratory death. And so we have a very well established treatment plan for cyanide poisoning and it’s three quick injections of a cyanide kit, and you’re using things like sodium nitrate in there to change the shape of hemoglobin so that it can bind through methemoglobin– the oxygen again. And so we have, you know, an FDA approved mechanism of treating cyanide. We should turn that kind of mindset to that. Now, am I right? Is that going to fix the problem? It may be more complicated than that. But, until we start treating the hemoglobin as an initial injury, we’re never going to solve the downstream infections that are happening. People aren’t dying of Covid, again, they are dying of secondary pneumonias that are bacterial in nature, downstream. And some of them are dying of a hypoxic organ failure, but they’re not dying of a virus per se. You don’t see any of the signs in those 5,000 patients.
DB: Right, but the virus is causing that problem, right? And whether, I mean, in some ways isn’t it semantics to say that, “well, the virus isn’t causing a fever, like, the way a virus would,” but it is in fact causing this hemoglobin problem, this inability to carry oxygen correctly – something that was pointed out by the MD in New York, Kyle-Sidell who came forward and said “this seems like my patients are at 30,000 feet.” So, on one hand you would say “oh it’s not a virus, people shouldn’t be afraid,” but there are people where this virus is causing this hypoxic issue, is it not?
Zach: It’s participating in it, for sure. I think it’s very – we haven’t proven that yet – but, yeah, I think there’s a distinct possibility that the virus is participating in the unmasking of this hemoglobin shift. And when I say unmasking it, it can’t be causing it directly or else everybody who got exposed to the virus would be having a hypoxic injury. But very few people who get exposed to the virus and mount an antibody response and all the typical things you would expect, actually presented with blue organ failure. Very few percent. And so the protein – there’s a new protein we’re told, and this needs to be proven out still – but we’re told there’s a new RNA strand that codes for a new protein that’s different than SARS and MERS. Okay, great. But something in SARS and MERS did the same thing, and so there’s been something stable in these coronaviruses that is unmasking, in a small percentage of patients, this hemoglobin type of effect.
So then should we say well it’s the virus causing it? Well if it was the virus causing it, again, everybody who was exposed would have that. So what is the virus doing? The virus seems to be unmasking the toxicity of our environment. And there’s something really poetic about that. The people that are dying from this are by and large in areas where there is high agriculture residues of Roundup and high residues of small particulate air pollution – smaller than 2.5 microns. And so northern Italy, New York City, Seattle, Louisiana: those are all the highest areas in Europe and the United States of those two phenomenon. Agricultural toxicity coupled with air pollution and small particulate matter. In China that happens to be Wuhan and that whole Hubei province. Hubei province has the highest Roundup and, kind of, destruction of the soils. And Beijing and south of Beijing have the highest concentrations of the air particulate, and Hubei is toxic. We’re talking about levels of micron particulate that are forty fold that seen in New York. So massive toxicity in the air pollution, in Hubei. And so in that air pollution we know it carries many things including cyanide. Cyanide we know is a part of normal air pollution, in fact a really nice Earth Justice piece got released just months before this whole pandemic story unfolded.
There was an Earth Justice mandate for kind of a class action lawsuit demand on the EPA for not accounting and not doing anything about the rising levels of cyanide. And in many of the US cities we were above state thresholds of cyanide over and over again, and there was nothing being done. So Earth Justice recognized that and months later we see people dying of something that looks like cyanide poisoning. And so what I think is interesting is the possibility of nature in a toxic stew of dying soils in a glysophate, Roundup, intense farming area of China has unmasked the relationship of cyanide to hemoglobin. And is this an adaptive event happening as Nature has exuded this? If this is a military operation, again, they are mimicking something that happening in 2001 and 2002 and so it’s not new. They’ve recreated – and it looks to have a much much much lower death toll than SARS did. SARS we seem to have a death toll maybe around 8% or 10%. It’s hard to know because we didn’t really do good universal screening. There may have been a lot of asymptomatic people with SARS too.
But certainly, this time around, I think we see a much much lower mortality rate. It’s down in that .1 to .3 percent range probably, something like that. The most recent Stanford study looking at Santa Clara as an entire city population is coming in around .1% something like that. So we’re somewhere around normal flu and mortality. So if it’s new, if it’s military, their agenda is not to kill people maybe and they don’t know what they’re playing with.
So is there a virus? Yes. What is it doing? It seems to be unmasking the toxicity of our environment that we’ve created. And the virus itself is not enough to cause the death. We have to have the perfect storm of air pollution, and every one micron increase has a 20-fold increase of death by that Harvard study. Every one micron of air pollution– and when I tell you there’s 40-fold increases in that micron density in Hubei, the chances of having an epidemic of hypoxic injury there is catastrophically high. You’re in the hundreds of fold increase risk of death by living in that environment. And so we saw the death rate suddenly dropped to near zero not because they were in confinement. I believe it was because if you look at the tracking of their air pollution levels, it went below forty microns per cubic meter of air in the two weeks following the cessation of activity in Hubei. And so by stopping human activity, we took the cyanide out of the air and suddenly nobody was dying of Covid.
Everybody’s, like, suspicious like “China is lying. China must – people must still be dying.” And I love it that the United States always thinks that China is lying. Always thinks that Russia is lying. That’s our default mechanism, like, who do – do we think we’re not lying? Who in the media do you trust right now? Who do you think is not lying here? And suddenly it’s China that’s lying…
DB:[laughs]
Zach: United States of America if you keep having this superiority complex over the Chinese, you are a fool. Because we have hospitals that can’t even figure out how to get masks on their doctors and nurses because they don’t know how to produce a mask because China produces it for us.
DB: Right.
Zach: And so we are so…lazy, ultimately. We are so lazy, and so capitalistically oriented that we didn’t even consider the repercussions of a mask that was seven cents cheaper to make in China than the United States, so we outsourced it. So we are not ingenious when it comes to knowing threat, knowing security. We are reactive, and we are pissed off at the world, and we’re fear – and we blame China and we blame this and that. We have nobody to blame but ourselves for our inability to be prepared, for our lack of forward prospective preparation for something like this. We have a really, you know, dismal track record for truth and justice in this country over the last 20, 30 years. It’s really eroded and so we need to look at the fact that we are a collapsing empire, and this Covid thing is a massive distraction to the fact that we have massive economic instability in this country that is mainly being driven, I believe, by a $3.7 trillion healthcare industry that can’t keep up with the rate of chronic disease development. There is –
DB: So let me ask you this – Let me just – We look at China. We look at America. America now has this skyrocketing death rate but I think it’s going to get very interesting. We know that many of those numbers are bloated. Everybody that’s got it – as you said, has tested positive for Covid. With Covid is dying from Covid. I think you’re going to see them retracting back those numbers as it starts making look – Anthony Fauci look bad. It’s gonna make Andrew Cuomo look bad. It’s gonna make Deborah Birx look bad. And I think you’re going to see them realizing they’ve made a tragic mistake by trying to bolster what appears to be a fear to get America to respond correctly. They’re now going to say wait a minute, we look like we’ve handled this worst than everyone else in the world. But specifically I want to talk about the lockdown because a lot of studies now coming out show that China was already past its peak before they locked down.
Zach: Yep.
DB: That it was probably ineffective. I think if you’re going to point to a country that locked down pretty early, it would be America. I think we stopped travel earlier than most. We moved to this lockdown and yet the former head [of the FDA] has come out and said:
[News clip of Scott Gottlieb]: We haven’t seen the kind of declines that we expected to see at this point.DB: We haven’t, like, the death rates the same. It’s continuing, we’re not curbing it and now we’re gonna open up so my question to you is: do lockdowns work? Or, did they work for Covid-19? Do they work at all? It seems like we were earlier than anyone else and we have this, you know – Look, there’s two ways of looking right? It’s still an infinitesimal death rate, really, if you really strip down what is actually a Covid-19 death. Italy said that 12% of the people they claimed were Covid-19. Really only 12% died from Covid as far as they could tell. The other 80 something percent, 88% died from other complications from the illnesses they had previously. I think our numbers would be about the same.
But does a lockdown – you’ve studied viruses, you’ve studied bacteria: the biome. Can we stop the biome in its natural proliferation by locking ourselves down, I guess is ultimately the question.
Zach: Not only can we not stop it, we wouldn’t want to, you know, is my position. And that, you know, we – the adaption speed of the planet is determined by airflow on this planet, and so genomic information didn’t wait for humans to show up. Viruses have been transiting our globe since long before humans showed up, in fact without that virus parade of genetic information mixing with the milieu of life and maybe, you know, informing the milieu of life over billions of years we would not have even shown up. And so we know that viruses can travel rapidly around the planet without human travel. Without –
DB: Without airplanes? I mean, because we’re being told it’s airplanes, right? Airplanes are what are delivering the virus.
Zach: – that’s now called aerobiology which is the whole science of how airplanes, you know, move viruses around quicker. If it’s quicker, you’re talking about a number of days down to, probably, three to five days because all you have to do is wait for the air to traffic across the Pacific Ocean so at most you’re looking at a couple weeks where the air is travelling. So there’s two ways that viruses have been measured to move. One is through respiratory spit, and this is the one that gets all the attention from the mask people. So the people that want you to put a mask on, the people that want you to go self sequester are studying the droplets and the droplets in your respiratory state that carry the virus go about three feet. And so if that was how viruses, travelled then airplanes would be super important in the movement of viruses around the planet.
But of course we had viral transmission around the globe before then, you know, we developed air travel. And there’s, again, the possibility that we can change the concentration of the virus in different environments but we’re not going to eliminate the virus by eliminating air travel. So the evidence of this continues to come out and, you know, the virome is just beginning to be studied, I think, effectively. And a really cool study looking at in Spain recently demonstrated that you could find the same viral particles in ice caps nearly at the same time that you would find the virus in desert systems and all of that around Europe. So you’re looking across Europe, all of the different – vast different ecosystems, most of them uninhabited by humans. And they were showing up – viruses showing up almost simultaneously seeming in these different environments. So what they are studying now is the other half of viral transmission which is aerosols. And so droplet or liquid based transfer goes three feet. Aerosols, where you’re not attached to a liquid droplet, but you’re actually airborne and you’re surrounded by a pocket of air rather than a pocket of liquid, those can travel great distances, and they survive much longer, interestingly, than if in liquid. And nobody has really worked out why or what the protective mechanisms are. But dust particles will select around that.
Interestingly we can screw up the normal distribution of a virus by air pollution. And so some really cool studies looking at flu are showing that in areas of high air pollution, we can have an abnormal density of virus transmission through aerosolized particles because they bind to the air pollution itself. And so again, I would argue that we will completely cease any future coronavirus pandemic if as soon as we see a strain come out we instantly stop traffic, and everybody has to go to bicycles, skateboards, roller-skates and the rest and carry on their life normally. If we do that, then aerosolized virus will spread over the earth over the course of a few weeks and months, and will spread itself out in a very even distribution and we won’t have these pockets of high density viruses in the pockets of high density humans. And so we won’t see the same penetration into that biology. In addition we won’t see the cyanide poisoning and the air pollution poisoning that increases the risk of death for many of these respiratory viruses.
And so a very simple approach would be: every Fall, we should adopt the technique of we’re going to be a public transit only community. And so every October-November, when our Vitamin D levels start dropping and we lose the intelligence of the soil, re-absorption of the carbon substrates – the amount of the carbon in the atmosphere, what is near zero by October. All of the greenery of Spring, Summer, and Fall have sucked in all the co2 and methane, there’s maybe a substrate of 3% or 4% of our total carbon leftover at the end of that time. And then between October and January, which is right when our quote-unquote flu season happens, the amount of co2 and methane in the atmosphere blows up and it goes berserk until about June. And so the reason why we see flu season correlates perfectly with carbon in the atmosphere due to natural soil cycles and we call that flu season. I don’t think there’s any proof at all that flu is causing this perfect, seasonal change because the virus doesn’t care what season it is. The virus can be made by any human cell any time of year, all the time. What seems to change its activity is the amount of co2, methane and other carbon substrates that we create through our transportation and other mechanisms, and then we create flu season. We create a syndrome of respiratory death and dis-ease that is actually a natural cycle of the sudden quiescence of the microbiome of the soils not participating in that same respiratory cycle. And so the respiratory system of the whole planet, including humans, starts to fail in that quiet state.
And death happens. And that happens in nature in a massive way, we call that Fall and Winter. And in that death we reabsorb nutrients into the soil and we get ready for an explosive new cycle of life. We need to come to terms with this is the viral phenomenon. The viral genome is expressing itself constantly and when it is in a microbial diversity – when it is in this ecosystem of friendly, you know, biodiversity – there is no death and disease. And then as the seasons carry on, we see death and disease accumulate. If we shift to bicycles and, you know, non-carbon emitting transportation in the fall, I think we will see a marked reduction in death from what we call flu season.
DB: You –
Zach: The virus will still be with us, but we won’t die from it.
DB: You, you’re one of these guys who has a lot of different investigations to go on but you actually also work in a hospice care. It is my understanding you work with the elderly. We’re being told around the world by scientist that really, predominately, these health issues you’ve described very well – the different reasons it may be caused. But not only is pollution part of it, but is predominantly affecting people over the age of 65 with no other comorbidities. I asked myself, you know, 20 years ago would we have just called these deaths old age? In some ways are we just putting a mic – you know, like, defining something, like, people talk about this – we never looked at flu like this. We’ve never tested, you know, millions of people. to see who actually got the flu. There’s been a large, you know – a large amount of science is just assumptions. Now we’re drilling down and you have scientists around the world, virologists, mathematicians, all saying “if we had done this with the flu, we could have made you panicked over the last twenty years. We could show you this death rate every time and make it specific to an illness and freak everybody out.” The media is a giant part of this.
But, specifically because you have worked with the care of elderly, I’m sure they’re very concerned. What is it, you know, what is the message there? Should we be afraid of dying as we get older? I have a mother-in-law who I am worried about in New York. I think New York is handling this in a terrible way. I think that you don’t want to end up in a New York hospital. They’re gonna vent you it seems. They’re still stuck on that crazy approach, you know, but I want her to feel safe. What is it that, you know, those that are over the age of 65, in that, what should we know about this? And specifically, to that really small group, that experienced a much higher rate of an acute reaction.
Zach: These are great questions. So, age is interesting and if you look at the average age of death and this current pandemic as we track it, northern Italy is six to eight years older than southern Italy. And so, it’s one of the oldest countries in the world. Its average age is around 49 years of age. The United States and China are about 36 years of age. So we’re thirteen years younger as a population. And so, when you see the United States having the highest death toll from this thing anywhere else in the world now, you need to ask what is going on with the United States and why is the United States apparently older biologically than it is chronologically? Why is China at the same age, average age, or many European countries similar age to, you know, our country – Why are we dying more?
And the answer is pretty obvious. When you rank in chronic disease or health outcomes everything from neonatal death all the way to end of life things, the United States ranks 35th in the world by the most, you know, friendly measurements from the government. Watchdog organizations think that we might rank closer to 46 or something in the world. But we’re somewhere between 35th and 49th in the world–
DB: So we’re the tail end of all modern societies. We are the…
Zach: We’re at the bottom of…
DB: At the bottom of the list.
Zach: So if you look at the top economies and industrialized nations, we’re dead last of health outcomes. And so why is the United States dying, and why do we have so many examples of younger people dying? It’s because we are sicker than any other nation. And so specific to this Covid, it turns out that we know that the coronavirus, both the common cold as well as these, you know, more severe versions of it and SARS, MERS and Covid binds to a receptor in the lung that’s called ACE2. And so this ACE2 receptor is expressed naturally on our lung surfaces.
As we age, ACE2 can go up, especially if there’s respiratory disease. So COPD, for example, has very high ACE2 expression on the lung’s surface. We have lots of channels in. And COPD is one of the only lung conditions that puts you at increased risk of death from this. All the rest are more vascular, right? It’s cardiovascular, renal disease, coronary disease and cerebral vascular disease. These can – and diabetes and the like.
If you look at those comorbidities that people are dying from, and their relationship to this ACE2 receptor, it gets pretty interesting. Because ACE2 goes up naturally in the lung tissue from damaged, from emphysema type thing […] COPD. But not in cardiovascular disease, until you add two drugs. And so when you add a statin drug, suddenly the whole system up-regulates ACE2 receptors. When you add an ACE inhibitor, which is our leading number one recommendation from all medical societies – if you have diabetes, heart disease or chronic kidney disease, the first drug you’re supposed to be on – and you can get sued for malpractice if you don’t have a patient on one of these drugs – is an ACE inhibitor.
If they don’t tolerate an ACE inhibitor, the most common side-effect of ACE inhibitors is cough, because you’ve up-regulated the ACE2, you know, in their lungs, and now they’re reacting to their environment abnormally. So if they develop an ACE inhibitor cough, which means you’ve changed the balance of their reactivity to their environment, then you need to put them on an ARB, which is an angiotensin receptor blocker, which again up-regulates ACE2 receptors.
And so ACE inhibitors and ARBs are now seen to be a major risk factor for death from Covid. Why? Because it up-regulates the ACE2 receptor. And so the United States is the most medicalized system. So yes, we have high chronic disease rates. And in response to those chronic diseases, we put on medications that we know are putting you at risk of dying from coronavirus.
So if we had a true public health organization that was really concerned about the next few months of death from a coronavirus that just got discovered over in Wuhan Province, the very first thing we should have done is announced: Doctors, you need to transition all your patients who are on ACE inhibitors over to a calcium channel blocker or some other form of blood pressure control, or hey, maybe put them on a healthy diet, but regardless, take them off the ACE inhibitor. If we had done that, we would have saved thousands of lives. Take them off the statin. There’s no – the absolute risk of dying from a heart attack by taking somebody off the statin is near zero for a three-month, six-month period.
And so take them off of their statin, put them on a healthy, plant-based diet so their cholesterol doesn’t go up, and then take them off their ACE inhibitor. If we had done that, we would have completely changed the death toll in the United States. We knew that these drugs increase ACE2, and we knew, based on SARS, MERS and the common cold corona, that it binds the ACE2 receptor. If we had done that, we would have saved thousands of lives, all over the country, not to mention all over the world.
And then we should have stopped influenza vaccination, because an extraordinary study came out in 2017 showing that if we vaccinate for flu, your risk of getting coronavirus the following year goes up. And this is not just corona, but six other common respiratory viruses – that risk goes up. And this is commonly seen, this is a well-described scientific phenomenon that if you get exposed to the real influenza, you develop what’s called kind of this transverse immunity, where you get immunity to bugs that aren’t even represented in influenza. You get this immune system intelligence and you will now become resistant to other bugs.
If you don’t get flu, and you’re exposed to an abnormal protein within that flu virus and you have to mount a weird antibody to that, so you can’t get your normal herd type or kind of immune system response to the environment, then you get increased risk of this. So what we should have done is – if we really believed that this thing was ten times more deadly than flu, if we – well, actually, they said at the beginning it was 100 times more deadly than flu.
If they really believed that, then in December they should have frozen all influenza vaccines. And no more influenza vaccines, come off your ACE inhibitor and your ARB and your statin drug. Don’t get influenza vaccine, we’re going to cruise through this season because we have a new strain. We didn’t do any of those things. We know that science. NIH knows that science. CDC knows that science. We did not make public health moves to protect the community from coronavirus. Why?
Well, I think we kind of knew – well, I knew right away just cos I have a calculator – anybody with a calculator, as soon as the first cruise ship stopped in Oakland – we knew everything we needed to know about this virus – that nobody died on that ship. For 14 days they were quarantined on that ship. It has a five-day infectious period. You will develop symptoms in five days if you’re going to develop symptoms at all.
And so we should have seen high amounts of blue people and, you know, liver failure and all that on that ship, because it was the worst population you could possibly isolate, as they had an average age over 70 on that ship. And there were children running around, so you’ve got children, which are the best microbiome swappers outside of dogs – dogs are definitely our best – but kids have this awesome gift that they’re so good at microbial communication. And so you’ve got kids running around the ship, you’ve got old people – they’re sequestered, and they didn’t sequester – they didn’t quarantine those patients away from each other in those initial couple weeks.
And so it should have been – massive death toll on that ship and yet nobody was even critically – I think one or two people came off critically ill. The rest of the 3,700 people weren’t even – there was only 100 people or so that were showing symptoms at the end of the 14 days. A few people, weeks later, died, and we said they died of coronavirus. Coronavirus was definitely in their experience, it was present, may have contributed in some way, unmasking toxicity of their statin drugs and their, you know, ACE inhibitors and their flu vaccine that they got, but ultimately we know that the death toll on that ship was low enough that if we extrapolate over the United States we would see somewhere around a death toll of 0.1 percent, maybe 0.3 percent at worst.
And we know that flu can – you know, in 2017 was causing a 7 percent mortality rate. So we knew at the beginning that this was not going to be some massively fatal thing unless we managed it wrong, and we did. Instead of learning from the past, we treated this like this was a vicious virus, and every death that happened got blamed on corona instead of our mindset. Our mindset of physicians that this is respiratory failure and I need to put this patient on a respiratory – that’s – that mindset was killing people.
We weren’t responding to the real things below our fingertips, because as physicians, frankly we have been brainwashed away from using our eyes, our nose, our fingers and our sensory system to look at a patient. We don’t believe anything until it comes through a serologic laboratory study or an MRI machine. If we don’t do those two things, we don’t – we have not been given permission to have any trust in our own intuition, our own massive capacity for quantum computation and intelligent decision making. That’s been taken away from us and we’re threatened with lawsuits if you don’t have the MRI and serological data to back up your plan.
We can’t move. We are paralyzed as a medical system, paralyzed by the fear of doing the wrong thing, doing something outside of the current paradigm, and so for that we are losing our patients. And so next winter all of the physicians answering – knowing what you know, what are you going to do next fall? Are you going to vaccinate your patient? Because we know there’s probably one more season where we’ll see Covid in the environment. It takes two years for these coronaviruses to leave.
By the way, know that – this will be gone, again, I said earlier in the show. But it’s very important. America, world, this virus will be gone by next summer, and when they come out with a vaccine next year, they’re going to say that the vaccine eliminated the virus. That is physiologically impossible, that is scientifically impossible, and it has never happened with the previous coronaviruses that have circulated. So let us not be this easily duped, okay?
DB: Right.
Zach: Another show we can talk about whether I believe in vaccines or not. I think that there is an intelligent way we could go about understanding vaccines in the future, but since 1986, you know better than anybody else, we have not been testing for efficacy and safety of our vaccines. So are vaccines important? Is Zach against vaccines? No, Zach is fully for an intelligent, microbiome-informed new model for childhood immunity and vaccination. That’s what I want people to sign on to. And so as an invitation on the tail end of this film will be an invitation to go to my website and sign a petition as a physician or scientist to sign up for healthy child immunity and intelligent vaccination.
We need to bring the new science of the last 30 years to the microbiome, to update our understanding of our relationship to the microbiome, and we need to stop seeing ourselves at war with it, we need to see ourselves as an ecologic member. We are a member within this microbial community, we are an ecosystem in and of ourselves, and we need to now advance the science of vaccination to understanding that exquisite role of microbes in our genome, microbes in our immune system responsiveness, microbes in our capacity to adapt and resist cancer and the chronic diseases that are truly threatening life on earth.
DB: Just – we, sort of finish this up, we’ve talked about all of what the virus does. What about the damage – I mean, you also work with elderly. We’re locking elderly away, they’re not being visited by their families. People are dying all by themselves in hospitals. People aren’t being able to go to memorial services and go through the experience of releasing these people and their family. We have literally become virtually – you know, I would say inhuman towards those elderly that are in end-of-life scenarios, whether it’s Covid-caused or a heart attack that happened because they didn’t have a hospital.
What is the hope for the future? Is there hope in this? What are we to learn as we move forward? Because on one level, you know, you describe the weeds as being important. They’re just like viruses are important. But our human connection too is so important to this. Do you have any thoughts on the result of the disease or the infection which I would call our lockdown – our, as you said, our incorrect approach is its own disease of mindset. What would you like people to know – as you know, as a career you stare into the eyes of these people that are going to have this transition period. Should we be afraid of death? Are we dying? Is this inhumane? Is there hope for us to move forward, or are we just looking into a dark world, as you know, that’s now out of our control?
Zach: If there’s crimes against humanity being exercised right now, I don’t believe that it’s in a military lab. I believe that it’s in those ICUs of dying patients alone. In what time in history have we decided that we need to en masse let our – let people die alone? Marines are taught to never leave a soldier on the battlefield. Marines will literally charge into machine gun fire, into rocket fire, to go grab that injured soldier so that they don’t die alone in enemy hands.
What level of fear have we induced in mankind that we are letting our revered elderly, and our young people, who are dying from these conditions, die alone? It is worse than rocket fire. It is worse than this. And we’ve generated that level of fear around a virus that looks to have a mortality similar to flu. What are we doing with this tyranny of fear? We are tearing apart the very fabric of what it means to be human. There’s an innate drive in us to stay connected, to stay in one another’s presence. To have fellowship with one another. It’s written into our constitution that you will not block public gatherings, you will not block the ability for us to get together and practice our spiritual faith, to practice our spiritual experience.
And if anything is a hallowed ground of spiritual environment, it is the birthplace of a child, and the birthplace of an elder person about to transition to the other side. There are two births that happen to humankind, and the first of course must be extraordinary if we could remember it all, how amazing would it have been. When you were in the womb of your mother, you can hear sounds muffled and you can hear the voice of your family members, you can hear the bark of a dog, you can hear the closing of a door – it’s muffled, but you can hear it.
You can see the light filtering through in the morning, through the skin of your mother’s belly, and through the wall of the womb. You can see these transitions of shadows moving by, you can see this beautiful world, and it’s all in red hues. It’s reds and oranges like an internal sunset happening around you, and then there’s peaceful darkness in the night, and that’s silent, and you’ve got your mother’s heartbeat right next to you, and you’ve got this extraordinary holy of holies, this protected space that you’re in.
Then suddenly, at the end of nine months, your entire human existence so far only knows this space – you have this catastrophic event where intense pressure is put on you, and you’re being covered in microbes as you go down this and your immune system has never seen this, your whole body has never seen this whole body of life that’s coding you, and you’re in this transit of dark tunnel and compression. Your heart rate is 180 and pushing 250 at moments because you are in this intense physiologic pressure state and you think you are dying.
I think that must pass the tissue levels possibilities – I think I’m dying because the light is gone and all I hear is crushing pressure and all I’m experiencing is – and then suddenly you’re in the light, all the pressure is gone. And you can’t believe the beauty around you. The face of your mother is mind-boggling. There’s a thousand colors in just the iris of her eye that’s looking in your face, and you’re staring at that for a second, and then there’s this like halo of light and color from this explosion of filaments out of your mother’s head that we call hair and it’s creating these rainbows of color, and all you can do is stare above your mother’s hair and look at that for a while. And then suddenly there’s this extraordinary, you know, scene as it unfolds, of greens and blues and your first sunset. You can’t believe how beautiful the world is.
And then we go through a forgetting of the magic that we are alive right now. And we forget that we are in an exquisite miracle of beauty every day. And we are dumbed down to an existence of drywall box with no microbiome diversity, into an off-gassing plastic car that off-gases cyanide and microtoxins into the environment, and we show up in an office building and carpeted cubicles that off-gas carcinogens all day long, and then we go to a grocery store and pick up a bunch of food that was treated with carcinogens before it was harvested. And then we go home and we sit around and blue light, you know, devices that reset our – and screw up our circadian rhythms, and we get depressed and we get disconnected.
And then we go through this extraordinary event, and suddenly there’s darkness in an ICU, and your eyesight is failing, and you’re starting to see things through the glass darkly again, and you see shadows, and you see this, and there’s an intense sense of pressure as your body starts to collapse in on itself. You can’t breathe, your heart rate’s failing, everything’s starting to go, and then you go into this dark tunnel, you can hear voices, perhaps, and you have this overwhelming sense of biology as being crushed into oblivion right now. And then you come out the other side, and it’s more beautiful and more bright than you could have ever imagined, and then suddenly that doctor resuscitates you and pulls you back into the body, and you tell that doctor: it’s so much prettier on the other side. I’m ready to go. I’m ready to rebirth. I just found out that I’m fully accepted on the other side. I’m a beautiful creature of light energy and I am excited to be there.
The danger that we have right now is not a virus. The danger that we have right now is that we have sterilized ourselves from death. We have created sterility around the death moment, which is ultimately our reason we’re here. We are here for a transformative experience where we find out we are not biologic, we are spiritual beings, we are light beings. We are spiritual beings trapped in a biologic shell for a moment, and we have learned to fear all of that, and for that we are missing the beauty of life. We are missing the beauty of the face of our lovers, of the face of our children. We are missing the beauty of one another, and we are letting each other die alone, out of fear of some genetic material that floats through the air and has since the beginning of time.
We have the wrong story going on, and it is not a conspiracy theory, it is not some government laboratory. It is the human emotion of fear, and we are afraid of our own death, which is our rebirth. We need to reorient ourselves to life. We need to put into line not just our medical system. We need to put into line our manufacturing and consumer goods industries. We need to put into line our energy and transportation industries – in line with biology. It has shown us how to produce energy cleanly. It has shown us how energy is produced at the cellular level.
We could do that. We could put all of it back in line and first and foremost we need to celebrate life and stop fearing death, and we will act much differently toward each other. We don’t need a revolution, we need an evolution. We need to evolve past our fear and we need to find love, and love is not a thing, it’s not something to be grabbed. It is an experience, and I believe it is – you know, through the wisdom of one of my deep friends, Patrick Gentempo, who gave me this extraordinary gift last year – love is not the fabric of everything, the fabric of everything is beauty and our reaction to seeing the beauty is love. If you feel unloved, if you feel like you don’t know what it means to love yourself, or your loved one who is dying right now, then stop trying to generate the human emotion of love, and start witnessing the beauty, and then you will experience the love.
We need to see the beauty of the viral, we need to see the beauty of the microbiome, we need to see the beauty of a human breath. We need to see the beauty of a planet that can breathe when given the opportunity. We need to see the beauty of human touch, a hug. When we go back to a normal, I hope it’s not the old normal. We need to find a new normal in these coming weeks. When they say you can go back to your normal activities, do not go back to your normal activities. Act much differently. See the beauty everywhere, engage with the beauty, most of all in your fellow humanity, and let’s love each other in the experience of each other’s beauty, to realize a much different future.
DB: Thank you, Zach. I think I want to leave it there. I think that is our message. Moving forward, we must not go back to normal, you’re right. We are far more spectacular than being normal. Thank you for taking the time, Zach, and take care.
Zach: Thank you.