Health & Fitness

This article was previously published June 7, 2020, and has been updated with new information.

In this interview, Dave Asprey, a Silicon Valley entrepreneur, founder and CEO of bulletproof.com, and author of "The Bulletproof Diet" and "Head Strong: The Bulletproof Plan to Activate Untapped Brain Energy to Work Smarter and Think Faster — in Just Two Weeks," discusses the role ketones play in COVID-19.

The initial motivation for this interview was the recent passing of Richard Veech, M.D., Ph.D.,  a Harvard trained physician who then went to Oxford to train with biochemist Sir Hans Krebs. Veech was a pioneer of the ketogenic diet and believed ketones have powerful antioxidant effects. This aligns with Asprey’s experience as well. As noted by Asprey:

"Your mitochondria's job is to take air and food and convert them into energy. If it does a complete job of that, you stay lean, you don't get inflammation and you have lots of energy.

[In] that complex process that Veech worked with Hans Krebs on — the Krebs cycle — parts of it are broken, you end up getting electrons that don't go where they're supposed to, and you end up with inflammation … these inflammatory cytokines throughout the body."

How to Raise Your Ketones

Veech developed and was fond of ketone esters, but they tend to be expensive. Two brands that make ketone esters are HVMN and KetoneAid. The alternative, beta-hydroxybutyrate salts can, according to Veech, cause mitochondrial harm, which is why he didn't recommend them. You can also raise your ketones naturally by going on a very low-carb, high-fat, moderate protein diet. Asprey mentions some additional strategies:

"The way that I pioneered and still prefer, is using certain types of MCT oil. The C8 MCT also will turn into beta-hydroxybutyrate … I do about a tablespoon or two spread out throughout the day …

If you have enough of any of these three forms of ketone-generating things in the body, what happens is those ketones come in, and then the cell says, 'Oh, wait, I could use a unit of oxygen and a unit of glucose or a unit of ketone.' When it uses the ketone, it gets more electricity out of it than it would from the sugar.

Your neurons love this. Your heart cells love this and it tends to wake you up. It tends to make you feel good. And if you've heard of bulletproof coffee, which I'm very well known for … it works because when you put that C8 MCT, the Brain Octane oil, in [the coffee], it gives you ketones so that when your brain is in the state of working, it works.

From the perspective of COVID-19, anything that raises your ketone levels is probably going to be good for you. One of the magic things that raises ketones is eight hours of fasting — that's called sleeping. Plus, the amount of caffeine [found] in two small cups of coffee is shown to double ketone production.

So, what I'd propose is, if you're feeling crappy, and you have COVID-19, you probably should have some coffee. And you probably should have whatever ketones you can possibly get from any of those forms, because it's anti-inflammatory, because it can help your cells with energy.

When you do that, it will likely turn down this inflammatory snowball effect that happens. Even … sepsis … can be prevented by restoring ATP levels, NAD levels and something called the acetyl coenzyme A. So, what we're trying to do is get in before the damage happens."

While Asprey takes 1 to 2 tablespoons of C8 MCT oil a day, I regularly take 12 to 14 tablespoons a day. At 100 calories per tablespoon, it's my primary source of calories. You will need to work your way up, though, as some will experience digestive upset when first starting. At 14 tablespoons a day, I can get my ketone levels to about 6 if I take additional ketone esters, which is difficult to reach even after a week of water fasting.

Insulin Resistance Makes You Susceptible to Cytokine Storm

According to recent NHANES data,¹ 87.8% of Americans are metabolically inflexible and, as such, are at an increased risk of developing COVID-19 due to impaired immune function. Diabetes, high blood pressure, obesity and elevated fasting triglycerides are all clinical symptoms of insulin resistance.

When you burn sugar for fuel, you need to break glucose down to two molecules of 3 carbon pyruvate. Pyruvate is then used by your mitochondria after it is converted to acetyl CoA. Insulin resistance, in turn, can impair the enzyme that converts a breakdown product of glucose into pyruvate so it can be shuttled and burned as energy in your mitochondria.

Ketones Inhibit Cytokine Storm

The problem with COVID-19 is that the cytokine storm inhibits the enzyme converting pyruvate to acetyl CoA, which radically limits your mitochondrial ATP production. An additional consequence of this is that it also reduces NADPH.

NADPH is the battery of your cell, the reservoir of electrons that actually cause endogenous antioxidants like glutathione, vitamin E and C to be recharged so they can continue to work and mitigate against the free radical damage resulting from all this oxidative stress. One way to compensate is to make sure you have enough NADPH, and ketones radically upregulate NADPH.

NADPH also turns off NLRP3 inflammasome that produces cytokines like TNF alpha, NF Kappa B, IL1B, IL6 and IL18 (interleukins) that are causing all the damage.

Ketones are also able to interrupt the feedback cascade of cytokine storms caused by ionizing radiation. It is thought that it does this by providing a source of NADPH that is not dependent on glucose or sensitive to pyruvate dehydrogenase kinase or loss of pyruvate dehydrogenase phosphatase. Ketones are also useful for ARDS, stroke, traumatic brain injuries, and radiation exposures such as flying, CT scans, X-rays and 3D cone beam CT scans.

While many of my readers are not metabolically inflexible and therefore at low risk for COVID-19, most are at some point exposed to ionizing radiation exposure. We discuss this at greater depth in the interview, so for more details, listen to it in its entirety, or read through the transcript.

As noted by Asprey, the pathways involved in nutritional ketosis are relatively well-understood, and they point to ketones being a valuable prophylactic and adjunct to COVID-19 treatment.

"I have a little pulse oximeter on my finger right now. It's a $30 item, and it tells you what your blood oxygen level is. [Mine's] at 98%. It will probably go to 99% in a minute. What's going on here is my lungs are working fine and my blood can carry oxygen.

When people get COVID-19, and they're not metabolically healthy, then [their oxygen level] could be at 90 and [they] feel a little bit weird. But they're actually metabolically really broken and their blood is starting to break down from [SARS-CoV-2 infection] and they're starting to get the inflammatory cytokine storm.

If they had ketones present, if they were able to measure [their oxygen level], if they could block a cytokine storm with any of the herbs that we know about — andrographis stands out really well, but so does oregano, bay leaf, rosemary, green tea — if they could block iron using vitamin C, they wouldn't be getting the lung damage and they might not even have to go to the hospital.

I just wish that the knowledge was out there, but when we have authorities saying, 'Well, there's nothing approved or studied for this,' what that means is 'don't do anything until we say so,' which is a terrible idea."

COVID-19 Patient Successfully Using Ketone Esters

Below, I've included a video of a COVID-19 patient who, when given ketone esters, experienced significant improvement in her breathing — within minutes.

While the ketone esters provide fairly astounding improvements in COVID-19, they are in no way treating the primary cause of the disease, which is an impaired immune system, typically due to insulin resistance. This is why it is key not to rely on ketone esters as a magic bullet but, rather, a powerful tool that can be used when needed.

The Importance of Magnesium

Aside from ketones, magnesium is also important. "You can't make enough of the chemicals that you need to make to fight off an inflammatory cytokine storm if you don't have high magnesium levels," Asprey notes. "And you won't be able to have enough ATP because you get calcium dysregulation if you don't have enough magnesium."

Asprey recommends taking 500 milligrams to 1,500 mg of magnesium each day if you're taking ketone esters, ketone salts or MCT oil. Like me, Asprey prefers magnesium threonate, as it has better absorption into the brain and doesn't cause loose stools even at high doses. But he also takes other forms of magnesium.

"I take mixed magnesium-ate. In other words, every form of magnesium that ends in 'ate' [such as] orotate, citrate, malate. So, I'm getting broad spectrum in the evening and the brain one [magnesium threonate] in the morning."

Aside from magnesium threonate, one of my favorite forms of magnesium is molecular hydrogen tablets. Once dissolved in water, each tablet liberates 80 mg of highly absorbable ionic elemental magnesium. On a side note, Tyler Lebaron, founder of the Molecular Hydrogen Institute, did a magnificent lecture on the therapeutic value of molecular hydrogen for COVID-19 and the molecular biology behind it, so it can be beneficial in more ways than one.

Metabolic Inflexibility Is the Primary Risk Factor

The primary risk factor for serious COVID-19 infection is metabolic inflexibility. Crazy enough, research² published in Metabolic Syndrome and Related Disorders in February 2019 concluded that 87.8% of the U.S. adults sampled were metabolically inflexible.

A mere 12.2% met the updated guidelines for metabolic health. Among the overweight, only 8% were metabolically healthy and among the obese, only 0.5% met the criteria for metabolic health. As noted by the authors:³

"Prevalence of metabolic health in American adults is alarmingly low, even in normal weight individuals. The large number of people not achieving optimal levels of risk factors, even in low-risk groups, has serious implications for public health."

We're certainly seeing the implications for public health in this pandemic. One of the most effective ways to regain your insulin sensitivity and metabolic flexibility is through time-restricted eating. The ability to burn fat and generate ketones is how you know that you're metabolically flexible. Alternatively, you could do cyclical fasting.

"When I was obese, I knew I would starve if I didn't eat six times a day, which is totally wrong. Now, I have two kids. They're 10 and 12. That week, they both said, along with my wife, Dr. Lana, 'We're going to fast for 24 hours.' So, we had dinner and we didn't eat anything until the next day's dinner.

And you know what, the kids handled it … They played and did their farm chores and it wasn't a big deal. I like to think, 'Great, I have metabolically flexible kids.' If you're not doing this kind of a practice, then OK — anything that quickly stresses the cells and then allows them to recover will help metabolic flexibility.

So, you could try cold showers … Getting quality sleep is another way … And if you're going to exercise, do very brief, very intense exercise … I'm talking 20 seconds of the craziest thing you can do twice in seven minutes.

Nothing else will outperform a 45-minute steady state cardio workout, according to research from the University of Colorado. All of those things help, but if you have some ketones present when you're doing them, I think you're going to benefit more from all of those."

Other Mechanisms of Ketones

Ketones are also a histone deacetylase (HDAC) inhibitor, which has profound metabolic implications. By inhibiting HDAC, ketones radically reduce inflammatory consequences like cytokine storms. Ketones also activate Nrf2 and FOXO3a, transcription pathways that decrease oxidative stress by increasing endogenous antioxidants.

So, overall, ketones push everything in the right direction — away from inflammation. It's much more difficult to get into trouble with inflammation when your ketone level is high. Asprey agrees, saying:

"It's true. Now we've got millions of people who are stuck at home, and a lot of them are saying, 'Oh, I can't afford this stuff, it's too much.' But at the end of the day, you are so much less hungry. And we're talking about skipping meals.

It is cost-effective to put 100 calories of MCTs into your diet every day, even if you're on a pretty restricted diet, because it does so much good stuff for you. And it replaces some other oils that you're going to pay for and it makes you not hungry.

So, I am advising people, the more soluble fiber and the more MCTs you can take right now, the better off you're going to be. And then, of course, avoid the industrial meats and the fried stuff and the bad oils. If you can do that … [COVID-19] illness will be very different than if you don't do that. And, of course, you have to exercise and all that."

Hyperbaric Oxygen

Another amazing tool discussed in this interview is hyperbaric oxygen. It’s a particularly valuable alternative to mechanical ventilation.

Mechanical ventilation can easily damage the lungs for the fact that it's pushing air into the lungs with force in a disease where the alveoli are compromised and filled with fluid from inflammatory cytokines due to insulin resistance. HBOT bypasses this problem by supplying 100% oxygen in a pressurized chamber, which allows your body to bypass this defect and absorb oxygen directly into your tissues.

Opelousas General Hospital in Louisiana, which has a hyperbaric center, has been deploying "off-label compassionate use" of HBOT as an alternative for patients that would otherwise have required ventilation.⁴ So far, 100% of patients treated with HBOT saw rapid improvements in their respiratory rates and dramatic decreases in CRP (an inflammatory marker) and D-dimer (a measure of blood coagulation), and none has required ventilation.

Reducing Comorbidity Factors Is Essential Pandemic Response

However, as important as it is to have effective treatments, it's even more important to address the underlying causes to prevent out-of-control infection in the first place.

"The whole idea of flattening the curve is such a cowardly, low-end goal," Asprey says. "The goal ought to be to lower the curve, because those of us who do math understand that if you flatten the curve, it's the same number of people who get sick [in the end]. You got sick later so we could have more doctors for you.

What I want is fewer people to get sick. [By reducing comorbidity factors] we'd take the load off the medical system, which is an important goal, but we'd also [reduce] the chance of dying, we'd lower the overall death rate, and you do that through prevention. That's been entirely missing from the $2 trillion national strategy, which is astounding to me.

When you look at what's really going on inside the body, there is systemic hypoxia. We have three different studies that show that hemoglobin is pulled apart and iron comes out, using three different methodologies, which is very fascinating. And then there's all the field reports of people saying, 'Why are my patients hypoxic, yet their lungs are still working?' …

Let's see. Heart damage, brain damage, neurological symptoms, loss of smell and taste. Any high-altitude mountaineer like me will tell you, you can't taste your food at high altitude. There's a reason for that. And they're also seeing those red spots on their feet, which are furthest from the heart and get the lowest amount of oxygen.

So, every symptom that has been documented from COVID-19 is hypoxic-related except for damage to the lungs, which is iron-related from all the free iron from … the damage to the hemoglobin. So, what do we end up with when you put all that stuff together?

You have a person who is hypoxic. And no matter what you do to their lungs, it doesn't matter because their blood doesn't carry oxygen well. So, how would you address that? Stick them in a hyperbaric chamber … Hyperbaric forces oxygen into the cells without hemoglobin being required.

When you do that, the cells that are struggling [get oxygenated] as the bone marrow works to make more red blood cells. By the way, we have data that COVID-19 makes bone marrow produce more blood cells. We know there are biological markers of that …

Given that these chambers … have other uses for things like traumatic brain injuries, metabolic problems and cancer, this ought to be something every hospital has. [Many] do have [hyperbaric chambers] yet it's usually illegal to use [HBOT for many of these conditions] …"

We Need a Return to Common Sense

As for the direction we're getting from our government leadership and mainstream media, Asprey is like me — frustrated with the lack of common sense and balance.

"You'll see these talking heads on TV saying, 'Well, I have a medical degree and I've spent 40 years studying how to use drugs to treat diseases, and there are no drugs that we have yet proven to treat this disease, therefore, you will sit there and eat pizza.'

I'm like, 'What is wrong with you?' There's this whole body of knowledge and you don't have to do everything I've talked about. You don't have to be able to spell HDAC inhibitor. What we can tell you is, use some MCT oil, get enough sleep, don't eat after dark, intermittently fast and maybe you'll just be harder to kill from any bad disease, and that's OK …

I'm particularly shocked that they're shutting down parks and [beaches]. It doesn't make any sense … The people who won't socially isolate won't socially isolate, but preventing children from having access to sunshine [and] walking in grass — it's mean, it's unnecessary and it's beyond the scope of what our government is legally allowed to do in the U.S.

So, we sometimes need to just say, 'All right, let's do what Sweden's head doctor did.' The people said, 'What should we do? We need guidance.' And he said, 'You're smart people. Use common sense.' And that was literally the guidance …

There are some heinous statements being made at the highest levels saying, 'Science says there's no evidence.' But there is evidence. There's lots of evidence. The fact that one of the seven forms of evidence is double-blinded clinical trials does not mean that [you ignore] when a large number of clinical people treating people notice that something works.

That is a great form of evidence. Another form of evidence is we understand these pathways and A leads to B, leads to C, therefore, C is likely. That is a form of evidence. It doesn't mean it's proof, but it's evidence.

For our leaders to say, 'Hold still, die and lose your businesses and your livelihood while we wait for our preferred form of evidence,' is fear-based decision making. It's dysfunctional … Doing nothing until we know everything, that doesn't work."

If there is a silver lining to this pandemic, it’s that it’s showcasing that healthy lifestyles provide essential immunity to these types of infections and disastrous health consequences. Hopefully, people will start to wake up and recognize there is something you can do that doesn't involve taking medications or vaccines — something that can strengthen your own innate immune system.

To learn more about Asprey's work, be sure to check out his blog, DaveAsprey.com, and listen to his Webby Award-winning podcast, Bulletproof Radio.

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In this interview, return guest Stephanie Seneff, Ph.D., a senior research scientist at MIT who has been at MIT for over five decades, discusses her latest paper, "Innate Immune Suppression by SARS-CoV-2 mRNA Vaccinations. The Role of G-quadruplexes, Exosomes and MicroRNAs," co-written with Dr. Peter McCullough, along with two other authors, Dr. Greg Nigh and Dr. Anthony Kyriakopoulos.

Previously, Nigh and Seneff co-wrote an entire paper detailing the differences between the spike protein and the COVID jab spike protein. In a non-peer-reviewed research paper just this week published on the pre-print service authorea, they and their other co-authors delve deeply into the mechanisms of the COVID shots, showing how they absolutely, in no way, shape or form, are safe or effective. The shots actually suppress your innate immune system.

"I think McCullough is fantastic and I'm so happy to have him collaborate with me," Seneff says. "I really hope we will be able to find a journal that is willing to publish it. We may have to seek some kind of alternative media to get it published.

It's really incredible the amount of censorship that's going on right now. I'm in a state of shock all the time. I just keep thinking it's not going to get any worse, and it's truly going to get better, and it just seems to keep on getting worse and worse.

I don't know where the end is. It's very discouraging ... Pharma has so much money behind [them] and they've got it all set up to make sure that nothing gets past them ...

We're hoping to put it up as a preprint, but ... remarkably, they can reject it at the level of preprint as well. We're working on that angle, but it's not easy. When you're writing something this radical, they really fight hard to keep it off the web."

On January 16, 2022, the pre-print service Authorea published this paper on its web site, assigning it a DOI, thus making it official.

Exceptionally Strong Safety Signals

As noted by Seneff, when you look at the various databases for adverse effects, you can see an exceptionally strong safety signal — and the COVID shot developers know that. "The numbers are out of sight," Seneff says, and this goes for all levels of side effects, from mild to catastrophic.

Seneff has been looking at the cancer data, for example, and on average, there are twice as many reports of cancer following the COVID shots compared to all other vaccines combined over the last 31 years.

"It's just amazing, because it's overall two times [higher]. Breast cancer, for example, is three times [higher] for these vaccines in one year, as they are for all the other vaccines for 31 years. It's a hugely strong signal," Seneff says.

"Lymphoma is also showing up much more frequently with these [COVID shots]. There's just an amazing signal there in VAERS [the U.S. Vaccine Adverse Events Reporting System]."

The fact that the signal is that strong is even more remarkable when you consider that most people don't think the COVID shot could be a variable in their cancer emergence, so they never report it. "It puzzles me that they're willing to do such damage to the health of the whole population of the world. I don't understand that degree of evilness," Seneff says.

Type-1 Interferon Disruption

The shots suppress your innate immune system by inhibiting type-1 interferon. One of the first studies to tip off Seneff and McCullough to this was an Indian study, in which human cells grown in a culture were exposed to the DNA nanoparticles that instruct them to make SARS-CoV-2 spike protein, much like the COVID shots do.¹

The cell strain is called HEK-293. These are cells that were taken from the kidneys of an aborted fetus in the 1980s and are frequently used in research. While taken from the kidneys, these cells have neuron-like properties. When programmed to make spike protein, these cells release that spike protein inside exosomes — lipid nanoparticles inside which the spike protein is packaged.

Exosomes act as a communication network for cells. When a cell is under stress, it releases exosomes containing some of the molecules that are stressing it. So, in the case of the COVID shots, the exosomes contain spike protein and microRNA. MicroRNAs are signaling molecules that are able to influence cell function. They cause the cell to change its behavior or metabolism. Typically, they do this by suppressing certain enzymes.

The Indian study found two specific microRNAs inside the exosomes released by these neuron-like cells: miR-148a and miR-590. The researchers then exposed microglia (immune cells in your brain) to these exosomes. So, as explained by Seneff, you've got neurons in your brain producing spike protein, or taking up spike protein that is in circulation, and reacting to it by releasing exosomes.

The exosomes are then picked up by microglia, the immune cells in your brain. When the immune cells receive those exosomes, they turn on an inflammatory response. This is primarily a response to those microRNAs, the miR-148a and miR-590. Of course, you also have the toxic spike protein there.

Combined, they cause inflammation in the brain, which damages neurons. This inflammation, in turn, can contribute to a number of degenerative brain disorders. The lipid particles in the COVID shot, which contain the mRNA, are similar to exosomes, but not identical. They're also very similar to low-density lipid (LDL) particles.

"I think the exosomes are probably quite a bit smaller. The vaccine particles are bigger. They're more like an LDL particle. The vaccine particles have cholesterol in their membrane, and they have lipoprotein. So, they're made to look like an LDL particle.

But then they throw in this cationic lipid, which is really, really toxic — a synthetic cationic lipid that makes it positively charged. Experimentally, they've found that this lipid, when the particle is taken up by the cell, is released into the cytoplasm, [where] that mRNA then makes spike protein.

[The COVID shots] are very cleverly designed, both in terms of protecting the RNA from getting broken down, and in terms of making the RNA be very efficient at making spike protein. It's very different from the mRNA that the virus makes, even though it codes for the same protein."

Seneff wrote an entire paper² detailing the differences between the viral spike protein and the COVID jab spike protein, together with Greg Nigh, which was published in the International Journal of Vaccine Theory, Practice and Research in May 2021. It basically serves as a primer for understanding what we discuss here.

Getting back to the Indian paper cited above, they found that the microglia ended up producing inflammation in the brain, and the two microRNAs were central in this process. The miR-148a and miR-590 were put into those exosomes with the spike protein, and these two microRNAs are able to significantly disrupt the type-1 interferon response in any cell, including immune cells.

Type-1 interferon also keeps latent viruses like herpes and varicella (which causes shingles) viruses in check, so if your interferon pathway is suppressed, these latent viruses can also start to emerge. The VAERS database reveals many who have been jabbed do report these kinds of infections. Suppressed interferon also raises your risk of cancer and cardiovascular disease.

Type-1 Interferon Response Is Crucial in Viral Infections

As explained by Seneff, the type-1 interferon response is absolutely crucial as the first-stage response to a viral infection. When a cell is invaded by a virus, it releases type-1 interferon alpha and type-1 interferon beta. They act as signaling molecules that tell the cell that it's been infected.

That, in turn, launches the immune response and gets it going early in the viral infection. It's been shown that people who end up with severe SARS-CoV-2 infection have a compromised type-1 interferon response. As noted by Seneff:

"It's ironic that the vaccines are being given to protect you from COVID, yet, they produce a situation where your immune cells are ill-equipped to fight SARS-CoV-2 if it gets into the cell. The trick is, the vaccine produces a tremendous antibody response, and that's typical of severe disease.

So, the [COVID shot] fools your immune system into thinking that you've had a severe case of COVID. It's really interesting that way, because it's gotten past the mucosal barrier of the lungs, it's gotten past the vascular barrier of the blood, into the muscle. Also, it's been disguised.

The RNA doesn't look like a virus RNA, it looks like a human RNA molecule. Part of the modifications [made to the mRNA in the jab] was to make it very sturdy, so it can't be broken down. It's also very good at making [spike] protein fast, which also has a problem because it leads to a lot of errors, which is another issue ...

The immune cells take up the nanoparticles and carry them through the lymph system into the spleen. Multiple studies have shown that it ends up in the spleen ... the ovaries, the liver, the bone marrow ... The spleen, of course, is very important for producing antibodies."

Importantly, the antibody response you get from the COVID shot is exponentially higher than what you get from natural infection, and research has shown that the level of antibody response rises with disease severity. So, the shot basically mimics severe infection. In mild infection, you may not produce any antibodies at all, because the innate immune cells are strong enough to fight off the infection without them.

It's when your innate immune system is weak that you get into trouble, and part of that weakness is a suppressed type-1 interferon response. If your type-1 interferon response is deficient, your immune cells are not very capable of stopping the spread of the virus in your body.

According to Seneff, the reason type-1 interferon supplementation has not been recommended thus far is because you have to time it perfectly in order for the immune cascade to function properly. Type-1 interferon plays a definitive role only at the very earliest stage of the infection. Once you've entered a moderate or severe infection stage, it's too late to use it.

COVID Shots Confuse Your Immune System

As noted by Seneff, the COVID shots are so unnatural that your immune system doesn't quite know what to do anymore.

"My impression is that the immune cells don't know what the hell's going on. There's this toxic protein being produced in massive amounts by the immune cells. That's extremely unusual. There's no sign of any kind of viral infection because these RNAs look like human RNAs.

It's as if the human immune cells suddenly decided to make a really toxic protein, and make lots of it — which is exactly what they're doing — and the immune system is completely baffled by this. The immune cells have no clue what to do with it.

Of course, these immune cells that are overloaded with all this spike protein, they say, 'I've got to get rid of this stuff,' so they ship it out as these exosomes. The microRNAs [in the exosomes] think that the recipient cells are going to need those particular signaling molecules to help it do whatever it needs to do to cope with this toxic load.

So, you're spreading the spike protein around to the rest of the body, just to dissipate the toxicity you're coping with in the spleen, I think. Those exosomes are also very good for training antibodies. There was a nice paper that showed the exosomes being released [have] spike protein in their membrane, the exterior of the exosome.

It's quite cool that the spike protein is displayed there, because this allows the immune cells — the B-cells and the T-cells that need to get up close and personal to it — to figure out how to shape their antibodies. The antibodies get shaped to match the toxic protein that's exposed on the surface of the exosomes.

After something like 14 days of the second [jab], the exosomes induced an antibody response. [The researchers] felt the exosomes played a critical role in this extreme antibody response that was produced by the B-cells and the T-cells, the adaptive immune system.

But I think the way the vaccine works is that there's no game that you can choose other than to make antibodies. It's the only way you can fight this. It's a toxic protein that's being produced and released by these immune cells, and the only thing you can do to stop it is to make antibodies.

They try to make lots and lots of antibodies that will glue onto those toxic spike proteins and block them from being able to get in through the ACE2 receptor. That's the job of the antibodies. They do a good job of it, initially ... It's true that they do protect you from disease. Unfortunately, the antibody levels drop pretty dramatically, pretty quickly."

There are also antibodies that enhance disease rather than fight it, and the level of these antibodies declines at a slower pace than the protective antibodies. So, after a number of months you end up with a NEGATIVE immune response. In other words, you're now more prone to infection than ever before. As explained by Seneff:

"There's a crossover point at which the enhancing antibodies can be stronger than the protective antibodies, and that's when you can get this antibody dependent enhancement (ADE) that people have seen in the past with [other] coronavirus vaccines. We're still trying to see if that's the case with [the COVID jabs]. There is some evidence here and there, but it's not [conclusive yet]."

The Importance of Cytotoxic T-Cells

After the India study tipped off Seneff and McCullough to the interferon problem, they came across a Chinese study³ that tracked the effect of the COVID jab on the immune system over time. Here, they discovered that the infection caused an increase in CD8+ T-cells, important cytotoxic T-cells that actually remove infected cells.

As noted by Seneff, the CD8+ cells are an important part of the defense against SARS-CoV-2. Importantly, CD8+ T-cells were enhanced in response to natural infection, but not in response to the COVID shot. They too found type-1 interferon suppression post-jab. So, in the aftermath of the jab, not only is your first-line response depressed — the type-1 interferon response — but you're also missing the part of the immune response that cleans away infected cells.

The microRNA That Influences Myocarditis Risk

A third microRNA (mRNA) created by natural SARS-CoV-2 infection is miR-155, and it plays an important role in heart health. Early on in the pandemic, there were reports of COVID-19 causing heart problems.

Seneff suspects the miR-155-containing exosomes may also be present post-jab, and may play a role in the heart damage that's being reported. Specifically, miR-155 is associated with myocarditis. As mentioned earlier, microRNA suppresses certain proteins that then cause a complicated cascade response. When a particular protein that is a critical player gets suppressed by a microRNA, then a whole different cascade takes place.

Why Autoimmune Problems May Arise Post-Jab

The antibodies produced by the jab also have several short peptide sequences in them that have previously been found in several human cells that are related to autoimmune disease. Seneff explains:

"Kanduc has written a lot about this. She's an expert on these antibodies ... The [SARS-CoV-2] spike protein is very overlapped with human protein. That means when you build a really strong antibody response to the spike protein, those antibodies can get confused and they can attack a human protein that has a similar sequence.

That's a classic form of autoimmune disease. It's called molecular mimicry. There were many different proteins that matched. It was quite surprising ... It seems to be very well designed to induce autoimmune disease, if you produce antibodies to those sequences in the spike protein."

Neurological Problems in Women

The shots are also tightly associated with neurological problems such as uncontrollable tremors and shaking. Curiously, this side effect disproportionally affects women. The mechanism here again involves the exosomes. Seneff explains:

"I feel there's a very strong signal for the idea, which I'm pushing, that you have those immune cells in the spleen making spike protein and releasing it in exosomes. It's been shown in studies on Parkinson's disease that those exosomes travel along nerve fibers.

They'll go along the splanchnic nerve, they'll hook up with the vagus nerve, they'll go up to the brain and get into all these different nerves in the brain. When you look at the VAERS database, you see tremendous signals for all kinds of things that suggest different nerves are being inflamed.

For example, there are 12,000 cases of tinnitus associated with the COVID-19 vaccine, and that's only what's reported. Tinnitus is a strong signal. Tinnitus is going to be inflammation of the auditory nerve. This means you have to go all the way from the spleen, up the vagus nerve, and then connect to the auditory nerve to cause tinnitus.

Then you have Bell's palsy, which is inflammation of the facial nerve. You have migraine headache. There are over 8,000 cases of migraine headache, which is linked to an inflammation of the trigeminal nerve.

It probably also goes, I suspect, along the nerve fibers of the spinal column, which may be causing some of these cases where they're finding paralysis. People have a lot of mobility issues connected with these vaccines.

I see the possibility of causing a lot of disturbances to the myelin sheath, and we talk about that in the paper. It involves, again, complex signaling. You can get to the myelin sheath problem through the type-1 interferon disruption.

That, again, involves something called interferon response factor 9 IRF9. This protein triggers the production of sulfatide in the liver, and this protein gets suppressed by these microRNAs that I mentioned earlier."

Sulfatide, an important lipid carrier, is the only sulfonated lipid in the human body. Your liver makes most of the sulfatide, which is then carried by your platelets (blood cells) to other areas in your body. The myelin sheath contains high amounts of sulfatide. It's part of what protects the myelin sheath. In demyelinating diseases, that sulfatide erodes, ultimately allowing the myelin to be attacked.⁴

Seneff believes the COVID jab results in significant myelin damage, thanks to these inflammatory exosomes. This damage does not necessarily show up right away, although some jab recipients experience acutely devastating effects. It could take 10 years or more before a demyelinating disease sets in.

"I think we're going to see people getting these neurodegenerative diseases earlier and earlier in life than they used to," Seneff says, "and I think anybody who already has any of these diseases is going to have accelerated progression."

We May Soon See an Explosion of Parkinson's Cases

Disturbingly, loss of smell and dysphagia, the inability to swallow, are both signs of Parkinson's disease, and both of these conditions are being reported post-jab by the thousands. So, in years to come, we could be looking at an explosion of Parkinson's.

"Parkinson's studies have shown that you can get pathogens in the gut that produce a prion-like protein, which is what the spike protein is. The immune cells then take it up and take it to the spleen. This, of course, causes stress.

A stressed immune cell in the spleen upregulates and produces more alpha-synuclein. Alpha-synuclein is a molecule that fights infection, and that's the molecule that misfolds in association with Parkinson's disease.

I'm fascinated with all of these molecules that are prion-like. There's the prion protein itself, which is associated with CJD, Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease, but then there's the alpha-synuclein and amyloid beta, there's TDP-43, which is associated with ALS.

All of those diseases are overrepresented in the VAERS database for the COVID shots, compared to all the other vaccines combined over 31 years. It's just completely out of line.

There are 58 cases of Alzheimer's in association with the COVID vaccines, and 13 in association with all the other vaccines over 31 years. That's several times more — 58 versus 13.

CJD is also much more common. It's almost seven times as common in the COVID vaccine cases. CJD is a terrible disease. You get very crippled and die after a few years. That's the classic prion protein [disease]. It's extremely rare. Only 1 in 1 million gets CJD.

There was a person who contacted me from France whose wife got CJD just a few weeks after the second vaccine. He was absolutely convinced the vaccine caused it. There are actually 27 cases [of CJD] reported in VAERS for the COVID-19 vaccines, against only four cases over the entire history of all other vaccines combined."

Health Problems We Can Expect to See More Of

In time, Seneff predicts we'll see a dramatic increase in infections and cancers of all types, autoimmune diseases, neurodegenerative diseases and reproductive issues. As mentioned, research has demonstrated that the spike protein accumulates in the spleen and women's ovaries.

Without doubt, inflammation in the ovaries is not a good thing. Men also report swollen testes, and that could be indicative of inflammation as well. Preliminary data show women who get the jab within the first 20 weeks of pregnancy have a miscarriage rate of 82% to 91%.⁵ There are also VAERS reports describing fetal damage. Of course, it could also impair future fertility.

As described earlier, some antibodies produced by the jab can react to human proteins. One protein that is similar to the spike protein that the antibodies attack is syncytin, which is essential for the fertilization of the egg. The concern is that the antibodies might attack and destroy syncytin, thereby disrupting and preventing implantation in the placenta.

Omicron — A Blessing in Disguise?

The jabs also perpetuate COVID, with ever-new variants of the virus.

"In the first paper that Greg and I wrote, we predicted the vaccines would cause an increased emergence of variants of spike protein, altered versions of the virus, under the pressure of the vaccine," Seneff says.

"Indeed, it looks to me like that's what's happening. But I'm really hopeful with Omicron, because Omicron looks like it's a milder virus, but incredibly infectious. It'll flash through the population and give everybody, essentially, a vaccine. It's kind of like a natural vaccine, I think.

[Research] showed that ... having had Omicron, you were protected, to some extent, from Delta. Delta's disappearing anyway, because Omicron is chasing it out. It's really great. I think Omicron is God's gift from heaven."

That blessing may be canceled out in those who have received multiple COVID jabs, however. Each dose erodes your immune response, such that it becomes increasingly compromised with each jab. Again, this has to do with the suppression of type-1 interferon, discussed earlier.

What Catalyzes Damage in Athletes?

More than 400 cases of serious heart problems and death have also been reported among professional athletes,⁶ who are some of the healthiest people on the planet. What mechanism can account for this phenomenon? How is it that the COVID jabs can cause enough damage to take out young people with optimized biology?

Seneff suspects that being fit might cause you to have more ACE2 receptors in the heart, and the S1 portion of the SARS-CoV-2 spike protein binds to the ACE2 receptor. She believes the spike protein is being delivered to the heart via exosomes, by way of the vagus nerve, and, again, the miR-155 exosome is associated with heart problems.⁷

Additionally, when the S1 spike protein binds to the ACE2 receptor,⁸ it disables the receptor. When you disable ACE2, you get an increase in ACE, which causes high blood pressure and elevates angiotensin 2. When angiotensin 2 is overexpressed, you can get intense inflammation in the heart. If you're engaging in intense exertion and your heart is inflamed, you can trigger cardiac arrest, which is what we see in many of these athlete cases. They're collapsing on the field.

G-Quadruplexes

Another focus of Seneff's and McCullough's paper is something called G4 or G-quadruplexes.

"G-quadruplexes are really fascinating, and I don't have a handle on them at all," Seneff says. "It's hard biology, even harder than a lot of the other stuff that I've been reading ...

G4s are basically an arrangement of [guanines]. Guanines are one of the four nucleotides that make up DNA or RNA. Guanine is the G in the G4. What happens is that a sequence of nucleotides on a DNA or an RNA string can fold in on itself and form G-quadruplexes. It's four guanines, at different places on the protein, winding back around and sticking together.

There's a metal in the middle — often potassium or calcium — that helps to stabilize these G4s. The interesting thing about them is that they make the water around them structured. They make gelled water [aka exclusion zone (EZ) water] ...

Those G4s can form in the DNA, and that actually keeps it from becoming active. [The DNA] doesn't get converted into RNA, and it doesn't make protein if it has those G4s. Probably, the EZ water doesn't allow anything to get close. Think of it as being stuck in a gel.

There are a lot of G4s in the promoter regions of these DNA sequences, and there are lots of proteins that have these G4s in their promoter region. Interestingly, there are certain proteins that can unravel them. There are proteins that can bind to them and cause the G4 to undo, and that activates or allows the protein to be expressed.

It's a regulatory element that controls which proteins get to be expressed from the DNA. Many of the proteins that have these G4s in their promoter are cancer oncogenes. As long as they stay gelled, they're inactive, but if they become ungelled, they become active.

It turns out that prion proteins ... [are] made from RNA, and the RNA has these G4s. The protein can bind to the G4s in the RNA and both of them react. The theory is that the protein becomes prion-like. These prion proteins have two ways to be, one is safe and one is not safe, and the G4s increase the risk for prion protein misfolding.

The presence of those G4s, and the meeting with those G4s, increases the risk of misfolding in the prion-like configuration.⁹ The interesting thing about that is that spike protein is a prion-like protein. The RNA they built for the [COVID jab], they did something called codon optimization, which involved putting a lot more guanines into the RNA than [found] in the original [virus]. They enhanced the guanine.

Enhancing the guanine means increasing the number of G4s, which means increasing the risk of the spike protein misfolding into a prion like protein. I think that the G4s increase the risk, the danger of spike protein [acting] as a prion-like protein.

But we don't really know what the consequence of having all these G4 RNAs in the cytoplasm will be. We have massive numbers of these RNAs sitting there with their G4s. What is that going to do to the rest of the G4 regulatory process? We do not know. Nobody knows. Nobody has a clue."

Summary

To summarize the central point of Seneff's latest paper, the COVID jab causes alpha interferon suppression, which weakens your immune system. Indeed, regulators in the European Union are now warning that repeat COVID shots can weaken overall immunity.¹⁰

The primary mechanism is the impairment of alpha interferon response, which is essential for the proper activation of your innate immune system, your cellular immunity, mostly your T-cells and killer cells. When functioning properly, the cell launches the type-1 interferon response as soon as it's infected with a virus.

It triggers the immune cells to come in, kill the virus and remove the debris. This activates the humoral component of your immune system, the antibody production, which takes longer. (That's why they say you are not protected until 14 days after the injection.)

How is type-1 interferon suppressed by the jab? It's suppressed because type-1 interferon responds to viral RNA, and viral RNA is not present in the COVID shot. The RNA is modified to look like human RNA molecule, so the interferon pathway is not triggered. Worse, the interferon pathway is actively suppressed by the large number of spike proteins produced from the mRNA in the shot, and by the microRNAs in the exosomes released by the stressed immune cells.

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This article was previously published March 11, 2020, and has been updated with new information.

Statins are HMG-CoA reductase inhibitors; that is, they block the enzyme in your liver responsible for making cholesterol (HMG-CoA reductase). According to Drugs.com, more than 35 million Americans are on a statin drug, making it one of the most commonly prescribed medicines in the U.S.¹

National Health and Nutrition Examination Survey data suggest 47.6% of seniors over the age of 75 are on a statin drug.² Lipitor — which is just one of several brand name statin drugs — is one of the most profitable drugs in the history of medicine.^3,4

Collectively, statins have earned over $1 trillion since they were introduced.⁵ This, despite their being off patent. There is simply no doubt that selling them is big business with major financial incentives to distort the truth to continue their sales.

Statin recommendations have become fairly complex, as they're recommended for various age groups under different circumstances, and whether they're used as primary prevention of cardiovascular disease (CVD), or secondary prevention. Guidelines also vary slightly depending on the organization providing the recommendation and the country you're in.⁶

In the U.S., the two guidelines available are from the U.S. Preventive Services Task Force (USPSTF),⁷ and the American College of Cardiology and American Heart Association.^8,9 The USPSTF guidelines recommend using a statin for the primary prevention of CVD when a patient:¹⁰

• Is between the age of 40 to 75
• Has one or more CVD risk factors (dyslipidemia, diabetes, hypertension or smoking)
• Has a calculated 10-year risk of a cardiovascular event of 10% or greater

In secondary prevention of CVD, statins are "a mainstay," according to the Journal of the American College of Cardiology.¹¹ Secondary prevention means the drug is used to prevent a recurrence of a heart attack or stroke in patients who have already had one.

Regulators' Role Questioned

A February 2020 analysis¹² in BMJ Evidence-Based Medicine (paywall) brings up the fact that while the use of statins in primary prevention of CVD "has been controversial" and there's ongoing debate as to "whether the benefits outweigh the harms," drug regulators around the world — which have approved statins for the prevention of CVD — have stayed out of the debate. Should they? The analysis goes on to note:

"Our aim was to navigate the decision-making processes of European drug regulators and ultimately request the data upon which statins were approved. Our findings revealed a system of fragmented regulation in which many countries licensed statins but did not analyze the data themselves.

There is no easily accessible archive containing information about the licensing approval of statins or a central location for holding the trial data. This is an unsustainable model and serves neither the general public, nor researchers."

Have We Been Misled by the Evidence?

In her 2018 peer-reviewed narrative review,¹³ "Statin Wars: Have We Been Misled About the Evidence?" published in the British Journal of Sports Medicine, Maryanne Demasi, Ph.D., a former medical science major turned investigative health reporter, delves into some of these ongoing controversies.

"A bitter dispute has erupted among doctors over suggestions that statins should be prescribed to millions of healthy people at low risk of heart disease. There are concerns that the benefits have been exaggerated and the risks have been underplayed.

Also, the raw data on the efficacy and safety of statins are being kept secret and have not been subjected to scrutiny by other scientists. This lack of transparency has led to an erosion of public confidence.

Doctors and patients are being misled about the true benefits and harms of statins, and it is now a matter of urgency that the raw data from the clinical trials are released," Demasi writes.¹⁴

While Demasi's paper is behind a paywall, she reviews her arguments in the featured video above. Among them is the fact that the "statin empire" is built on prescribing these drugs to people who really don't need them and are likely to suffer side effects without getting any benefits.

For example, some have recommended statins should be given to everyone over the age of 50, regardless of their cholesterol level. Others have suggested screening and dosing young children.

Even more outrageous suggestions over the past few years include statin "'condiments' in burger outlets to counter the negative effects of a fast food meal,'" and adding statins to the municipal water supply.

Simple Tricks, Big Payoffs

Medical professionals are now largely divided into two camps, one saying statins are lifesaving and safe enough for everyone, and the other saying they're largely unnecessary and harmful to boot. How did such a divide arise, when all have access to the same research and data?

Demasi suggests that in order to understand how health professionals can be so divided on this issue, you have to follow the money. The cost of developing and getting market approval for a new drug exceeds $2.5 billion. "A more effective way to fast-track company profits is to broaden the use of an existing drug," Demasi says, and this is precisely what happened with statins.

By simply revising the definition of "high cholesterol," which was done in 2000 and again in 2004, millions of people became eligible for statin treatment, without any evidence whatsoever that it would actually benefit them.

As it turns out, eight of the nine members on the U.S. National Cholesterol Education Program panel responsible for these revisions had "direct ties to statin manufacturers," Demasi says, and that public revelation sowed the first seed of suspicion in many people's minds.

Skepticism ratcheted up even more when, in 2013, the American College of Cardiology and AHA revised their statin guideline to include a CVD risk calculation rather than a single cholesterol number. U.S. patients with a 7.5% risk of developing CVD in the next 10 years were now put on a statin. (In the U.K., the percentage used was a more reasonable 20%.)

This resulted in another 12.8 million Americans being put on statin treatment even though they didn't have any real risk factors for CVD. Worse, a majority of these were older people without heart disease — the very population that stand to gain the least from these medications.

What's worse, 4 of 5 calculators were eventually found to overestimate the risk of CVD, some by as much as 115%, which means the rate of overprescription was even greater than previously suspected.

Industry Bias

While simple revisions of the definitions of high cholesterol and CVD risk massively augmented the statin market, industry-funded studies have further fueled the overprescription trend. As noted by Demasi, when U.S. President Ronald Reagan cut funding to the National Institutes of Health, private industry moved in to sponsor their own clinical trials.

The vast majority of statin trials are funded by the manufacturers, and research has repeatedly found that funding plays a major role in research outcomes. It's not surprising then that most statin studies overestimate drug benefits and underestimate risks.

Demasi quotes Dr. Peter Gøtzsche, a Danish physician-researcher who in 1993 co-founded the Cochrane Collaboration and later launched the Nordic Cochrane Centre:

"When drug industry sponsored trials cannot be examined and questioned by independent researchers, science ceases to exist and it becomes nothing more than marketing."

"The very nature of science is its contestability," Demasi notes. "We need to be able to challenge and rechallenge scientific results to ensure they're reproducible and legitimate." However, there's been a "cloud of secrecy" around clinical statin trials, Demasi says, as the raw data on side effects have never been released to the public, nor other scientists.

The data are being held by the Cholesterol Treatment Trialists (CTT) Collaboration at CTSU Oxford, headed by Rory Collins, which periodically publishes meta-analyses of the otherwise inaccessible data. While the CTT claims to be an independent organization, it has received more than £260 million from statin makers.

Inevitably, its conclusions end up promoting wider use of statins, and no independent review is possible to contest or confirm the CTT Collaboration's conclusions.

Tricks Used to Minimize Harms in Clinical Trials

As explained by Demasi, there are many ways in which researchers can influence the outcome of a drug trial. One is by designing the study in such a way that it minimizes the chances of finding harm. The example she gives in her lecture is the Heart Protection Study.

Before the trial got started, all participants were given a statin drug for six weeks. By the end of that run-in period, 36% of the participants had dropped out due to side effects or lack of compliance. Once they had this "freshly culled" population, where those suffering side effects had already been eliminated, that's when the trial actually started.

Now, patients were divided into statin and placebo groups. But since everyone had already taken a statin before the trial began, the side effects found in the statin and placebo groups by the end of the trial were relatively similar.

In short, this strategy grossly underestimates the percentage of the population that will experience side effects, and this "may explain why the rate of side effects in statin trials is wildly different from the rate of side effects seen in real-world observations," Demasi says.

Deception Through Statistics

Public opinion can also be influenced by exaggerating statistics. A common statistic used to promote statins is that they lower your risk of heart attack by about 36%.¹⁵ This statistic is derived from a 2008 study¹⁶ in the European Heart Journal. One of the authors on this study is Rory Collins, who heads up the CTT Collaboration.

Table 4 in this study shows the rate of heart attack in the placebo group was 3.1% while the statin group's rate was 2% — a 36% reduction in relative risk. However, the absolute risk reduction — the actual difference between the two groups, i.e., 3.1% minus 2% — is only 1.1%, which really isn't very impressive.

In other words, in the real world, if you take a statin, your chance of a heart attack is only 1.1% lower than if you're not taking it. At the end of the day, what really matters is what your risk of death is the absolute risk. The study, however, only stresses the relative risk (36%), not the absolute risk (1.1%).

As noted in the review,¹⁷ "How Statistical Deception Created the Appearance That Statins Are Safe and Effective in Primary and Secondary Prevention of Cardiovascular Disease," it's very easy to confuse and mislead people with relative risks. You can learn more about absolute and relative risk in my 2015 interview with David Diamond, Ph.D., who co-wrote that paper.

Silencing Dissenters and Fear-Based PR

Yet another strategy used to mislead people is to create the illusion of "consensus" by silencing dissenters, discrediting critics and/or censoring differing views.

In her lecture, Demasi quotes Collins of the CTT Collaboration saying that "those who questioned statin side effects were 'far worse' and had probably 'killed more people' than 'the paper on the MMR vaccine'" … "Accusing you of murdering people is an effective way [to] discredit you," she says.

Demasi also highlights the case of a French cardiologist who questioned the value of statins in his book. It received widespread attention in the French press, until critics started saying the book and resulting press coverage posed a danger to public health.

One report blamed the book for causing a 50% increase in statin discontinuation, which was predicted would lead to the death of 10,000 people. On this particular occasion, however, researchers analyzed the number of actual deaths based on national statistics, and found the actual death toll decreased in the year following the release of the book.

The authors, Demasi says, noted that it was "'not evidence-based to claim that statin discontinuation increases mortality,' and that in the future, scientists should assess 'real effects of statin discontinuation rather than making dubious extrapolations and calculations.'"

Trillion-Dollar Business Based on Flimsy Evidence

Statins, originally introduced three decades ago as secondary prevention for those with established CVD and patients with congenital and familial hyperlipidemias, have now vastly expanded thanks to the strategies summarized above.

Tens if not hundreds of millions of people are now on these drugs, without any scientific evidence to show they will actually benefit from them. As noted in the EBM analysis, "Statins for Primary Prevention: What Is the Regulator's Role?":¹⁸

"The central clinical controversy has been a fierce debate over whether their benefits in primary prevention outweigh their harms … The largest known statin usage survey conducted in the USA found that 75% of new statin users discontinued their therapy by the end of the first year, with 62% of them saying it was because of the side effects.

Regardless of what level of prevention statin prescription is aimed at, the proposed widening of the population to over 75s de facto includes people with multiple pathologies, whether symptomatic or not, and bypasses the distinction between primary and secondary prevention …

The CTT Collaboration estimates the frequency of myopathy is quite rare, at five cases per 10,000 statin users over five years. But others have contended that the CTT Collaboration's work 'simply does not match clinical experience' … [Muscle-related adverse events] reportedly occur with a frequency of … as many as 20% of patients in clinical practice."

Regulators Have a Duty to Create Transparency

Considering the discrepancy in reported side effects between statin trials, clinical practice and statin usage surveys, what responsibility do regulators have?

According to "Statins for Primary Prevention: What Is the Regulator's Role?"¹⁹ regulators have a responsibility to "engage and publicly articulate their position on the controversy and make the evidence base underlying those judgments available to third parties for independent scrutiny," none of which has been done to date. The paper adds:

"Regulators holding clinical trial data, particularly for public health drugs, should make these data available in searchable format with curated and dedicated web-based resource. If national regulators are not resourced for this, pooling or centralizing resources may be necessary.

The isolation of regulators from the realities of prescribing medications based on incomplete or distorted information is not enshrined in law but is a product of a subculture in which commercial confidentiality is more important than people. This also needs to change."

Do Your Homework Before Taking a Statin

There's a lot of evidence to suggest drug company-sponsored statin research and its PR cannot be trusted, and that few of the millions of people currently taking these drugs actually benefit from them.

Some of the research questioning the veracity of oft-cited statin trials is reviewed in "Statins' Flawed Studies and Flawed Advertising" and "Statins Shown to Extend Life by Mere Days."

To learn more about the potential harms of statins, see "Statins Double Diabetes Rates," "Statins Trigger Brain Changes With Devastating Effects," and "5 Great Reasons You Should Not Take Statins."

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