The Irrationality of Managing COVID-19
Publisher, Dr. Jonathan Collin, and their grandkids
You wouldn’t think so, but pandemic movies have been a hot item during the last several months. Imagine lying sick in bed with the SARS-CoV-2 virus experiencing all the “delights” of a virus unleashing a cytokine storm in your body while watching folks experiencing the plague on your home big screen. Movie critic Anthony Lane did just that viewing Contagion (“Our Fever for Plague Movies, NewYorker.com, May 15, 2020). The celebrity A-List taking part in the 2011 movie eerily mirrored much of what we have gone through this Spring; however, the flick portrayed a much more desperate scenario with food supplies disappearing entirely overnight, military personnel blocking interstate travel, folks with guns doing home invasions, and infected individuals decompensating more like Ebola victims than corona ones. (Poor Gwyneth Paltrow depicts “Patient Zero” after noshing on an infected pig in the Chinese countryside; the pigs were noshing on bat droppings.)
For those who like this sort of thing, Emma Thompson gets the rare honor of being responsible for the greatest decimation of humankind in the 2007 I Am Legend; her experimental cancer cure based on a genetically-engineered measles vaccine goes tragically awry decimating 3.5 billion, unleashing the ultimate population of zombies. (How’s that for a plug for the so-called novel coronavirus vaccines we are being promised to be made available in the months ahead? All in?) Lane apparently survived his infection without complications—perhaps we should add watching sci-fi disease films to the treatment protocol.
It is a well-accepted tenet of economics that the wealthy are able to make hay out of any situation, good or bad, while the poor only find themselves getting even more screwed. Before the pandemic resulted in lockdown, savvy investors were shorting stocks and making fortunes. A month into the nationwide quarantine, these same day-traders were purchasing “volatility” options—not whether the stock would go up or down, but just that the stocks would wildly gyrate up and down on a week-to-week basis. Of course, the folks who have always enjoyed big tax advantages on their capital gains, hedge funds, are deeply involved now in volatility options. These individuals are actually counting on COVID-19 craziness continuing big-time in the weeks and months (and years) ahead. Why not? Aren’t these captains of Wall Street entitled to make millions while the middle-class suffers and the lower-class completely goes insolvent and starves? Of course, let me not just blame rich traders, when the California Public Employees Retirement System is also betting on volatility (Banerji, G. Investors Bet on Volatility. WSJ. June 13-14, 2020). If you have a few bucks to make a very risky investment, you can place a bet (make an investment) on ProShares Ultra VIX Short-Term Futures ETF, traded as UVXY. Realize that you’ll be betting that COVID-19 management continues to be irrational.
From my perspective, the Alice in Wonderland aspects of public health policy remains the notion that the way to control this ongoing pandemic is social isolation so that the population as a whole is not exposed to the virus. How is that possible? SARS-CoV-2 is not going away. If we are not exposed today, we will be exposed tomorrow; if not tomorrow, the day after. It is eventually going to happen. Clearly it is not going away. The big lotto prize is that we invent a vaccine, one that is likely to be genetically engineered, and that immunization will make us immune. Well, if you buy that lotteries are winnable, then you will agree to self-isolate until a vaccine appears this winter, or the next, or the next. However, if you are not a lotto man/woman, you should maintain a steady course of vitamin D, vitamin C, vitamin A, zinc, elderberry, garlic, mushroom fractions, proteolytic enzymes, get a regular IV infusion of vitamin C or Meyer’s cocktail, and be socially distant as prudent. Eventually you will contract the virus. And that will be a good thing. We do need herd immunity, and that will require 70% of the population to develop antibodies. We aren’t going to get there by staying at home and being couch potatoes.
And those folks who think masks are our best protection are sadly missing out on the protection conferred by using nutrient supplementation. It is a sad state of affairs that medical authorities ignore the value of vitamin C and nutrients in preventing viral infection, but that is the intransigence of evidence-based medicine.
