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Podcast 389: Hacking the COVID Pandemic

We are all feeling uncertain, some of us even nervous or afraid, about the current coronavirus situation. Martin and Spencer discuss their favorite strategies to prevent and fight any viral infection, including the new COVID-19 causing a strand of coronavirus. There is no need to panic, knowledge is a powerful weapon, and these tips include using tools and ingredients you probably already have at home!

Check the sidebar for recommended products that will support your body during a viral infection, make sure to also check all videos mentioned on Remedy Link Youtube Channel!

Martin: Hello everybody! Martin Pytela here for the Life Enthusiast online radio, coming to you across the internet and through the galactic waves! Today with me is Spencer Feldman from Remedy Link! He is my favorite product formulator. I listen to what he has to say because he has a mind that understands science, but can translate it into accessible language. So, here we are! Spencer Feldman, welcome!

Spencer: Thanks, Martin! I thought we could talk a little bit about the coronavirus today.

Martin: From the public reactions out there, it really feels to a lot of people like an existential threat.

Spencer: There are still a lot of unknowns about this virus. We don’t really know what the rate of hospitalization is, we don’t really know what the death rate is. And if the rate of hospitalization gets to a certain point, and all the ICUs are closed, and people can’t get put on ventilators, and the drugs aren’t available, then the rate of hospitalization becomes the death rate, or close to it. And as you are aware I am sure, not only is China not making raw materials, but now India is also saying that they are not going to be exporting a number of pharmaceuticals because one, they don’t have the raw materials and two, they need them for their own people. So specialization of labor has a lot of great advantages, but it also makes for a fragile system.

We have two issues with the coronavirus: how it will physically play out in terms of people getting sick, and then how it will play out from the perception of it socially. So for instance, Iran let out a huge number of prisoners. Now if the police stations are closed because they are quarantined, and the prisons are opened up, and there is not enough food to go around, you can imagine what that does to a society.

When the coronavirus started to be on my radar in January, what I wanted to do was think about what happens if you can’t go to a hospital, because it is overrun and they have no supplies. So what can you do at home? How do you MacGyver this? How do you hack the coronavirus? And so I have made a series of five videos for my Youtube channel, and I thought I would give you a brief idea of what is going through my mind about coronavirus, and how I am preparing.

Martin: Yes, please! Let’s have it!

Spencer: So the first thing I thought was that China is the country that is making all the masks. What happens if masks run out? So in the first video, I explain how you can take cotton or flannel or a t-shirt, and you can mix up two solutions. One is copper and zinc sulfate in water, and the other is 5% vinegar. This is not my idea, this is based on a patent that is linked in one of the videos that says: hey, if you have a face mask and you have layers and one layer is 5% acid and another layer is copper and zinc sulfate, then as the virus passes through, it can become denatured. That is great! These are common chemicals; copper sulfate is available by the ton because they use it as a fungicide on crops. They use it as a mineral for crops. It is used all over the place.

So you can go on Amazon right now and buy a pound of copper sulfate or zinc sulfate. And so I show how you take a tablespoon of zinc sulfate, then a tablespoon of copper sulfate, and you mix it in a liter of distilled water, and you get this bright blue solution, that if you dunk some cloth in and then cut it to a certain shape and make it a mask, you have got some protection. Now people will say: hey, that is not as good as a mask. And I am like: no, it is not. But masks have been sold out for weeks now. The best material you could make it out of, if you can still get it, if you go to a hardware store, they have these big HEPA filters that go into furnace and forced-air heating systems and ventilation systems in houses. And if you strip the metal backing off that, you are left with HEPA material. So the first video is aimed at places where people don’t have access to masks.

What about the second video? Let’s say you got the virus. Or you are working with someone who has it. Or maybe you have a cough and you don’t know if you have it. You are around people, and you just don’t want to get it. What can we do preventatively and therapeutically, both to prevent getting it and to address it if already infected? And if you look at the virus, well, most viruses, there are some things they have in common. This one in particular, like other viruses, like H5N1, has a series of enzymes and it uses them as part of its mechanism to get in. Viruses are very, very simple, and they have a few moving parts. And if you can interfere with a couple of them, then the odds are in your favor. One of them is hemagglutinin. That is the protein that attaches the virus to your cells.

Martin: Yeah, it is the spikes that are on the surface, right?

Spencer: Yes. The first thing it has to do is get into your bloodstream, and it has to dock onto a cell. So if you can keep it from docking or minimize the docking, if you can interfere with the hemagglutinin, that is one weak spot the virus can be hacked.

Martin: Yes, so you make it unable to dock, unable to attach to your cells.

Spencer: Now the neuraminidase is another thing, that is an enzyme that helps the virus to get into and out of the cell once it is docked. So if you can keep it from entering, or once it enters and replicates, you keep it from exiting, that is another place you can interfere with the virus. And then the last one I would like to interfere with is the replicating enzyme. Once the virus gets into a cell, it dissolves your own DNA and then uses that mix of your dissolved DNA to build itself, to replicate itself.

And part of that process requires replicase, which is another enzyme. So you can keep a number of them from docking, you can keep some of them from getting in and out, and then on top of it, make it more difficult for it to replicate. Now you have what I would say is a good way to interfere with that virus.

Martin: Yes, and on every level, you are making a big difference.

Spencer: Yeah, I don’t believe in magic bullets. This is trench warfare, and in trench warfare, a shotgun trumps a sniper rifle. We need to go at this with multiple things that are very difficult to mess with. So we have three different targets, and we are going to hit them all. And if you watch video number two, if you go to Remedy Link on YouTube, not the website, I don’t put these videos on my website, I don’t want people to think I am making these videos in order to drive advertising, so if you go to the Remedy Link YouTube channel, there are five videos there.

Martin: We will link all the videos in the show notes.

Spencer: So if you click on video number two, it talks about this tea you could make – it is not really a tea, it is an herbal mix. And I will give you a list of things you can use. I was going for things that were not esoteric and difficult to find. So I have got turmeric or curcumin if you can get the extract, green tea, rosemary, cinnamon, elderberry, astragalus, and resveratrol. And the reason I picked things like rosemary and cinnamon is that you can find those typically in your supermarket or in your cupboard.

So I am aiming at things that you can get even when you are stuck in the house, maybe you are in a quarantine, maybe the stores are closed, it is not safe to go out, but you have some culinary spices, you can work with that. The one I am now making for myself and my friends and family, I have in it a privet, which is a little more difficult to find, but you can still get it, elderberry, the fruit, not the flower, quercetin, which is the extract of turmeric, brown or red marine algae, and astragalus. Those are the ones that I put in my own personal mix, and I take a quarter teaspoon every morning when I wake up.

And then if I am out and about, and maybe I have gone into a place where people are coughing or there are a lot of people in a small area when I come home, I’ll take half a teaspoon. And I am going to be taking this for probably the next three years because when the 1918 influenza came around in waves, it took about two years for it to finish, and that makes sense because the solar minimums are two to three years long, and that is when our immune system is the lowest. So that is something you can think of mixing up for yourself and your family. It doesn’t taste bad, the elderberry makes it taste kind of good.

Now to the third video. What about the people in Wuhan, who’ve been welded into their homes, right? The front doors are welded shut, the wood is nailed up…

Martin: I am failing to understand the logic, they essentially decided that they are not letting them out!

Spencer: Yeah, that is a death sentence, these people are not getting out.

Martin: They can jump out of the window, I suppose…

Spencer: If it is important enough to you, you will find a way out, you can take the top of your toilet seat and break through a wall and find a way out, if you are determined enough, you know, where there is a will there’s a way. So I am thinking of these people in Wuhan. Right now, you and I can go and buy zinc and copper sulfate online, on Amazon, eBay, or you can go to your pool shop, your spa place, and they might have copper sulfate to treat pools for algae. But I am thinking, what about people who can’t get those two materials for the masks either because they are no longer available locally, or they are stuck inside their house.

So in one of the videos, I show you how to actually make copper chloride and silver chloride. Basically you are going to be taking some saltwater and a car battery, or even just the power supply of some electronics, and you are going to create chlorine gas, and you are going to have the copper in the chlorine gas, it is going to react, and you are going to get this green solution of copper chloride. Then you put a little silver in there, junk silver, like pre-1965 coins and sterling silver, that is 8-10% copper and 90-92% silver. So I show how you can make copper chloride instead of copper sulfate, and silver chloride instead of zinc sulfate. Because finding zinc around the house is more difficult; yes, you can get it out of alkaline batteries, but that is a little tricky. Most people have some silverware or something.

Martin: Maybe you have some zinc plated nails left in your cupboard…

Spencer: You might have! There you go! So I show you how to do it with copper and silver, which will also go after the hemagglutinin and neuraminidase. Then I made a fourth video. I have been involved with the work of Royal Rife for 20 years, he was a great man that not only invented a microscope that was well beyond its time in terms of what it could see, but then based on what he was seeing under the microscope, he identified a cause of cancer, which at that time was viral. I don’t think cancers are predominantly viral anymore, which is why I don’t think rife machines work as well for cancer, let alone the role of most rife machines is not right, but that is a topic for another conversation. But he also came up with the technology for destroying what he was seeing under the microscope with radio waves. And so in the fourth video, I show how to recreate that with a HAM radio. It is my hope that people who own HAM radios will watch this and understand how to use this, or maybe some governments will contact me and I’ll tell them how to set it up.

Martin: Can you define HAM radio?

Spencer: Sure, HAM radio is an electrical device, it is a transceiver, something that sends and receives signals in a particular range. In this case, the range I am looking at is 8-20 megahertz. A CB radio operates at around 27 megahertz, a HAM radio has a much wider range. Twenty years ago when I first bumped into someone with hepatitis C, I spent a few days with it and I found three frequencies that he really reacted to, he was in front of it for I don’t know how many hours a day, and after about a week we had his blood tested, and his viral load went down, I think about a thousandfold. It didn’t get rid of the hep C, but it took the viral load down significantly. So I don’t know if this will work with coronavirus, but heck, it is worth a try. It is scalable. Instead of 100-watt units for our home, we could have 10,000-watt units outside at airports and in hospitals, and then people would walk at a specific distance, and they could possibly blast this thing up.

Martin: Something like irradiating the food on the conveyor belt, so to speak, right?

Spencer: Right, except the frequency is between 8-20 megahertz. Our bodies are mostly transparent to these waves, so there is no place that the virus can hide, and it is not ionizing. It is a little thermal, but it is not going to burn you. I got a lot of flack from the HAM radio community, saying what I was doing was dangerous, and I appreciate their perspective because from how they are trained, from the amount of time and the amount of frequency and amount of wattage you are allowed to be around, yeah, this is not what they are taught is appropriate. But number one, there is a pandemic on the loose. Number two, people that say this is dangerous, that is based on very well-meaning paperwork, and I have got real-world experience, and I would say real-world experience trumps a theory on a piece of paper, because the people who wrote up the standards for how long you could be in front of it, at what frequency, and how much power, if you read their notes, they are saying, we don’t really know, so here is a guess.

So I know because I have been in front of it and I have checked myself and others and I have checked my blood. I can tell you, at these power levels and these frequencies, it is fine. The second thing the HAM radio enthusiasts are upset about is when we first find this frequency, we are going to have to scan the whole range, and it is going to create interference. Well, okay, if that bothers you, take aluminum foil and line a room and make a Faraday cage and then the signal won’t get out. But again, a small price to pay, if we can find the right frequency, then we are done and we can blast it out on one narrow band. The idea is that I don’t think we are killing the virus, because it is not alive, but what we are doing is somehow denaturing it.

This takes us to the fifth video, which is how does the virus actually kill? There is some evidence that the way it kills is two-fold. One is a cytokine storm, where the body reacts so aggressively to the virus, the immune system over-responds, the lungs fill with fluid and the person basically drowns. There is another way in which the virus kills, in fact, there are multiple strains of the virus simultaneously, and you can get one strain and then another. So there is no immunity to this. Some people believe that the second time you get it, it can ride on the antibodies. But the antibodies are not enough to knock out another strain of the virus.

Martin: Yet to the immune system it might look like it is taken care of, right?

Spencer: Right, so then it gets brought into the white blood cells to be destroyed, but it wasn’t destroyed. So now it gets brought into the white blood cells by the antibodies, but it is not quite dead, and then it replicates inside the white blood cells as it would with HIV for example. I don’t have any way to deal with that yet, but let’s talk about the cytokine storm. Again, I am thinking, what can you do with stuff that you can source locally, right? It can’t be something exotic. I came up with a few things. In the first video, I also talk about chili pepper and licorice, and with a little more time to research, I made a video on a way to possibly respond to the cytokines. The goal is to calm the immune system down, so the person doesn’t have so much fluid going into their lungs that they drown, because they can’t breathe.

Spencer’s recipe for immune support:

Mix equal amounts of

• privet
• red marine algae
• astragalus
• elderberry
• curcumin

take 1/2 tsp a day as preventative
take 1/4 tsp every 30 minutes in crisis

if breathing becomes difficult, stop and move to cytokine storm suppression:

take every 15 minutes

5,000 IU vitamin D3 or fish oil
1/4 tsp aloe
1/4 tsp licorice
and as much hot sauce (capsaicin) as you can stand

and then switch to immune support again when breathing is improved

Martin: So you are essentially modulating the immune system.

Spencer: Right. The things I chose were chili peppers, actually, the active ingredient capsaicin, if you can get capsaicin, great, if you can’t, get hot sauce or chili peppers, or cayenne, and then aloe vera, if you can get the extract, great, if not, get the plant. Bear in mind that some aloe plants are poisonous, so you can’t just grab any aloe, you have to know that you are getting an edible version, and get the pulp out of that. The last two things are fish oil and vitamin D, and then some high-proof alcohol. And basically what you do is you put 1/64 of a teaspoon of capsaicin extract into two ounces of either Everclear, which is a 190-proof or 200-proof alcohol, or the highest alcohol you can get. The capsaicin will dissolve in alcohol. And then you put four drops of that in a quarter or half a teaspoon of fish oil. Fish oil is anti-inflammatory. And then you are going to put some vitamin D in that, drink it, and then take some aloe.

Now, let’s say you don’t have capsaicin. That is quite easy, you can take a hot sauce, jalapeno peppers, cayenne powder, things you might find in your cupboard. If you don’t have vitamin D, by all means, you should go get it. Let me tell you why. Vitamin D regulates cytokines, but there is also another reason. Pandemics are more virulent in the cloudier and colder months, so spring, winter, and fall, in the summer they tend to back down. And I believe that is because with more sun, more ultraviolet light, not only is it slightly sterilizing the air, but it is giving us more vitamin D, and vitamin D is important to help you with your viral response and to calm down the cytokines. But let’s say you are watching this video, and it is too late and you can’t get vitamin D.

Can you get liver? Animal and fish liver is full of vitamin D! So these are ways you can hack it. And this mix, the cytokine storm mix, I don’t suggest you take until you start having respiratory distress. If you are just having the symptoms of flu, you know, achy, feverish, muscle ache, don’t take the mix yet, you don’t want to suppress the immune response at that point. We want to fight the coronavirus as much as we can. If the body starts overreacting and it starts getting short of breath, then I would start taking a shot of this mix every 15-30 minutes, until the body calms down.

But here’s the thing though, once you get to the other end of that, it is not done, because now there are secondary infections. So once the shortness of breath goes away, immediately stop taking the cytokine mix, and go back to the original herbal mix, the elderberry, and all those other things. You don’t want to use elderberry during a cytokine storm, it raises inflammatory cytokines. So basically what we are trying to do is have the immune system fight the virus up until a point where the damage to the lungs is worse than the virus, then we deal with that, and then get right back and just stimulate the immune system again to fight any secondary infections. All the details are in the fifth video on Remedy Link Youtube channel, links are going to be in the description box and in the show notes.

There is one more video coming out, it will probably come out tomorrow, so by the time your audience is watching this, it should already be out, video number six. When I first started hearing about this virus, I spent a day walking outside doing errands as if it was a pandemic. So I had a mask on, I had gloves on, and I got a lot of funny looks. I didn’t do it because I was concerned that the pandemic was there, I was doing it as a test run to see what it was like and what kinds of things I need to learn. I learned that it is very difficult to act like there is a pandemic! When someone comes up and is talking to you, there is a socially appropriate distance, and if you take two or three steps back because a person is exhaling at you and talking to you when you start taking a couple of steps back, it is socially uncomfortable.

Martin: Yeah, and they start following you instead of raising their voice.

Spencer: Right. You have to get used to it. I tried things like having one glove on when I went to a store, and that would be the glove that I would use on a pushcart, and then the other glove would be for other things, that didn’t work, I needed two gloves. I was too used to touching things with both hands. So these are the lessons you need to learn. There are times I wouldn’t bring the mask with me, I would be in the car and I am like: I won’t need it. I went into the store, there were three people coughing! So the other lesson is I have always got a mask with me. If I leave my car, the mask is around my neck so I can put it on.

I have got a glove on each hand and a few more in my pockets. These are cheap food service gloves. You can use the more expensive nitrile ones, but you can get 500 of the foodservice gloves for 10 bucks if you can still get them. And so I started practicing what it was like not to shake people’s hands. Now I don’t get so many weird looks, people understand. But what I want to pose to you is we have certain social habits and they don’t change instantly. So you need to start practicing changing those habits now, so you are ready to act when you need to.

There is one thing I couldn’t figure out how to do. I got a non-touch soap dispenser in my bathroom and things like that. But there were places that I would touch automatically like my steering wheel, the doorknob of my house, and the faucet. I didn’t want to keep sterilizing those places over and over. So what to do about it? This is going to be the last video I will make. I got some copper foil and I am going to wrap it around places that are commonly touched, like my doorknob, like my steering wheel, like a stick shift, I can get it into the handles of my door, I might even wrap my debit card and leave a little cutout for the chip. Copper denatures the virus. So when you go to touch your door, you don’t have to worry about a thousand people touching your doorknob and maybe someone forgot to wear gloves that day. So these are my thoughts on how to kind of prep for this.

Martin: Wow. So in your thought process, have you considered vitamin C?

Spencer: Yeah, sure! It doesn’t rank as highly as some of the other things I mentioned, like vitamin D, or the capsaicin, I would certainly use it if I had it, but I consider the ones I mentioned my first go-to.

Martin: The other alternative we suggest, next to rosemary and cinnamon, is oregano. Oregano oil to be specific.

Spencer: Oregano is good! I tend to think of oregano more for fungus than for viruses, but it is strong stuff! Taking oregano in the amounts that I think you would need long term can irritate the kidneys, so I like to think of oregano as a short term thing, it is not going to be my main tool, you know, again, it is something you can use.

Martin: My thought on the oregano was I’ll take a drop after I come home from a subway ride or a flight, for example.

Spencer: Yeah, sure. If that is what you have, then, by all means, use it! I am not against oregano, I am just comparing its pros and cons next to some other things.

Martin: I am shocked that you did not recommend a single Remedy Link product! All these are just simple hacks from the pantry!

Spencer: I could take all the ingredients, make a product and sell it, of course. But I won’t, for two reasons. One, I don’t want people to think that there is a financial angle to this. So if I tell you to go out and do it yourself, then you are not thinking: he is just trying to make money on this. And the second thing is, if I were to sell something like what I have described, the FDA would not be very pleased with that. But I can give you the information for free, and you can make it yourself.

Martin: We used to sell a product on the shelf called Flu-stop, and it was an inhibitor of the replication capacity of this HN-type virus. It was just essentially giving it a haircut, stopping the knobs from being able to penetrate and inject themselves into new cells. And it was a herbal mix, just old fashioned Chinese herbs, and it was awesome, very effective. But the guy went broke selling it because not enough people bought it.

Spencer: We might say “it was just herbs,” but that is where many drugs are coming from! Herbs are plants’ evolutionary responses to the same things that we are going through. Plants get viruses, plants get cancer, plants get fungus! Plants had millions of years to come up with lots of great, clever solutions. So I wouldn’t say “just herbs,” I would say: Oh wow, that is genius! Thank you, small amazonian flower for figuring out how to stop this disease! I think herbs should be treated with great respect, because they were our first pharmaceutical teachers, and we still have a lot to learn from them.

And the other thing is, right now, China is not able to get materials out, India is not shipping a number of key pharmaceuticals, and in the future, they might increase the list of things they are not going to ship to us. If you have a plant that you can go to, then you are at least a little more independent. We don’t have medicine gardens anymore, but maybe we could, if you can grow some things in your garden, then your supply chain is just your backyard!

Martin: Right on! One other thing I thought of is lecithin. It is documented that lecithin with its emulsifying action is able to help the immune system to essentially strip off the lipid coating that the virus uses to disguise itself. Essentially, the virus behaves like a wolf with sheep’s clothing. It has the cloaking, a lipid layer on itself, to make it look innocent and lecithin then dissolves it away and makes the virus more visible to the immune system.

Spencer: Well, the reason I picked alcohol in my mix was because capsaicin can dissolve in alcohol, and lipids can also dissolve well in alcohol.

Martin: Yes, in fact, that is how you make lecithin. You take an organic solvent and you take the oil, sunflower oil for example, and you separate the fats from the lecithin using the organic solvent, then get rid of the organic solvent and you have the lecithin left behind.

Spencer: Well, thank you, I am going to go look that up! The more the merrier, everything we can throw at this virus that might help, the more the better. The more options someone has, the better. If you give people 10 or 20 different ingredients they can use, maybe they can only source 10, but it will still work great. You don’t know what people have access to, so it is great when you give them a broad range.

Martin: Well, I hope to talk to you in a year, looking back at this situation, saying: we helped people! Thank you very much for listening. Be sure to check all the links to resources in the description box of this video, or in the show notes on the Life Enthusiast website. This was Spencer Feldman from Remedy Link and Martin Pytela from Life Enthusiast. We are restoring vitality to you and to the planet!