During my reasearch into how SARS2 mRNA vaccines operate, a very odd notion occurred to me: Can zinc ions interfere with vaccines?
It’s an important question for Carol and me. At the advice of our doctor, we’ve been taking zinc supplements and an OTC supplement called quercetin now for well over a year. We’d been taking it for months before we got the Pfizer vacc.
(If you’ve not read up on mRNA vaccines yet, this short explanation for laypeople is the best I’ve seen so far.)
The Pfizer vacc is the first of its kind. Vaccination is the process of familiarizing our immune systems with a specific pathogen. This is generally done by injecting weakened or fragmentary pathogens into the patient. The immune system reacts to those weakened or fragmentary pathogens and develops enough familiarity with them to attack the little devils on sight.
Making large quantities of a whole or partial pathogen is a slow business. Because time was of the essence, Pfizer used a new mechanism called mRNA, which literally creates a sort of crude virus using RNA sequences. This RNA virus enters human cells in the patient and begins manufacturing parts of the target pathogen. In the case of SARS2, it’s the spike proteins. Our immune systems then recognize the spike proteins as enemy action, and kill anything having that specific spike protein.
I twitched a little when I figured this out. We’re infecting ourselves with a virus that makes virus parts in our own cells, thus avoiding the delay of having to generate gazillions of doses in vitro. It’s an elegant solution, sure, and we were able to get it on the street in record time. There are a lot of fistfights going on right now over the issue of serious side effects. I’ll leave that discussion to others. The issue here is fundamentally different from that of side effects.
Carol and I had plenty of zinc ions in our systems when we were vaccinated. The quercetin (taken daily) is a zinc ionophore. It “escorts” zinc ions into a cell. Zinc really doesn’t like virus replication, and stops it cold. This is how some clinicians have been treating COVID-19: by giving patients zinc and a zinc ionophore as soon as symptoms appear.
My question is simple: Can zinc + a zinc ionophore block the mRNA vaccine’s spike protein replication process?
Don’t say, “Of course not!” I doubt that question has even come up yet, given the media’s mad-dog attack job done on a certain zinc ionophore called HCQ. We don’t know. If you’ve seen somebody take up this question elsewhere, send me a link. I’ve begun to wonder if the shots we were given actually took, and if they did, to what extent. We reacted to the shots, which is a good sign. That doesn’t mean the generated immune response wasn’t weak, brief, or both.
The issue isn’t whether the vaccines work. The issue is whether we were in fact fully vaccinated at all. And y’know, about things like that I’d really like to be sure.
Interesting. I’d assumed that a virus required DNA to reproduce, but a quick skim of the literature (Wikipedia) tells me that RNA viruses are a thing. However, my reading of what the manufacturers are saying is that while the vaccine contains RNA, their RNA does not synthesize copies of //itself//, only of the spike protein, and that the RNA originally injected breaks down in a few days after the cells in your arm spew spike proteins everywhere. I think calling an mRNA structure that doesn’t make copies of itself a virus is probably an error.
Reading up a little on how zinc interferes with viral replication (which is mighty dense reading, btw) does seem to suggest that zinc interferes with RNA replication of viruses, in particular coronaviruses.
//If// the vaccines share that weakness, as apparently human cells’ own RNA strands do not, then it would be a concern, but I don’t understand the replication of spike proteins nor of coronaviruses well enough to know if that condition is, in fact, the case.
Right on all counts. The virus they inject us with is not self-replicating. All it does is make protein spikes, and it’s swept out of the body in a couple of weeks.
The issue, of course, is that zinc may have prevented it from doing its intended job in the first place. It’s not all or nothing. Different ionophores may have different strengths, and if quercetin got enough zinc into our infected cells, the amount of spike protein may not have triggered enough immune response to be useful.
The biochemistry is dense, is fersure. That’s not my field. I don’t know how to evaluate the issue. So I hope that sooner or later somebody who knows viruses better than I do will be able to weigh in on the issue.
In the meantime, we’re still taking quercetin plus zinc every day. The zinc doesn’t care what kind of virus it is. We’re good with that.
“…swept out of the body…”
That’s a claim which has been refuted by some studies. I don’t have a link at hand, but I think it was researchers in Europe who found that the spikes are not, in fact, swept away in short order. In particular, in women, they seem to settle eventually in the ovaries.
Update:
The article which I was thinking of is here, with references.
https://doctors4covidethics.org/long-term-persistence-of-the-sars-cov-2-spike-protein-evidence-and-implications-2/
One could write interesting science fiction about a vaccine that //did// synthesize copies of itself and was, itself, infectious. Depending on how you arranged it to spread (eg: the diseases spreads through the air, but the vaccine is sexually transmitted) you could arrange the thing to selectively exclude people by behavior, diet, or anything else that effects the transmission of viruses. Wanna survive covid31? Best you eat that pork…
Of course, engineering such a thing with our current, still somewhat tentative grasp of molecular biology, would be incredibly unwise. Mutations happen. It’d be like Jurassic park, only on a molecular scale where evolution goes //fast//.
Since you are obviously at least semi-comfortable with “the literature”, and you mentioned the ambiguity about ivermectin in an earlier post, I thought this might pique your curiosity: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7536980/
Wow. Like, wow. I haven’t finished reading it yet, but after I do I will either include it in an Odd Lots or (more likely) give it an entry of its own. Many thanks for the link.
These things can be a slog, oy.
For onlookers: greatUnknown’s link is to a research paper posted on the National Institute of Health’s own website, in which the antiviral properties of ivermectin are dissected and evaluated. I’ll quote directly from the introduction to the paper:
“These findings demonstrate the broad‐spectrum antiviral property of ivermectin benefiting for COVID‐19 treatment in the context of predictive, preventive, and personalized medicine in virus‐related diseases.”
Remember, this was on the NIH site itself, though the paper was originally published by John Wiley in one of their medical journals. So ivermectin is back on my radar. This is a really dense paper, and you can be forgiven for not being able to follow all of it. At least read the abstract, the intro, and the conclusion. Now you have a link to throw at screamers foaming at the mouth about that deadliest of all drugs, HorsePastermectin.
Yes, after years of suspecting antiviral properties of ivermectin (according to the paper’s introduction), there is now some initial evidence in favor of ivermectin. However to avoid becoming like the dreaded “screamers foaming at the mouth” with an opposing viewpoint, I suggest not claiming more than is the paper itself does.
– It cannot be claimed that the paper’s publisher or the NIH website endorses or concurs with the conclusions. In fact, the website specifically disclaims this, noting it is only performing a public service to collect papers about Covid so researchers can have rapid access. I was unable to find whether the paper had even been peer reviewed (yet).
– It cannot be claimed that ivermectin’s reported antiviral properties make it a cure for Covid. The paper is quite modest in its claims. The paper claims, in the conclusion, that a) ivermectin affects some of the Covid related proteins, b) it “might”, in association with other drugs, help in the treatment of Covid, and c) the paper’s results can provide “guidance in efforts” to understand the molecular mechanisms in the treatment of Covid. While the paper reports on important advances, the randomized clinical trials of that have been reported in other papers do not show ivermectin as being effective in the treatment of Covid (yet).
– It is interesting that the paper showed (see figure 3a) a much higher number of ivermectin’s antiviral properties for the Epstein–Barr virus, human cytomegalovirus, and human papillomavirus (HPV) than for Covid, but these were not mentioned in the conclusion. Why?
As a side note, the paper’s introduction cites other research(?) suggesting ivermectin is (or may be) useful in treating covid, orbital myiasis, trichinosis, malaria, leishmaniasis, African trypanosomiasis, asthma, epilepsy, neurological disease, HIV, dengue, encephalitis, tuberculosis, Buruli ulcer, breast cancer, leukemia, glioblastoma, cervical cancer, gastric cancer, ovarian cancer, colon cancer, melanoma, lung cancer, diabetes, hypercholesterolemia, insulin resistance, obesity, hypertriglyceridemia, and hyperglycemia, atherosclerosis, nonalcohol fatty liver disease, cholestasia, and gallstones, and inflammation. I suspect that the main purpose for this list was to receive grant money for this study. However it makes ivermectin sound like the next wonder drug. What are the doctors and hospitals waiting for, not only for covid but for those other ailments?
Just a response to your second point: given today’s “I am Science” environment, it would behoove the authors of an article like this to avoid the word “Covid” as much as possible. Any claims on the subject would likely result in a very rapid withdrawal of the paper [under duress(?)].
I wish I was wrong, but …
Me to, but…the whole business is political. Not just everyday political but MAJOR political.
I will say that papers like this strengthen my conviction that MDs should be allowed to treat patients with whatever drug they want. I have looked and looked and have seen NO indication, none, zero, that the human (and not veterinary) formulation given at the doses known to work safely on parasitic diseases would have any harmful effects on patients. At those doses, IVERMECTIN IS NOT HARMFUL.
And if it is not harmful, what possible reason is there not to give it to COVID patients? At worst, nothing would happen. At most, it could save lives. And yet we don’t do it.
The paper demonstrates that ivermectin has antiviral properties. I think we can say that much with fair confidence. I also think greatUnknown is right: making any claims regarding ivermectin vs. COVID could shut the research grant faucet off hard. Some doctors are waiting because they’ve been threatened with all sorts of reprisals including loss of job and medical license. Fortunately, independent practices are doing telemed and prescribing the drug. There is anecdotal evidence that it works. But the whole business stinks to high hell.
“Can zinc ions interfere with vaccines?”
Something even stranger…
“Virus spike vs vaccine spike – COVID-19 mRNA vaccines update 20”
— Merogenomics (YouTube)
Olli, thanks. Here’s a direct link, BTW:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CAhgsnu7geM
Will probably do another entry on this issue after I’ve watched it a few times.
The videos from Merogenomics are excellent. I with I were competent to judge what he is presenting.
The whole Ivermectin/HCQ frothing is ‘interesting’ to watch. Friends who took both of them in Africa for years for malaria and were NOT vaccinated had very low impact Covid infections. One of them twice, and the second time he took Ivermectin and it was knocked out in about 3 days. And yes, I have a headache from trying to get through those papers. PhD I are not… sigh