Transcript:
What’s up, everyone? Spartacus, here, for a second Spartacast.
I figured I’d do a podcast on how I got into all of this, as well as the nature of COVID-19 pathology.
I first got into researching COVID-19 around late January of 2020. That was when I started picking up on the news that there was some kind of virus going around in Wuhan that they’d started calling 2019-nCoV or the 2019 Novel Coronavirus. I started digging into the cell phone cam footage from Wuhan on Twitter, and I was shocked by what I was seeing. People having seizures, collapsing in the street. Hospitals with hallways full of dead people in body bags.
They even started constructing field hospitals out of prefabs, establishing police checkpoints, welding people into their apartments, and spraying streets with tank trucks and mosquito foggers. People were quarantined inside their apartments. There were recordings of people in Wuhan screaming throughout the night. Some of these measures were so extreme looking, what I assumed, at first, was that some manner of highly enhanced airborne bioweapon or gain-of-function strain of SARS with a ten to twenty percent mortality rate had escaped from the lab at the Wuhan Institute of Virology.
Now, I question everything that we saw. What were China actually doing in those early days in Wuhan? Rounding up known dissidents using the virus as an excuse? Towards the end of February, 2020, I emailed the CDC, HHS, and a number of politicians inquiring about whether or not there was adequate PPE for healthcare workers and equipment and antivirals to treat the sick. They did not respond to any of my inquiries.
Predictably, when the pandemic hit the US a couple months later, there were supply shortages just as I suspected there would be. Prestige Ameritech actually offered to manufacture millions of N95 masks well in advance, but the government turned them down. The shortage was artificial. The conspirators in our government wanted this virus to become endemic. Their incompetent initial contact tracing and incompetent response was deliberate.
In March of 2020, I started digging through COVID-19 papers and SARS papers, and I quickly discovered a number of very interesting things that the media were not reporting on at the time. SARS-CoV-2 is a very close genetic relative of SARS. The pathology is very similar, as well. A lot of scientists made the mistake of going after COVID-19 with a sort of blank-slate approach, and part of that had to do with the name the WHO went with for the virus. COVID-19 made it sound completely novel, when it wasn’t. This is basically SARS. People who suffer from COVID-19 have textbook SARS symptoms.
If you comb over SARS papers from the past couple decades, what you will see is a both respiratory and neurotropic virus that can infect the brains of hACE2 mice via the olfactory nerve, cause severe viremia, sepsis, ARDS, and pneumonia, as well as long-term sequelae, similar to the so-called “Long COVID”, or Post-Acute Sequelae of COVID-19. Some SARS papers I combed over in March of 2020 indicated that it could cause vertebral arterial vasculitis, so I started wondering if COVID-19 was attacking people’s blood vessels. That is, if the virus had tropism for the vasculature. As it turns out, it certainly does.
In April of 2020, scientists at the University Hospital of Zurich in Switzerland confirmed that COVID-19 was a viral vascular endotheliitis, and that SARS-CoV-2 had a particular affinity for vascular endothelial cells. The virus does not really attack the airway. It moves from airway epithelial cells into the vasculature of the lungs as quickly as it can, attacking the small capillaries that serve the pulmonary alveoli.
Cue months and months of the media reporting on COVID-19 as though it were a mysterious pneumonia and they had no idea why sufferers were developing blood clots and multiple organ failure even though their pneumonia was being managed with a ventilator.
I can tell you exactly why that’s the case. In early-to-mid-2020, I got together with a number of other independent researchers digging into COVID-19, some of whom are actual biologists and virologists, and by the end of 2020, we’d figured out exactly how COVID-19 kills people.
First of all, in order for someone to be vulnerable to COVID-19, they have to be obese, diabetic, old, hypertensive, and/or African-American. What do all of these groups have in common? They all have endothelial dysfunction. That’s where someone has chronically low nitric oxide levels, redox equilibrium issues, and excess chronic oxidative stress and chronic inflammation in their vascular endothelium, which eventually leads to atherosclerosis, and so on. In obesity, diabetes, and hypertension, endothelial dysfunction is a common finding.
Unfortunately, the elderly and African-Americans have issues with the function of nitric oxide synthase enzymes in the lining of their blood vessels producing insufficient nitric oxide, which also promotes endothelial dysfunction. If you happen to be African-American and are listening to this right now, for your own health, I urge you to look up the rate of endothelial dysfunction in African-Americans. It is disturbingly high. Part of it is due to genetic differences in endothelial function, and part of it is due to, essentially, the calcification of endothelial cells due to vitamin D deficiency. If you’ve ever wondered why so many black guys get crazy high blood pressure and die in their fifties, this is literally one of the reasons why. It also has to do with diet quality. I’ll be very honest with you all, America has a serious problem with very low-quality, non-nutritious processed food. A high-carb, high-sugar diet (a.k.a. the “Standard American Diet”) with little in the way of micronutrients will inevitably give you obesity and endothelial dysfunction.
The vascular endothelium is a one-cell-thick lining found in all the blood vessels in a human body. It acts as the interface between the blood and the blood vessel. Vascular endothelial cells are studded with receptors that regulate immune responses, vasodilation, blood volume and tonicity, et cetera. One type of receptor found in vascular endothelial cells is known as ACE2, or Angiotensin Converting Enzyme 2. This receptor is a crucial part of the renin-angiotensin-aldosterone system, or RAAS, that works with the blood vessels, brain, liver, and kidneys in a feedback control loop that performs the critical function of osmoregulation in the body, maintaining proper blood volume by deciding how much salt you retain and how much you excrete.
Because of the close relationship between the RAAS and the vasculature, these receptors are found in the lining of blood vessels all over the body, and, indeed, in the blood-brain barrier. ACE2 is the receptor that SARS-CoV-2 Spike fuses to when the virus enters a cell. Because of that, the virus tends to infect and replicate in vascular endothelial cells.
Before the virus can infect a cell, its Spike proteins must undergo processing steps, such as palmitic acid attachment, also known as palmitoylation. Nitric oxide in the blood vessels inhibits the palmitoylation of Spike proteins. If you have higher nitric oxide levels in your blood vessels, the virus will not be able to replicate nearly as quickly. Nitric oxide is antiviral against SARS. So, if you have a condition, like pre-existing endothelial dysfunction from being obese, hypertensive, diabetic, old, and/or African-American, you’re going to be way, way more vulnerable to this virus, and this is what we see in the real world. COVID-19 cannot readily cause outbreaks in places where people have pescetarian endothelial support diets, like much of Southeast Asia and Japan, nor can it do so in countries with a low average age, like Africa, where people have the “benefit” of being young enough on average that they don’t have endothelial dysfunction, simply due to the poor life expectancy of these countries.
Endothelial dysfunction is everything, when it comes to COVID-19. If you can raise your nitric oxide levels and improve your endothelial health by engaging in chronic exercise, increasing your intake of dietary nitrate, Vitamin D, and antioxidant substrates like cysteine and selenium, you should do it. There is no magic pill for endothelial health. The cure for endothelial dysfunction is called daily jogging. So, what did the authorities do for COVID-19? They locked people down inside their homes, with no sunlight, and they encouraged sedentary behavior, which makes your vascular endothelium unhealthy, which, in the aggregate, makes people more vulnerable to COVID-19.
SARS-CoV-2 infects vascular endothelial cells by binding to ACE2 receptors on their surfaces, at which point the Spike is cleaved at the boundary of the S1 and S2 subunits by endogenous human proteases like Furin and TMPRSS2. The three-pointed S1 heads of the Spike fall off, exposing the S2. S2 unfurls, digs into the cell membrane, and pulls the membrane of the virus and the cell together, allowing for endocytosis and translation of the viral genome. SARS viroporins act as calcium ion channels, drawing excessive calcium into cells. The dysregulation of ACE2 leads to a bradykinin storm, which further increases intracellular calcium pathway activity, putting infected cells into metabolic overdrive, stressing mitochondria and the endoplasmic reticulum.
This leads to mitochondrial ROS production and the production of superoxide “kindling radicals” and their release into the extracellular space by membrane-bound NADPH oxidase. This superoxide reacts with nitric oxide in the blood vessels to make peroxynitrite, a highly damaging nitrogen radical. This is proven to happen in COVID-19 because people with severe COVID-19 have low nitric oxide and hydrogen sulfide gasotransmitters and elevated nitrotyrosine, which is nitrated tyrosine, which is proof positive of excessive oxidative stress in the vascular endothelium.
Peroxynitrite has another nasty trick. It can destroy tetrahydrobiopterin cofactors needed by nitric oxide synthase to produce nitric oxide. When endothelial nitric oxide synthase enzymes lose their tetrahydrobiopterin to peroxynitrite, they enter what’s called the “uncoupled” state. In this state, they produce superoxide radicals instead of nitric oxide. So now, those nitric oxide synthase enzymes have joined NADPH oxidase in spewing superoxide into the extracellular space. This is a positive feedback loop. Nitric oxide and superoxide react to make peroxynitrite, peroxynitrite destroys tetrahydrobiopterin in nitric oxide synthase, uncoupled nitric oxide synthase makes superoxide, superoxide reacts with nitric oxide to make even more peroxynitrite. Martin L. Pall refers to this feedback loop as “NO/ONOO- Disease”, after the chemical formulae for nitric oxide and peroxynitrite, but pronounced “no, oh no” as a bit of a pun.
Nitric oxide is what’s called a gasotransmitter. It’s a very small molecule that can rapidly diffuse through normally impermeable cell membranes and acts as a signal to cells to alter their behavior. Nitric oxide has tons of different functions in the body and even functions as a neurotransmitter, but one of the things it does is dilate blood vessels and lower blood pressure. You can see the effects for yourself in about two seconds by engaging in nose breathing, which greatly increases your nitric oxide levels and lowers your blood pressure, producing a noticeable calming effect. Dietary nitrate consumption in nitrate-rich foods like beets and leafy greens also increases your nitric oxide levels by the enterosalivary nitrate pathway. Nitric oxide cannot be stockpiled by the human body, because it’s a tiny, reactive gaseous molecule with a very, very short half-life of just a few seconds. Nitric oxide has to be produced and consumed constantly by nitric oxide synthase in your blood vessels.
If you have pre-existing endothelial dysfunction, SARS-CoV-2 will replicate faster simply because you will already have low nitric oxide levels in your blood vessels due to pre-existing chronic oxidative stress, which means that the Spike-inhibiting, radical-scavenging effects of nitric oxide will be missing.
This disinhibition of reactive oxygen species in the blood vessels eventually leads to sepsis, neutrophilia, neutrophil extracellular trap formation, and iron dysregulation. The end-stage of lethal COVID-19 looks something like the blood vessels in the lungs loading up with free iron, superoxide, and hydrogen peroxide. Fenton reagent, in other words. This produces extremely damaging hydroxyl radicals that attack and denature lipids and DNA, leading to runaway lipid peroxidation, ferroptosis, parthanatos, degradation of the endothelial glycocalyx, edema from the small capillaries of the lungs and into the air spaces, and autoantibody formation against oxidation-specific epitopes, such as antiphospholipid antibodies, anticardiolipin antibodies, and so on. This is also one of the reasons for the silent hypoxia of COVID-19. It’s actually a chemical attack of reactive oxygen species against O2 binding sites in heme.
To make matters much worse, the Spike and Nucleocapsid proteins of SARS-CoV-2 are highly amyloidogenic, which may promote systemic amyloidosis, amyloid fibrin clot formation, and additional inflammatory and oxidative stress damage. SARS-CoV-2’s proteins can directly trigger inflammasomes in cells, promoting the release of large quantities of inflammatory cytokines that summon additional pulmonary neutrophils. Those pulmonary neutrophils do what all neutrophils do to deal with pathogens; they start blasting their surroundings with more damaging radicals, using superoxide dismutase and myeloperoxidase to make hydrogen peroxide and hypochlorous acid, the latter of which is basically like bleach. There’s just one problem with this; human cells have a phospholipid bilayer membrane just like bacteria and do not like being immersed in peroxide and bleach.
Ventilators on their own do not make this better. In fact, ventilators mimic the physiology of ischemia-reperfusion injury and make more radicals. As hypoxic cells go from anaerobic back to aerobic metabolism, they use xanthine oxidase to break down hypoxanthine. This process produces more superoxide, accelerating the oxidative stress. Now, it’s kind of a catch-22, since cells obviously need oxygen for the electron transport chain and ATP synthesis to work correctly. But if you don’t protect the cells against oxidative stress, they’re done for. Lipid peroxidation and ferroptosis will do them in.
What improves this situation is if you activate the Nrf2 pathway and endogenous antioxidant activity, and feed antioxidant enzymes with their substrates, like cysteine to make glutathione, and selenium for selenoproteins necessary for antioxidant enzymes like glutathione peroxidase to do their job and make damaging oxygen radicals into harmless water.
SARS-CoV-2 directly suppresses cellular antioxidant activity. What they see in severe COVID-19 is someone who is running out of the glutathione necessary to detoxify reactive oxygen species. By the time someone has COVID-19-associated viral sepsis and they’re in the ICU with a tube down their throat, it is basically too late to pump them full of antioxidants and hope for the best. The tissue damage is already done. The damage-associated molecular patterns, lipid hydroperoxides, and autoantibodies against oxidatively modified molecules are already there.
Doctors and researchers see this happening in young people, too, much to their surprise. Normally, younger folks have perfectly fine glutathione synthesis. Why is this happening? I’ll tell you why. It’s because they’re micronutrient-deficient. They have hidden hunger, due to a Western diet of processed food, and their antioxidant enzymes don’t even have enough of their necessary substrates, like glutathione and selenium, to fend off all this ROS. They are critically vitamin and amino acid deficient, and they do not even realize it, because their hidden hunger is covered up by a diet of fat, empty carbs, and salt.
Now, is COVID-19 super-lethal? No, absolutely not. The mortality rate of COVID-19 is highly age-stratified, which is exactly what you would expect to see in a virus that causes more severe illness in people with endothelial dysfunction, given how closely endothelial dysfunction is linked to aging. In fact, we might refer to endothelial dysfunction in the blood vessels as a form of premature aging. If you’ve ever heard of someone in their thirties having blood vessels like a fifty-year-old, what they’re saying is that the person has endothelial dysfunction.
COVID-19, itself, causes a highly aggressive form of endothelial dysfunction, so if someone has pre-existing endothelial dysfunction, it stacks. They get viral sepsis atop dysfunction, and additional oxidative stress atop redox equilibrium issues. The most crucial public health directive to stave off COVID-19 would literally be to tell everyone who is capable of doing so to diet and exercise immediately to improve their endothelial health and get rid of chronic oxidative stress, which would, in fact, shield them from the virus.
Instead, they’ve pushed barely tested, fraudulent nucleic acid vaccines developed with DARPA grant money and shady venture capital, which make people’s cells express amyloidogenic, inflammatory, genotoxic Spike proteins, prompting the immune system to attack and destroy any cells that the lipid nanoparticles transfect, which would include heart muscle cells, reproductive tissues, the spleen, liver, bone marrow, or basically anywhere that lipid nanoparticles can go, which is everywhere in the body. Spike proteins have motifs that resemble human proteins, which may promote autoantibody formation. You can’t use human cells as bioreactors to make a viral protein without consequences.
Making people take these vaccines as a condition of travel or continued employment is ridiculous. SARS-CoV-2 is endemic. It has animal reservoirs. It will never go away. You can’t vaccinate it away like smallpox. It will do what all respiratory viruses have done throughout history; evolution will attenuate its virulence. Our immune systems will produce antibodies against it. Most people around the world are seropositive already, vaccine or not. All the vaccine is doing is moving billions of dollars from public coffers into pharmaceutical companies.
Having small children receive this shot is absolutely criminal. The infection fatality rate of COVID-19 in someone who’s 60 to 69 years old is about 2.2%. In the 30 to 39 age range, it’s 0.08%. I happen to be in that age range. I contracted COVID-19 this past January. Ironically enough, I got it from someone who was vaccinated, since the vaccinated can, indeed, carry the virus and transmit it to others. It’s not a sterilizing vaccine, which means it’s absolutely useless.
I got over it with over-the-counter meds and supplements. I took Pepcid and Benadryl (which are not just histamine blockers, they’re antioxidants and inhibit the Fenton reaction), quercetin, curcumin, resveratrol, N-acetylcysteine, and so on. I’m fine. I don’t have any lasting negative effects from the virus. I had reactive arthritis in my arms, wrists, and fingers that lasted a couple months due to it, but that’s to be expected, given how the virus promotes lasting immune hyperactivation. COVID-19 “brain fog” is literally an Alzheimer’s-like regime of chronic inflammation, lipid peroxidation, and amyloidosis in the brain, triggered by the virus. I don’t have that, because I took fistfuls of antioxidants the entire time I was sick. I’m not consulting any notes or anything, here. I’m writing all of this out from memory.
In the 0 to 9 year old age group, the infection fatality rate of COVID-19 is 0.002%. It’s negligible. There is absolutely no reason for small children (or, honestly, anyone younger than sixty) to be inoculated against this virus, and with the adverse effects piling up and insurance company data showing mysterious deaths among young people, it is basically criminal to give this vaccine to toddlers.
The media have invented all kinds of nonsense to cover up vaccine adverse effects, from SADS, to ads insisting small children have always gotten strokes and heart attacks, to winter vagina. Manufactured Consent is a real phenomenon, and if Noam Chomsky pulled his head out of his behind for two seconds and read his own book, he’d see that we’re living in an artificially created illusory world manufactured by mass media. Full Spectrum Dominance. The conspirators have control over our institutions, our media, our healthcare, everything. They always planned to sweep the vaccine deaths under the rug, and this is evident by their behavior.
This is planned, deliberate democide and geronticide, aided and abetted by our governments. They’re using the virus and lethal kill shots for “demographic rebalancing”, to get rid of elderly workers before they can retire and collect social security. The conspirators want to pocket it. All of it. The Welfare State is dead. Unionism is dead. All that’s left is for a bunch of Wall Street vultures to pick the carcass clean, enrich themselves on the public dime, and secure more assets and more luxuries for themselves while depriving the rest of us of our living standards and killing our parents.
David Martin is fundamentally correct. COVID-19 was not a “lab accident”. It is an ongoing crime. The criminal cartel of pharma and media executives and equally criminal public officials responsible for it need to be charged and prosecuted, immediately. There was no lab leak. There was no natural zoonosis. This was a planned, deliberate attack on the free people of the world. They made you stop vacationing, they banned you from bars, restaurants, and theaters. They muzzled your faces. They caused your children irreparable psychological damage. There were untold numbers of suicides. Joblessness. Homelessness. Tens of millions of people were pushed into food insecurity and starvation by supply chain disruptions. This was a comprehensive attack on humanity, sponsored by our own governments. Our own institutions. Our own hospitals. The people we entrust our lives to.
The murderers who did this to us are not anonymous. They have names, and they will be held accountable.
-Spartacus
This article and audio are licensed under CC BY-SA 4.0. To view a copy of this license, visit http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/
Spartacast 02