This year's flu shot side effects gave me a COVID scare but I would take it again

    I got my flu shot six days ago. I would do it again but this year it was not fun.

    I had two days of arm soreness that was a little worse than normal. I didn’t think much of it. Then came the weekend and I spent most of Saturday and Sunday sleeping. I am lazy, but when I finally managed to get out of the bed I headed downstairs and hit the couch. I was just completely exhausted.

    Monday morning came and I felt sick, with the muddled feeling that one gets when coming down with a virus, plus I had a little bit of a cough and the edge of a sore throat. I didn’t connect it with my flu shot so I headed over to the RedMed clinic in New Albany to get an instant COVID-19 test. It came out negative. For good measure they did a flu test, strep test, and general viral test, all of which came out negative. They told me in all likelihood it was a reaction to my flu shot, but insisted on doing a PCR test. I got the negative result on that test late today.

    I’ve never had a bad reaction to a flu shot before, and while it wasn’t pleasant the good news is that the strong reaction means I developed a strong immune response to this year’s flu strains. With all of the precautions we’re taking against COVID-19, I don’t anticipate a bad flu season, but it is possible to have both the flu and COVID-19 at the same time and I don’t think that would be a good thing at all. Most people have no problems at all with their flu shots, so by all means get one.

    My case of the mini-flu included two days of exhaustion followed by two days of feeling pretty bad. I am mostly better but am going to spend one more day at home for good measure. I’m glad I don’t have the Rona as of yet and that I don’t have to face the flu shot again for another year. And a couple of days of feeling a little bit bad is better than actually catching the flu – especially this year.

I said it in February and it's true today: Vitamin D important key to surviving COVID-19 infection

Marik Protocol (Click to Enlarge)

    Back in late February 2020 I mentioned the importance of taking Vitamins C & D as a way to ameliorate symptoms of a COVID-19 infection, which at that time I said we all would eventually get. I also recommended taking a low-dose of a statin if a doctor had recommended one in the past. Many people quit taking statins due to muscle pain when the solution is simply to lower the dose or frequency.

    That wasn’t my only advice. In February I also urged the wearing of masks in crowded places and called on churches to stop the repulsive practice of forcing congregants to rush around and shake hands during the service. And I suggested researching various drugs that might have been effective against SARS-02 and MERS, assuming that they might also be effective against COVID-19. (I also suggested stocking up on grocery staples such as hamburger meat; folks, you need to listen to me!).

    On May 2, 2002, I blogged again, and far more explicitly stated the importance of Vitamin D in battling COVID-19. I also shared the Marik Protocol, shown above, and pointed out that the best time to “treat” the virus was in advance. The Marik Protocol has been modified since May to include the heartburn medicine Pepsid, which is available over the counter and has been shown to be effective against the COVID-19 virus. My early advice is being proven correct.

    One thing to keep in mind is that in battling COVID-19 we must never rely on double-blind studies. They are far too dangerous and time consuming. Instead we must study correlations and analyze whether there is a scientific basis for such correlation. The correlation between Vitamin D deficiency and COVID-19 lethality is now about as sharp as such a correlation can be.

    I would urge everyone to follow the Marik Protocol, which now consists of:

• Vitamin C, 500 mg, morning and night (no harm in taking more)
• Vitamin D, 1000-4000 iu daily
• Zinc, 75-100 mg per day for one or two months, then cut dose by half
• Quercetin, 250 to 500 mg, morning and night
• Melatonin, up to 2 mg at night
• Pepsid, 10-20 mg morning and night

    Consider adding to the above a low-dose multi-vitamin and a selenium supplement.

    After this whole thing is over I’d like to see the FDA disbanded. They should be telling people right now to take Vitamin D, if nothing else, but the agency is doing nothing. Instead, they sit around waiting for double-blind studies, by which time the virus will be gone or we’ll all be dead.

    I wrote extensively about Vitamin D deficiency in my earlier post, so no need to repeat it here, save that supplementation is especially important for blacks. I would urge you to read about this. Unlike the case with most vitamins, it is possible to overdose on Vitamin D, so taking 10,000 iu daily is probably a bad idea unless you are having regular blood work.

    As a matter of public policy we need to encourage every citizen to follow the Marik Protocol, exercise caution, and go on about their lives. Simple precautions can keep us alive and keep our country going.

New film portrays whites as slaves and blacks as owners, but there is no need for fantasy world

A European woman being sold in an African slave market

    In the spirit of the times a new movie, called “Cracka,” features blacks as slave owners and whites as slaves. I rarely watch movies but do get a bit of sad amusement out of the crap that is being produced these days.
    What I find odd is that the movie is based in the United States instead of Africa, where more than a million whites were enslaved by Africans. In comparison, approximately 388,000 Africans were brought to the American colonies or later to the United States. Although the slavers were North African, many were what we would consider today as black.
    The bulk of the kidnapings began in the 1500s and continued until the United States, tired of its citizens being kidnaped and sold into slavery, defeated the Barbary States in our nation’s first war, fought from 1801 to 1805. The defeat of these slaver states ended with the American flag being raised over Tripoli, a fact commemorated by the Marine hymn which includes the phrase “to the shores of Tripoli.” The United States again used military force against the pirates in 1815.
    There is no need for some masturbatory fantasy flic about whites being slaves to blacks. White slavery is a historical fact. Stories based on or incorporating true facts almost always have more impact than made-up fantasy films. We need a film showcasing the lives of white slaves and their black owners, but “Cracka” doesn’t pass muster at all.

One study shows popular cough suppressant helps the COVID-19 virus reproduce

    Some important COVID-19 news. I'll be brief
    There have been a lot of studies about repurposing existing drugs to fight the coronavirus. These studies hold tremendous promise. Researchers who have tested these compounds have found a few that hold promise. But the were surprised to find that dextromethorphan, the cough suppressant found in Robitussin DM and Nyquil, actually aided in the replication of the coronavirus.
    This was an animal study, so it might not be a problem in "real life." But the best choice, in my view, if to avoid dextromethorphan like the plague.
    I've touted the non-narcotic drug benzonatate (Tessalon Pereles) before, but it is an outstanding cough suppressant. One front-line doctor has blogged that this is an excellent drug for treating the dry cough that comes with COVID-19. I also have had luck (for acid reflux cough) with over-the-counter Chloraseptic lozenges which contain benzocaine. The only choices I know of other than these are various opiods, which doctors are scared to death to prescribe. Pick your poison, just don't take dextromethorphan!

The best time to "cure" COVID-19 is to treat it in advance with vitamins and supplements

Click to enlarge

    There is a lot of talk and argument about the best way to treat the COVID-19 virus. There is no officially recognized treatment, so it's pretty much every man for himself. This is a disease that has to be treated with hunches, not clinical trials. It seems to me the “cure” for the coronavirus would be to treat it in advance with vitamins, dietary supplements, and perhaps prescription drugs.
    The randomness of COVID-19 is scary. Most people apparently have little problem with this virus, with many being infected without even knowing it. Others are ravaged by it. Age and physical condition explain a lot of this, but it’s still scary.
    Vitamin deficiencies seem to be playing a huge role in who gets sick and who gets really sick or dies. More than two months ago I suggested taking decent doses of Vitamins C & D, along with a statin if a doctor had suggested one. This is now an official treatment protocol at at least one hospital (see below).

Vitamin D deficiency, by race

    Blacks have been especially hard hit by the coronavirus. Forty percent of whites have a Vitamin D deficiency; for blacks that number if more like 80 percent, because dark skin doesn’t produce as much Vitamin D as light skin. These figures are for the absolute minimum Vitamin D levels. Some experts say more Vitamin D is beneficial. With a higher threshold almost no blacks and fewer than 50 percent of whites have enough Vitamin D. The disparate racial impact of the virus might very well be in large part due to Vitamin D deficiency. I am at a loss as to why state and national leaders haven’t been urging people to take more Vitamin D or to spend more time outdoors, because there can be no harm from this. Instead they are closing beaches in an effort to deny the populace access to the sun.
    The chart at the top of this blog post shows a treatment protocol developed by Dr. Paul Marik, Chief of Pulmonary and Critical Care Medicine at Eastern Virginia Medical School. For prevention he calls for:

• Vitamin C, 500 mg, morning and night
• Vitamin D, 1000-4000 iu daily
• Zinc, 75-100 mg per day for one or two months, then cut dose by half
• Quercetin, 250 to 500 mg, morning and night
• Melatonin, up to 2 mg at night

• To the above Dr. Reb would add selenium

    Quercetin is a zinc ionophone, which is a fancy was of saying it helps zinc get into the body’s cells. Melatonin is an over-the-counter sleep aid with antiviral properties. Computer models show that both of these compounds might actually bind with the COVID-19 or Wuhan virus (the operative word here is “might"). But even without the binding there is plenty of benefit.
    To Dr. Marik’s prevention or pre-infection protocol I would add the need for a selenium supplement, the best source of which may be a multi-vitamin. A study in China found huge differences in COVID-19 cure rates based on regional differences in selenium levels. Much of China has virtually no selenium in the soil and thus the citizenry has low selenium levels in their bodies. A few areas have ultra-high selenium levels. Those in the selenium-rich areas had cure rates three times the average; those with the lowest selenium levels had death rates five times the average. (Why, oh why, did this report decide to use different measurements, cure vs. death rate, for the high- and low-selenium groups?)!
    Most Americans have enough selenium, but a little more won’t hurt. It is far better to have selenium and not need it than to need selenium and not have it. A good multi-vitamin can provide this, along with any other trace minerals that might help in the fight against a virus.
    It’s important to adjust our thinking insofar as a “cure” for the Wuhan virus is concerned. Most of us will get it at some point; a delay in infection will just give us much better treatment options -- hopefully far better than the ones I've outlined above. The only cure for this virus is not to die and to recover with little or no damage to our bodies. For those who prep their bodies in advance COVID-19 is likely to be like the flu, or even like a very mild cold. For those with severe vitamin or mineral deficiencies, hello Grim Reaper.
    Beat COVID-19 by treating it now. I've given you the recipe, so at this point the choice is yours.
 

Elections have consequences; many Democrats have promised to bring back forced busing

These Charlotte, N.C., students are being forcibly bused into the inner city to attend school in 1973. What an incredibly unpleasant experience!

    It's easy to forget that we're in the middle of a presidential campaign. On one side we have Donald Trump, a loudmouth who always says the wrong thing but usually does the right thing. On the other we have a completely senile Joe Biden, who has been pushed far to the left by a Democrat party that is now an uneasy alliance of America's fringe groups.
    During the primaries virtually all of the Democrat candidates said they supported greater federal efforts to desegregate schools; many stridently advocated for forced busing, one of the most unpopular edicts our courts have ever imposed on the American citizenry. The definition of "segregation" has somehow been changed so that it applies to any school or program whose enrollment doesn't exactly reflect the surrounding population. For example, a highly competitive New York City school with a 30 percent white population has been described as "segregated" because only 15 percent of that city's public school students are white. The only real way to achieve the desegregation goals these leftists hold dear is through forced busing over very long distances.
    Busing, like communism or socialism, works in the short term. But in the long term it's pretty ineffective because people just move away; the same is true of other radical desegregation efforts. Leftists lament the 1974 Milliken v. Bradley, 418 U.S. 717, busing case in which the Supreme Court chose not to force busing on innocent children whose parents or school districts had never discriminated against anyone. The leftist view is that it is perfectly okay for children to be forced to spend hours on a bus every day being carted across two or more counties in order for schools to have perfect racial balance.
    I required my children to ride public school buses either to or from school for a few years. They are adults now but have made it clear that what I did was a moral wrong. School buses are just unpleasant and children who have less are often mean as snakes to those who have more. My kids finally impressed on me the importance of my dropping them off and picking them up for school. Their physical and mental well-being demanded it.
    In Oxford it took my kids almost 70 minutes of bus-riding time to get home. I wanted to let them take the bus from home to school but found they would have to get up every morning before 5 a.m. in order to catch a 6 a.m. bus to school. That's just too much. Of course, if they had been subject to some sort of Democrat busing scheme they would have had to spend four or five hours every day being carted to some school district in a neighboring county. It's just ridiculous, and people who support forced busing are truly evil.
    The photo at the top of this post shows innocent children from suburban and rural areas around Charlotte, North Carolina being forced to ride unpleasant buses taking them to and from that city's inner-city schools. Notice how extraordinarily crowded this bus is! No child should have to endure that, or at the least they deserve to be paid a high hourly wage for their suffering. Democrats effectively turned these children into uncompensated slaves, but of course the Democrats have always been the party of slavery.
    And could there be a greater vector for the transmission of disease than these dreadful school buses? If Democrats have their way Americans kids are going to be herded onto these buses by the millions, thus ensuring massive transmission of the COVID-19 and other viruses. They don't care how many millions of Americans get sick or die from their forced busing schemes so long as they are allowed to engage in their grand social-tinkering.
    Americans have a choice. We can elect a senile old man whose controllers are going to force our nation's innocent school children to spend hundreds of millions of hours on unpleasant school buses, all so they can be forced to attend schools in slum areas. Or we can vote for Donald Trump.
    It's a simple choice of good versus evil. Those who are evil can support Biden. Those who are good can support Trump. For me, and for anyone with children or who remembers raising children, the choice is easy.

Wuhan likely virus wasn't created in a lab, but lab negligence released it on the world

    Everyone seems to be debating whether the Wuhan virus came from a lab; the leftist media insists that it came from a "wet" market. The fact that this debate could even take place is evidence of how stupid the national media is.
    What do we know? We know that China has 1.3 billion people and that Wuhan has 8 million of them, or a little over one-half of one percent of the country's population. We know that "wet markets" where wild and exotic animals are bought and sold are present all over China, and that these wet markets are a vector for contagion. We also know that Wuhan has China's only Level 4 biological lab. Crunch these numbers and the odds of this virus starting in a Wuhan wet market are less than one in one hundred as there are so many other cities where it could have started. It simply is not reasonably possible for this virus to have started in a wet market a few hundred feet from a lab containing massive amounts of deadly pathogens.
    Note that I am not claiming that the Wuhan virus was "created" in a laboratory. Chinese scientists were on record as being very aggressive in isolating and preserving various bat viruses. There is no need to create a virus in the lab when one can isolate hundreds of them from the bat population. Several Chinese scientists reported that the virus originated in the Wuhan lab only to find them selves silenced and perhaps even dead.
    The only real question is whether or not China intentionally release this virus on the world. My inclination is no. Although there has been video evidence of Chinese citizens intentionally infecting public areas, I find it highly unlikely that the release of this virus was intentional. Equally unlikely is that this virus was released by anything other than negligence at the Wuhan biolab.
    I don't believe the Chinese government released this virus on purpose, but I do believe that it is 100-percent culpable in the release of the virus negligently. Those who would maintain otherwise need to explain mathematically why my view is wrong.