This is the story of COVID-19, Malaria and Chloroquine

Preparation is everything, and so a few words are in order. The following discussion is theoretical only.  Although I speak of malaria, it does not necessarily follow that the mutation I speak of must be the mutation that we all know and love with regard to sickle cell anemia. The body is diverse, and the body may respond with any number of mutations to protect itself in any number of organs.  The theoretical receptor I speak of may be a receptor yet to be discovered.

I chose the disease malaria because malaria was endemic to Rome, because Rome conquered the known world, and because the countries and areas hardest hit by COVID-19 were those that Rome conquered.  Let’s keep in mind that if Italians came to New York and took over the joint, then Rome, and all its attendant genetics, came as well.

With that stated, a long time ago in a land far far away there were people who lived in the Mediterranean basin.  And they were all there, Italians, Persians to name but a few.  Life was good for them but, alas, life was not perfect. One had to live with the maladies of life. Then as today people had to live with their neighbors. And in the case of these peoples there was a neighbor who had never been kind to them.  This neighbor’s name was ‘bad air.’  

We know it today as malaria.

And so to live with this bad air, the people adjusted. Not consciously. Their bodies did it for them, automatically, in the middle of the night while they were asleep, sometimes in the middle of the day while they were awake. Thankfully this is the way the human body works; we don’t always need to think.

So, let’s do some diagrams.

We will have native peoples north and south of the Alps.   The people north of the Alps will not be endemically exposed to malaria. The people south of the Alps will.  Let us call their peculiar genetics the Nordic genome and Italian genome respectively.

Each will have a receptor “somewhere”  through which the “malaria juice” – MJ – enters and attaches.  

On day zero, both their receptors will look the same.

The “malaria juice” will look like this:

Day Zero

 

On Day One, the receptor will mutate in those people south of the Alps in order to mitigate the effects of malaria.

Day One

So you can see that the “malaria juice” can not get a snug fit in those south of the Alps, therefore it loses effectiveness.  It can still attach, but not quite as effectively.  So you get 1/2 the action and less bang for the buck.

Now, the people north of the Alps are still affected in the same old way, but they aren’t exposed to malaria to the same degree as their neighbors south of the Alps because they live in colder climes.

On Day Two, some peasant tests out this tree bark called Cinchona, and it works; it treats malaria to a decent degree.  How does it work?  It works by blocking the “malaria juice” from attaching to the receptor. Today we call that tree bark Chloroquine.

The chloroquine molecule has a molecular configuration that looks similar to but not precisely like the “malaria juice.” 

Day Two

Day Three

Rome conquers the known western world, south of the Alps, 1/2 of England, 1/2 of the Netherlands.  Rome does not conquer north of the Alps, nor north of Hadrian’s Wall.  Ditto to the northern Netherlands.  Germania and the Vikings are safe.  Rome does conquer Anatolia but the Seljuk Turks, who possess a Nordic genome, eventually take over the place between 1071 and the mid 1400s.

Day Four

Immigration comes to America.  People north of the  Alps enter through Pennsylvania cut through the mid-section of the country take a right hand turn in Illinois and then settle up in Wisconsin and  Minnesota.  People south of the Alps enter first through New Orleans, then switch to New York, Philly (to a lesser degree) and take over the New England area. Some go to Detroit, Miami, Las Vegas.

Day Five

Unenlightened yahoos open their new chemistry set courtesy of Watson and Crick and invent a bio-weapon to attack Iran.  They exploit a receptor in the lungs that they feel only Iranians possess.  After studying  the effects of falciparum malaria on the lungs and learning that malaria is hugely endemic to Iran, they invent COVID-19, take it to Wuhan where it can be dragged back to Iran.  Then they blame it on a wet market.  Nice try.

Here is but one male receptor that can be expressed by the COVID-19 virus.

Does the shape look familiar? Yep, here are the modified male receptors as they connect with their female companions.

These unenlightened, poorly read yahoos developed a virus that fits perfectly into the Italian genome that had been modified by virtue of having been exposed to malaria. What these monkeys failed to consider is human migration over thousands of years.  Italians descended from Persians.  Or one might say that both Iranians and Italians came from the same stock of people in the Mediterranean basin.

The male COVID-19 male receptor will fit less well into the Nordic genome, but enough to cause some damage.

Now there are probably peoples with genomes that sit halfway between the Nordic and Italian genomes.

Day Six

Unenlightened yahoos burn down the neighborhood, then blame it on China.

Day Seven

Normal people of the world wake up and insist on real changes to their leadership.  Bio-weapons are seen as not feasible because knowledge of ancestry and human migration patterns will always be imperfect. 

Discussion

Now, off course this is a theoretical model to illustrate a point. This is a starter, an appetizer.  No claims are made as to where in the human body this receptor exists.

What is evident is that the chloroquine molecule needs to be studied and altered so that it can fit into the Italian genome.  We may need two types of chloroquine molecules – one for the north and one for the south.  Or we may need to invent a new molecule that does what chloroquine does, only better. That’s where the money is.

Once the receptor is blocked much mortality can be prevented.

There is no way to do it except through trial and error because this receptor could be anywhere; and it’s not like we have a lot of time – thanks to the ill-advised lockdown.

The model above only exists to demonstrate the relationship between malaria, COVID-19 and chloroquine effectiveness.

Clearly chloroquine is effective against both maladies.  Given that both COVID-19 and plasmodium, in its different stages, seemingly have different structures, one must conclude that the chloroquine is acting at the receptor level on the lung tissue.  Now it could also be that there is a level before the level upon which chloroquine is working.  But it is clear that it is working on some final common pathway.

At this point, it may not be necessary to isolate the receptor where chloroquine is working as long as we know that the structure of chloroquine is important and that there is a final common pathway upon which chloroquine is working.  We would only need to manipulate the chloroquine molecule.  This is the poor man’s way out of the problem.  It’s like following McDonalds.  Where McDonalds goes, we go.  Let McDonalds do the heavy lifting.

How do we test this theory?  Develop a better Chloroquine molecule.

I had originally intended to do a discussion of sickle cell anemia and link that malady to this discussion but then realized the discussion was moot because, as I have already pointed out, the body responds to an invader in multiple ways as evidenced by the plethora of theories as to how chloroquine works in malaria.

Everyone has their pet theory, and now you know mine.

Archer Crosley, MD

McAllen, TX 78501

Sunday, May 10, 2020

Copyright 2020   Archer Crosley   All Rights Reserved

Who was our biggest enemy?

Hitler?  Stalin?  Mao?  Castro?  Idi Amin?  Gaddafi?  Ayatollah Khomeini?  Saddam Hussein?  Bin Laden?  Kim Jong Un?

So many enemies, eh?  What could we possibly have done to warrant so many?

Alas, none of these illustrious men fits the bill.

Our biggest enemy has always been right here at home residing in the Ivory Tower.

That’s right, our biggest enemy are the home-grown terrorists in our nation’s universities.

For over 90 years now, these academics and their disciples have worked tirelessly around the clock to screw up the economy and the welfare of the nation.

I suppose craziness must occur at least once in your lifetime. If you’re lucky, it can occur twice.  In the case of my mother, who is 94, it can occur three times.

The first craziness occurred in the administration of Franklin Delano Roosevelt. While Roosevelt did many good things, listening to crackpot academics was not one of them. These nutters convinced FDR that the problem in the Great Depression was not fear but low prices.  

According to the crackpots, since low prices decreased the revenue for the shopkeeper that in turn forced him to let go of employees, why then the solution must be to raise prices.

If only prices could be elevated, why then the shopkeeper would have enough revenue to employ his workers.  These employed people would then have the money to buy things.

That sounds good on paper; unfortunately, the game is not played on paper.

Shopkeepers were lowering their prices because people were hoarding their money.  People were hoarding their money because they were scared. Creating artificial shortages, which was what Roosevelt did after listening to the crackpots, didn’t alleviate the fear; it increased fear because prices rose.  Thus people bought less.

What transpired was a quagmiring of the Depression brought about by playing the game on paper.

When you play the game on paper, it’s a snap to conclude that you can reverse the engine by simply raising prices.  

Yet, it’s nonsense, because fear is the dog, and price is the tail.

The tail doesn’t wag the dog; the dog wags the tail.

Fear and confidence together are the defining context of the economy.  Prices rise and fall within that context.

The second craziness came about with Robert McNamara’s prosecution of the Vietnam war.  Although McNamara wasn’t technically an academic, he sure acted like one.

McNamara’s contribution to insanity was to fight a war with statistics.  Increasing body count was one of his principal goals.  Winning battles was another.  Apparently Bob never heard of a pyrrhic victory.

Just show me the bodies, Jerry!

Show me the bodies!

That nutty philosophy led to racking up numbers in order to win the war. 

What McNamara must have concluded was that since winners of wars generally win more battles and kill more people, it must necessarily follow that  greater body counts and more victories will result in a successful war.  

That looks great on paper, right?  

Not so fast, Bob. Successful wars are prosecuted in an organic manner by generals who apply realistic strategies that involve tactics other than killing.  A customary but not mandatory byproduct of that realistic prosecution is a greater body count and more battles won.  The war must still be fought realistically.  Plus the goal of war is to sell people to your way of thinking; if the general can accomplish this without killing, then the general will do so.

Because we did not follow that time-honored advice, we won the battles and killed millions but ultimately lost the war –  a war that was protracted because we eschewed the sensible and realistic course of action.

Again the dog wags the tail; the tail does not wag the dog.

Nice going, Bob.

This leads us to the third craziness. It does so because the spirit of Robert McNamara lives on. Oh, yes, he has so many disciples in government today.  Healthcare is chock full of them; and they stand ready with their metrics to save you from reality.

This third craziness is rooted in lowering the R₀ value.

Like McNamara, Gates and Fauci are fixated on numbers and statistics, only in this case it’s a lower body count and a lower R₀ value.  Indeed, lowering the R₀ value is the holy grail for Gates and Fauci.  It is the basis for the lockdown. Now, of course, if you have read any of my writings before, you know that the lockdown, otherwise known as extreme social distancing, has never been tried out in the real world until now. That’s right, you’re a guinea pig.

Here Gates and Fauci are fighting the coronavirus war.  Since successful wars against viruses generally result in lower R₀ values, it must necessarily follow that lowering the R₀ value will result in a successful war. 

Again we have people playing the game on paper, not understanding that the tail does not wag the dog. 

In the real world successful, virus wars are won because people become infected naturally or through vaccination.  A consequence of this is a lowering of the R₀ value.  In the paper world, R₀ values are lowered first by locking people up in their houses.  The problem with this approach is that someday these coronavirus virgins must come out of the house.  And when they do, the R₀ value will rise and more people will die.  

 Essentially Gates and Fauci have prolonged the battle. They have kicked the can down the road. They have accomplished nothing.

As did McNamara; as did FDR’s crackpot economists.

 

Archer Crosley, MD

McAllen, TX

Tuesday, May 12, 2020

 

Copyright 2020   Archer Crosley   All Rights Reserved