All tagged pandemic

The Mystery of SARS-CoV-2: Why does it kill some and not others?

The Mystery of SARS-CoV-2: Why does it kill some and not others?

Tatiana Prophet
Health Care

The key to virus and vaccine side effects is the deadly spike protein that can bind to cells all over the body

PHOTO: Rutland (Mass.) Police Detective John Songy and his wife Joanne Songy. Both were hospitalized with Covid-19 in the spring of 2020. John didn’t make it.

By Tatiana Prophet

The SARS-CoV-2 virus attaches to a type of cell receptor that is found almost everywhere in the body, including white and red blood cells. So it would seem obvious why people have such widely differing symptoms. This is not just a respiratory disease.

The body’s ACE2 receptors are the locks that the virus’s iconic spike protein “key” penetrates. And these “locks” are found in the lungs, kidneys, gut and brain. This is why preventing cell entry is so important – and by many accounts, is not as complicated as we’ve been led to believe. This is why keeping the body environment hostile to the virus is easing the fears of many who seek healthy food, clean air, exercise and an alkaline bodily environment.

COVID-19 TIMELINE: PREDICTION AND DIAGNOSIS

COVID-19 TIMELINE: PREDICTION AND DIAGNOSIS

Tatiana Prophet
Health Care

By TATIANA PROPHET

A healthy society should not only have one voice. - Dr. Li Wenliang, reluctant whistleblower, who died of Covid-19 in Wuhan, China, after warning his fellow doctors to be alert in their facilities, on a private chat system. Someone leaked his comments and he was reprimanded publicly by police.

NOVEMBER 9, 2015 RALPH BARIC, AN INFECTIOUS-DISEASE RESEARCHER AT THE UNIVERSITY OF NORTH CAROLINA AT CHAPEL HILL, published a study on his team’s efforts to engineer a chimeric virus with the surface protein of the SHC014 coronavirus, found in horseshoe bats in China, and the backbone of one that causes human-like severe acute respiratory syndrome (SARS) in mice. The hybrid virus could infect human airway cells and caused disease in mice, according to the team’s results, which were published in Nature Medicine. The team included four scientists from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, one from the Key Laboratory of Special Pathogens in Wuhan, China, one from Zurich and two from Harvard.