OFFENSE VS. DEFENSE
Today I want to introduce you to a functional medical doctor, Dr. Justin Marchegiani whose podcasts were recommended to me by one of our former apprentices. I've fallen in love with this guy. I highly recommend you look at a couple of his presentations. They ain't on the news.
None of this is original with me, but it resonates with my thinking. All of us tend to like folks whose thinking jives with ours, right? The response to coronavirus can be divided quite clearly between rural and urban, between liberal and conservative, between entrepreneurs and bureaucrats. Much of our response and our thinking about this comes from our perspective: what we're watching, who we trust, what we believe.
Dr. Marchegiani's recipe for dealing with the outbreak differs dramatically with the current orthodoxy. First, he says we need to appreciate the different vulnerabilities of risk classes. To refuse to appreciate different classes of risk simply prolongs the agony. The weak and elderly are vulnerable; for them, practicing defense is important. Try not to let them get it. Social distancing, reduced visitation, travel, etc. all make sense.
But the other side of the coin is offense. Offense recognizes a couple of things. First, 90 percent of everyone who gets it is completely asymptomatic. That means millions of us are walking around either having gotten it or at least having been exposed to it but had enough immunological function to protect us.
Herd immunity kicks in at 60 percent exposure; this is a biological law. The faster a population can hit that 60 percent exposure level, the faster the virus has no place to go. He says this level creates a "protective barrier" to the disease spread. I don't know about you, but I want to get there as fast as possible.
"We should have kept the economy open for the healthy" is his way of expressing an offensive medical strategy. While there are hot spots and vulnerabilities, most areas are neither. To lump every locality or business into the same stipulations simply lengthens the time to get to herd immunity, which is the tipping point we all want to see. To put the whole nation on defensive posture does not make medical, emotional, economic, or social sense.
And yes, he agrees with my demand for immuno-boosting protocols. Vitamin C, Vitamin D, sunshine, sleep. Why can't any public health official say a word about immunity? It's because we've drunk the defense Kool-aid, huddling in our quarters until some vaccine can be invented. Folks, no vaccine is going to stop this any more than the flu vaccines stop the flu. Already some 6 or 8 strains of this COVID-19 have developed. You don't stop this stuff with vaccine, as much as the pharmaceutical companies would love to sell that message.
You identify highly vulnerable populations and highly non-vulnerable populations and then let them adopt appropriate protocols accordingly. He calls the death projections "hysteria math" due to the prejudice toward blaming the virus on deaths. It skews everything. I encourage anyone intrigued by this alternative view to check him out. And I'll repeat Peter Bane's famous line in his permaculture book, that in times of great epochal change, the most important equity in a culture is the freedom for opposing viewpoints to be expressed. Amen, Peter.
Are you ready for some offense?