COVID-19 : Why is it attacking those it does?

sp331yi

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Here is an excerpt from Wired putting forth the very old Botany concept to Disease Tolerance in a new light in regards to the current pandemic. If nothing else, it presents a way of thinking that is scientific rather than emotional. Hope (the key word) it helps!

Un-Miracle Drugs Could Help Tame the Pandemic


A new idea for how to fight pandemics came to David Fedson as he walked through
Lausanne on a sunny spring afternoon in 2004. That a global catastrophe was on
Fedson's mind even as he made his way along the Swiss city's scenic streets was
not unusual. Fedson, who studied medicine at Yale and trained at Johns Hopkins,
had served on a number of national vaccination committees in the United States
. . .
By 2004, Fedson, now 82, had reached a scientific dead end. But, as he walked
through Lausanne, his thoughts rerouted sharply. If it would never be possible
to stop a pandemic viral infection with vaccines and antivirals in some
countries, maybe the virus itself was the wrong thing to treat. Maybe it made
more sense to treat people's bodies, once they became infected, so that they
could withstand whatever the virus had in store for them.
. . .
Ever since the idea came to him, Fedson, an American who lives in the
countryside of Eastern France with his wife, has been a literal voice in the
wilderness. He says he has repeatedly discussed his ideas with officials at WHO
and the CDC. He has reached out to private charities and has written one
scientific article and "letter to the editor" after another, calling for the
experiments that would put his idea to the test.
. . .
Fedson's idea of treating the body rather than targeting the virus was
soil-focused thinking. That he had returned to an idea from generations past
may have been more than a coincidence. His home, in France's
Auvergne-Rhône-Alpes region, is more than three centuries old. When he looks up
from his work in his home office, he can see the peak of Mont Blanc through the
window.

To this day, Fedson can?t comprehend why almost no one has been interested in
his idea of battling pandemics by targeting the body(what researchers refer to
as the 'host response')with generic drugs. When he talks about the idea, the
exasperation comes out in almost every other sentence. "Why we can?t have the
imagination to take advantage of what we've already got is just beyond me" he
says.
. . .
Fedson's frustration notwithstanding, the most surprising part of his story may
not be the way in which his thinking failed to gain traction in public health
circles but the way in which it slipped into mainstream academic science
through a back door. Unbeknownst to Fedson, as he was spending his retirement
as a full-time gadfly buzzing about world health officials, a graduate student
named Janelle Ayres was arriving at a similar line of thinking by studying
actual flies in a microbiology and immunology lab at Stanford.
. . .
 

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