Rhonda Patrick Makes a Case for Wearing Masks During the Pandemic

That's what's crazy about this. There's so many variables in terms of how people are affected by it and what goes wrong. Because there are so many variables. There's your genetics. There's your immune system. How is your immune system shaped? There's your diet that's included in it, your vitamin D status. The other interesting thing, and there's been no studies with SARS-CoV-2, but there have been influenza studies showing that viral dose, it's really interesting studies that have been done where, I don't know who volunteers for these studies, but sign me up to get influenza. I want to be... Right. Let's give me a full load of virus. They somehow get healthy people to do that. There's been these studies where people are intranasal. They'll give them various titers of influenza virus. And they try, the point of the studies to figure out what viral dose, and they have a measurement in tissue culture number or whatever. To make people have symptoms. And they found with influenza, I forgot which A or something, I think, one of the strains, it was like they could do a certain dose, like 10 to the seven in tissue culture or whatever units, where 70% of the people would get symptoms ranging from fever, cough, and all the influenza flu symptoms. But then when they went down from 10 to the seven, let's say they went down to 10 to the five, only 10% of people were getting symptoms. So it's interesting that viral dose, at least with influenza, and there's actually been some other studies, I think measles also, that it is a thing, not something that you want to go and experiment with yourself, but that's another possibility. For sure, when you hear about nurses. Yes. They're getting way more sick. That could be one reason. Their actual job is to be around infected people, and they're intubating these people. They're doing chest compressions. They're getting their respiratory droplets. Oh, yeah, they're getting it right in their faces. With some of them, they have poor PPE, especially in the beginning, when you were seeing these people that were using makeshift masks and trying to... It's horrible. I think with the masks, for people... Reopening the economy, and some places have been more successful, even in Japan and stuff where... The wearing the mask, the cloth mask doesn't do much to prevent you from breathing in maybe a respiratory droplet or something, or aerosol. But it will prevent you from spreading it. To a certain degree, I get that people don't want to wear masks. It sucks. Who wants to wear a mask? But maybe to open up the economy again, now, maybe everyone could wear a mask if they're going to be inside around a bunch of people, grocery stores, theaters. It's certainly better than keeping the economy closed. It's better than keeping the economy closed. I'll be willing to do it. It's not going to be forever. You know why it's not going to be forever? Because we're going to figure this stuff out. We are. We're already finding repurposed therapeutics. The monoclonal antibodies, people are working on that. That's going to be coming soon. The monoclonal antibodies. Remember, you were talking about the llamas? So the whole point of that is that they're identifying antibodies that can neutralize the virus, and they're going to grow them and manufacture them and give them to people. It'll help treat. Eventually, they'll identify one that works. What kind of a timeline do you think they have for something like this? I think that these therapeutics can start... So, remdesivir has already been identified, and they may start to identify other ones, like the pancreatitis drug in Japan, chemistat, something. There's the Pepcid. I mean, there's a lot of different repurposing drugs that are being investigated. I think over the next couple of months, and then Regeneron's already doing one of these monoclonal antibodies, I think in the next couple of months, we'll have more therapeutics than we have right now. That'll make things less scary. People will be less scared of getting sick because they'll have a better idea of, oh, we have some more things that can therapeutically treat this successfully. Hopefully people are going to start looking at the vitamin D. I really hope that. If not, just I hope people are going to take their vitamin D or ask their doctor to take it. But yeah, I think then a couple of months, so can you wear a mask for a couple of months? Here's why it's not going to work to just have the people that are vulnerable wear the mask, because the cloth mask isn't going to prevent them from getting the aerosolized drop. If you're spreading it and asymptomatic, which it's been shown that if you are asymptomatic, that CDC study I mentioned a while ago about how pre-symptomatic versus asymptomatic, after a week when they came back to measure the people again, they found that out of the 13, 10 of them actually did get symptoms. The other three that were asymptomatic, they were spreading, sorry, shedding as much virus that could make them basically contagious and basically able to transmit it to others. That's so strange. The point is that I think that I know people don't want to wear masks. I have family members that think it's infringing their freedom. It does suck. I know people are worried. The thing is also children, I don't know how to tackle that issue because it's really hard. That seems a little more difficult. But adults, I think that if you're working, you want to open your restaurant back up. Masks, I think that seems like a good compromise, right? It does.