Do The COVID Vaccines Affect Your Ability to Think?
Examining some of the common neurological injuries caused by vaccination
A Midwestern Doctor
Jul 20, 2023
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Cross-posted by
The Forgotten Side of Medicine
"I unfortunately cross posted the wrong AMD article yesterday. Take 2:

In my practice of treating vaccine injuries, one of the three most common symptoms I see is brain fog. So many of my patients had been in the prime of their lives, can now barely function, have significant cognitive impairment and need a lot of help from our nurses to carry out their treatment plans.

I never imagined I would see any of this in people far younger than me and instead I see it every day.

AMD did an excellent job illustrating the suffering I bear witness to on a daily basis, where it comes from, and most importantly, what needs to be looked at to treat it.

You need to read this article and take the time go review the heartbreaking comments on it from everyone else who has been through this too."
-
Pierre Kory, MD, MPA
Story at a Glance:
•Subtle and overt neurological injuries are one of the most common results of a pharmaceutical injury.
•The COVID-19 vaccines excel at causing damage to cognition, and many of us have noticed both subtle and over cognitive impairment following vaccination that relatively few people know how to address.
•For a long time, the hypothesis that the vaccines impaired cognition was “anecdotal” because it was based on individuals observing it in their peer group or patients.  Recently large datasets emerged which show this phenomenon is very real.
When the COVID-19 vaccines were brought to market, due to their design I expected them to have safety issues, and I expected over the long term, a variety of chronic issues would be linked to them.  This was because there were a variety of reasons to suspect they would cause autoimmune disorders, fertility issues and cancers—but for some reason (as shown by
the Pfizer EMA leaks
), the vaccines had been exempted from being appropriately tested for any of these issues prior to being given to humans.
Since all new drugs are required to receive that testing, I interpreted it to be a tacit admission it was known major issues would emerge in these areas, and that a decision was made that it was better to just not officially test any of them so there would be no data to show Pfizer knew the problems would develop.  Sadly, since the time the vaccines entered the market, those three issues (especially autoimmunity) have become some of the most common severe events associated with the vaccines.
The Forgotten Side of Medicine is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, please consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.
At the start of the vaccine rollout, there were four red flags to me:
•The early advertising campaigns for the vaccines mentioned that you would feel awful when you got the vaccine, but that was fine and a sign the vaccine was working.  Even with vaccines that had a very high rate of adverse events (e.g.,
the HPV vaccine
), had I never seen this mentioned.  This signified it was likely the adverse event rate with the spike protein vaccines would be much higher than normal.
•Many of my colleagues who got the vaccine (since they were healthcare workers they were able to get it first) posted on social media about just how awful they felt after getting the vaccine.  This was also something I had never seen with a previous vaccine.  After some digging, I noticed those with the worse vaccine reactions typically had already had COVID and had their reaction was to the second shot rather than the first, signifying that some type of increased sensitization was occurring from repeated exposures to the spike protein.  Likewise,
the published clinical trial
about Pfizer’s vaccine also showed adverse reactions were dramatically higher with the second rather than first shot.
•Once it became available to the general public, I immediately had patients start showing up with vaccine reactions, many of whom stated they received their flu shot each year and never had experienced something similar with a previous vaccination.  One of the most concerning things were the pre-exacerbation of autoimmune diseases (e.g., spots in their body they previously would occasionally have arthritis in all felt like they were on fire).  After I started looking into this I realized people were seeing between a 15-25% rate of new autoimmune disorders or exacerbations of existing autoimmune disorders developing after the vaccine (
later shown in an Israeli survey
), a massive increase I had never seen any previous vaccine cause.
•About a month after the vaccines were available to the public, I started having friends and patients share that they’d known someone who had unexpectedly died suddenly after receiving the vaccine (typically from a heart attack, stroke, or a sudden aggressive case of COVID-19).
This was extremely concerning to me, because reactions to a toxin typically distribute on a bell curve, with the severe ones being much rarer than the moderate ones.  This meant that if that many severe reactions were occurring, what I could already see was only the tip of the iceberg and far, far more less obvious reactions were going to be happening, to the point it was likely many people I knew would end up experiencing complications from the vaccine.
I tried to warn my colleagues about the dangers of this vaccine, but even when I pointed out Pfizer’s own trial admitted the vaccine was more likely to harm than help you, no one would listen to me.  Not being sure what else to do, but not be willing to do nothing, I decided
to start documenting
all the severe reactions I came across so I could have some type of “proof” to show my colleagues.
This was something that was extremely important at the time since no one was willing to take on the personal risk of publishing that something went against the narrative (that vaccines were killing people) in the peer reviewed literature.  Shortly after
Steve Kirsch
kindly helped launched my Substack, I decided
to post the log I’d put together
, and since there was a critical need for that information, the post went viral and created much of the initial reader base that made my substack possible.
It was immensely time consuming to do the project (especially the verification of the story that was reported to me), so I ended the project after a year.
During that time
, I came across 45 cases of either a death (these comprised the majority of the 45 cases), something I expected to be fatal later on (e.g., a metastatic cancer) or a permanent and total disability.  Additionally, in line with the previously described bell curve, I also came across many more serious but not quite as severe injuries.
Patterns of Vaccine Injury
I’ve had a long term interest in studying pharmaceutical injuries because many of my friends and relatives have had bad reactions to pharmaceuticals.  In most of these cases, ample data existed to show that reaction could happen (often to the degree it strongly argued against the pharmaceutical remaining on the market) and yet almost no one in the medical field was aware of those dangers, hence leading to my injured friends never being warned before they took the pharmaceutical or even while the injury was occurring.
My bell curve theory originally came about from examining all of their cases.  I thus was interested to know if the distribution of adverse events from the spike protein vaccines would match what I had observed with previous dangerous pharmaceuticals and if what I saw personally did or did not match what everyone was reporting online.
One of the things that immediately jumped out at me were the multiple cases of a friend’s parent in a nursing home receiving the vaccine, immediately undergoing a rapid cognitive decline which was “diagnosed” as Alzheimer’s disease and then dying not long after.  At the time, I assumed these were most likely due to undiagnosed ischemic strokes as that was the most plausible mechanism to describe what I’d heard, but I was not certain as I could never examine any of these individuals for signs a stroke had indeed happened.
Note: despite many deaths in the nursing home population due to COVID and the vaccines, the number of people awaiting admission to a nursing home has significantly increased (shown
by this large data set from the Netherlands
).  Given that individuals typically do not want to go to a nursing home unless they are no longe able to take care of themselves, this suggests that
something
new is causing the rapid development of debilitating cognitive impairment (e.g., dementia) in the adult population.  Likewise, as Ed Dowd
has repeatedly documented
, there has been a large increase in physical and cognitive disability throughout the adult population which has significantly impacted the economy because of how many workers are being lost to vaccine injuries.
Most recently, Steve Kirsch was contacted by a whistleblower who reported there has been
a 25 fold increase
in sudden dementia at the nursing home where she works.  Similarly, like the cases shared with me, Kirsch has noted that he has frequently been contacted by relatives who reported a sudden onset of dementia in their beloved relative which was then swept under the rug.  Furthermore, he has also collected numerous other forms of evidence corroborating this is indeed happening.  These cases are really sad because the elders in nursing homes have very little ability to advocate for themselves, and most people will just write the cases off as “normal Alzheimers,” rather than seeing the red flag staring them in the face.
These cases were very concerning to me, as they signified (per the bell curve) that there was going to be a much larger portion of people who would develop less severe (but nonetheless impactful) cognitive decline following vaccination.
Note: one of the most common types of injuries from pharmaceuticals are neurological injuries which both impair cognitive function and create psychiatric symptoms.  This places patients in a difficult situation of
being gaslighted
by the medical system.  This is because their doctors assume the psychiatric symptoms the patients are experiencing are the cause of their illness rather than a symptom of it, leading to the patient being told the illness is all in their head and continually referred for psychiatric help.  One of the best examples with this occurred as a result of the abnormal heart rhythms (e.g., rapid anxiety provoking palpitations) caused by the vaccine damaging the heart which were consistently diagnosed as being a result of anxiety, even when a subsequent workup I requested showed heart damage was present.
As I began seeing more and more signs of cognitive impairment following vaccination, I realized that what I observed mirrored what I previously seen with chronic inflammatory conditions such as mold toxicity,
HPV vaccine injuries
, and lyme disease.  Some of the examples included:
•Many people reported having a “COVID” brain where it was just harder for them to think and remember things.  I sometimes saw this after more severe cases of COVID, more frequently after vaccination, and repeatedly in patients who per their timeline clearly developed it from the vaccine but believed it had come from COVID.
•These issues tended to be more likely to affect older adults, but younger ones were more likely to notice (and complain) about them.  In the case of older adults, I typically learned about them from someone else who had observed the cognitive decline rather than directly from the individual.
•I saw cases of vaccine injured individuals who had trouble remembering or recalling the word they knew expressed what they were trying to communicate (this is also a common mold toxicity symptom).
•I had friends and patients who told me their brain just didn’t work the same since they’d received the vaccine.  As an example, a few colleagues told me they started losing the ability to remember basic things they needed to practice medicine (e.g., medication dosages for prescriptions).  They shared that they were very worried they would need to take an early retirement and that they thought it came from the vaccine but there was no one they could talk to about it (which understandably created a lot of doubt and anxiety).
•I saw cases of coworkers demonstrating noticeable (and permanent) cognitive impairment after I’d assumed they’d received the vaccine.  Their impairment was never mentioned or addressed (rather the physician kept on working, did not perform as well, and in some cases retired).
•I met significantly injured vaccine injured patients who told me one of the primary symptoms was a loss of cognitive functioning they had taken for granted throughout their life.  In many cases following treatment of their vaccine injury, their cognition also improved.
•Colleagues who treated vaccine injured patients told me cognitive impairment was one of the common symptoms they saw and was particularly noteworthy because they had never seen anything like that happen to young adults. To quote Pierre Kory:
In my practice of treating vaccine injuries, one of the three most common symptoms I see is brain fog. So many of my patients had been in the prime of their lives, can now barely function, have significant cognitive impairment and need a lot of help from our nurses to carry out their treatment plans. I never imagined I would see any of this in people far younger than me and instead I see it every day. I bear witness to an immense amount of suffering on a daily basis that is hard to put into words.
•One of my friends (a very smart immunologist) developed complications from the first two vaccines and based on their symptoms was able to describe exactly which parts of their immune systems were becoming dysregulated.  Against my advice, they took a booster and reported they suffered a significant cognitive impairment never experienced before in their lifetime.  I feel this case was important to share as it illustrates how an exacerbation of a vaccine injury can also cause an exacerbation of cognitive symptoms.
Note: I also saw significant cognitive impairment occur in individuals who were acutely ill with COVID-19.  This was not as unusual since delirium is a well known complication in patients hospitalized with a systemic illness (e.g., sepsis), but it seemed to happen more frequently than ususual.
Evidence of Cognitive Impairment
At the same time I was observing these effects, many rumors were also swirling around online that the vaccines would cause severe cognitive impairment and that we would witness a zombie apocalypse from the vaccine injuries.
This apocalypse of course never happened, but many observed a suspicion cognitive impairment was occurring.  For example to quote
Igor’s recent article
:
I own a small business and deal with many people and other small businesses. Most provided reliable service, would remember appointments, followed up on issues, and so on. I noticed that
lately, some people have become less capable cognitively
. They forget essential appointments, cannot concentrate, make crazy-stupid mistakes, and so on.
In my own case, the most evident change I noticed was a worsening of drivers around me and had a few near misses from impaired driving.
The challenge with these situations is that it’s very hard to tell if something is actually happening or your perception is simply a product of confirmation bias.  For this reason, while I was comfortable asserting my belief the COVID-19 vaccines were causing the severe injuries on either end of the bell curve, I avoided doing so for many of the less impactful injuries in the middle where it was much more ambiguous if what I was observing was “real” or simply my own biased perception of the events around me.  Because of this, amongst other things, I never mentioned the changes in driving I observed.
Note: after I posted
the original article
many of the readers stated they too had observed a significant worsening in the behavior of drivers around them.  I was then pointed to this dataset, which
suggests
this issue was happening, but
is difficult to properly assess
because COVID-19 can also cause cognitive impairment and less people were driving in 2020.
Typically, when we have situations like this, large bodies of data or scientific studies are needed to tease out if a correlation is in fact occurring.  Unfortunately, since there are political repercussions for dissenting from the dominant narrative, data which threatens tends not to be published.  This creates the challenging situation where those who are looking for answers on a topic which challenges a vested interest have to look quite carefully for clues on the subject (e.g., by dissecting papers to see exactly what the data is actually showing).
Igor periodically finds those, and after I saw the most recent one he unearthed, I requested to write the original guest post.  To quote his discovery from the Netherlands:
Primary care data for January to March 2023 showed that adults visited their GP more frequently for a number of symptoms compared to the same period in 2019. Memory and concentration problems were significantly more common than last year and in the period before COVID-19. Where these symptoms are concerned, the difference compared to 2019
is growing steadily in each quarter
.
In the first quarter of 2023, there was a 24% increase in GP [general practioner] visits related to memory and concentration problems among adults (age 25 years and older) compared to the same period in 2020. This is evidenced by the latest quarterly research update from the
GOR Network
. The increase in memory and concentration problems of adults
seems to be a longer-term effect of the coronavirus measures
as well as SARS-CoV-2 infections.
More specifically they found:
•No increase was observed in adults under 25 years old.
•A 31% increase was observed in those 24-44 years old.
•A 40% increase was observed in those 45-74 years old.
•A 18% increase was observed in those over 75 years old.
Note: previous rounds of this survey, in addition to the cognitive issues described above, worsening mental health (e.g, anxiety, depression or suicidal thoughts), sleep problems, tiredness, and cardiovascular issues (e.g., shortness of breath, dizziness or heart palpitation) were also observed to have significantly increased since 2019.
Typically, patients, less than 75 years old are unlikely to visit their doctors for cognitive issues.  Taken in context with this data, it means there is a stronger case that the (massive) increases in those under 75 were caused by
something
that happened after 2019.  Additionally, since there were already a large number of visits for cognitive impairment in the elderly, the lower percentage increase is slightly misleading in quantifying the extent to which everyone was affected.  For example to quote
the previous report
:
Primary care data showed that adults visited their GP somewhat more frequently for sleep problems in October–December 2022 than in the same period in 2019. This was particularly striking in the oldest age group (75 years and older).
All of this data put health officials in a bit of an awkward situation since publishing data demonstrating large scale cognitive impairment directly undermines the narrative they previous had committed themselves to.  Nonetheless, the authors of the report were significantly more candid than many other before them:
The source of this increase in memory and concentration problems is unclear. A possible explanation could be that COVID-19 measures
caused accelerated cognitive decline
among people who were starting to have problems with memory and concentration (66 years on average).
COVID-19 was of course cited as a potential cause (which, as discussed above can
sometimes
cause long term cognitive impairment):
A
supplementary explanation
could be that some of these people have long-term symptoms after COVID-19. Various studies have shown that memory and concentration problems are common in post-COVID symptoms. Other infectious diseases, such as flu, can also cause these symptoms. However,
recent studies
have shown that long-term memory and concentration problems are much more common after COVID-19 than after flu. In addition, these symptoms are more common in older age groups. The figures provided by GPs are consistent with this expectation.
Fortunately, the authors acknowledged that long COVID could not be the primary explanation for what was occurring, and instead alluded to the elephant in the room—the vaccines.
Note: on VAERS, in the 23 years VAERS has operated, 2352 of the 3071 (76.6%) reports of memory impairment following vaccination came from the COVID-19 vaccines.  Additionally, Ed Dowd has identified
numerous government datasets
demonstrating that widespread impairment and disability has occurred since the vaccine rollout.
Why Are The Vaccines Causing Cognitive Impairment?
My specific interest in studying spike protein vaccine toxicity arose because I suspected I would see many similarities to other pharmaceutical injuries I had observed previously and treatments that had developed for those injuries could be used to treat COVID-19 vaccine injuries.  On Substack, I’ve tried to focus on explaining the areas that I believe are the most important to understanding this, zeta-potential, the cell danger response (CDR) and the treatments for Alzheimer’s disease.
Note: Each of these is interrelated with and often causes the others.
Zeta Potential:
Zeta potential (explained in detail
here
) governs if fluid in the body clumps together (e.g., forming a clot) or remains dispersed and capable of freely flowing.  Additionally, it also influences if proteins will stay in their correct formation or misfold and clump together.  Many different issues (discussed
here
) emerge when fluid circulation (be it blood, lymph, interstitial fluid or cerebrospinal fluid) becomes impaired.  Since the spike protein is uniquely suited for impairing zeta potential, we have found
restoring zeta potential
(discussed
here
) often is immensely helpful during COVID-19 infections and for treating COVID-19 vaccine injuries.  Many of those approaches were initially developed from working with other vaccine injuries and cognitive decline in the elderly.
Cell Danger Response (CDR):
When cells are exposed to a threat, their mitochondria shift from producing energy for the cell to a protective mode where the cell’s metabolism and internal growth shuts down, the mitochondria release reactive oxygen species to kill potential invaders, the cell warns other cells to enter the CDR and the cell seals off and disconnects itself from the body.  The CDR (explained further
here
) is an essential process for cellular survival, but frequently in chronic illness, cells become stuck in it rather than allowing the healing response to complete.
Understanding the CDR is extremely important when working with complex illnesses because it explains why triggers from long ago can cause an inexplicable illness, and why many treatments that seem appropriate (specifically those that treat a symptom of the CDR rather than the cause of it) either don’t help or worsen the patient’s conditions.  Many of the most challenging patients seen by integrative practitioners are those trapped within the CDR, but unfortunately, there is still very little knowledge of this phenomena.
My interest was drawn back to the CDR after I realized that
one of the most effective treatments
for long COVID and COVID-19 vaccine injuries was one that directly treated the CDR.  Since many of the therapies that have been developed to revive nonfunctional tissue was developed by the regenerative medical field, I wrote an article describing how these approaches are applied to restore localized regions of dysfunctional tissue (which is sometimes needed to treat vaccine injuries) and another on the regenerative treatments
that treat systemic CDRs
(and are more frequently needed for vaccine injuries).
Alzheimer’s Disease (AD):
AD is one of the most devastating and costly conditions in existence (e.g., for the year of 2020
it was estimated
to have cost America 305 billion dollars) and as a result, billions of dollars are spent each year in researching a cure for it.
This research (which began in 1906) has gone nowhere
and presently
the FDA is working with the drug industry
to push forward ineffective, quite dangerous but highly profitable treatments for AD.
However,
effective treatments do exist
for AD and my colleagues have developed a few different methods that have successfully treated the condition.  Additionally, one neurologist, Dale Bresden developed a method for reversing AD that he proved worked
in mulitiple publications
(included
a recent 2022 clinical trial
).
All of these successful approaches utilize the following principles:
•Restore both the blood flow to the brain and the lymphatic drainage from it (which removes amyloid plaques).  This often requires
restoring the physiologic zeta potential
and
having a healthy sleep cycle
.
•Treating the CDR (which causes chronic inflammation)
and reactivating brain cells
that became trapped in an unresolved CDR (which amongst other things requires reclaiming a healthy sleep cycle).
Note: Bresden’s approach also emphasizes the importance of addressing chronically elevated blood sugar or insulin levels.
One of the most important things to recognize about AD is that it is a slowly worsening disease which often progresses over decades.  In the early stages of AD, minor cognitive changes occur, which (when possible to autopsy) correlate with tissue changes within the brain.  In rare instances, individuals can instead have a rapidly progressing form of Alzheimer's which strikes with a younger age and is often linked to the toxin exposure.
In the case of  spike proteins illnesses, I have seen both the early signs of AD cognitive decline occurring in much younger patients, and exist in cases of AD rapidly progressing following COVID vaccination.  Additionally, I have also seen cases of rapid cognitive decline in the elderly following the administration of other vaccinations—however they were far less frequent than those seen with the COVID-19 vaccines.
Conclusion
Anytime you attempt to perceive the world around you, you are always biased by the pre-existing filters you have which prevent you from seeing much of the world around you (discussed further
here
).  To some extent, these filters are a necessary evil as without them, the world would be overwhelmingly complicated.  However, if you cannot be open to the possibility a biased filter this is clouding your perception of reality, you become blind to a great deal of important things around you.
Misleading filters
for example, explain why many of those committed to the narrative cannot see the overwhelming evidence of COVID-19 vaccine injuries around them.
One of the most commonly used filters is "
social proof
," which essentially says people will typically not act on something, believe it, or even see it unless their peers (the herd) already are.  This creates a problem, because frequently when you need to know something, the herd does not yet believe it, forcing you to either make a decision no one else supports (which can be quite terrifying) or to wait until there is safety in doing it because the herd has now moved in that direction (which is often too late).
As I’ve gotten to know those who challenged the COVID-19 narrative, I’ve noticed they all had a tendency they’d learned through life experience to not follow the crowd and be willing to act on their initial impression of what preliminary data suggested before the rest of the crowd caught on.  For example, Ed Dowd was a highly successful stock trader (e.g., he made Blackrock a lot of money) and his method boiled down to spotting early trends before anyone else and acting on them while they were still profitable to investors.
Like many, from the start of the vaccination campaign, based on the preliminary data points that were available, I suspected it was going to cause long-term cognitive issues.  Now that the data which supports that trend is beginning to appear, and concerningly the issue appears to be gradually worsening, something commonly observed over time with factors that give rise to dementia.  This is an important issue and I want to extend my thanks to
Igor
for drawing attention to this very important dataset.
Note: This article (which has since been revised) was originally posted as a guest post on
Igor Chudov’s substack
.  Igor was one of the original authors who helped me get started here and consistently posts on target articles I make a point to read.
The Forgotten Side of Medicine is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, please consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.
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What is the Cell Danger Response?

Story at a Glance:
 •The Cell Danger Response is an evolutionarily conserved adaptation cells use to protect themselves from environmental stressors.

•Mitochondria orchestrate the CDR by first detecting a threat and then switching from powering the cell to shutting it down to protect the cell from danger. Many complex illnesses result from a chronically sustained CDR that prevents the cells from their normal functionality.

•Therapies which address the CDR are often necessary to treat a variety of complex illnesses such as chronic fatigue syndrome, autism, and COVID-19 vaccine injuries.

Since early 2020, I have worked with patients with spike protein injuries, either from COVID-19 or the vaccines. Now and then, I’ve observed a specific treatment for a spike protein injury have a rapid effect that was so dramatic it would have been difficult to believe it had happened had I not witnessed it firsthand.
 Whenever I spotted a treatment doing that, I asked, “Why did this happen?” Over time, I realized two mechanisms appeared to be able to account for almost every case where I observed this happen.
 The first was that impaired fluid circulation in the body was restored, most commonly by restoring the physiologic zeta potential (something the spike protein is uniquely suited to inhibit). Since this is a complex but relatively unknown topic, I’ve worked to explain  what zeta potential is , how its disruption  creates illness by impairing fluid circulation  throughout the body, and  the methods I know of which can restore it .
 Note: in parallel to doing this, I also discussed  the fourth phase of water  (something also critical for the health of the body)  as the two concepts are deeply interrelated .
 The second was that the Cell Danger Response (CDR) was deactivated. Since there is much more awareness about this (still relatively unknown) concept in the integrative medical field, I felt zeta potential needed to be covered first. Nonetheless, the CDR is an essential concept to understand, and  like zeta potential , it plays a foundational role in explaining and addressing many of the complex conditions we face today.
 Before I go further, I would like to acknowledge two of my colleagues who have a great deal of experience working with the CDR that assisted me in drafting this series (and both independently observed that the COVID vaccines triggered the CDR).
 The Forgotten Side of Medicine is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, please consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.

 What is the Cell Danger Response?
 For cells to survive, something has to protect them from the innumerable threats they encounter. In complex organisms, we typically assign that role to the immune system. In contrast, in single-celled organisms (e.g., bacteria), it’s fulfilled either by them putting protective agents into their environment (e.g., bacteriocins to kill enemy bacteria) or them evolving resistance to the danger they are facing (e.g., antibiotics).
 However, those are not the only options. In  a previous article  where I tried to explain the potential consequences of bacteria DNA being found in the vaccines, I touched on an important concept. When bacteria (and fungi) are placed in a dangerous environment, in addition to those that die, some will transform into a form better suited to survive the hostile environment (this is the most well-recognized with spore-forming bacteria).
 Note: Since those forms are often more likely to cause diseases and resist antibiotics, it can be counter-productive to continue addressing them with the same antibiotics, and different approaches are needed to aid patients with those infections.
 When cells are stressed by their environment, they also transform into a more defensive state primarily mediated by the cell’s mitochondria (which are essentially bacteria and able to rapidly adapt to changes in their environment). This process has been observed by many (e.g., some call it  the integrated stress response ), and I believe the process is the most comprehensively described by the CDR.
 The CDR concept is frequently credited to  Robert Naviaux  (someone I consider a genius). He integrated all of the existing scientific knowledge on cellular adaptations, utilized a variety of established approaches (e.g., genomic analysis), and, most importantly, used an innovative but relatively unknown diagnostic method, metabolomics, to map out the CDR.
 Metabolomics  uses  mass spectrometry  to identify every biomolecule present in a sample of blood, which is both quite feasible and provides an in-depth understanding of the body which, to my knowledge, cannot be obtained with any other existing technology (e.g., the endless lab tests that provide a narrow snapshot of the body which may not have any correlation to the patient’s symptoms). This is how Naviaux described the merits of the technology:
 First, fewer than 2,000 metabolites constitute the majority of the parent molecules in the blood that are used for cell-to-cell communication and metabolism, compared with 6 billion bases in the diploid human genome. Second, metabolites reflect the current functional state of the individual. Collective cellular chemistry represents the functional interaction of genes and environment.
 The process of the CDR essentially is as follows:
 1. Something stresses the cell.
 2. Mitochondria within the cell rapidly detect this stress (e.g., before the stressor can kill the cell). This detection, Naviaux argues, is due to electrons that previously were available to mitochondria being diverted to the stressor (e.g., an invading virus hijacking the cell to reproduce, a heavy metal being present, or many of the harmful [electron stealing] chemicals we are exposed to now), which creates a voltage drop in the mitochondria.
 3. The mitochondria then reduce or terminate their primary function (creating energy in the form of ATP for the cell) and switch from an anti-inflammatory to a pro-inflammatory state ( macrophages also switch  from an anti-inflammatory to a pro-inflammatory form).
 4. Because the mitochondria producing ATP uses up a lot of oxygen, once that production is reduced (or becomes incomplete) and the mitochondria shift to producing different biomolecules, the available oxygen in a cell rapidly increases. For context, mitochondria contain 1500 proteins tailored to meet the needs of each cell type and catalyze over 500 different chemical reactions in metabolism.
 These mitochondrial effects (particularly the elevated oxygen) cause the following to occur:
 •Production of complex proteins (polymers) is reduced, which viruses require to reproduce.
 •Protective changes in the behavior of the whole organism (e.g., increased tiredness that induces the sleep needed to facilitate healing or a desire to isolate so the infection is not transferred to other members of their group).
 •Antiviral and antimicrobial substances are released inside the cell.
 •Warning cells in the vicinity that a danger is present.
 •Increased consumption (autophagy) of components within the cell, including the defective parts of the mitochondria and the mitochondria themselves.
 •Changes in gene expression and mobilization of parts of cellular DNA.
 •The cell membranes stiffen so things are prevented from passing through it.
 Note: a long time ago, a mentor versed in some of the most remarkable forgotten sides of medicine showed me an ancient test his teacher used to evaluate if the body was consuming oxygen properly (something they believed was critical for proper health). The test was known as the blood crenation test and assessed the degree to which cells would change their size once placed in a hypertonic solution. After I learned about the CDR, I realized that the test detected if the membranes had stiffened due to an active CDR and mitochondria, in turn, not correctly consuming oxygen. That stiffening is greatest during CDR1 and begins to soften during CDR3 (explained below). I found this fascinating because the therapy (designed to treat numerous illnesses through restoring the oxidative metabolism of cells) he used the blood crenation test for had two stages of treatment, and the second stage could only be used once the first stage had sufficiently softened the cell membranes.
 In the recent series on zeta potential , I argued that a key reason for why zeta potential disruption has become a root cause of so many illnesses is due to the physiologic mechanisms for maintaining zeta potential having evolved in an era where the human body faced far fewer zeta potential disrupting toxins. Because of this, the baseline zeta potential our body is designed to maintain (keep in mind that an excessive zeta potential also creates problems) is often not strong enough to counteract those harmful environmental influences.
 The CDR likewise evolved in an era when humans faced far fewer stressors and is not appropriately calibrated for the modern world. For example, when the CDR is activated, the oxidizing environment causes cells to sequester rather than excrete heavy metals. This is a problem since heavy metals (which are now common in our environment) are both a common cause of chronic illness and a trigger for the CDR.
 When Naviaux originally mapped the CDR out, he thought that it had one phase, but in time realized it had three different phases, the initial response, a proliferative phase (which rebuilds tissue), and then the cell beginning to return to its initial function:

 Nauviux’s central argument is that while the CDR is a normal adaptive response, it will create problems if cells get stuck in one of the CDR phases because they did not receive the final all-clear signal to exit the CDR.
 Note: Chronic diseases are characterized by impaired communication between cells and tissues. If this occurs at a young age (e.g., in autism), the normal trajectory of development is altered, leading to the abnormal tissue and organs the body’s systems must adapt to. In adults, these alterations cause tissue and organ performance to degrade over time, eventually leading to various problems such as cancers and organ failures.
 During CDR2 (which, amongst other things, Nauviux links to cancer ) , dividing and migrating cells cannot establish long-term metabolic cooperation between cells because their location within tissues is continuously changing. CDR3, in turn, is the integration phase that allows cellular communication to be restored, and hence is critical to complete for many complex illnesses.
 Additionally, CDR3’s completion is aided by the autonomic nervous system being in a rest and recovery state (facilitated by the vagal nerve—the parasympathetics are one of the foundational ways to communicate safety to the body). My colleagues believe this helps to explain why the converse, excessive stress, and sympathetic activity that characterizes the modern age can have such a large impact on chronic illnesses, as they signal to the body danger (that requires a CDR) is still present.
 What are the effects of the CDR?
 Much of this series was an attempt to simplify and summarize  Nauviux's years of research . The specific publications I referenced throughout this article were as follows:
 • The original 2014 paper  which explained the CDR.
 • A 2016 study  of patients with chronic fatigue syndrome (CFS) identified consistent patterns within their metabolomics. Those hypometabolic changes resembled dauer, an evolutionarily conserved state organisms enter that makes them much more capable of surviving environmental stressors and conserving energy but much less able to engage in normal activity (e.g., a functional life free of suffering and disability). Since the biological clock within those cells slows (and they can survive periods of resource starvation), they can outlast the cells that fail to make this transition and take over once conditions are safe for the cells to return to normal.
 Note: many of the genes involved in dauer have been actively studied for promoting longevity (e.g., they overlap with the changes created through caloric restriction). Additionally, in dauer, behavioral responses become "brittle," such that small stimuli produce significant responses in otherwise docile animals, a phenomenon also commonly observed in complex chronic illnesses.
 • A pilot 2017 study  where autistic children were provided a CDR blocking agent. This double-blind trial demonstrated significant improvement in autistic children, which to my knowledge, has not been obtained in any other clinical trial attempting to treat autism.
 • A 2017 review  of the cell danger response and the potential applications in using CDR targeting agents for conditions such as autism.
 • A 2018 paper  discusses the CDR's three stages and how they are part of the body's normal healing cycle. This is the most detailed overview of the CDR Nauviux has written and the paper  I most recommend reading .
 • A brief 2020 paper  connecting the CDR to mitochondrial dysfunction and chronic illness.
 • A 2020 study  evaluated the link between viral infection and the CDR. It found the HHV-6 virus (to which 90% of the population is exposed by age three) could trigger the CDR. Once activated, the CDR shielded cells from other viruses as there was up to a 99% decrease in their infection from influenza or HSV-1. Notably, the CDR persisted even when HHV-6 was almost undetectable, and serum from CFS patients could induce the CDR within healthy cells (and matched the CDR seen in CFS), thus demonstrating that a pathologic CDR can persist long after the inciting stimulus disappears.
 • A 2021 study  exposed rats to the primary CDR-inducing agent (ATP) and then measured the metabolic and behavioral changes that followed (e.g., whole body oxygen consumption decreased by 74% and rectal temperature dropped by 6.2˚C in 30 minutes—both of which are massive changes). This paper is the most detailed published study (I know of) that has been conducted on how the CDR alters both behavior and biochemistry (over 200 metabolites from 37 different biochemical pathways were changed). Furthermore, it found that most of the changes returned to baseline in a few hours and that the responses in male and female rats to ATP were noticeably different (males were more sensitive to behavioral changes, females were more sensitive to metabolic changes).

• A 2023 review paper that discussed the current understanding of the CDR and methods for treating it. Much of this paper is discussed in the third part of this series.
 Purinergic Signaling
 The primary agent that appears to set off the CDR is ATP leaking out of cells (which evolutionarily makes sense as its concentration is approximately one million times higher inside cells compared to outside them, so it will consistently leak out when the cell is damaged or stressed). In addition to this leak occurring due to damage to the cell, there are also redox-gated, mechanical stress-gated and voltage-gated channels that directly facilitate this leak alongside ATP exporting vesicles, all of which allow one cell in the CDR to induce the CDR within the cells surrounding it through purinergic signaling.
 In turn, ATP (a purine) and a variety of related molecules (that often leak in tandem with it) are detected by numerous receptors throughout the body, affecting them through a process known as purinergic signaling. Since purinergic signaling is a relatively new field of study, each year, more and more of its implications for the body are being discovered (e.g., its role in the communication between cells, the stress response, autonomic, vestibular, and many sensory integration pathways).
 Many of the consequences of the CDR result from the changes created within the nervous system. ATP or its metabolites have also been found, according to Nauviux, to “be co-neurotransmitters and neuromodulators at every synapse in the central and enteric nervous systems, and every immunologic synapse that has been studied to date.”
 Purinergic receptors control neurotransmission, cortisol production, inflammation, chronic pain signaling, and autonomic nervous system control. Furthermore, Nauviux has proposed that the effects of CDR purinergic signaling help explain why the human body responds to danger by exhibiting the stereotypical behaviors observed in sickness (e.g., during the flu or while recovering from a severe injury), such as withdrawing from social contact, decreasing speech, having fragmented sleep, or developing an increased sensitivity to heat, touch, sound, and light. For example, in the rats studied, triggering the CDR caused them to decrease their motor activity, avoid open areas (or explore new ones) and to develop gait coordination abnormalities.
 The presence of purinergic receptors at neural synapses  has also implicated purines  as being a necessary component of learning. In conjunction,  the 2021 study showed  activating the CDR spiked the levels of dopamine in the body (a key neurotransmitter for learning and creating habits within the nervous system).

 It is frequently observed that if an injury (e.g., a head concussion) occurs before a previous version of the same injury finishes healing, the consequences of second injury (even if much lighter) can be significantly greater than the original injury. Similarly, is known that stimulating the immune systems of pregnant mice (in a process mimicking what a viral infectious would do) increase the likelihood of offspring with features resembling those seen in neurodevelopmental disorders such as autism or in schizophrenia. In the 2021 study, when that same stimulation was done to pregnant mice, their offspring became hypersensitive to the effects of injected ATP and took much longer to return to their baseline.

Two of the greatest challenges in treating patients with a complex chronic illnesses are their susceptibility towards relapses (e.g., one triggered by a light stressor) and the body becoming programmed to have something akin to an addiction to the chemicals released by the CDR (e.g., the risk of a recurrence of depression is 3-6 times greater than the risk in those who have not previously been depressed). Lastly, to quote Nauviaux :
 Complex negative and maladaptive behavioral responses to adversity can be paradoxically reinforced by an anti-inflammatory effect they produce at the cellular level.
 Because of all of this, many of my colleagues suspect that the CDR triggers a learning process that causes patients to become progressively easier to trap in a CDR state each time a successive threat is presented toward them, even when the original trigger or stressor is no longer present. This is a major reason why the proper treatment of a chronic illness often requires recognizing the body’s existing momentum towards illness and incomplete recovery, and then gradually redirecting it to wellness.
 Note: I also believe impaired lymphatic drainage from the brain helps to account for the severity of successive concussions.
 Why is the CDR Important?
 One of the major problems we face in medicine is the immense amount of data available to us and our simultaneous inability to integrate it into a coherent story that makes sense for patients. For example, functional medicine practitioners memorize an endless number of biochemical pathways. However, in many cases understanding why so many different pathways can be abnormal is only possible with the context provided by the CDR.

Additionally, many apparently harmful genetic variations (polymorphisms) are frequently assessed and then mitigated by functional medicine practitioners. The CDR often provides a critical context for why these variations exist, as when the CDR is active,  unexpected benefits  can arise from the presence of the “defective” polymorphism.
 One colleague (an integrative physician and leader in the discipline) who frequently uses the CDR in clinical practice feels it is invaluable because the CDR helped them understand why integrative therapies they thought should work never did anything for patients (and sometimes harmed them).
 For example, as the years have gone by, the medical field (particularly within integrative medicine) has tied more and more chronic diseases to mitochondrial dysfunction and treated them with supplements (or energy-inputting therapies) designed to increase mitochondrial output. This works if the issue arises from a deficiency of what the mitochondria need but does not help if the decreased mitochondrial output is instead a protective adaptation.
 In some cases, this means the patient wastes money on unneeded supplements, and in other cases (e.g., sometimes with intravenous NAD), the patient can feel quite bad afterward if parts of their system were not ready for the mitochondrial function to be upregulated. This harmful reaction commonly occurs if the agent inciting the CDR is still present but treatments are instead directed at negating the symptoms created by an active CDR.
 Note: in the rat study , triggering the CDR did not deplete the levels of any vitamin.
 Since the CDR is such a fundamental survival mechanism, the changes in metabolism, inflammation, immunity, microbiome, brain function, sleep patterns, and social behaviors the CDR creates can be triggered by many different kinds of threats (e.g., infection, pollution, poisoning, physical or psychological trauma, a lack of nutrients or blood to the cells and even  a reduced gravity environment ). Within the 2016 study on 45 CFS patients, for instance, over a dozen triggers for CFS were identified, with some patients having multiple triggers occurring in the same period, and no trigger being significantly more common than the rest.
 Note: Frequently in complex diseases, patients pass a critical threshold of (highly variable) stressors, and then have a radically altered physiology which becomes dramatically more sensitive to additional stressors.
 Conversely, because the CDR can get stuck in different phases (creating different types of diseases) and often only affects specific cells within the body (e.g., only a particular tissue or some but not all the cells within one tissue) it is thus possible to have the same underlying process cause an immense number of seemingly different diseases.
 Note: Nauviux’s best attempt to map many of the common chronic diseases to a CDR phase can be found  here  in Table 1. For example, a defining characteristic of CFS and often fibromyalgia is an inability of the body to replenish its energy after exertion (or sleep). This makes sense if mitochondria are producing much less of the ATP needed for that energy replenishment and some of the ATP they produce is leaking out of the cell.
 Within our linear scientific paradigm, every cause must be attributed to one effect. This leads many to be at a loss in understanding how so many different things can cause the same inexplicable illness. Furthermore, since many believe scientific proof requires a repeatable cause and effect relationship, it is almost impossible to convince skeptical audiences of the legitimacy of these non-linear conditions.
 Thus, without a unifying model like the CDR that accounts for this immense variability, there are myriad of “complex” diseases that are nearly unsolvable within the existing paradigm. For example, to quote Naviaux:
 Complex [multisystem] diseases like CFS are often difficult and expensive to diagnose [e.g., no single diagnostic test yet exists for CFS]. Although individual tests may be affordable and possibly covered by medical insurance, many patients undergo a diagnostic odyssey that results in substantial personal expenditures that can exceed $100,000 over years of searching [for a cure], absence from the workplace, and significant reductions in quality of life.
 Naviaux’s 2016 words describe exactly what countless COVID vaccine injured individuals have also experienced. One of these patients, for example, had seen 31 doctors before me (many of whom worked at prestigious institutions) and felt only two of them (both of whom had already left the conventional system) could provide anything helpful. The rest ordered various expensive tests that were mostly covered by insurance but provided no benefit whatsoever to the patient.
 As another example, the national economic cost of autism is estimated to be $75,000 per patient with autism, and the average family caring for a family member with autism, in turn, spends over $17,000 on necessary care expenses not covered by public services. Since the incidence of autism is rapidly growing, this cost is growing too (it reached $268 billion in 2015 and is expected to rise to $461 billion by 2025).
 Note:  I previously reviewed  Peter Hotez’s book that argued vaccines do not cause autism (without providing anything to substantiate his claim). Hotez’s justification for frequently attacking parents who link vaccines to autism was that doing so diverts public funding away from supporting the out-of-pocket expenses parents like Hotez have to spend caring for autistic children. Given the rate at which autism is rising within the USA, that is a nonsensical approach akin to scooping water out of a boat with a large hole in the hull.
 Because of the economic impact of autism, over $1 billion has been spent on research for the genetic causes of autism over the past ten years. This work has shown that hundreds of genes play a role in different children and that no single gene accounts for more than 1–2% of autism. Conversely, other politically unpalatable causes (e.g., multiple vaccinations in close succession activating the CDR or other environmental stressors that can as well) are never looked at. Similarly, viable treatments that have both a mechanistic basis and clinical evidence to support them, but are not profitable (e.g., Naviaux used a repurposed drug to treat autism), are sadly never looked at.
 This situation is virtually identical to what  I previously discussed  with the even more impactful condition, Alzheimer’s disease. Billions are spent each year on ( sometimes fraudulent ) research that has relentlessly focused upon a highly questionable mechanism for the disease that has consistently failed to produce a viable therapy for the disease. Conversely,  proven treatments  based on different models of the disease exist, which very few Alzheimer’s researchers are even aware of.
 Like Naviaux, I feel the lack of treatments for autism is particularly tragic because autistic children are often highly gifted individuals, and I have seen numerous cases of an autistic child who was cured (or at least significantly improved) with an “unproven” treatment that then went on to lead an immensely impactful and productive life. Unfortunately, those treatments are rarely available; instead, many autistic children are often treated terribly (e.g., they experience a very high rate of physical or sexual abuse), and what they go through is almost invisible to those who do not directly work with them. Similarly, many older adults with dementia are often treated quite poorly, but placed in areas like nursing homes where they can be kept out of sight and out of mind.
 What I find so surprising about Naviaux’s work is its commercial potential (as numerous drugs which inhibit purinergic signaling improve conditions linked to the CDR). However, despite the fact Naviaux has meticulously laid out all the research that demonstrates the importance of the CDR for over a decade, his work has not caught on outside the alternative medical field, and no pharmaceutical company has seriously pursued developing drugs targeted at the numerous purinergic receptors throughout the body.
 Why Do Spike Proteins Set off the CDR?
 Presently, I believe there are three causes for most of the symptoms individuals experience with spike protein injuries:
 •Circulatory obstructions.
 •Autoimmunity.
 •Immune suppression.
 It turn, I've tried to put forward some of the mechanisms that could be causing these to happen. For example, I believe the circulatory issues are due to the  spike protein damaging  the protective lining of the blood vessels, the spike protein  creating misfolding  within the proteins the body uses to create fibrin clots, and as mentioned above, the  spike protein collapsing  the physiologic zeta potential of the body.
 In regards to autoimmunity, I have thus far proposed that the primary issues are:
 The spike protein being inherently immunogenic (stimulating to the immune system).

 The spike protein having a  highly unusual degree of overlap with human tissue .

 Vaccines being designed so that the immunogenic spike protein is expressed on the surfaces of cells.

 Additionally, I also believe the spike protein's  effects on zeta potential  exacerbate this issue.
 Note: because spike proteins overload the cells, many find their way to the cell surface. In addition to triggering the immune system to destroy the spike protein-expressing cell, it also causes parts of the membrane to separate from the cell and travel through the body as exosomes.
 The body relies upon exosomes for communication between the cells (including to signal the CDR), and spike protein-coated exosomes  have been detected  in mRNA-vaccinated individuals. The changes in the exosomes throughout the body have been both hypothesized  to account for many of the pathologic changes observed in these patients  and to explain how the seemingly impossible mRNA vaccine shedding can occur (as exosomes are also exhaled); presently, the only other potential mechanism I have identified to explain the inexplicable shedding process is bacterial DNA within the vaccines  causing the microbiome to express the spike protein .
 A key feature of the CDR is the mitochondria transforming from their typical energy-producing state to a pro-inflammatory state that activates the innate immune system. Thus, in addition to fatigue and varying degrees of organ dysfunction arising in individuals whose mitochondria are no longer devoted to powering the cells, a wide range of inflammatory conditions (e.g., autoimmune disorders) can result from a sustained CDR (e.g., that caused by an infection like HHV-6 ).

Conversely, many of my colleagues have also observed that the same therapy which we have found rapidly treats the CDR in spike protein injured patients (i.e., acute covid, long covid, and covid vaccine injuries) also can treat challenging autoimmune disorders (e.g.,  Sjögrens syndrome ) in patients not suffering from spike protein injuries. Likewise, before COVID-19, my colleagues who specialized in complex autoimmune conditions frequently found approaches they believed targeted a persistent CDR simultaneously improved many of the autoimmune disorders those patients were suffering from.
 One of the biggest things that have helped my team develop treatments for spike protein vaccine injuries is that many of the modes of harm we've witnessed from these injections resemble what we had previously seen with other vaccines. The big difference is that the toxicity and rate of adverse events from the COVID-19 vaccines are much higher than that seen with a typical vaccine, so certain reactions (e.g., sudden deaths in healthy adults) are unique to this vaccine, and its harms  are frequent enough the general population can recognize them .
 Previously, I advanced Andrew Moulden's argument  that every vaccine causes harm  due to their effects on the physiologic zeta potential (along with the immune system further obstructing circulation by having its large cells enter the smallest vessels of the body). The easiest way to detect these circulatory obstructions is from the pathological changes the microstrokes create, and I have noticed many of my vaccinated friends developed  the same neurological signs  Moulden observed in vaccine-injured children (e.g., an eye's ability to move outward becomes impaired).
 Vaccinations, likewise, are well suited to activating the CDR. Typically, when the body confronts an invader, it is dealt with on its surface (e.g., within the respiratory mucosa), and a specific immune response is created to address it. It is much rarer for the body to first confront an invader within the bloodstream. When this occurs, the cells sense a greater danger, and a much more severe response is directed toward the invader that rarely prevents the initial stages of an infection that mucosal immunity typically prevents.
 Since vaccines that use the natural routes of exposure that trigger the body's first line of defense are harder to develop (the oral polio vaccine being one of the only examples), we typically default to vaccinations that utilize a backdoor into the immune system that instead activates its final line of defense. This amongst other things causes different antibody types to be produced by the system. Furthermore, we often repeatedly administer the same vaccine (and multiple vaccines simultaneously), thereby providing a repeating stimulus that trains the CDR to become progressively easier to activate.
 Sadly, due to the widespread blind faith in the safety and efficacy of vaccines, basic practices to improve their safety (e.g., spacing them out), let alone their effects on the CDR and zeta potential, rarely, if ever, enter the conversation. Furthermore, outside of Naviux's circle, very few are even aware that activating the CDR plays a key role in how the body develops immunity to a foreign entity.
 In addition to the inherent toxicity of the spike protein, the mRNA vaccines design itself is particularly well suited to triggering the CDR. Because the mRNA is designed to transfect cells, like an actual viral infection, it continually steals the resources of the cell to manufacture the synthetic spike protein, and like what occurs in a viral infection, the mitochondria most likely detect this theft and initiate the CDR.
 There are also many other issues with overstimulating the body's immune response. For example,  to quote the National Cancer Institute :
 [T cell exhaustion] describes a condition in which T cells (a type of immune cell) lose their ability to kill certain cells, such as cancer cells or cells infected with a virus [or mRNA spike proteins]. This can happen when cancer, chronic infection, or other conditions cause the body’s immune system to stay active for a long time. Exhausted T cells have high amounts of immune checkpoint proteins on their surface, which may keep the activity of the T cells suppressed [as excessively killing the cells of the body is also dangerous and must have a counterbalance to prevent it from occurring]. In cancer treatment, drugs that target these proteins may be given to allow the T cells to better kill cancer cells.
 T cell exhaustion is one of the many issues that must be addressed when working with complex illnesses (e.g., this frequently comes up with chronic Epstein Barr infections—a dormant condition that many have reported reactivates in vaccine-injured patients). One of the interesting things my colleagues have found is that T cell exhaustion is also commonly observed in patients with long covid and spike protein vaccine injuries (which my colleagues also suspect is what triggers the Epstein Barr reactivation).
 Lastly, beyond reducing the cell's ability to produce proteins, the CDR also triggers the cell to degrade the foreign material within it. Unfortunately, to make the mRNA vaccines "work," their mRNA  was modified through pseudouridation  to resist degradation so the mRNA could produce the spike protein for a much longer period within the cell—which unfortunately leads to the mitochondria repeatedly being signaled to initiate the CDR. At this point, it is still unknown why stressors (e.g., mounting an immune response to an invader) cause some individuals to develop a permanent rather than temporary CDR; the only thing that is known is repeated activations of the CDR make it more likely to become permanent.
 Note: in the 2021 rat study, briefly triggering the CDR was shown to initially either increase or decrease a wide range of metabolites in the body, with the metabolites returning to their original levels in a few hours. One of the few exceptions to this rule was pseudouridine, which initially had a slight increase, but over time, rather than returning to baseline, developed a much more significant increase. This pseudouridine elevation  might  be one of the mechanisms at work in vaccine injury (e.g.,  pseudouridated mRNA is thought to suppress the immune system ), however, I do not know of a study that has directly assessed if pseudouridine levels become elevated following mRNA vaccination, particularly within chronically ill patients who appear to be trapped within the CDR .
 Conclusion:
 My sincere hope is that this series, along with the previous one on  liquid crystalline water and zeta potential , has helped to provide a framework to explain the perplexing question of why numerous stressors (e.g., toxins) can cause the same disease and why the same stressor can create such a widely varying spectrum of illness in those exposed to it. I have done my best to accurately simplify this subject, and regrettably, despite all the work I’ve done thus far, I still feel I have only scratched the surface of that perplexing question.
 For example, I am frequently asked about the relationship between the CDR and zeta potential or liquid crystalline water. The short answer is that I know they are interrelated as:
•The CDR goes hand in hand with fluid stagnation (each exacerbates the other—for example interstitial pressure, a sign of obstructed fluid circulation, increases in CDR1).
•One of the changes observed within cells during the CDR is a destructuring of the liquid crystalline water within it (discussed further by Nauviax  here )
•That ATP is concentrated in the liquid crystalline water layer which surrounds each cell (and likely plays a key role in creating that layer).
 The major challenge with the current understanding of the CDR is how to treat it. On the one hand,  to some extent , countless therapies can help (e.g., now that the CDR is known about in parts of the integrative medical community, patients and colleagues periodically introduce me to natural preparations that allegedly treat it). However, creating a consistent improvement in the CDR is much more challenging and requires both targeted treatments and a comprehensive understanding of the CDR.
 Fortunately, one medical specialty, regenerative medicine, emphasizes restoring the critical functions of non-functional tissue. Because of this, the field has independently developed a comprehensive understanding of why cells get trapped in a non-functional state and the most direct ways to restore their functionality.
 In the next part of this series, I discussed the practice of regenerative medicine and its perspectives in treating the CDR . This helps to lay the context for the final part of the series on the methods within the integrative medical field and the regenerative medical field that treat the CDR , and that we have seen help numerous individuals with spike protein injuries recover from their illness.

Lastly, it should also be noted that in the same way I have previously characterized many of the diseases of aging as being partly due the physiologic zeta potential worsening with ago (likely resulting for a declining kidney function), the CDR also worsens with age. Hence, many of the effects arising from a sustained CDR that were described throughout this article, will to varying extents eventually be seen in everyone and thus are something the regenerative medical field has prioritized finding ways to address.
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Summary: Understanding the CDR is critical for treating treating spike protein injuries and many other complex illnesses.


How To Create A Fake News Cycle

To that end, I published an Op-Ed in RealClear Politics today using an example of a fake news cycle around ivermectin. Enjoy:

 Despite the best efforts of the mainstream media to pillory him as an anti-vaccine conspiracy theorist, Robert F. Kennedy Jr. is having a moment. A recent poll from CNN of all places showed him earning 20% of Democratic primary voters – and that was before his Joe Rogan interview and shirtless push-up video went viral. Kennedy’s support only confirms the titanic loss of trust between voters and mainstream media.
 Except for those in the business, few people understand the inner workings of the media world. As a doctor and lifelong Democratic voter who pulled the lever for Biden in 2020, I had no clue. Prior to COVID-19, I trusted that what I was reading represented the truth. My experience running the Front Line COVID-19 Critical Care Alliance (FLCCC) quickly disabused me of that idea.
 The first wave hit in December 2020, when I testified in the Senate that corticosteroids were saving my COVID patients’ lives. My recommendations weren’t just ignored – they were attacked , and I was personally ridiculed as a fraud and Trump puppet. My life and career were upended. I felt forced to resign my faculty position. It was cold comfort when a few months later, a large study confirmed my testimony and government agencies added steroids to the standard of care for COVID patients.
 I struggled to make sense of it through much of 2021. The Biden administration and the mainstream media single-mindedly pushed untested vaccines even as the FLCCC accumulated more and more evidence that cheap, generic medicines could stop COVID. As I detailed in my new book, “ The War on Ivermectin ,” simply presenting evidence that doctors were using the medicine to treat and prevent COVID around the world was a dog whistle for the mob.
 After this crash course in media manipulation, I was much savvier and learned to spot the tactics. When in September 2021 Rachel Maddow tweeted a local news story to her 10 million followers about Oklahoma hospitals being overrun with ivermectin overdoses , I knew it was fake news.
 Remember this headline:

 The report quoted a doctor claiming that patients overdosing on ivermectin were backing up rural hospitals. Supposedly people coming to the ER with serious injuries – even gunshot wounds – could not access care. The story was laundered through countless media outlets and blue checks , who were already skeptical of ivermectin because of its association with Trump and his supporters. In their eyes, a bunch of MAGA lunatics overdosing on “horse de-wormer” were killing grandma.
 Six days later, the hospital where the doctor worked confirmed that the story was a total fabrication . There were no ivermectin overdoses – none – and the doctor hadn’t worked at the hospital in more than two months.
 This was easily the sloppiest and most brazen hit job the media pulled during the pandemic. But Rolling Stone’s coverage took the cake. The outlet used a photo portraying people lined up outside wearing winter clothes – wrong season.

 As the saying goes, “A lie is halfway round the world before the truth has got its boots on.” To this day, Rolling Stone still hasn’t taken the story down. It simply changed the headline and slapped on a disclaimer .
 The whole debacle presents a neat lesson in how to create a fake news cycle. It goes like this.
 Step one: Identify a public tool, such as poison control centers, that are easy to manipulate. These organizations have a public hotline and email address that anyone can use to report a problem. The reports are logged as “adverse events,” but they are not easily confirmed and typically will be tabulated for public records whether or not they have been verified. This is exactly what happened with the Oklahoma story. The local poison control center was deluged with fake calls from people claiming they overdosed on ivermectin.
 Step two: Deploy “independent,” seemingly credible voices to validate and embellish the false claims. Doctors are among the most trusted professionals, but having a medical degree doesn’t make you an honest broker. Many doctors struggle to earn a living practicing medicine, and sadly some – like the Oklahoma ER doc – will stoop to industry or political hit jobs if it pays the bills. And doctors willing to go on the record expressing concern about a health scare – ivermectin overdoses – are all a reporter needs for a juicy scoop.
 Step three: Coordinate with institutional allies to add legitimacy – FDA, American Medical Association, and GAVI (The Vaccine Alliance) – to add credibility and fan the flames with outraged public statements and targeted ad buys. Reporters can pose questions to their representatives at televised briefings, which carried more significance during the pandemic.
 Finally, step four: Activate the echo chamber in mainstream and social media. Twitter influencers who live and play in the Acela corridor can talk to each other in the green rooms of cable news studios and glitzy Beltway gatherings. They can pat each other on the back for exposing the crazies and conspiracy theorists.
 The pharmaceutical company didn’t invent this playbook, though it used it effectively to wage war on ivermectin and rake in more than $30 billion dollars from COVID vaccines. Tobacco, energy, chemicals, and other industries have deployed these same tactics to neutralize competition and preserve market control.
 Big business has been gaming the system for a long time, but the rise of social media has turned once respected media institutions into clickbait machines easily manipulated by industry. With Americans locked in their homes and constantly primed to accuse each other of killing grandma, the pandemic rapidly accelerated this trend and gave pharma – and its media allies – strong motive and ample opportunity.
 From masks and lockdowns to vaccines and remote learning: Time and again, solutions touted by the media oversold and underdelivered. We may never know how many lives were lost because of the tactics used to suppress ivermectin, but we know we can’t trust the media. That explains RFK Jr.’s rise – and it’s why I wouldn’t bet against him.
 Pierre Kory, M.D., is president and chief medical officer of the Front Line COVID-19 Critical Care Alliance and author of "T he War on Ivermectin: The Medicine that Saved Millions and Could Have Ended the Pandemic ."

 P.S I just want to say thanks to all my subscribers, especially the paid ones! Your support is greatly appreciated as it allows me to devote what is often large amount of time I spend researching and writing my posts, so again, thanks . - Pierre
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 P.P.S - Proud to report that my book is gaining Best Seller status on Amazon in several countries and is climbing up the U.S Amazon rankings… Link:

Summary: A big win was achieved against government sponsored censorship in the Missouri v. Biden case this week. But what to do about the relentless propaganda? First would be to educate people how to spot it.


The COVID-19 Vaccines Could Never Prevent Transmission

Speaking out against the vaccines is quite challenging because of how deep the faith in them runs throughout the medical field. On one hand, anything which supports the vaccine narrative (e.g., dubious claims vaccines are completely effective) is taken on faith and never subject to scrutiny. On the other hand, anything which questions their efficacy or safety is attacked to the point you are on shaky ground to question something about them even if you have rock-solid evidence.
 Before my eyes were opened to this with the COVID-19 vaccines, I, like many of my colleagues assumed vaccines were safe, effective, and proven to be by a robust body of clinical research. After me and my colleagues realized how much we had been lied to about this with the COVID-19 vaccines, we started looking into the vaccines and discovered much of the evidence we’d assumed was there simply wasn’t. For example, at this point one of the only vaccines that we believe has robust clinical trial evidence demonstrating efficacy is the shingles vaccine.
 Pierre Kory’s Medical Musings is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.

 In the last few years, I’ve gained a deep understanding for how powerful the pharmaceutical industry’s propaganda apparatus is and I’ve come to terms with the fact many people I deeply respect can’t see what’s right in front of them. At the same time, things still keep on happening that just leave me jaw dropped.
 Whenever I share something on Twitter for instance, defenders of the narrative always jump at the chance to attack what I put forward. In many cases, this results in them taking a quick look at what I said, extrapolating it into an idea in their mind, and then ridiculing that idea because it is patently absurd. The problem is that in many cases, the idea they are attacking has nothing to do with what I actually said; it was just something they imagined I said.

Recently, I shared an article about how 3 (and arguably 4) Democratic members of the Senate suffered unusual heath complications that required them to have an extended leave of absence from the Senate. In addition to the odds of this happening by chance being very low, those Senators aggressively pushed the vaccines, their injuries were ones known to be linked to the vaccine and their injury rate (out of the 48 Democratic Senators) matched the adverse event rate independent surveys have found with these vaccines.

One of the injured Senators was Dianne Feinstein, who developed a shingles infection which then developed into Ramsay Hunt Syndrome (a very rare complication of shingles Justin Bieber experienced last year), and then encephalitis (an even rarer complication that affects roughly 1/30,000 to 1/50,000 people who get shingles ). Beyond this being an extraordinarily rare condition, both an increased rate of shingles and the two severe complications Feinstein experienced have been linked to the COVID-19 vaccines in numerous databases tracking the adverse responses to vaccines.
 The response I saw on Twitter to this was that shingles is such a common condition (it affects 1/3 adults) that me arguing Dianne Feinstein’s condition was linked to the vaccines was equivalent to me being unscientific enough to argue someone needing to go to the bathroom after drinking a glass of water was also due to a vaccine. I received many more similar criticisms as well (this line of attack is a common trope used to dismiss people who claim they experienced an adverse reaction to a vaccine).

What I found so surprising about this was that it wasn’t just nobody’s on Twitter; many of the well know “experts” also jumped in on this meme (e.g., these two ) including one of the most prolific skeptics on Twitter:

 AMD asked quite a few of them if they wanted to correct their statements and was ignored by all of them—something we both believe illustrates how little accountability there is for people who make absurd statements that endorse the narrative. When I asked AMD why smart people do things like this, I was sent “ Cognitive sophistication does not attenuate the bias blind spot ” as a response.

 That article argues that the more “intelligent” people are, the more likely they are to appraise information by quickly looking for something which supports their existing beliefs while simultaneously being blind to anything which challenges them. AMD argued this behavior is particularly problematic because the non-experts on Twitter will typically default to parroting the messages established by those tunnel-visioned experts.
 Last week, I shared this article, again from AMD:

 After I posted it, I then had many commentators argue that no one ever promised the vaccines would prevent transmission and that I was gaslighting the public by claiming anyone said that. This really shocked me. We literally had our public officials tell us over and over that the vaccines would stop transmission and tons of documented proof they did this can easily be found online. It’s both incredible and sad that the hypnosis of the narrative is so powerful people can easily forgot what they had sincerely believed only a year ago.
 After this happened I asked AMD to put together a compilation of the lies we were told about transmission and the proof those who told us should have known they were lying. I feel this is important for everyone to learn about because the mythology of stopping transmission was used to:

 1. Encourage widespread discrimination against the unvaccinated (under the nonsensical logic that the vaccines “worked” but simultaneously could not protect you from someone who had not been vaccinated).

 2. Bait the public into agreeing to a mass vaccination campaign and to accept both illegal and extremely harmful vaccination mandates being enacted upon the American people.

Please read AMD’s article and consider subscribing to their newsletter (its my favorite one on Substack).
 The Forgotten Side of Medicine Here I do my best to expose both the light and dark within medicine that has remained hidden. My hope is that knowledge can improve your health and the health of those around us.
 By A Midwestern Doctor

 AMD’s article is excellent and throughly debunks one of the central lies that made the insanity we saw throughout COVID-19 possible. If this lie is not exposed, I am certain it will be reused to push through the next onslaught of vaccine mandates:
 The Forgotten Side of Medicine
 Why the COVID-19 Vaccines Could Never Prevent Transmission

 Recently, the lies conducted to push the vaccines have been brought back to the public’s attention. This is partly because of the numerous videos now circulating that show just how many times a spokesman for them contradicted himself while making false promises about the vaccines to sell them to the American public on national television (which he late…
 Read more
 3 years ago · 287 likes · 253 comments · A Midwestern Doctor

 Pierre Kory’s Medical Musings is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.

Summary: Why did all of our officials lie to us and why do so many people now believe that never happened?


I Published Another Op-Ed on FoxNews.com: "3 Commitments Biden's CDC Pick Must Make To Restore The Agency's Credibility"

By now, my subscribers have witnessed the transformation of my perspective on both government and its health care agencies. Many have followed my journey of discovery after I became expert on numerous aspects of Covid science (using a wide array of data sources) and found that it was completely divorced from government and health agency policies.
 I came to the conclusion that the agencies (and really the government in its entirety) is fully captured by corporations. This was a shocking discovery to me, mostly given its scope and scale (but not to many of my subscribers who had been “awakened” to this fact long before I had). So, understand that in this Op-Ed, I literally try to pretend that these agencies have population health as their primary consideration but have been somehow incompetent and thus need better guidance.
 I actually don’t believe that at all obviously, but that is not a message that can get published in major media in our present era. So, instead, I pretend” that my guidance is something they should follow (which they won’t) but the intent of these Op-Ed’s is not that. Instead, what I am trying to do is to get more of our population to understand just how discordant our government and its health agencies are from pragmatic approaches to protecting our population health.
 In this era of brazen corporate controlled media (CCM) propaganda and censorship, we have to bring the population’s awareness along slowly, mostly because you can’t get “real truth” published there. It’s kind of weird because I feel like I am lying in these Op-Ed’s by “pretending” that what I say will translate into correct action or policy. It won’t. Or that the “mistakes” made during Covid (they weren’t mistakes) can somehow by remedied by a captured government. It can’t.
 But I still try to navigate the truth out there, walking a tightrope through that sea of censorship and propaganda. Not sure how successful my approaches are but I feel like I have to try whatever way I can in our current media environment to get more and more people to keep asking questions and keep assessing why and how the agencies have failed and are failing. Because people are increasingly diseased and dying as a consequence of their actions. If my tactics are successful, then maybe the wider population can get to the truth of the matter which is that we are in a state of complete regulatory capture and that we have to go elsewhere for health guidance.
 One example of a source of un-conflicted, transparent, pragmatic guidance is.,. wait for it.. the FLCCC . That is where my partner, Professor Paul Marik, has been on an absolute warpath of late amassing sound, credible evidence-based guidance on pragmatic approaches to protecting against and treating numerous disease conditions beyond Covid.
 Please behold his work on 1) Eating Well , 2) Insulin Resistance, Metabolic Syndrome, and Type II Diabetes (the proximate cause of well, almost everything the U.S population suffers from,) and 3) his most recent opus of scientific research called “The Role of Repurposed Drugs and Metabolic Interventions in Treating Cancer. ” You don’t know what you don’t know.
 Anyway, back to my Op-Ed:

 Among the litany of reasons that President Joe Biden’s approval rating stands at a dreary 31% is his failure to deliver on the promise of a return to normal after COVID.
 The candidate who ran on unity drove the country further apart with decisions based on bad science. Biden’s failings are fueling the surprising strength of Robert Kennedy, Jr., who enjoys the support of 16% of Democratic primary voters in a recent FOX News poll.
 With Dr. Rochelle Walensky leaving her perch atop the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) at the end of June, Biden’s pick to replace her is another step in the wrong direction.

 Dr. Mandy Cohen, secretary of the state Department of Health and Human Services, speaks during a briefing on the coronavirus pandemic in Raleigh, North Carolina, May 26, 2020. (Ethan Hyman/Raleigh News & Observer/Tribune News Service via Getty Images)
 As the secretary of the North Carolina Department of Health and Human Services during COVID, Mandy Cohen marched in lockstep with Dr. Anthony Fauci through the pandemic. She even sported a mask featuring his image.
 Her policies subjected North Carolinians to harsh restrictions that disrupted everyday life without any demonstrated benefit. What’s worse, she doesn’t regret any of it, recalling with glee how she joked with friends about enforcing mass shutdowns.
 The fallout from these policies were no laughing matter. Many people were devastated financially and emotionally. Depression and anxiety in children doubled, and concerns about mental health skyrocketed.
 Against this backdrop, Cohen’s critics have every reason to be skeptical about her ability to chart a new course. Since her appointment is not subject to Senate approval, here are three commitments Cohen should make to restore the CDC’s credibility.
 First, submit to a full congressional investigation of pandemic decision-making. Since the 118th Congress took power in January, the House Committee on Oversight and Accountability has made great strides shedding light on fraud and waste in federal pandemic spending. Even as the recent compromise on the debt ceiling clawed back $27 billion in COVID-era federal funding to federal agencies, the committee’s oversight work must continue into other arenas.
 From confusing medical guidance to misrepresenting data to embarrassing communication errors (remember the suggestion to play basketball online with friends?), the CDC’s failings during the pandemic are well-documented. These actions have damaged the once sterling reputation of the agency. Cohen should commit to safeguards that ensure they can never be repeated.

 CDC Director Robert Redfield speaks during a Senate Appropriations subcommittee hearing on Capitol Hill on Sept. 16, 2020. (Andrew Harnik/AP Photo/Bloomberg via Getty Images)
 Second, Cohen should decry the politicization of agency recommendations. Many of my fellow Democrats were quick to accuse the CDC director under President Trump, Dr. Robert Redfield, for allowing politics to influence mitigation measures. They were correct then, and it’s a principle that must be fought for, regardless of which party is in the White House.
 To operate effectively, the CDC must follow the data – not political whims. A good place to start is allowing an independent review of the Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report (MMWR), the CDC's in-house think tank. During the pandemic, MMWR cherry-picked data about masks and vaccines to make the case for their effectiveness. Three years later, a powerful combination of academic studies, data and common sense indicate that promises about masks and vaccines were oversold and underdelivered.
 The CDC’s vaccine injury monitoring efforts must be strengthened and made more transparent, too. The agency effectively ignored data about vaccine-related injuries that people and health care providers reported through its Vaccine Adverse Event Reporting System (VAERS) and v-safe. A Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request revealed that 7.7% of people receiving the experimental COVID vaccine reported requiring medical care – an astonishing statistic of which few are fully aware.
 Finally, Cohen must demonstrate a commitment to medical freedom. It’s easy to look back and marvel at bad decisions made during the fog of COVID. But at the time, those who raised concerns were treated as pariahs and shunned from society. California even tried to deny doctors their livelihood for spreading "misinformation."
 The role of CDC is not to police and shame people who don't follow agency recommendations. It's to give people practical guideposts for health care concerns based on comprehensive and transparent scientific data, and then trust them to make decisions for themselves. The one-size-fits-all approach simply does not work.
 Voters will render judgment on Biden’s handling of the pandemic next November, or maybe even sooner. A USA Today/Suffolk University poll shows 80% of Democrats wish to see Biden engage Kennedy in a debate. To truly turn the page, the next head of the CDC must break from the mistakes of the past. Let’s hope Cohen seizes the opportunity.
 CLICK HERE FOR MORE FROM DR. PIERRE KORY (my other Op-Ed’s, following similar tactics and themes that have landed on Foxnews.com).
 Pierre Kory, M.D., is president and chief medical officer of the Front Line COVID-19 Critical Care Alliance.

 P.S I just want to say thanks to all my subscribers, especially the paid ones! Your support is greatly appreciated as it allows me to devote what is often large amount of time I spend researching and writing my posts, so again, thanks. - Pierre
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 P.P.S. My book called “The War on Ivermectin” was published this month and the reviews are literally beyond my wildest dreams. Big shout out to my co-writer Jenna McCarthy who helped make it tight, fast-paced, and un-put-downable (says the reviews, not me :). If any of you have read it and liked it.. please leave a review if so inclined. Link to book below:

Summary: I "gave some guidance" to Dr. Mandy Cohen, former secretary of the North Carolina Department of Health and Human Services on how the CDC could clean up its act. Not gonna happen, but still.