 Think, take Hawaii, cold green. My honorable guest, and I do mean honorable this time, is Dr. Malcolm Ng of the John Burns School of Medicine, and he's also a member of the Hawaii Medical Association and chief of ophthalmology at Kapiolani Hospital for Women and Children, but maybe more important from my standpoint is he's a long, long, long-term friend and not only is he a doctor's doctor, I think he's published about a million papers on ophthalmology, but he is what I would term a holistic health doctor. He wants to look at the whole body as a system and make sure that all cylinders are firing so that we coordinate all of our little mini ecosystems within the body to attain homeostasis. And I think I can mention the doctor's age. He has passed the big 8-0 and the main reason to my knowledge he sees other doctors is when he's after he's engaged in a surfing contest and has taken a wrong move, gone off the surfboard and bashed his shoulder against a reef. That's his idea of visiting the doctors at age 80 plus, which most people 80 plus would give their their ITs for. So welcome, welcome, Dr. Malcolm. I'm so pleased to have you on the show. And normally I'm talking about energy efficiency, but in this case, we're going to talk about the most efficacious means of combating the gosh darn the COVID virus. And something that the doctor and I have both been wondering is with all of these national pronouncements about how we're going to beat the virus. And the fact that the vaccine is going to can inject you with a small bit of the virus such that you your immune system is able to combat it and build up resistance to it so that when the real thing hits you, you have your resistance immune system at the ready. Our question is why not build up the immune system by other means? You don't have to wait for the vaccine, but you have perfectly over the counter non harmful type, not medications, but supplements, which launches us into vitamin D three. I was just scanning some other documents this morning. And D three keeps popping up one article described it as a very effective means of combating cancer, another against the other virus, including pneumonia and so forth. So why in the world aren't we are the whole immunology profession? We mean talking about vitamin D three, the sunshine vitamin. And guess my first question to you, doctor is we live in Hawaii. We've got plenty of sunshine. Why do even we need vitamin D three? And what in the world does it do that is so that boosts our immune system so effectively? Take it away, doctor. Well, thank you, Howard. I enjoyed that introduction. Hopefully I can live up to it. But I would like to share some knowledge about vitamin D three. Vitamin D three might be called the most miracle vitamin you can think of because it affects so many systems and seems to be so important. But primarily, everyone knows vitamin D three is so called sunshine vitamin. They also know that has something to do with bones and calcium metabolism. And of course, vitamin D deficiency in children results in something called rickets, which is really wobbly bones and poorly constructed bones. But vitamin D three has a lot more impact on your health than just helping you have healthy bones. I got interested in this vitamin some time ago, in fact, probably over 15 years ago. When I happened to start doing some reading and research on vitamin D three from that was coming out of Harvard by a Dr. Willett, W I L L E T T and Dr. Willett was emphasizing how much this vitamin actually played a part in your health system. It's really a hormone in a sense, not just a vitamin. But he was emphasizing that it could improve your immune system and your responses from your immune system to outside invaders, namely viruses. Now, this is long before COVID was even known. But it occurred to me that maybe this vitamin might have some value in protecting against the bad reactions we have with COVID. Now, let's let's put COVID in perspective. The mortality rate of COVID is twice that of regular flu. That's been accepted. Those are statistics that come out of the CDC. Well, the mortality rate for regular flu is 0.1%. 0.1. So when you say it's twice as deadly, you're talking about 0.2. So the way you read the newspapers these days, you think this would be a lot more lethal than it really is. But nevertheless, we know there are certain groups of people that it affects badly. And these are people with what they call comorbidity, obesity, diabetes, aging, especially people who seem to be in nursing homes and especially people during the winter season. So let's get around to this idea of the sunshine vitamin. Let's talk a little bit more about that. It turns out that our flu season goes out as our vitamin D3 supply, which is namely in your skin due to mechanisms from the sun, the sun affects your skin and a precursor of vitamin D3 is in your skin and it converts it. So we have low vitamin D3, typically in winter months. Guess what when we have more flu? Winter months. So it's not that, you know, this is not rocket science. So let's look at vitamin D3 also in terms of level. We have multiple studies showing that if you have a low vitamin D3 level in your blood at the time you're affected by various diseases such as COVID-19, which is the one we want to concentrate on, you can have a pretty bad reaction. What is that reaction? Well, the reaction is an over response you might call it of your immune system. And this response is called a cytokine storm at the moment. This is where your immune cells are going haywire and giving you more reaction than you really need. Somehow and not all the mechanisms are worked out completely here. Vitamin D3 seems to modulate your immune system to allow you to not overreact, you might say. And it also provides, it's true, some complicated system called the renin angiotensin system. But I won't get into the real complex detail. Just say it improves your immune system. Well, how do we know that it has anything to do with COVID-19? It turns out that with low levels that is deficient COVID-19 or even you might say subnormal levels of that in your bloodstream at the time you're infected with COVID-19, your mortality rate goes way up. A large study done in Indonesia showing what happens with what happens with the correlation between a low vitamin D3 level in your bloodstream as well as those that have normal. Okay, well, look at the bar on the left. The bar on the left is a green bar showing that you can have about a 4% mortality rate at the time you're admitted to the hospital with COVID-19. Now the middle bar is if you have deficient vitamin D3 and the bar on the far right is really scary because that is about 99% mortality rate if you're deficient in vitamin D3. So that bar, although it is only one study, there are multiple other studies that show that high levels of vitamin D3 do seem to protect against adverse reaction to the virus, but this one is the most dramatic study that I could pull out of the literature. And it really emphasizes something. It emphasizes that there's something you can do with your immune system besides vaccines because what does the vaccine do for you? Well, it improves your antibody reaction to the virus to allow it to defeat the virus, but apparently also vitamin D3 has an important role. And so besides putting on a mask, washing your hands, avoiding social contact, in other words, social distancing, there's something that someone can do that's pretty simple. You go to the drugstore and get vitamin D3 capsules and make sure that your level of vitamin D3 is adequate. Any physician can have you evaluated for your vitamin D3 level. It's very easy to get that level. If it's below 30 nanograms, you're deficient. That's 30 nanograms for ML. And how do you raise it? You can raise it by sitting in the sun for 20 minutes, 30 minutes. If you sit out in your BVDs in the sun or your bikini and don't put on sunscreen, guess what? You're going to get 10,000 units. That's a big low. That's a big low. But here's the problem. Vitamin D3 has a short time life. A half life of vitamin D3 is two weeks. So this means you should have a constant supply. You can't just rely on one big sunburn per month. That's not enough. So what you have to do is make sure you have the adequate level of vitamin D3 on board when you get attacked by the virus. And who are the people that are typically low in vitamin D3? Obese, diabetics, and people don't get any sunshine. And they cover up during winter, which means they have even less sunshine. And then if they live in a nursing home and they don't go outside and get exposed to the sun, which they rarely do, they have a low level. Repeated studies have shown that nursing home patients have low levels of vitamin D3. You would think that part of the public health advice today would be every nursing home supervisor should get their patients evaluated for vitamin D3 levels in their blood. And take them out in their wheelchairs and expose them to the sun for a while. That was the treatment for TB, remember? 30, 40 years ago. That's all they had to offer. There are no antibiotics in those days. My grandfather was treated in sunshine for tuberculosis that he developed. This was about 50 to 60 years ago, actually, quite a long time ago. So without antibiotics on board for TB, that was the treatment. But sunshine vitamin D3 has now been examined in various methods because some physicians will say, Oh, well, that's just an association, maybe that has nothing to do with real resistance to the virus. Maybe it's other things like co-morbidities, et cetera. And Dr, we have to take a break right now. Sure. This is Sink Tech, Hawaii, Howard Wigg, Dr. Malcolm Ng, my honored guest. We will be back in one minute. Afternoon again, Howard Wigg, Code Green, Sink Tech, Hawaii, here with your friend, Dr. Malcolm Ng, and we are talking about subject, just a wee bit interesting to most people, namely the COVID virus and what we can do to boost our immune systems to be more resistant to the COVID virus. And we are talking specifically about vitamin D3. So take it away again, Dr. Okay. So we're talking again about vitamin D3 and what you can do. So your levels of vitamin D3 tend to decrease with co-morbidities such as diabetes, high blood pressure, chronic illness of any type, or just aging. So the best thing that someone can do for themselves is make sure their doctors evaluate their vitamin D3 level and if they're deficient, allow them to get on a very inexpensive gel cap that you can buy in any pharmacy. It turns out that perhaps the older you get and the more co-morbidities you have, you have to check your levels even more carefully. And I would say aging alone, if you're a healthy person over 60, you probably need about 5,000 units a day to keep your levels up high enough that will help resist it. Now, let me emphasize again, this is not prevention of COVID. This is prevention of severe reactions to COVID-19. And the latest studies have been even more encouraging about this because people are figuring out certain combinations of treatment and there are triple and quadruple medications used these days and their studies are coming through. One of the studies shows using ivermectin, which is a, apparently becoming a very well known now, little known before, but ivermectin is an antibiotic used for COVID-19 by many physicians finding positive results. But listen to this, they combine ivermectin sometimes with vitamin D3 also as part of their treatment and they also combine zinc. So you have vitamin D3, you have zinc, you have ivermectin and they're adding sometimes another antibiotic like gauke and cycling. So vitamin D3 is becoming much more well known by the clinicians that are treating the virus and not, unfortunately, not so much in the United States, but in other countries. In India, for instance, it's part of the regimen they'll give the patients right away. They'll find out and they'll give them a big whopping dose. I mean 20,000 units of vitamin D3 on, on admission to the hospital. And they also check their levels, of course beforehand, but it turns out that, that this is not really a toxic vitamin. The toxicity gets there if you go over 100 nanograms per ml and maybe even over 75, there might be a little bit of a risk. But nevertheless, it's a pretty safe vitamin to take. So I want to emphasize that if you want to combine approach, it's like when I talk to somebody about health measures, they say, well, but you might say vitamin D3 is important, but you know, what about other things? Yeah, it's true. You're going to have to combine your treatment sometimes. What you're going to have to look at is, like I say, it's a combined approach to the virus. If you're fighting a war and you want just a Navy, or do you want the Army, the Air Force and everything else. So of nothing else, this vitamin, this whole COVID-19 points up that we have a problem with health in our, in our community. And the biggest things that some people can do besides taking vitamin D3 is make sure their general health is best they can get. In other words, if you're diabetic, control your diabetes, if you're hypertension, control your hypertension, if you're smoking, don't just stop because your lungs are at risk once you're smoking. So there are, if nothing else, the dreaded virus COVID-19 has woken up the public a little bit about how they're going to have a tougher time with the virus and infection if they have the virus encounter with the virus. So I basically, you know, in a way it's a stimulus to start thinking about your general health. And that's diet and exercise and all these other general measures. You know, Dr, this is reminding me of the fact that in the 1980s, the HIV epidemic broke out. And it is now under control, as I understand it, because the medical profession has developed a cocktail, quote unquote, of, I guess, vitamins to combat this HIV. And it sounds like the vitamin D3 is maybe the... Well, they've developed antivirals. Yes. And we have antivirals coming down the track. And some of them are being tested now in prospective studies. As I mentioned, ivermectin is not well known, but it will be known because it's being used in other parts of the world with outstanding development, outstanding results. And then zinc, of course, has been known by the people that are interested in general natural methods. The persons have been aware of this. In fact, it was one time when I was inviting some of my patients to go out and get some zinc. There was no zinc to be found on the shelves anywhere in any of the health food stores or vitamin shop. So finally, the need was met. And now you can get adequate zinc, but I would say 30 to 50 milligrams of zinc per day is also a good idea. And it turns out that zinc is really lethal to viruses. And this is the way hydroxychloroquine work. Hydroxychloroquine, which got a bad name because of political reasons perhaps more than anything else. Hydroxychloroquine was a zinc ionophore, which means that it allows zinc to go into the viral particle and stop the replication. So you want something that helps stop the replication. You have to have adequate zinc. And some of the studies done on hydroxychloroquine were totally deficient because they did not repeat, did not include zinc in the regimen. So if the patient was deficient in zinc, then the expected benefit of hydroxychloroquine was not really expressed and didn't come through. So hydroxychloroquine got to be very controversial. For a while, it was approved by the FDA. Now they say the FDA doesn't approve it, etc, etc. But there are, there are some public health individuals, namely Dr. Rich from Yale University School of Medicine. He's in the School of Public Health, actually. And I was trained at Yale. That's where I got my MD. Dr. Rich says that observatory study should actually be the cornerstone of advances in medicine and not shunted to the side and say, oh, are there not randomized controlled trials? Therefore, no good. And he strongly opposes that other position, which is unfortunately what I call the conventional view now, is that unless you have a randomized controlled study, you're not going to have anything of value in terms of medication or, or in terms of treatment. Well, we like that as the gold standard. But remember, Howard, there was a famous Dr. Jenner. I don't know if you've ever heard of him. Dr. Jenner's first observational study was that everybody was dying of smallpox in London. And the cow maids, the, the cow maids that did the milking of the cows in the rural areas were not getting smallpox. They were getting something else, a little, a little disturbing in that they got pustules and fever, but it was called cowpox. So Dr. Jenner put these observations together and thought, I wonder if I took some cowpox, puss, you might say, or exudate, and actually inoculated people with that and see if that would prevent smallpox. And there you have Howard, the first vaccine ever developed. But how was it developed? By observation. So as physicians, I have to remind the public that positions change all the time. Don't expect them to be so-called, but the science says just the science, because just the science says maybe totally opposite in six more months. And you may find out totally differently about the same thing that was being advocated. But what I'm saying is you've got to be observant and see what happens. And basically, I'm on this program to allow people to understand that they have to take control of their own health system sometime with the high cost of health care these days. And I will mention this just briefly, the collateral damage to the lockdowns, which have now been totally refuted, you might say. I mean, there's no longer the advice, you know, locked out for the virus, that WHO has reversed its position that it had, as I said, many months ago, they were saying, oh yeah, we have to do lockdowns. Now lockdowns are only valuable to make sure that the hospitals are not overwhelmed by patients with conditions or the disease. So that still applies. But as far as total lockdown, look at the collateral damage. People aren't going for cancer screenings, they're not going for the regular health exam. I had a good friend recently who passed away with hypertension with a stroke. He hadn't seen his doctor in six months because he was afraid to go out and get a physician's examination. He basically neglected his general health because of COVID and paid a terrible price. He got a stroke and he passed away. So let me tell you something. We have to question this whole idea of lockdown being so-called beneficial. If we become so narrowly focused that we only think that we have to do lockdown because after all, people are dying of COVID, we're going to be so short-sighted. And you might say we're like horses with blinders on our eyes and have become single focus at the expense of other illnesses. So this should remind us, COVID should remind us though, it's our general health and our immune system that are going to help us defeat the virus, prevent the ill effects of the virus. And Doctor, we've got to wrap up. But if I could summarize, we also talked about something called targeted response and you targeted those individuals who are most vulnerable, namely the elderly, the people in the care homes and so far, and people with generally in poor health. I believe you're saying those are the people we should really focus on the rest of us who are blessed with good health and lead fairly normal lives. Is that a good summary? Yeah, exactly. Howard and I further emphasize that by targeting, we mean people that are a nursing home, people with comorbidities. And the Great Barrington Declaration was a document signed by over 30, I think it's up to 35,000 physicians and scientists, including myself now, which emphasizes targeted mitigation for the virus, not blanketed lockdown. In other words, they are allowing children to go to school and restaurants to be open, et cetera. And this is not, in other words, a lockdown method. The Great Barrington Declaration was actually composed by three very, very well-known and rather well-known and very scholarly physicians and epidemiologists, one from Harvard, one from Stanford and one from Oxford University. And they put together this targeted. So anybody can go online, Google it and you'll find the Great Barrington Declaration. And on that very cheery note, we must bid fond of you to everybody. Again, Dr. Malcolm Ng, John A. Byrne School of Medicine, I forgot to mention that he did his training in two teeny little institutions called Harvard and Yale. And Lord knows how many lives he's helped to save in the meantime. And he's also an age group surfing champion. Thank you so much for being with us, Dr. So how are they green? See you next time.