Genetic and Autoimmune Susceptibility to Covid-19 Infections

Since this pandemic started now over 2 years ago, doctors and researches have noted that patients respond differently to SARS-CoV-2 infection, ranging from having no symptoms at all to needing hospitalization. As of this month, at least 4.7 million people have died from COVID-19 worldwide.  But luckily the vaccine role has slowed that death toll although the infection rate with the new mutations or variants as we call them is higher. This “clogging” of our hospitals is reducing the ability of hospitals to treat other medical emergencies and forcing them to triage (accept only best chance to survive patients and turning the other Covid cases away) Covid-19 patients! The vaccine has some rare reactions less than 0.0008% of death from it but it has a 94% increased survival when taken. Yes a chiropractor is telling you, the fast food junky to get the vaccine now and stop clogging the ER’s of the world. Ultimately this chiropractor wishes you would start working on better eating habits and doing serious nutrition and keeping better spinal health with regular chiropractic instead of “back pain chiropractic” because then you wouldn’t need the vaccine! The ones who need to hear this will most likely not be the ones reading this article so it is up to you the more health conscious reader to inform them.

A recent compilation of studies on why some people young and old reacted far worse when infected with Covid-19 than others has been done and is ongoing. As will all things in life genes play a crucial role in how we respond to things in the environment like viruses and pollution and son on. There are a few genes that make a person more susceptible to SARS-CoV-2 infections because they don’t “turn on” a specific part of your immune response to viral invaders like Covid-19. The other reason is one we are far too familiar with in modern healthcare and society, autoimmune disease which in this case also turns off this crucial part of immune responses to viruses. The specific defect is lack of or low concentrations of a crucial protein called interferon. It’s production has been shown to be low in individuals with severe Covid-19 symptoms compared to those that have mild or no symptoms who recovery relatively quickly.

Interferon is a protein that senses the presence of the viruses trying to invade your body every day which don’t belong there. Once antibodies detect and attach to the virus the interferon attaches to your cells signaling to get ready for an “invasion” and not to let the virus in. Sometimes this response does not work well enough due to low concentrations of interferon and not enough of your cells get the “battle call”. This can be due to viral adaptations to “get around our defenses” or as just stated low concentrations of interferon, therefore many cells become infected so our body goes to “def-con 2” so to speak and the inflammatory reaction to the invaders begins, the cytokine storm. Now depending on your state of health BEFORE being infected, your other genes that keep things in check as this storm rages on dictates how well you get over the infection…or become overwhelmed with inflammation in your lungs and blood clots and die. Most fair well but some do not.

Dr. Darragh Duffy and Casanova are quoted directly now…

“We can think of COVID-19 as a two-step disease, says immunologist Darragh Duffy of the Institut Pasteur in Paris. The first step is when “the immune system is trying to respond to the virus and there, for me, it’s all about the interferon response,” he says. Interferons are proteins that bind to specific surface receptors on cells in danger, warning them about the viral invaders and orchestrating a signaling pathway that will keep the viruses from multiplying”.  

“Casanova and colleagues have further shown that interferon activity can be blunted by the body’s own antibodies. In a cohort of 3,595 patients with critical COVID-19, 13.6 percent carried autoantibodies to type I interferons called -α2 or -ω in their blood. Among critical patients above 80 years old, the percentage increased to 21 percent, as these particular autoantibodies become more frequent with age. Only 1 percent of the patients with mild or no symptoms carried them. The team then looked at a cohort of 10,778 uninfected individuals, and found that 2.3 percent of them carried these autoantibodies—for those older than 80, the percentage climbed to 6.3. Along with other studies, these findings suggest that autoantibodies targeting interferons -α2 and -ω predate infection, increase with age, and may be more common in men than in women”.  

So these current findings suggest that “the general mechanism of disease is a disruption of type I interferon immunity,” says Casanova: “whether genetic or autoimmune, the endpoint is insufficient type I interferon.” 

Timing matters 

Interferons appear to only play a positive role in the immune response to SARS-CoV-2 early in the course of infection, however. When it comes to the interferon response, timing is critical, says Duffy. “It could be detrimental later on in that it could be inhibiting some of the adaptive immune response [or] it could be driving certain inflammation,” he says. In line with this, administration of interferon to hospitalized patients in a clinical trial led by the World Health Organization Solidarity Trial Consortium did not reduce mortality. 

“The inability to mount [a] proper sequence of events is likely leading to this kind of delay,” says Iwasaki. The immune systems of patients with the delayed response eventually “do develop antibodies, but it’s too late at that point because the virus infection has already spread.” In those patients, “it’s no longer the virus that is causing the disease, but [rather] the hyperimmune response . . . and at that point, antibodies might not be functional or even relevant.” 

All this new understanding leads me, Dr. Kydonieus back to what I have been saying all along, LIFESTYLE, LIFESTYLE, LIFESTYLE. You are what you eat, drink and breath. Autoimmune diseases/reactions come from poor diet and pollution over years of GI abuse that is why you see this more of the autoimmune decreased interferon response in older individuals- they have had decades of pollution exposure and eating processed foods that damage the gut (leaky gut). If you have lived a life of low physical activity, processed food, sugary drinks, cookies and cakes not to mention too many grains (bread and gravy) as well as pasteurized dairy you are going to have issues when you contract Covid-19. But it’s not too late to change or improve your health habits! Most of you will need a “coach” as changing a lifetime of habits is harder than quitting smoking! Find a nutrition/herbalist coach, you’ll also need a chiropractor to keep your nerves connected without interference so your immune system can respond fully when needed. And you will need to get “in shape” and stop using your treadmill as a towel rack in the spare room! An exercise trainer would be the best for most us! These things ALL need to happen NOW, TODAY before you need them due to Covid. Then once you get yourself on the road to a better, healthier life with less autoimmunity and less activation of “bad genes” the hard part begins, teach your family how to join you.

Read my Covid recommendations for supplements and nebulizing here.

This Pandemic is a wake up call to the ultra-modern, polluted, global warming, fast paced, industrialized food consumption, less personal, career driven world we humans have created.

To read the complete article where the above quotes were taken from on The Scientist website, click here.