The Real Threat of COVID-19 and How Cannabis Can Help

This week’s episode is a departure from our editorial calendar to address the tragic onslaught of the COVID-19 pandemic and explore ways in which cannabis can help. Our hearts are breaking for the thousands of people suffering amid the outbreak, subsequent social distancing and ensuing financial fallout. We also want to honor the heroic sacrifices being made by healthcare workers, first responders and others performing essential services so that the rest of us can shelter in place.

Before now, it would have been hard to fathom how a virus could so dramatically change life as we know it. After all, millions of people are infected with at least one of a dozen strains of flu in a given year without as much consequence to our way of life. According to the Centers for Disease Control, more than 45 million people living in the U.S. were diagnosed with flu in 2018. Tragically, 61 thousand lost their lives. While those numbers seem staggering, flu outbreaks are anticipated and, since they happen over the course of several months each year, they rarely max out our healthcare system all at once the way the COVID-19 pandemic has. Not since the Spanish Flu in 1913 has a single virus brought the world to its knees.

Unlike other global health pandemics like Ebola, HIV and the Zika virus, which were contained by rapid, coordinated government responses, what makes the coronavirus pandemic so much more devastating, has been the lack of transparency on the part of government officials, first in China, then here at home, coupled with the Administration’s painfully slow response. By the time the truth was unearthed by whistleblowers and concerned scientists began to sound the alarm, the virus had jumped continents, making containment virtually impossible. Adding insult to injury, the incubation period of this particular mutation of the corona family of viruses is lengthy so, unlike the common flu, a-symptomatic carriers are unwittingly infecting everyone around them.

For so many of us, the social isolation, fear and uncertainty about this disease are only compounding the stress of coping with extreme disruptions of ordinary life. It’s no secret that oxidative stress can lead to inflammatory disease and is factor impacting immunity.  Left unchecked, stress can impede the healing process and make matters far worse when we are ill.  That explains why so many people are experiencing medical complications and obviates the need for all of us to find ways to cope.

That’s where cannabis can help. To be clear, there is no evidence suggesting cannabis cures coronavirus; there is no known cure to date. But cannabis does help to alleviate the stress that causes disease and reinforce our immunity to enhance our body’s capacity to combat the consequential infections caused by coronavirus.

That’s the topic of this episode and Dr. Judy Mikovits returns to help us understand why. It’s worth mentioning that she will also go into detail about her findings during the Canna World Expo which takes place on the first two Saturdays of April.

Dr. Judy A. Mikovits is an acclaimed biomedical researcher and author of Plague and the newly published Plague of Corruption. She earned her BA in chemistry with a specialization in biology from the University of Virginia in 1980 and her PhD in biochemistry and molecular biology from George Washington University in 1992. In her 35-year quest to understand and treat chronic diseases, she has co-authored seminal papers culminating at least a decade of research in each of four fields: immunology, natural products chemistry, epigenetics, and HIV/AIDs drug development. In 2006, she became attracted to the plight of families with neuroimmune diseases including ME/CFS and autism. Dr. Mikovits has been primarily responsible for demonstrating the relationship between environmentally acquired immune dysfunction, chronic inflammation, and these diseases.

Dr. Mikovits has published more than 50 peer-reviewed articles, many in the world’s top medical journals and she has been profiled in Discover magazine as well as the Wall Street Journal and The New York Times. Her pioneering work during her 20-year career at the National Cancer Institute includes the discovery of the modulation of DNA methylation machinery by human retro viral infection and the development of the concept of inflammatory cytokines and chemokine signatures of infection and disease, which was first published in 1999, when she directed the Laboratory of Antiviral Drug Mechanisms in developing therapeutics and diagnostics for HIV/AIDS and AIDS associated malignancies.

These are all therapies that are still the standard of care twenty-five years later and credited with preventing millions of deaths from HIV/AIDS.

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