All Episodes
Previous Next
March 24, 2018 - Health Ranger - Mike Adams
34:02
Pandemic Preparedness FREE Online How-To Course: Episode 16
| Copy link to current segment

Time Text
Welcome back to Pandemic Preparedness.
I'm your host, Mike Adams, the Health Ranger.
And in this episode, we're covering the mathematics of the Ebola spread.
I promise not to bore you with too many numbers, but I do need to explain some crucial concepts that are not necessarily intuitive.
That's why it's so important to understand these.
And also, this will explain why the medical system in any first world nation will be rapidly overwhelmed with Ebola patients and completely unable to help most people in an actual outbreak.
Even if the doctors and nurses want to help people, they won't be able to.
And here's why.
If you look at the mathematics behind the spread of Ebola, currently every one infection is resulting in an additional 1.5 to 2.0 new infections.
It's almost 2.0, and that's actually what the Washington Post went with, saying it's about a 1 to 2 ratio right now of one person getting infected and then two new people getting infected.
Technically, it's not really quite 2.0, but it's close enough.
We'll use that for Illustrated purposes.
Now the cycle time on this is about three to four weeks.
So if you've got something that is nearly doubling every three to four weeks, you have an exponential multiplication of the problem.
The problem is getting worse at a very rapid scale, even if the number is only 1.8.
If you take one number and multiply it by 1.8 every 30 days, you get a very very big number in just 12 months.
And this is really the basis behind the CDC's estimate that we could be looking at 1.4 million infections of Ebola by the end of January 2015.
The Washington Post, their infographic recently estimated that in about one month from now, which is mid-November of 2014, there will be 45,000 to 50,000 patients infected.
And then in another month, in other words, mid-December, there will be 100,000 or so.
And then by mid-January, maybe 200,000.
So the estimates, of course, vary significantly.
That's a big difference between 200,000 and 1.4 million.
But if you don't stop the exponential progression, it's going to get into millions sooner or later anyway.
You have to stop the progression.
Now, let's go back to the United States.
In Dallas, Texas, Thomas Duncan, the first victim of Ebola in America, passed away.
But before he passed away, he spread Ebola to at least one other person that we know of right now, and more than likely there will be at least an additional person who caught Ebola from him.
Now we learned recently that there were 70 medical staffers who had attended to Mr.
Duncan's medical needs.
Seventy people.
Yes, seven-zero.
Seventy medical staffers.
That is a lot of people.
But Thomas Duncan was in the late stages of an Ebola crash, as they call it.
He was losing function in all the organs, liver, kidneys, bowel movements.
He was vomiting.
I'm not even going to go into the details.
It's pretty horrifying.
And it's sad that anyone would have to die that way.
But this required an enormous number of medical staffers to tend to his needs.
Now, in addition to these 70 medical staffers, one of whom we already know has been confirmed infected with Ebola, there were about 48 people who were already on the CDC's watch list.
And interestingly, the medical staffer, the nurse who caught Ebola from Mr.
Duncan, she was not on that watch list.
So clearly the watch list was not encompassing everybody that it needed to watch.
So even though the numbers are a little bit wishy-washy out there right now, the reports keep changing, let's say that there's about 100 people that Mr.
Duncan came into contact with who could have caught Ebola.
All right, let's just say 100.
It's probably in the ballpark of what's really accurate.
This includes his family members, perhaps some of his neighbors, the EMTs that took him to the hospital, the first doctor that saw him at the hospital who sent him home, and then all the 17 medical staffers and a few other people.
So 100 people.
Now, here's my question to you.
If two out of these 100 people become infected with Ebola, the government and the CDC would very likely say, this is great.
Our system is working.
98% did not get infected.
Our system is working.
They would claim a 98% success rate, right?
And at first, that kind of sounds like, well, that's a great success.
If we have a 98% success rate, we're going to get this thing licked, right?
Wrong.
Duncan was one man.
Now you've got two additional infections.
One man transmitted the virus to two people.
You have a one-to-two ratio.
You've just doubled the The number of infections in a hospital, in a first world advanced hospital in Dallas, Texas.
Believe me, if this virus can achieve a one to two multiplication ratio, it is thrilled.
That is a huge success for Ebola.
It doesn't need to infect 98 out of 100 people.
It doesn't even need to infect 10 out of 100 people.
It only needs to infect two people for every one person that gets infected.
And that is a raging, raging outbreak.
That is a massive failure on the part of modern medicine.
98% success rate is not enough.
In fact, a 99% success rate at halting the infections still allows Ebola to continue indefinitely in the population because that's a one-to-one ratio.
If every one person infects one more person, then Ebola is never wiped out.
It continues forever.
The only way to wipe out Ebola, and this is where the mathematics comes into play here, is if every one infection results in a 0.99 infections or smaller.
If you could have every one infection result in 0.7 new infections, then you're getting it under control.
If you could have it result in 0.5 new infections, that's even better.
To really eradicate Ebola, you have to have that second number being something less than 1.
Does that make sense?
If that number is 1, if it's 1 to 1, then the infections are staying the same.
If the number is greater than one, then Ebola is growing exponentially.
And if it's less than one, then the number of Ebola infections is shrinking.
And right now in Dallas, Texas, based on what we know today, it is one to one, which means that Ebola and the CDC are neck and neck.
And if there's another infection diagnosed or confirmed in those 100 people, then that means Ebola is winning and the CDC is losing, or in fact, we're all losing at that point because it's not being contained.
So be very wary of these interviews.
I saw a guy from the NIH on television who was giving his spin.
There's a lot of spin out there right now.
And his spin was, oh, the system is working, he said, because this nurse who got infected, well, she self-reported her fever and she realized that she was infected.
So the system is working.
Well, gosh, if that's their measure of success, then we all need to be fleeing as rapidly as possible.
Because that is not success to keep having more and more infections, obviously.
Success is if you have fewer infections.
Now, talking about how the medical system will be very rapidly overwhelmed, let's get back to this number 70.
According to the Associated Press, there were 70 medical staffers needed to treat Mr.
Thomas Duncan in this Dallas Presbyterian Hospital.
Now, think about this for a moment.
70 people were treating this one patient.
How many people, how many medical staffers would it take to treat, let's say, 10 Ebola patients?
Now, the number's not exactly 700.
It's probably significantly less than that because there are some efficiencies of scale for treating patients in quantity, so to speak.
But it's not hard to imagine that it could easily require 200 medical staffers to treat, let's say, 10 Ebola patients.
Now you might say, well, that number seems crazy high.
Well, so does 70 to treat one.
I'm not making these up.
This is what the Associated Press has reported.
70 staffers to treat one Ebola patient.
So 10?
Let's go with 200.
Just as a wild guess.
Well, it doesn't take very long to realize that if you start to have 100 Ebola patients, you begin to very quickly overwhelm the available medical staff in the national hospital system.
Let's say you have one Ebola patient in every major hospital in the country.
Well, then you've got hundreds, if not thousands, of Ebola patients, and they are overwhelming medical staff.
They're taking all the medical resources.
The medical staffers are unable to take on large numbers of new patients of any kind, heart attack patients, cancer patients, you name it.
We consume all of the medical resources in the US economy.
Now, there are about 5,700 hospitals in the United States.
Many of them are small community hospitals actually and the number of large hospitals is fewer than a thousand.
So we do have some medical bandwidth here.
But it's not hard to imagine that medical bandwidth being very rapidly overwhelmed when Ebola is on an exponential mathematical progression.
So if you've got a ratio of one infection leading to let's say 1.8 new infections and you let that play out for very long and all those people are going to the hospital All over the country, then you have a, basically you have a medical system that will find itself in a state of paralysis very, very quickly.
Now at the same time that this is happening, it's record demand on the medical resources of the country, you will have medical staffers who resign in large numbers.
And they will resign for very rational reasons.
They will one day wake up and realize, hey, it's not worth risking my life for a paycheck.
Especially nurses will make this decision.
Doctors would have a much more difficult time changing careers, but nurses may decide to make that career move they've always been thinking about.
Go start a birthday cake factory, retail store, or whatever they want to do.
Instead of risking their lives on the front lines of the Ebola war, And this is especially true because nurses in hospitals across America are not being issued appropriate gear to handle biosafety level for Ebola patients.
We have to remember in all of this that Ebola is a level 4 biohazard.
And a level 4 biohazard virus should only be treated or encountered when you are wearing a level 4 biohazard safety suit, basically a space suit, a positive pressure suit with an air hose where you are fully isolated inside the suit.
Or at minimum, you need to have a Like a Tyvek bodysuit and a full-face respirator.
None of this N95 mask with goggles that we've seen many photos of medical staff wearing.
That is not sufficient if you're going to be treating a hot Ebola patient.
And by hot, I mean someone who's symptomatic and can transmit the virus at that moment.
So you've got nurses and doctors who are not being given proper medical gear.
To be able to safely treat Ebola patients in hospitals.
And at the same time, they are also not given sufficient training.
So the training to treat a level 4 biohazard patient is quite extensive.
In the U.S. Army virology branches, they will not let a person even enter a biosafety level 4 room without years of extensive training and many, many tests of their decision-making skills and even simple things like how well they control their hand movements.
Because the hands are the areas of the body that are most prone to infection.
That's the area that's moving around the most.
That's the area where you need the most dexterity and sensory feedback.
And so the gloves are the thinnest there compared to every other area on your body.
The hands are where you do the work of a scientist, whether it's opening a monkey's skull or taking blood from a patient.
I mean, this is the kind of thing that these virologists do.
This is their research.
And they need their hands to be able to do that.
So the hands are the most vulnerable point of infection.
So if you don't have steady hands, they're not going to let you in the biosafety level 4 rooms.
And yet, in US hospitals, in places like Dallas, they allowed medical staffers who did not have level 4 training and did not have level 4 equipment to interact with a level 4 biohazard patient who was,
by all accounts, Vomiting on the walls and releasing other body fluids that I won't even go into in a very dangerous manner that clearly exposed many of these medical staffers to body fluids.
So, I mentioned before that you've got about 5,700 hospitals in the United States.
I think the actual number is 5,723.
And out of that, there are 5,719 hospitals that do not have level 4 biohazard isolation rooms.
At least that's what I found in the research that I did.
Those are the best numbers available.
In fact, there are only four medical centers in the United States that have level four biosafety isolation rooms.
So remember when they brought Dr.
Brantley over from Africa?
They put him in one of these rooms at Emory University with oversight from the CDC. And they talked about this to the press.
They said, well, this guy is going to be contained in an elaborate isolation room.
There's zero risk to the public.
Zero risk, they said, because he's in an isolation room.
Well, they were correct that time that he apparently did not spread Ebola out of that room to other medical staff.
They treated him probably like a level 4 biohazard patient, which was appropriate.
They had the best CDC virologists and scientists in the world, probably wearing the spacesuits and wearing level 4 biohazard gear, and they had the guy in a level 4 biohazard room.
But then when it comes to Thomas Duncan, Well, he shows up in Dallas and he's in the Dallas Presbyterian Hospital where there is no level 4 isolation room and the staff there don't have level 4 biohazard training and they don't have the appropriate gear.
So what does the CDC do?
They say, well, that's good enough.
Every hospital in America is good enough to treat level 4 biohazard Ebola patients.
And how did they come to that conclusion?
They just made it up.
They just said, well, 4 equals 3.
Now everybody that's got level 3 training can work on level 4 patients.
Why not?
4 equals 3.
It's the new math of the CDC. There is no scientific rationale for this claim whatsoever.
In fact, it defies scientific thinking completely.
There is a reason that these different levels have different numbers.
There's a reason Level 2 is defined in a certain way.
There's a reason Level 3 is defined in a certain way.
There's a reason that Level 4 is the maximum level, because there are no treatments, there are no cures, and virtually all Level 4 biohazards, such as Marburg or Lhasa, have very high fatality rates.
So, remember, there is no Level 5.
Level 4 is as bad as it gets.
So basically when the CDC said that these 5,723 hospitals across America are good enough to treat level 4 biohazard infections, what they basically were saying was that, ah, who needs level 4 isolation rooms anyway?
You know, just slap on an N95 mask, slap on a pair of goggles, wear those latex gloves, and you'll be alright.
It's the what me worry approach to infectious disease, which, by the way, is also a recipe for mass death and mass failure of the medical system.
So if the CDC continues to operate in this politically motivated, doublespeak fashion of delusional denial of reality, then we're all at risk.
And I've pointed that out many, many times.
There are many other critics out there of the CDC at the moment.
Heck, Michael Savage says that the CDC director, Thomas Frieden, should be arrested.
He says, arrest the guy.
Because of his negligence, criminal negligence apparently is what Mr.
Savage is implying.
And it's kind of hard to disagree with that because of the unwillingness of the CDC to tell the truth about the different routes of transmission that Ebola pursues and the incredible virulence of Ebola and the need for level 4 biohazard isolation rooms, medical equipment, and appropriate training of medical staff.
If you don't have those things in place, you can't really effectively control a level 4 pandemic.
And right now in America, this pandemic is not controlled.
Although the government and the CDC will tell you, yeah, we have it under control.
What they really mean is, no, we have no control at all.
The way they say they don't have it under control is to say we do have it under control.
When they say the budget is balanced, what they mean is the budget will never be balanced.
So make sure you understand government terminology.
We could get this under control.
It's not too late for America, but we have to be honest about all these things I'm talking about, the modes of transmission, the biohazard isolation gear, and so on.
But one of my main points in this chapter is to get you to realize just how narrow this window of opportunity is to get this pandemic under control even in America.
So far, we've had a handful of people in America with Ebola.
The NBC News cameraman is one.
Dr.
Brantley was one.
Thomas Duncan was another.
And then this nurse that caught it from Mr.
Duncan is another.
There might be a couple other people who were also brought over from Africa and put into care facilities.
So it's just a handful at the moment, at the time that I'm recording this.
Many people believe falsely that the U.S. medical system could handle millions of Ebola patients successfully because we've got maybe, I don't know, a few hundred thousand or maybe a million hospital beds across the country.
I don't think it's a million.
I think it's much less than that.
I wish I had that number, actually.
Let's say it's half a million hospital beds.
Some people think, well, then we could successfully handle half a million Ebola patients.
I'm here to tell you that the actual number that we could handle is significantly smaller than that.
I believe that if Ebola infections in the United States exceed 1,000, that that may already be beyond containment because of all the reasons I've mentioned here.
That is barring some miraculous intervention.
Let's say, for example, if you watch the movie Outbreak with Dustin Hoffman and Morgan Freeman, they came up with an anti-serum A miraculous serum that they made from the blood of the host monkey that had carried this infectious agent.
And they were able to magically, in Hollywood magic fashion, convert or I guess multiply this monkey's blood into an antiserum that they then just injected, drip IV into everybody's bodies and then they were magically cured.
So, in Hollywood, the cures can happen just like that.
Just little bags of anti-serum labeled E1101 or whatever it was in the movie, and it cures the patient.
In reality, this is a much more involved and difficult process.
Just because you get the blood of a host carrier doesn't mean you can create an antiserum that magically works in a human body, especially given that humans are a very different species from the host species that carries the virus.
In other words, the virus naturally cycles inside a different species of animal that is not killed by the virus.
Why does this virus exist in the first place?
Because it lives and it cycles inside the body of an animal that is immune to it.
And then when you have, for example, the destruction of the biosphere, the continued insults to the ecosystem by human activity, and you get biospheres that are collapsing, rainforests for example, jungles, you get animals who naturally carry these viruses coming out of the jungle, some of them migrating out, some of them have lost their natural habitat, they're migrating out, they're interacting with humans, and that's how you get a cross-species transmission.
of a virus such as Ebola which I believe the current consensus is that it may cycle naturally in cave bats I don't know what species of bat but Some kind of bat in Africa.
It doesn't mean we can go round up a bunch of bats and take their blood and magically make Ebola anti-serum that's going to cure the human population of Ebola.
So we have to be very resistant to Hollywood magic medicine thinking.
If we believe the movies, then, you know, gosh, the outbreak can easily be solved in mere minutes by just locating the correct bat.
It doesn't actually work that way in the real world.
In fact, if you actually take something out of the blood of these bats and inject it into humans, you might kill those humans.
The process of developing an anti-serum, basically a serum with antibodies that happens to work in cross-species fashion, that is a very long and painstaking process requiring typically many years of development and funding in clinical trials and start over that-didn't-work type of approaches.
It's also worth noting that U.S. virologists, U.S. Army scientists, have been trying to find something that would work against Ebola in primates for many decades.
And to my knowledge, to the best of my research, they've never found any drug or any antiserum or any vaccine or anything that ever worked against Ebola.
It just did not exist.
They couldn't find it.
They tried everything.
In fact, in one of the previous chapters here on biodefense.com, I mentioned that the monkey houses run by the U.S. Army at one point had about 500 monkeys in them.
And they were testing many, many of these monkeys for possible Ebola cures or treatments.
And they could not identify anything that worked.
And that was back in the 1980s and 1990s.
Now, here we are in 2014.
GlaxoSmithKline is working on an Ebola vaccine, but guess what?
the vaccine is not being tested against Ebola.
They're not doing human clinical trials and lining people up and giving them the vaccine and then giving them Ebola to see who lives and who dies.
That would obviously be unethical, although I'm sure some people would volunteer for that if they were paid enough money.
But it's medically unacceptable to have that kind of clinical trial.
So even when the vaccine is approved by the FDA, there will be no scientific evidence whatsoever showing that it works against Ebola.
At best, we're going to get a vaccine that has some margin of safety, of tolerance in the population.
In other words, if you take the shot, it doesn't put you into a coma.
That's the best case.
And then from there, you can only hope that maybe it works against Ebola.
I hope it does.
I hope they do come up with a miraculous vaccine that works against Ebola, because that may be one of the very few Western medicine interventions that could make any difference at all.
But I also believe that there are many, many other things that we can be doing right now.
I've covered those in Episode 6 of this free course, in fact, talking about all the natural antivirals, talking about how to boost your immune function, boost your natural defenses, and I think that may be a key for survivors who make it through an outbreak if, indeed, the outbreak really sweeps through Western nations such as the United States.
Now, I said all of that to get to this conclusion.
If there is an outbreak in your area, you will need to fend for yourself medically.
The medical system will be rapidly overwhelmed.
There will be no spare hospital beds, and the medical staff will simply be worked to exhaustion, or they will have quit, or they will have become infected and died, in fact.
And some of these things go hand in hand.
If you overwork the medical staff to the point of exhaustion, guess what?
They get sloppy, they make mistakes, they stick themselves in the thumb with an Ebola needle, and it's all over.
This is a very real risk of virologists who work in these conditions.
They know about this.
You better have some good healthy sleep so that you can keep your wits about you when you're dealing with level 4 biohazards and scalpels or needles.
So you are going to have to take care of yourself, your family members, perhaps friends or whoever you're with.
That's the point of this.
Understand this.
Take this to heart.
Really drill this in to your mind and your memory that you won't be able to call 911 and get an ambulance to show up and take you to the hospital.
And even if there is an ambulance that shows up, do you really want to get in that ambulance knowing that it's probably heavily contaminated with Ebola all over the place?
How many other violently thrashing Ebola patients rode in that ambulance before you got in?
Remember that every form of public transportation is likely to be contaminated if you're in an outbreak scenario, so you don't want to be getting in that ambulance anyway.
And even if they did give you a ride, you get to the hospital, you think you're going to have a spare bed there?
You think the doctor, you think there's going to be 70 medical staffers there waiting for you to show up so they can help you alone when there might be hundreds or thousands of other Ebola patients in that same city?
It's very likely they're not going to be able to help you.
And this is why it's absolutely crucial that we all take steps right now to understand, to learn the basics of viral transmission, the basics of personal hygiene, medical hygiene, isolation, how to build an isolation room like I covered in the previous section.
How to decontaminate yourself, how to use bleach and water solutions to decontaminate surfaces, clean surfaces, the importance of sunlight in breaking down viral integrity.
All these things.
How to take care of yourself in isolation in the middle of a forced medical quarantine or a shelter-in-place order for your region.
You may be told to shelter in place for 21 days or even longer.
Perhaps a period of months, believe it or not.
So these are all the crucial things.
And I find it so fascinating that mainstream America has not yet really woken up to these possibilities.
Mainstream America is still mesmerized by the droning news on television.
They're hypnotized by the, you know, comedy shows or dancing with the stars or whatever it is they watch.
So they have spent zero time thinking about this.
They have zero preparedness.
The concept of being prepared with extra food and emergency supplies has literally never crossed their minds.
And so in an actual emergency, these people are going to completely freak out and panic.
And they then become a very real danger to the rest of us, which is why I'm such a proponent of telling people the truth Encouraging calm preparedness, encouraging people to have knowledge and to be empowered by that knowledge so that everyone can take basic steps to be a little better prepared.
Remember, as I've said, every person who is prepared is one less person who panics.
Lack of preparedness leads to panic, but full preparedness actually reduces panic, and it is that lack of panic that we need as a community in any kind of an outbreak.
We need people to keep their wits about them, keep their heads on straight, to think clearly, and to not go crazy running around in the streets, breaking into people's homes, looting for food, for example.
Not a good scenario.
And those are the people that are going to end up in the FEMA camps, in the quarantine centers, at gunpoint, by the way, as I already mentioned.
So stay clear-headed in all of this.
Stay prepared or get prepared if you're not yet prepared.
And most importantly, understand the mathematics of this.
Remember, when you hear the news reports out there, anytime that one Ebola patient infects just one other person, that is Ebola in a tie ballgame.
And if it's more than one, then Ebola is winning.
The only way that we win as human beings is if it becomes less than one.
The truth is that Ebola is a massive disassembly code.
It is a non-living chain of proteins that serves to completely disassemble biological cells.
It is the anti-life virus.
And it doesn't have a will.
It doesn't have a consciousness.
It doesn't have a mind.
It doesn't make decisions.
It doesn't have emotions.
It starts to sound like a line out of the Terminator.
It doesn't have any feelings.
I forgot the line that Reese said in the Terminator.
It doesn't feel.
It doesn't think.
It just wants to kill you.
That's Ebola.
It's a terminator.
It's a microscopic, protein-shaped terminator of the human species.
And if we don't take it seriously, if we don't really, really stop with the BS and the doublespeak and the denials and the delusions, then we may all be victims of it.
It really is that serious.
So spread the word, folks.
Get prepared.
Do everything you can.
Wake up as many people as you can.
Share this audio file.
Share this webpage if you're listening to this online.
Tell people to go to biodefense.com.
Learn the truth.
Go out and buy the book, The Hot Zone.
Read that book.
There's even an audio book on audible.com if you want to listen to it.
It's pretty gross.
It'll freak you out if you listen to it, but I encourage you to...
I encourage you to get informed in any way you can.
My name is Mike Adams.
I'm the Health Ranger and I do this because I want to help protect life and halt human suffering.
It's really that simple.
I don't want to see this outbreak harming anyone else.
We can stop it now if we take appropriate actions, but I don't see those actions being taken and I'm worried.
▲
Export Selection