Let's stop the virus!
Let's end the hysteria!
To the people and governments of the world
An Open Letter by Dr. Matthias Rath
A pandemic is currently threatening the health and lives of people around the world and ruining the economies of entire nations. The shockwave from this pandemic is only surpassed by the audacity through which potentially life-saving information on the possible containment of the pandemic is being systematically withheld from the people, as well as from many political decision-takers worldwide.
Social life is being disturbed, basic civil rights are being taken away, and economic damage in unprecedented proportions is being accepted, all in the name of curtailing the pandemic. And yet neither the so-called ‘experts’ nor the politicians they advise are providing people with the most basic – and potentially life-saving – health advice: An optimum intake of vitamins and other essential micronutrients is a key measure for anyone to strengthen their immune system. This scientific fact – recognized by nine Nobel Prizes and documented in countless textbooks of biology and biochemistry around the world – is notoriously absent from essentially every public health recommendation.
While the search for an effective and safe vaccine to help control the current pandemic remains important, the deliberate silence over natural ways to strengthen the immune system, which are readily available now, is outright irresponsible. This silence is no coincidence. It happens in the interest of those corporate interests that try to take massive economic advantage from the ongoing crisis, namely the pharmaceutical investment business.
The publication of this Open Letter, however, will derail these plans and further accelerate the demise of these corporate interests.
As the scientist who – together with two-time Nobel laureate Linus Pauling – contributed to a thus far unprecedented advance in natural human health, I feel it is incumbent upon me to raise my voice at this critical moment in history.
Towards these goals, this Open Letter has three main sections:
It is an unconscionable act that neither national nor international health authorities are providing the people with basic scientific facts and answers to questions that are potentially lifesaving.
While the current pandemic causes disease and death among human beings around the world, animals are rarely affected. They can carry the virus but they do not develop a deadly disease. In fact, in seeking to test potential therapies, researchers worldwide struggle to find a suitable animal model in which the virus causes disease. Any scientific experts who do not take this striking fact into account when advising governments or addressing the public on possible solutions to the pandemic should therefore be listened to with caution. Similarly, any scientific effort to find a therapeutic solution to the pandemic is doomed without addressing this critical aspect.
The human metabolism is set apart from that of essentially all other animals by its inability to synthesize vitamin C from glucose. Most animals produce vitamin C in high amounts of up to 20,000 milligrams per day compared to human body weight. Humans and sub-human primates lack this ability due to a genetic mutation that occurred during their evolution. Thus, all humans today are dependent on an optimum intake of vitamin C, either from the diet or from supplements. Vitamin C deficiency, and most people in the world suffer from it, causes a weakening of the connective tissue, compromises natural barriers like skin and the inner cell lining of the lungs (epithelial cells of the lungs), and weakens our immune system. Thus, viruses and many other infectious organisms can easily enter the body and find too little immune resistance to fight them.
Vitamin C in the fight against the pandemic
Most animals produce vitamin C in high amounts of up to 20,000 milligrams per day compared to human body weight.
While the current pandemic causes disease and death among human beings around the world, animals are rarely affected. They can carry the virus but they do not develop a deadly disease. In fact, in seeking to test potential therapies, researchers worldwide struggle to find a suitable animal model in which the virus causes disease. Any scientific experts who do not take this striking fact into account when advising governments or addressing the public on possible solutions to the pandemic should therefore be listened to with caution. Similarly, any scientific effort to find a therapeutic solution to the pandemic is doomed without addressing this critical aspect.
The human metabolism is set apart from that of essentially all other animals by its inability to synthesize vitamin C from glucose. Most animals produce vitamin C in high amounts of up to 20,000 milligrams per day compared to human body weight. Humans and sub-human primates lack this ability due to a genetic mutation that occurred during their evolution. Thus, all humans today are dependent on an optimum intake of vitamin C, either from the diet or from supplements. Vitamin C deficiency, and most people in the world suffer from it, causes a weakening of the connective tissue, compromises natural barriers like skin and the inner cell lining of the lungs (epithelial cells of the lungs), and weakens our immune system. Thus, viruses and many other infectious organisms can easily enter the body and find too little immune resistance to fight them.
These anti-viral mechanisms of vitamin C have been scientifically demonstrated in a multitude of viruses affecting humans including:
When used against the human deficiency virus (HIV), one of the most recent epidemics to haunt mankind, vitamin C has been shown in research studies to inhibit the multiplication of this virus by over 99 percent. It is therefore no surprise that high doses of vitamin C are effective in blocking essentially all human viruses studied thus far, including also influenza (flu).
Vitamin C has also been shown to be effective against the virus that causes the current global pandemic. In February this year, the first clinical reports became available from Chinese clinics where patients severely infected by the current virus almost completely recovered after receiving high dose vitamin C treatment.
At the same time, the Chinese government transported vitamin C by the ton into the affected regions to fight the epidemic’s spread among the population. This fact would explain the massive decline in new infections during the beginning of March this year.
Viruses invade the cells of our body, for example the inner (epithelial) lining cells of the lung. In order to spread, they reprogram the genetic information of cells to produce the biological tools the virus needs to multiply its spread throughout human tissue and ultimately become a manifest infection.
As part of this process, virally infected cells activate enzymes (catalysts) that are able to cut through the surrounding connective tissue (e.g. collagen) like biological scissors. Essentially all viruses activate such enzymes as a precondition for spreading and developing into a full-blown disease.
The natural amino acid lysine is able to block these enzymes and, thus, inhibit the spread of the virus inside the body.
In 1992 I published a scientific paper together with Nobel laureate Linus Pauling, highlighting the importance of combining vitamin C with lysine to maximize the inhibition of disease processes particularly related to viral diseases and cancer. In short, cancer cells and virally infected cells both use the same mechanism of enzyme activation and tissue destruction. This groundbreaking article ends with the following statement:
“We predict that the use of lysine and lysine analogs, particularly in combination with ascorbate [vitamin C], will lead to a breakthrough in the control of many forms of cancer and infectious diseases.”
The combination of vitamin C and lysine is particularly advantageous because these micronutrients target different mechanisms of disease. While lysine helps to block disease-related degradation of connective tissue, vitamin C stimulates the new production of this ‘stability tissue’.
The fact that both of these micronutrients cannot be produced in the human body highlights the need to supplement them in optimum amounts – particularly during ongoing disease processes.
A specific highlight of this landmark publication was the recommendation to combine these two natural micronutrients with synthetic derivatives of the amino acid lysine. These lysine analogs, e.g. tranexamic acid, are many times more effective than lysine in blocking excessive tissue breakdown. They are listed in the publication and can now be tested as potential therapeutic agents in fighting the current pandemic.
The efficacy of lysine in blocking viral infections was later tested in a study with a particularly malicious HTLV-1 virus that causes leukemia in humans. In this virus-induced human disease – for which there is no cure – the supplementation of lysine was shown to block the proliferation of the virus. More significantly, lysine was also able to cause the virally infected cells to commit ‘biological suicide’ (apoptosis).
Thus, the control of this virus was not made possible by means of a pharmaceutical drug, but from a micronutrient identified by understanding the underlying cellular disease mechanisms.
In 1999, the Dr. Rath Research Institute was founded in California, with Dr. Aleksandra Niedzwiecki as its director. Over the years our research team expanded the testing of specific micronutrients against a variety of health conditions, including viral diseases. Besides vitamin C and lysine, several other natural compounds were proven to work in synergy to block viral proliferation and spread. These substances include green tea extracts, proline, N-acetyl cysteine, selenium and certain other micronutrients.
The combination of these micronutrients has been successfully tested against a variety of viruses. The results of the studies can be accessed via the website of our research institute.
To my knowledge, no pharmaceutical drug exists with comparable efficacy, safety and affordability to that of the scientifically tested micronutrient synergy approach.
The previous paragraphs highlighted the fact that natural health approaches to viral diseases are not a matter of hearsay but of scientific fact. You can take advantage of this health knowledge in two principal ways: in the form of vitamin-rich nutrition, or by taking dietary supplements.
These recommendations are helpful for people to reinforce their immune system in order to prevent viral infections.
If a person is already infected, vitamin C and (if available) lysine should be taken in the form of an intravenous preparation in order to attain maximum efficacy.
The efficacy of high dose intravenous vitamin C in the therapy of patients affected by the current epidemic has successfully been shown in a clinic located in Wuhan, China. Patients receiving this treatment recovered from their infection and could subsequently be dismissed from the clinic.
In stark contrast to effective and safe natural approaches, the tools of the pharmaceutical industry in the fight against viral diseases are rather limited.
In the absence of a specific vaccine, pharmaceutical companies are promoting so-called ‘antiviral’ drugs. The name ‘antiviral’ is already misleading because it implies that these drugs affect viruses specifically. Fact is, however, that these drugs affect both the multiplication of the virus and, at the same time, the growth of our body cells.
For example, the antiviral drug now widely discussed in the battle against the current pandemic replaces certain building blocks in the DNA of both viruses and body cells. The side effects of such drugs are predictable: they particularly damage the organs dependent on a high turnover of cells. Thus, the bone marrow – the production site of the main immune cells (leukocytes) – is damaged first. With the formation of white blood cells depressed, the effect of these drugs is, at best, short term, and in most cases outright devastating.
Another drug currently propagated as an alleged hope against the current pandemic was originally developed to fight arthritis. But no one tells an expectant public that this drug has been associated with hundreds of deaths. A mass promotion of such drugs in the current pandemic may likely kill more patients by its side-effects than would die from the viral infection.
Irrespective of the questionable efficacy, as well as the severe side effects, the manufacturers of these patented synthetic drugs are already considered by international financial circles as the most lucrative investment firms of our time!
In order to comprehend why this life-saving information is being strategically withheld from you, we need to address some critical aspects of the pharmaceutical business.
In many parts of the world, the health care system is operated by governments.
In European, North American and other countries, health care is largely dominated by the influence of large private interests, namely the pharmaceutical investment industry. In order to understand the astonishing silence about natural health solutions we have to take a look at this industry’s business model.
The laws of the pharmaceutical industry
The pharmaceutical industry is not primarily a health industry but an investment business, being ultimately responsible only to its shareholders.
The marketplaces for this trillion-dollar investment industry are existing diseases. Its business strategy is to extend these ‘disease markets’ globally.
The merchandise that drives this industry are patented synthetic drugs, with exorbitant patent fees determining the ‘return on investment’.
The prevention and eradication of diseases threatens to destroy the ‘disease marketplace’ of this industry and, in the long run, will lead to its collapse.
To secure its future, the pharmaceutical industry’s lobbyists fight against effective natural, non-patentable health approaches, and particularly against highly effective vitamin therapies.
The withholding of natural health information in the current pandemic strictly follows these laws.
Based on the above analysis, in a public presentation in Chemnitz, Germany, in 1997, I described the pharmaceutical business with disease as the greatest obstacle to human health. With this analysis, I was not alone for long. In the ensuing years, this analysis has gone mainstream, with even experts who previously held influential positions in the medical establishment publicly sharing it.
In the course of its 150-year-old history pharmaceutical multinationals were involved in crimes against humanity. The German branches of the chemical/pharmaceutical industry, for example,
became the economic driving forces behind two World Wars.
The records of the Nuremberg War Crimes Tribunal (Case VI) document that Bayer, BASF and other companies (‘The IG Farben Cartel’) became the main corporate sponsors behind the rise to power of the Nazis.
In this Tribunal, several directors of Bayer, BASF and other German chemical/pharmaceutical companies were sentenced for crimes against humanity, including for abusing innocent prisoners of the Auschwitz concentration camp by testing experimental patented drugs on them.
Telford Taylor, the US Chief prosecutor in the Nuremberg Tribunal against these companies, stated the following about the alliance between these chemical/pharmaceutical companies and the Third Reich:
“Their purpose was to turn the German nation into a military machine and build it into an engine of destruction so terrifyingly formidable that Germany could, by brutal threats, and if necessary, by war, impose her will and her dominion on Europe, and, later, on other nation beyond the seas.”
Over the years, one of the few large international newspaper that was willing to publish my warnings – in the form of Open Letters – about the danger of the pharmaceutical industry, was the ‘New York Times’. This internationally recognized newspaper, published in New York at the seat of the United Nations, has to be commended for allowing this ‘wall of silence’ to be broken.
As the scientist who published groundbreaking new discoveries in natural health, which – from a scientific point of view – threaten the entire business model of the drug investment industry, I became the ‘witness of history’ for the liberation of human health.
My publications together with Linus Pauling, as summarized below, presented fundamentally new scientific concepts describing how natural molecules play a decisive role in fighting the most common diseases of our time, namely cardiovascular disease, cancer and viral diseases.
Cardiovascular diseases, heart attacks and strokes are essentially the consequence of a long-term deficiency of vitamins, particularly vitamin C. This deficiency leads to weakening of the blood vessel walls, similar to what happens in the so-called sailors’ disease scurvy. My book summarizing these discoveries has, over the past decade, been translated into 14 languages and has changed the perception of this major health problem worldwide. Today, the death rate from heart attacks has significantly declined, in some countries by more than 50 percent.
Let us briefly consider what this means. Pharmaceutical drugs that decrease the symptoms of cardiovascular disease are the single largest group of drugs for the pharmaceutical industry. A reduction in cardiovascular disease by more than 50% translates roughly into a loss of more than 50% of these drugs for the investment business with disease – occurring year after year.
One of the largest pandemics, prior to the current one, was the HIV/AIDS crisis. In 2002, together with our research team, I was invited by the South African Medical Research Council to join the efforts of the South African government to control this epidemic in their country by applying the knowledge of vitamin research to viral diseases. The battle to establish natural health as a global answer to HIV/AIDS is documented in our book END AIDS!
A decade later, in November 2013, the Journal of the American Medical Association (JAMA) published the results of a 2-year study of HIV-infected people who received daily supplementation with micronutrients. The study concluded:
“This evidence supports the use of specific micronutrient supplementation as an effective intervention in HIV-infected adults in early stages of HIV disease, significantly reducing the risk for disease progression.”
As described above we also presented an entirely new understanding for controlling the spread of cancer, namely by using natural compounds such as lysine and vitamin C. The comprehensive research into this new way of controlling the cancer epidemic was summarized by Dr. Niedzwiecki and myself in our 2012 book Victory Over Cancer.
In 2020, 28 years after the first publication of this landmark discovery, the bulletin of the US National Cancer Institute (NCI), one of the largest cancer research institutions in the world, recommended that doctors should use high dose vitamin C in order to control cancer. The article concludes:
“. . . given the current high financial cost of new cancer drugs, it seems rational to improve the effectiveness of current therapies by studying their clinical interactions with vitamin C. In our view, the implementation of this treatment paradigm could provide benefit to many cancer patients.”
Let us consider what this recommendation in the bulletin of the largest cancer research institution in the world means. After a century of advocating toxic chemotherapy to millions of cancer patients around the world as an alleged cure for this disease, after having extorted trillions of dollars from patients and public health authorities with this hoax – it is now clear that a simple vitamin is superior to all these expensive, toxic drugs.
With the current annual sales of patented pharmaceutical cancer drugs exceeding 100 billion dollars, this lucrative market was suddenly threatened with being annihilated by effective, affordable vitamin therapies. It is easy to comprehend that January 2020 signified ‘Armageddon’ for the pharmaceutical investment business.
To explain this decisive moment in history even further, cancer has been upheld by the pharmaceutical investment business for more than a century as an almost certain death verdict. This constant death threat was strategically used to discipline millions of people into accepting the pharmaceutical investment business as the only purveyors of ‘modern medicine’. With the recognition of vitamin C as a solution to the cancer epidemic the deceptive mask was taken from the entire pharmaceutical industry’s business model, and its ugly face of unscrupulous greed became visible.
In January 2020, the billionaire investors of the pharmaceutical industry – as well as tens of thousands of its stakeholders around the world from politics, the media and medicine – realized that if this information spreads globally, they would be exposed as accomplices of bringing misery to the world in genocidal proportions. Pharmaceutical companies and lobbyists alike would be brought to justice in the courts of the world by millions of people, communities and national health services, for the unprecedented health and economic damage they caused over decades.
With this background, recent dramatic speeches and ‘martial law’-like measures introduced by certain politicians appear in a new light. As a rule: the louder they screamed and the more draconian measures they imposed, the bigger was their fear of being held accountable in the forthcoming legal ‘clean up’ by the people of the world.
Leading among these political voices were, not surprisingly, the political representatives from key export countries of pharmaceutical drugs. Their rhetoric was truly amazing. Emmanuel Macron telling the French people that they live in times of war, and Angela Merkel talking the German people into a crisis not seen “since World War II”, are just two examples.
The deliberate neglect and omission of the scientifically documented health benefits of vitamins by any politicians in the current crisis is a crime. These natural health options are readily available to millions of people – and are potentially lifesaving for them. No politician will get away with the argument any longer that “I did not know”.
I encourage you to confront your local, regional and national political decision takers with the facts of this letter, and ask them to position themselves publicly.
When we look at the current crisis, we have to ask ourselves:
In answering these questions, the people of the world must take a closer look at the role of the German government and its decades-long effort to ban natural therapies, including vitamins, on a worldwide scale. This effort had only one goal: to protect the export business of German pharmaceutical companies, which for many years had been the leading pharmaceutical drug exporters in the world.
Under the auspices of the government of Germany, an international effort was launched to ban worldwide any preventive and therapeutic health statements about vitamins and other natural, non-patentable substances. Over the past quarter of a century, the German government, via the so-called ‘Codex Alimentarius Commission’, used international organizations like the World Health Organization (WHO) and the Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) and tried to impose these outright unethical goals on more than 200 countries.
As a consequence of this unscrupulous global strategy, research and education about the health benefits of vitamins and other natural therapies was systematically discredited, underfunded, and often outright banned in most countries of the world.
With the health benefits of vitamins in strengthening the immune system and in fighting viral infections firmly established, the consequences of the systematic suppression of this knowledge for the people of the world are obvious: The current pandemic could have been largely avoided had this knowledge become part of public health policies around the world.
It is also clear that economic shortages in certain countries, with people having less access to fresh fruits and vegetables or dietary supplements, would massively aggravate the susceptibility of millions of people living in such countries or regions. This can explain why the current pandemic particularly affects countries like Iran, who have been coping with years of economic sanctions. In Italy, decades of trade imbalance between richer and poorer countries within the European Union left this country economically weak and its citizens exposed.
In short, the whole world is currently paying the price for decades of irresponsible actions by the German government, and the insatiable greed of the international pharmaceutical investment business. Based on the above information, the people and governments of the world will now also have firm grounds to seek compensation for the immense economic damage they suffer during the current crisis.
The philosopher Arthur Schopenhauer once stated: “All truth goes through three stages. First, it is ridiculed or distorted. Then it is fought. And, finally, it is taken for granted.” The battle for the liberation of natural health is no exception to this.
The publications by Linus Pauling and myself in the early 1990s immediately caused fierce reactions. The US Food and Drug Administration (FDA), an agency at that time heavily infested by lobbyists of the pharmaceutical investment business, announced that – by law – they wanted to turn vitamins into prescription drugs.
This protectionist plan, launched in the interest of the pharmaceutical industry, fundamentally backfired. Tens of millions of vitamin consumers – “the largest grassroots movement since the Vietnam war” (Newsweek) – defended the right of free access to natural health and resulted in the US Congress passing the ‘Dietary Supplement Health and Education Act’ (DSHEA). This 1994 law allowed, for the first time, health statements with vitamins and other natural substances to be publicly made.
This new law effectively ended almost a century in US history during which life-saving natural health information was deliberately silenced and kept hostage by protectionist laws imposed on behalf of the pharmaceutical investment business.
There were also a multitude of reactions at the international level which go beyond the scope of this letter. A case in point was the decision of the Chinese government to launch a massive production of vitamin C, making China by far the largest production site of this essential vitamin today. Without this decision – taken more than 25 years ago – China may not have been able to cope with the current pandemic so effectively.
Despite all resistance, our research team and I were able to contribute to the defense and gradual expansion of this valuable health knowledge. During two previous pandemics, Bird Flu and SARS, I was forced to raise my voice in leading international newspapers and publish ‘Public Health Information’ about the value of vitamins in fighting these pandemics.
The SARS and Bird Flu pandemics have since vanished.
In retrospect, since our landmark publications in the early 1990s, the world community of scientists contributed more than 100,000 scientific studies on health benefits of vitamins and other micronutrients. Hardly any of these studies would have been published without this battle for the liberation of human health having been fought for almost three decades now.
As the current crisis continues, more and more politicians state that their decisions are based on the instructions of so-called experts. It is, thus, worthwhile to have a closer look at who these ‘experts’ are and whose interests they primarily serve.
Whether they are scientists, virologists, journalists or self-appointed ‘experts’ – essentially all of them are directly or indirectly dependent on the pharmaceutical investment business. Some of them are directly on the pay-roll of these special interests, others receive so-called ‘third-party funding’ to conduct pharma-oriented research and others are dependent through advertising money.
In the current crisis, these experts make sure that the politicians they ‘advise’ take actions in accordance with the interests of the pharmaceutical investment business. Thus, it is no surprise that the global scare rhetoric reaches us from all channels – and that the voices advocating effective natural alternatives are silenced. This has to stop!
The people of any nation have the right to immediately learn that there are effective, safe and affordable means, in the form of vitamins, available right now to boost their immune system and help protect their health against viral infections. Depriving the people of the world from this potentially life-saving information is a crime against humanity!
To make sure that this dreadful dependency on the PR machinery of the pharmaceutical investment stops right now, I encourage you, the readers of this letter, to send us any name of such ‘experts’ from your country who – deliberately or by negligence – mislead the people of their country on matters of life and death. We will make sure that these ‘experts’ will be listed on a special website in order to stop this irresponsible disinformation.
The following graph summarizes the ongoing global scam of public manipulation on behalf of those known vested interests: