Hello,

I thought this week I would share a one man's experience with Covid-19. Let me know if you have any questions, and know I am always here for you!



The Covid-19 Vaccine Will Save Lives and Get This Country Back on Track

by Curtis Hayden

What baffles me is why anyone would not want to get vaccinated and have 95% protection against this insidious virus. And for that matter, why would someone not want to wear a mask when around other people if it’s supposed to provide up to 90% protection? It doesn’t make sense, and I’m not sure how this thing turned into something political. Why are we rolling over and letting a foreign invader take over our country? I’m thankful our grandparents didn’t do that on December 7, 1941, but people were a little more patriotic back in those days.

As an example of what our lives could have looked like if we’d had our eyes on the ball back in March 2020, let’s look at the country of Taiwan. It contains 34 million people and is a mere 81 miles from China across the Formosa Strait. Before reading further, I want you to close your eyes and take a guess at how many people in Taiwan have died from Covid-19 in the last 14 months. Okay, are you ready for the answer? There have been a grand total of ten deaths since this whole thing started. Ten! All of that is thanks to a government that imposed mandatory mask wearing, testing, contact tracing, and isolation of infected people.

On the day I’m writing this, there were 549,411 deaths in the United States. As one of the more celebrated Monday Morning Quarterbacks in this country (three-time MVP winner), my heart goes out to Danny and all the others who were casualties of this government’s botched response to the virus.

Since a certain percentage of ill-informed people are not wearing masks and are mingling at super spreader events, our last line of defense is going to have to be vaccinations. Please, for your sake and your family’s sake, do not turn it into something political.

And so, armed with my masters in neurobiology in 1984 from the University of Colorado-Denver, I am writing this Cliff Notes version of exactly what is going to happen in your body when you get your vaccination, and why you have nothing to be afraid of.

First, suspend all of your notions about space and time, because when you get to the cellular level, it’s a whole different ball game. There are approximately 30 to 40 trillion cells in the human body, and that’s not counting the 100 trillion friendly bacteria that live in your gut, and the trillions of viruses that feed off those bacteria.

You’re reading this article not even aware of what is going on in your brain. To make reading possible, there are 85 billion brain cells that are communicating in exquisite electrical synchronicity by using tiny channels in their cell membranes in which they exchange sodium and potassium ions. It’s an electrical system built on minerals we receive from our diet, so don’t forget to eat your bananas.

But back to those 100 trillion cells in the body. They are so small that time becomes something entirely different. When you are one-billionth the size of the period at the end of this sentence, you can do extraordinary things in human time. There are some proteins that can produce one million reactions every second. Obviously, human time is a different ballgame, time-wise, at the cellular level.

Most of our cells are factories for producing proteins. The pancreas is the most famous example, as its task is to produce the protein insulin, which facilitates the movement of glucose throughout the body. If your pancreas goes bad, you get diabetes.

How exactly do these proteins get made? First of all, except for red blood cells and platelets, every human cell contains a nucleus, where our 46 chromosomes comfortably reside inside their own protective membrane. Chromosomes are essentially strands of something called DNA that wind in a double helical fashion (think of a winding staircase). Twenty-three of those chromosomes came from your mother (via an egg from one of her ovaries), and the other 23 came from Dada via a sperm cell.

In your pancreatic cells, the gene for insulin just happens to lie on the Number 11 chromosome. Responding to messages from the body that insulin is needed (like after you’ve consumed three boxes of ding dongs), there are very specialized proteins called enzymes that unzip the number 11 chromosome, exposing the strands of DNA.

Think of the DNA molecule as a ladder with both sides connected by rungs in the middle. When the enzyme cuts that rung, the two sides are exposed. In the pancreas, both the Mommy and Daddy #11 chromosomes work overtime to produce insulin, and the first step is unzipping that ladder.

The next step involves a molecule called RNA (very similar to DNA but don’t worry about knowing the difference), which slips in between the ladder and makes a complementary copy of the gene for insulin. The specific name for that molecule is messenger RNA, or mRNA, which you’ve probably heard about in relation to the Covid-19 vaccine.

After making a copy of the gene for insulin, mRNA then sneaks out of the nucleus and lands on another type of RNA in the body of the cell dubbed ribosomal RNA (rRNA), where it prepares the cell to start churning out insulin with a vengeance.

Since 2003, researchers have been perfecting a technique using mRNA to treat cancer and to develop vaccines. So when they were tasked with developing a vaccine for Covid-19, they were years ahead of the curve. They knew they didn’t have to inject a live virus to stimulate the immune system. All they had to do was use Covid’s single-stranded RNA and make a copy of the protein used to make spikes on its outer membrane.

Remember, mRNA is the vehicle used to make proteins. The next step was to get that mRNA segment into the body’s immune cells, where the mRNA would make those spike proteins. And that’s where the vaccine comes in. In order to stop the body from attacking the mRNA, it’s wrapped in a fatty layer. Once it enters your upper arm, it travels mere inches to the lymph glands, which are repositories of immune cells (helper cells, T-cells and scary-sounding dudes named killer cells).

Those cells will produce Covid-19 spikes on their outer membranes and will jump start the entire immune system to recognize them as foreign agents. The nice thing is that the spikes will not make you sick because, well, they’re just spikes attached to our own immune cells. They’re not there to make you sick or kill you.

So when some idiot with Covid coughs in your face during a U2 concert and tons of Covid viruses enter your body, the immune system is ready and takes them out of commission almost immediately.

So please get your Covid-19 vaccinations. You can still complain about this country’s over-reliance on vaccinations, but in this case, I think you need to make an exception and take one for the team. Either that or move to Taiwan where you’ll be safe.  

Take care,

Tamara Powell