When I was a child one of my favourite books was “The Ascent of Everest” by John Hunt. Published in 1953, mere months after the first successful ascent by Edmund Hillary and Tenzing Norgay, it was a gripping account of all the individuals and teams to achieve what seemed at first to be impossible. The book describes how each attempt drew on the work and struggle of those who came before them.

In the same spirit, I made the decision to make a bold first attempt at a total cure for this terrible disease that is disabling millions of people around the world. I see my attempt as one of many. There's still so much to learn and discover, and I hope that my effort will serve as one small part of the team effort for the discovery of the cure for this disease.

I have benefitted so much from those who came before me, all the small poorly funded teams and citizen scientists working largely outside of the medical establishment which still tries to gaslight us as anxious and depressed.

They do this because it serves their short sighted and narrow minded agenda of framing the disease as psychological, in order to avoid spending the money this disease deserves. Psychology is cheap, it saves Governments and insurance companies lots of money compared to spending huge sums of money on proper biological research, and besides, everyone wants to forget about the Covid times and move on.

So it's up to us. All of us. Experimenting on ourselves. Sharing our anecdotal results to help each other. Scrappy independent research teams scratching together the money however we can and making every dollar count. Struggling through brain fog, that cruel phenomenon that makes it even harder to piece scraps of information together to come up with solutions. Thinking outside the box with a brain that's failing in the face of an unsupportive cynical medical establishment.

This is by far the hardest medical problem I've ever tried to solve in my over 20 years of solving medical problems. I was always attracted to trying to help the patients abandoned by the medical establishment with diseases like fibromyalgia, chronic pain and ME. Little did I know that one day I would have to bring all my previous knowledge, experience and skills to the task of treating myself. The whole journey of doing my bit to find effective and affordable treatments for long Covid over the last 5 years has felt very much like my own attempt to reach the summit of my own personal Everest.

But the advantage of only having the meager funding that I can supply for myself has the benefit of forcing me to look at affordable possibilities, which means that many more people can potentially access any treatments that I discover.

Small teams and individual clinicians are now attempting antiviral treatments for long Covid, with the growing evidence that much of the disease is probably simply Covid that never went away. This idea satisfies Occam's Razor, the principle that the simplest possible explanation for all the phenomena of a problem is usually the correct answer. Not that the diagnosis and treatment is necessarily simple, but that the underlying problem could be, even if the manifestations are complex.

It's like a stack of pancakes, even though there's many syndromes on the top such as microclotting, MCAS, POTS, microbiome derangements and so on, the pancake at the very bottom of the pile, the one that drives the persistence of all the rest, in many cases may simply be chronic Covid infection. To take into account all of long Covid related syndromes including vaccine related I expand on this by putting forward the idea that the one idea that covers all of this is spike protein persistence which may occur through non infection causes as well. If you want to go further into this I explore these ideas in my essay for paid subscribers: “One theory to unite them all,” spike persistence as the unifying basis of long Covid.

(It's one of my few paid articles because it is not crucial to getting practical benefit from my ideas and explorations, which I feel no one should be excluded from.)

Back to the antivirals.

Looking at the examples of other chronic viral infections we treat successfully, such as Hepatitis C and HIV, they usually require a combination of different drugs over an extended period of time. Most serious attempts at a cure are using what we've learnt from battles against other chronic viruses to design treatment trials with different antivirals that work in different ways and for an extended period of time.

There are, however, a couple of practical problems with most antiviral combination treatment approaches. One is accessibility, most of them relying on intravenous infusions of monoclonal antibodies which you cannot do at home. The other is cost. Monoclonal antibodies are not cheap.

At first glance, the most available oral antivirals we have, Paxlovid and Molnupiravir, are also terribly expensive, with the private cost of them in Western countries in the thousands of dollars even for just the standard 5 day treatment course.

However, 30 years ago I helped run a clinic in a slum in Chennai, India where every week I would go to pharmaceutical wholesalers and negotiate the buying of generic versions of drugs over an obligatory cup of tea and a chat. These were a fraction of the price one would have to pay in the West.

So I looked up the cost of the Indian generic versions of Paxlovid and Molnupiravir. My jaw dropped when I realised that I could buy these at prices that were thirty to forty times less than what they would cost in Australia. A monthly course (the minimum that I thought might be effective) that might cost around $20000 in Australia could be purchased in India for around $500, making it truly affordable for almost anyone.

That's a big part of the reason for selecting these drugs for my attempt at a cure.

I'm off to another remote gathering now and won't be online for a few weeks. I'll be able to assess the level of permanent improvement (or not) after this and write more about the potential effectiveness of this combination. I have finally managed to get some blood tests after being on these drugs for a month. All results (LFTs, FBE, U&E) were good. The only symptoms I ran into that were probably drug related was some dyspepsia and delayed stomach emptying. I'll be continuing my push up challenge to objectively measure whether I'm now capable of significantly increasing my strength by training. I'm also curious if I go backwards after coming off them, which would suggest that the treatment length might be too short. As I discussed in my videos, there were so many confounding variables that this is a very long way from a scientific trial, but I have established that this combination is feasible for further study.

I plan to write more about the case for using these antivirals in combination for extended periods of time and there's a few studies that back up the likely safety and antiviral effectiveness of this strategy.

But life and adventure now call me forward to new horizons!