Ridding the Body of Spike Proteins

Dr. Paul Marik on vaccines, vitamins, lifestyle changes, and the enormous potential for self-repair

Dr. Paul Marik, co-founder of Front Line COVID-19 Critical Care Alliance. York Du/The Epoch Times

“We make up about 4 percent of the global population in America, yet we consume 55 percent of prescription drugs,” says Dr. Paul Marik. “How is that possible? Eighty percent of prescription opiates are written in this country. This tells you the stranglehold that Big Pharma has.”

In a recent episode of “American Thought Leaders,” host Jan Jekielek spoke with Dr. Paul Marik to get an update on the spike protein-induced diseases in people who have received the COVID-19 vaccine. They discuss the best treatments for ridding the body of spike protein and the broader ways that vitamins and lifestyle changes might radically improve human health. Dr. Marik is a critical care physician and co-founder of Front Line COVID-19 Critical Care Alliance (FLCCC).

Jan Jekielek: You have been doing some fascinating research on a range of things, but I want to start with COVID and the current state of spike-related disease. What do we understand about it now?

Dr. Paul Marik: Our understanding continues to evolve. The truth of the matter is that spike protein is probably one of the most toxic compounds that human beings can be exposed to. Its toxicity is through multiple pathways that we’re just beginning to understand.

Spike protein causes profound inflammation. It activates clotting and platelets. It causes auto-antibodies. It causes damage to the endothelium of blood vessels. Then, it has some really bad effects on many of the genes involved in cancer suppression.

Probably the best study is by a brave pathologist in Germany. In the United States, if someone dies unexpectedly, you’re not allowed to look for spike protein.

Dr. Arne Burkhardt in Germany has done over 75 autopsies on patients who have died post-vaccination. The findings are unbelievable. The body is packed with spike protein. There’s spike protein in the brain, the heart, and the vasculature.

It actually causes a disease in the blood vessels—medial necrosis—which is, in this case, death of the wall of the blood vessel, and the blood vessel ruptures. It’s a slow, progressive organ dysfunction leading to death. When you get the jab, the amount of spike protein is exponentially higher than with natural infection. That’s why we’re seeing all these vaccine complications.

For example, long COVID—and you don’t want to minimize it—is a self-limiting disease. Because of the amount of spike protein that’s produced with most people who get long COVID, the average is four months, and then they get better. We know the vaccine-injured have such a load of spike protein that two to three years after the jab, they’re still highly symptomatic. It’s related to the load of spike protein.

Mr. Jekielek: Where are we in terms of treatment?

Dr. Marik: One problem with the vaccine is the people who invented and developed it didn’t develop an antidote. They made this toxin, but they left it for us to figure out how to deal with it. Most medicines that we know have toxicity, and we have a good idea how to deal with the toxicity.

So we had to start from scratch figuring out how spike protein damages the patient. As we’ve learned about spike, we’ve learned about ways to deal with it. The more spike protein you have, the worse the disease. You can look at how many times they’ve had COVID and how many shots they’ve had, and it gives you an index of how much spike they have.

Mr. Jekielek: So the less spike you have in you, the better.

Dr. Marik: Yes. The first thing is to avoid being spiked. If you’ve been vaccinated, don’t get boosters. You want to limit exposure to spike, so no more jabs. Secondly, if you get COVID, you want to be treated early, because the longer it lingers, the more spike protein. Then, you need to help the body get rid of the spike protein.

The body has an evolutionary process called autophagy. When the body detects foreign protein, misfolded protein, or dysfunctional protein, it destroys it, because it figures out this is not good and wants to get rid of it. It goes through this autophagy process. It’s like the garbage collection system of the cell.

So what you want to do is enhance the ability of the cell to break down these proteins. So much of what we’ve learned is that we have this enormous potential of self-repair and self-healing. We want to embrace the ability of the host to heal itself and to activate autophagy.

The most potent method of activating autophagy is called intermittent fasting, or time-related feeding, because there is this biological switch called the mTOR switch. Whenever you eat, you switch off autophagy through the mTOR pathway. Glucose and insulin and protein switch off this process. However, when you deprive the cell of glucose and protein, it switches on autophagy, and it breaks down protein.

This is the way we were designed. The Neanderthal man, our cousin, didn’t eat all the time. This is a relatively new phenomenon with our processed foods and supermarkets. People eat all the time. They’ll sit in front of the TV after dinner, for example, and snack on processed food and carbohydrates, which is terrible. First of all, it never allows autophagy to switch on. More importantly, autophagy is really important for brain recovery when you sleep.

For brain regeneration, it’s important to clear out all the metabolic products and allow the synapses to regenerate. During sleep, you undergo autophagy. So if you eat before you go to sleep, it does two really bad things. First, it switches off autophagy. Secondly, there’s a remarkable system in the brain called the glymphatic system. This is the lymphatic system of the brain, and it does the same thing. It washes out the metabolic byproducts from metabolism to get rid of them. Impaired glymphatic flow is linked to many neurodegenerative diseases, as is deficient autophagy. If you eat before you go to sleep, you limit autophagy and you limit glymphatic flow.

The other thing that’s really good for lymphatics and autophagy is exercise.

All of this is important for getting rid of spike protein, but the implications go much further, because we now know that it prevents aging and Alzheimer’s disease. It likely reduces the risk of cancer. It reduces the risk of metabolic syndrome and diabetes.

Getting back to spike, it’s essential that people change their diet. You don’t have to do strict intermittent fasting like I do, where you eat within a six- to eight-hour window, and then the rest of the time you don’t eat.

Mr. Jekielek: It sounds like there’s a simple recipe here. How do you activate the time-restricted eating?

Dr. Marik: The first step is to concentrate on eating real food and not processed food. Then, what you want to do is miss one meal, and breakfast is probably the best meal to miss. You have lunch, and you have an early dinner—but it must be early. Then you gradually increase the window of time-restricted eating.

Maybe you start off by eating within a window of 12 hours, then 10 hours, then eight hours, and then six hours. But it’s important that when you eat, you actually have good food. During the periods when you’re fasting, you can have liquids. You don’t want to get dehydrated. Water is fine—but no juices—and coffee is fine. Coffee actually activates autophagy and has important phytochemicals. Don’t add artificial sweeteners or milk. If you want, you can add thick cream. You want to prevent adding glucose, which will break your ketosis.

With time-restricted eating, you shouldn’t lose lean body mass; you should lose fat mass. You utilize the excess fat stores. You break down the fat, but you prevent breaking down muscle.

If you don’t eat for a number of hours, you’ll use glucose, which is stored in the liver as glycogen. Once that’s depleted, you’ll start breaking down and converting the visceral fat, your belly fat, into ketone bodies, so you will be breaking down fatty tissue.

The bottom line is that you’re linking two things. One is time-restricted eating.  The other is to eat nutrient-dense foods and not processed foods. We know that for Americans, 80 percent of what they eat is processed food.

What’s the difference? If it looks like food, it likely is food. If it comes in a box, has a package and a label, it’s probably not food.

We don’t realize the profound toxicity of the processed foods we eat. It’s essentially processed as high glucose and, most importantly, fructose. Fructose is different from glucose, and most of these things have high levels of corn fructose. Fructose is metabolized into fat in the liver. It causes a fatty liver, which causes this process of insulin resistance.

Obviously, there’s a lot of fructose in fruit. One has to be careful about how much fruit one eats. The best fruits are berries—blueberries, strawberries, and blackberries—because they have the lowest glycemic index. They have fructose, but they also have fiber.

Basically, what I’m saying is that by very simple changes in the way we eat, we can have a profound metabolic effect. This has another implication, because it is estimated that 40 percent of cancers are caused by insulin resistance.

Mr. Jekielek: You’re not sounding like the typical ICU doctor.

Dr. Marik: I worked in the ICU and followed conventional medicine. Fortunately, in the ICU, most of our therapies were based on a good understanding of physiology, and then how to deal with physiology, rather than corrupt medications.

You really have to think about getting back to basics. The human body has enormous capacity for self-renewal and self-healing, and there are natural products that can help the body restore itself. With intermittent fasting, you buy less food, so you are saving money. If we actually adopted this across the country, we could reduce our expenditure on health care by at least 50 percent.

Mr. Jekielek: It seems so simple.

Dr. Marik: Yes. More recently, I’ve become interested in vitamin D. Human beings used to sleep with no artificial light. That is important because having darkness at night is really important in making melatonin. That’s what the pineal gland does. If your pineal gland isn’t functioning optimally, you don’t make melatonin, which significantly increases your risk of cancer, particularly breast cancer.

During the day, we used to go outdoors more, we got sunshine, and we got blue light. Blue light is important during the day to switch off the pineal gland. We’ve disturbed that natural cycle of life. We need to get back to the basics: Walk outdoors, get sunshine, eat once or twice a day, and reestablish our circadian rhythm, where you have darkness at night and light during the day.

And vitamin D is so critical. There’s overwhelming data that people who have low vitamin D levels increase their risk of cancer. There was a study recently published in a peer-reviewed journal in which they looked at three simple interventions to reduce cancer. It was a prospective randomized study.

They gave patients 4,000 units of vitamin D, one gram of omega-3, plus a simple home exercise program. They reduced the risk of cancer by 50 percent. Just think of the implications. I would add one or two other compounds. I would probably add melatonin and probably metformin, which improves the way your body handles insulin.

So there are simple common sense things you can do to reduce your risk; Take vitamin D, take melatonin, and get some exercise and sunshine. Through lifestyle changes that are just common sense, we can improve our health, our wellbeing, our longevity, and our happiness.

Mr. Jekielek: I want to talk about one ICU intervention you developed, an intravenous vitamin C protocol that was highly effective. You came to adopt an unorthodox view on dealing with COVID and were attacked for it, and even your sepsis protocol came under serious attack. It’s cheap and can be easily adapted in the developing world to save lives. It’s just a wonderful thing on the face of it. A lot of people were thrilled with this protocol at one point, then suddenly, it became toxic, metaphorically.

Dr. Marik: What people may not know is that vitamin C is really a hormone rather than a vitamin. All species on this planet—except for humans and guinea pigs—make vitamin C. When your dog or your cat or your goat gets stressed, it actually makes vitamin C, but humans have lost that ability.

Vitamin C is a potent antioxidant and has anti-inflammatory properties. It’s very important for making hormones, but from the adrenal gland. It has anti-inflammatory, antibacterial properties. But for whatever reasons, humans have a genetic mutation where they can’t make it. What’s the implication? It’s simple. When humans are stressed, give them vitamin C. I stumbled upon this by accident. Because I had this patient in the ICU who was clearly dying of sepsis.

As a clinician, when you have a patient who’s dying, and this was pre-COVID, you do whatever you can to save the patient’s life—as long as it’s not illegal, as long as it’s an approved drug. I had read the work of Dr. [Alpha A. (Berry)] Fowler on vitamin C.

I thought, “Why not? Let me give it a try.” I was expecting this woman to die. When I came back the next day, she was sitting up in bed, communicating. She was extubated, and her kidney function improved. This woman who was dying walked out of the ICU three days later. I thought, “That’s impressive, but maybe it’s just a one-off thing. I’ll try it again.” The same thing happened. I tried again, and the same thing happened again. When observation is scientifically valid, it’s reproducible. I kept doing it because it was saving patients’ lives. At that point, I said, “No one is going to believe me. I need to do a randomized study.” I said to the nurses, “I’m going to do a randomized study.” We couldn’t withhold a therapy, which saves kidneys and lives, so to give them a placebo would be unethical. If I have something which might help patients, how could I deny it to them? Instead, we collected a series of 48 patients and then compared it retrospectively to a similar match group, and we showed a marked reduction in mortality.

The head of the global sepsis forum, who worked in Australia, tweeted out that this was snake oil medicine and that I was a snake oil doctor. They didn’t like the idea that a vitamin, which is cheap, could save people’s lives. It goes against the narrative. It has to be an expensive molecule from pharma. The idea that vitamin C— which is cheap, available, and safe—could have a significant impact in reducing mortality from sepsis was snake oil medicine.

Mr. Jekielek: What did you think of them saying that?

Dr. Marik: I was personally offended. I was disturbed because they went on this Twitter campaign to suggest that I had somehow manipulated the data.

Traditional medicine does not like challenges to the status quo. It’s very disturbing to them, particularly when it’s an off-label drug. That’s a theme that I’ve now recognized. As my direction has changed in terms of metabolic syndrome, diabetes, and cancer, I’ve realized that there are many repurposed drugs that are highly effective for these conditions.

Mr. Jekielek: This is astounding to most people—that in the established literature, hundreds of deeply researched papers will tell you that these things work. But it’s not known in the collective consciousness, even among medical doctors.

Dr. Marik: Most doctors don’t know because they’ve been isolated from this. I use vitamin D because of the amount of data supporting the concept that vitamin D deficiency causes cancer and that supplementing with vitamin D reduces your risk of cancer. Yet nobody knows about it.

Medicine is controlled by big pharma. The food industry is controlled by the big nutrition companies. We need a reawakening because this current medical system is broken. The Epoch Times is wonderful in that respect because it does speak the truth. We make up about 4 percent of the global population in America, yet we consume 55 percent of the prescription drugs. How is that possible? Eighty percent of prescription opiates are written in this country. This tells you the stranglehold that big pharma has on this country. But the reality is there are cheap repurposed drugs that could have a massive effect on improving the health and welfare of humanity.

Mr. Jekielek: Those are astounding numbers. You understand there’s something deeply wrong knowing that.

Dr. Marik: Once you see the lies, the deceit, and the dishonesty, you can’t unsee it. You realize the depth of this corruption. We’ve been brainwashed. The good thing is that we’re exposing this, and there are simple interventions that people can use to empower themselves and improve their health.

They need to be educated, and they need to be informed. When you choose a physician, you need to engage in a conversation just to get an idea of where they sit on the spectrum, if they are open to the use of repurposed drugs, and if they’re open to vitamin D and vitamin C. There are some good physicians out there who really want to treat patients, follow the Hippocratic principles, and help people. You just need to find them.

Mr. Jekielek: Any final thoughts as we finish up?

Dr. Marik: People need to get back to basics and common sense, to think for themselves. Read about these issues, explore them, and go on this new adventure. Hopefully, we’ll live happier, healthier, and more fulfilling lives.

This interview has been edited for clarity and brevity.