Dr. Wes Youngberg discusses the COVID-19 coronavirus and explains how to optimize our immune systems in light of this and other respiratory infections. (Note: The original recording of this message cut off before the presentation was over. We regret the abrupt ending to this talk.)

Dr. Wes Youngberg discusses the COVID-19 coronavirus and explains how to optimize our immune systems in light of this and other respiratory infections. (Note: The original recording of this message cut off before the presentation was over. We regret the abrupt ending to this talk.)

Free sharing permitted under the Creative Commons <a rel="license" href="http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/3.0/us/">BY-NC-ND 3.0 (US)</a> license.

Fallbrook SDA Church

Wes Youngberg on COVID-19

Wes Youngberg

Optimizing Our Immune System: Natural Strategies for Preventing and Treating Coronavirus and Other Respiratory Infections

How many of you want to avoid the coronavirus and all viruses?

I'm thankful that we serve a God that wants us to be healthy.

I wish that you were in good health, right?

So why don't we go ahead and have prayer and I'll turn it over to Dan who's gonna introduce our speaker today, our own resident Wes Youngberg.

Heavenly Father, thank you so much Lord for being our Creator and our Redeemer and wanting us to be healthy physically and spiritually and mentally and how all these things work together.

Lord I pray that you would give us alert minds today as we listen to Dr.

Youngberg speak about how to prepare for this and other things coming.

And so please give him the words to speak today and anoint his lips and his mind as he speaks from his experience and for the things that you put on his heart.

You know, with all that's been happening in the last week as we've been hearing about the coronavirus and the fear that that has created all around the world.

I called him on Thursday and said, hey, would you be willing to come to my Sabbath school class and say a few words for 5 minutes?

And what we talked about, we said, you know what, let's do a Sabbath afternoon program and just let him have a full discussion of this from a health standpoint.

How many of you would like to know some simple things that you could do to strengthen your opportunity to avoid this and to deal with it if you came in contact with it?

Okay today you're gonna get that and I'm very pleased and I don't think Dr.

Youngberg needs any introduction here, but some people may be watching on our live stream and will watch it later, and we're very fortunate here in Fallbrook to have Dr.

Wes Youngberg and his family as members of our church.

He is the director of the Youngberg Lifestyle Medicine Clinic in Temecula.

He has an incredible array of treatment that he does for people all over the nation and some places in the world.

Does a lot of his consultation by Skype, but he is into health and preventive health specifically.

And he's going to be bringing some things that will help us understand what is happening.

You know, here in our area, you may know that there are 201 people quarantined less than 50 miles from here, okay, that were flown back out of China, and we hope that they're all doing well.

In fact, we're praying for the people in China, in Bangladesh, India, United States, Canada, Germany, all the places in the world where people have gone from there.

And we just are asking our God to be with them and to be with us.

Youngberg, he is, in addition to being at the Youngberg Lifestyle Medicine Clinic here in Temecula.

He's also an adjunct professor, an assistant clinical professor, did I say that right?

At Loma Linda University in their School of Public Health, School of Medicine, etc.

And he also is a fellow of the American College of Lifestyle Medicine, has a doctorate in clinical preventive care.

And I am very pleased and would like to invite you to welcome today Dr.

I'm not supposed to stay up late when you're preparing to keep your immune system strong.

But all this week I've been staying up late, trying to keep up with this amazing new information every day.

You know, just things are changing hour by hour as we're as we're trying to understand this novel coronavirus epidemic and that is now going pandemic.

There was a report just yesterday that I read it says we should really be focusing on the flu not on the coronavirus.

Is it true that the coronavirus is not as much of a problem as the regular seasonal flu.

There's so much information and mixed information and I have actually found it somewhat difficult to keep up on it myself, and I've been studying this for 35 years.

And so it's clear to me that the average layperson in the public is just gonna be just overwhelmed with information and not really be able to make heads or tails of, you know, well, what's going on?

We're being told, well, wait a minute, just a few days ago, the World Health Organization declared a global health emergency because of the coronavirus epidemic.

Okay, should that somehow impact what we're doing in our personal lives today?

Or do we just sit back and wait for the government and other health authorities tell us what to do next?

Is there something that we can start doing right now?

Or as yesterday, on January the 31st, when the United States task force on the coronavirus came out and basically declared a national public health emergency.

These are unprecedented times that we're dealing with and yet we keep hearing you know we're really at low risk and so the the implications I think to the average lay person is just keep stressing, which is the last thing that we should be doing right now is stressing because stress in our lives and not knowing what's going to happen next not knowing what to do not knowing how to prepare ourselves is the worst thing for our immune system and so today my hope is to try to make sense of what the latest information is, which, again, is changing from day to day.

So a month from now, or even a few days from now, there may be different perspectives coming out.

But it's important that we start making some decisions right now.

And that's going to become clearer as we get through the data that has unfolded over the last week in particular.

So my philosophy as a lifestyle medicine specialist and a clinical nutritionist is to be 100% honest with my patient about what's going on in their health.

I have a reputation for doing lots of lab tests and because of that we're going to find some stuff that's wrong.

I don't care how healthy you are, we're going to find some stuff that isn't good.

We're not going to just do the regular metabolic profile and complete blood count and a thyroid stimulating hormone.

We're doing a lot more than that to figure out what are our weak points, and therefore, what can we do about it?

So I call it the philosophy of Desire of Ages page 104, where John the Baptist, It's a chapter on John the Baptist when he said he saw his people, the Jewish people, deceived in the sleep of their sins.

And so he longed to rouse them to make better decisions with their lives.

And his approach to doing so was basically tell it like it is.

Don't sugarcoat it, just tell it like it is, and then provide answers that give hope.

And so I'm going to try to appropriately report what I feel is going on based on the literature, there's a lot of literature that's on Madison that's being published every day in top medical journals.

Because I'm going to share with you an example of, it was actually a Seventh-day Adventist seminary in 1918, near the city of Minneapolis, Minnesota, where the majority of the individuals in the school and the faculty lived under 1 big roof it was a huge huge building a hundred and 20 people in that building were exposed to the Spanish flu.

This is a flu that over the course of 1918 through 1920 took the lives of between 50 and 100 million individuals.

And I'm gonna explain to you how the physician in charge of that student and faculty group implemented a protocol that cured all 90 patients who had come down with a Spanish flu.

In other words, there are insights from history that if we pay attention to, we can gain great insight from.

And so that, in other words, there is hope.

There's a concept called passive stress versus active stress.

Neil Nedley talks about this in his depression recovery series.

He says if you're just stressed out, but you have no idea what to do about it, and you're just waiting for the other shoe to drop, you're waiting to get exposed, you're basically not sure what's going on and that type of stress significantly depresses the immune system thus perpetuating exactly what you don't want to happen.

Whereas active stress is when you purpose in your heart to do something about it, and you figure out what the most rational, prudent, appropriate strategies are, and you begin implementing.

You're doing something about that according to your abilities and knowledge and understanding and By doing so that becomes an act of stress that actually enhances your immune system which is exactly what we need in situations like this, when the body's defense against a virus or another pathogen may be the determining factor on whether you become infected and therefore whether you end up transmitting that pathogen to other people, especially people that you love or people that you work with or people around you.

And so it's important That we dig in and start having some active stress right that's what we're doing today We're getting into some active stress doing something about it, and then what my goal is to share with you additional natural remedies that directly impact how to optimize our immunity and apply those appropriately.

And then finally I want to share with you what we call simple remedies.

We have natural remedies which are the lifestyle medicine strategies and then we have simple remedies which are strategies that we could take advantage of, both as a preventive to optimize the immune system, and in particular, as a therapeutic strategy for those of us who may get exposed and for those of us who unfortunately actually catch any kind of viral respiratory illness.

So these type of strategies are not just for us to prepare and address the novel coronavirus, but they're also the very same strategies that we use to impact any respiratory condition, any immune-related condition.

Alright, so that's what we're going to try to get done today.

Okay, so that is a joke, but we'll try to run through this.

So it's, my first challenge is to summarize what we have learned, what's available in the medical literature over the last week.

It's of interest to me that today, February 1, 2020, marks exactly 2 months from the very first reported case of novel coronavirus in Wuhan City in China.

So it's been just a little bit over 60 days and wow have things changed so dramatically.

It is also very interesting to me that we didn't really start being even that concerned about this until around January 23rd when it was starting to get announced.

And my house have things changed over the last 7, 8 days.

So 1 of the first things that we want to take a look at and this is this is hard to see maybe from the back of the church but you can look this up on the internet essentially essentially this is looking at the outbreaks from January 20 to January 30 in January 20 there was 291 cases identified.

Dan Houghton

COVID-19 Information for Churches and Schools

Well, I want to welcome those who may be viewing this video.

I have the privilege of sitting down with Dr.

And we are just going to be talking about the issues related to the coronavirus, which that whole issue is sweeping our world, I believe, over 50 countries now.

And we're sitting here in our own church.

This is our Fallbrook Seventh-day Adventist Church, where we're both members, and this is our worship community.

But not every church, not every school has the privilege of having someone like a Dr.

Talk about what this means, and Wes, give just a little bit of a background.

Youngberg, yes, but I'm going to go back and forth with Wes.

Want you to give anybody who might be watching this a little bit of an idea of why this is a passion to you, what your background, your education, your study on this is?

Well, I became very interested in health when I was a young kid in my early teenage years.

And to make a long story short, that changed my life.

That made me very aware that life can be taken from you.

You know, the people that you care the most about can be taken away from you at a moment's notice.

And so I became very interested in health.

I became very interested in the Seventh Day Adventist health message.

I read, as an eighth grader, I read the book, Ministry of Healing.

And it just instilled within me a deep passion to learn how to be healthy, not just to stay healthy, but to regain health once lost.

And so those are critical issues that are before us as we're, as globally we're faced with a very significant threat to our health and the health of our family members, especially those family members that are most at risk, that have underlying medical conditions like diabetes, which we have discussed many times, and like heart disease and COPD or asthma or other lung conditions.

Those are the people that are dying at a very high case fatality rate when exposed and infected with the new novel coronavirus or COVID-19 virus.

I've been talking to every patient every day.

I've been talking to church members and I get this deer in the headlights there from them like, what?

No, I heard on TV that it was no big deal.

On the other hand, you might hear someone freaking out.

I know you can't buy anywhere in Southern California right now, the masks.

So on the 1 hand you have those who say there's no problem, and on the other hand you have people that are freaking out.

Right, and of course freaking out is the worst thing you can do, because if you're stressed out at a time like this, it actually depresses your immune system such that now you're more susceptible to be infected and more susceptible if infected to develop serious complications.

So we need to look at this from a realistic perspective, but then we need to come up with strategies that have been shown in the past from the Spanish flu epidemic of 1918 to be very successful and we can share that information.

Now, our goal tonight is not to do a six-hour marathon of why it's important and what to do about it, how to prevent being infected, how to manage and treat infections.

That has already been done in this church.

A month ago, you know, 4 weeks ago, February the 1st, we had a 2 hour and 10 minutes, that's when the video cut out, but it actually went longer than that, presentation.

I think there's somewhere north of 8, 000 people that have watched that on YouTube.

And I know I had 1 friend tell me today that they had shared it with over 100 people.

And I just, before we jump into this, there's 1 more thing I want to say.

As a businessman and very concerned about the spiritual health of myself and my friends and the people that I care about, I have as a matter of philosophy never ever wanted to make a decision based on fear.

When you start making decisions in the business world based on fear or even in the spiritual world based on fear, it's not going to turn out necessarily so well.

But an abundance of caution, being realistic as you said a moment ago, and saying, okay, what do we need to do to appropriately handle this?

Now, some people right now, because of the politics in our country and in the world, wish this would go away.

And of course, we all wish that it wasn't happening.

And On the other hand, there are people who are, you know, they see a boogeyman behind every bush.

I think we're gonna be trying to look at what is real and what are strategies that a local church can use and what are strategies that a school can use.

And so that's the approach on abundance of caution.

And let me just, first let me just say a little bit about my background for maybe individuals that aren't aware of the type of work that I do.

I actually, because of my interest in lifestyle medicine, I chose to take maybe a track that was different than most, and ended up getting the Doctorate of Public Health in Preventive Care, which is essentially lifestyle medicine, and had the privilege about 16 years ago to be 1 of the founding directors of the American College of Lifestyle Medicine.

I also have a master's in nutrition, but I have a lot of background in epidemiology because you have to if you're gonna do a doctorate in public health.

And so we need to actually listen to what the experts, the professors at Harvard and the mathematic modelers at Los Alamos National Laboratory, what they're saying based on information that they've been able to glean over the years and decades and optimizing the way they can forecast, they can project into the future very precisely what is about to happen.

So let me just read a couple things real quick that come from medical journals.

Here, January the 31st, The Lancet, 1 of the best medical journals in the world, published a report by Dr.

Gabriel Leung and colleagues at University of Hong Kong.

And they were extremely concerned about what had been happening for the previous month or more in China.

So we're a good 3 months out now, and we're reaping the whirlwind right now on February the 28th, and we need to get serious about this.

So this is what he said essentially 4 weeks ago.

Unless substantial public health interventions at both the population and personal levels are implemented immediately, independent, self-sustaining outbreaks in major cities globally could become inevitable because of substantial exportation of pre-symptomatic cases.

Preparedness plans and mitigation interventions should be readied immediately.

Now this is something that was shared with the entire world 4 weeks ago.

And there's still people that aren't paying attention to this, still people at high levels, still a lot of doctors or media people are still thinking, ah, no, no, no, this is no worse than the common flu.

In fact, the common flu has killed more people.

It's true that presently the common flu has killed far more people.

Some projections are between 10 and 25, 000 people this flu season alone have already succumbed, died because of the flu, the common flu, the seasonal flu.

But the case fatality rate for that, compared to the number infected, is at 0.1% if that.

The case fatality rate for the COVID-19 is at the low end of the spectrum right now at 2.2.

That means that the likelihood of dying from the coronavirus COVID-19 right now is at least 20 times higher than if you get the flu.

And that information is malpractice in reporting, in my opinion.

Robert Redfield, who's the director of the CDC, and I understand a virologist himself, went on record February the 12th in Stat News and saying, right now we're in a containment strategy.

We're sitting in California right now, where just a few hours ago, the second human to human transmission, confirmed transmission of the coronavirus has occurred in an individual who had no relationship to China, no travel to China, or to anybody else who had traveled to China.

What does that tell us in terms of our own level of preparedness as a family and as a church family, as a community, as a country, as a state?

Redfield made a point that, that this was 2 weeks ago, that until they have confirmation of 4 generations of transmission, That is, somebody who's infected in the US, maybe they brought it back from China or wherever, they infect somebody else, who then infects somebody else, who then infects a fourth individual.

Okay, and we know that the R0, or the reproduction number, the basic reproduction number of COVID-19 is way above 3.

It's being projected between 4 and 6.7 or so.

And that is the number of people that are infected by each infected person.

So this is huge in terms of how the doubling rate occurs exponentially over time.

So In the money world, we talk about the principle of compounding.

You get paid a penny today and in 30 days it's millions and millions.

In this case, it's anywhere from 2 and a half to 4 days, it doubles.

COVID-19 Update - March 13, 2020

It is May 3rd, I'm sorry, it's March 13th.

2 weeks ago, we sat at the same spot and gave a little update about the coronavirus COVID-19.

Tonight, there's been so many things happening, even today, Wes, even just today.

We decided to sit down and just have another casual discussion for anyone who wants to know what is really happening and how it affects their families and the church, I would just begin by saying if you have opportunity, yesterday, talk about what a difference a day makes, yesterday at 9 o'clock a.m.

In Illinois, we taped a special program on 3 Angels Broadcasting Network with myself, Danny Shelton, Mark Finley, John Lomaking, Dr.

And In that short amount of time, so much has changed.

It'll be shown all day tomorrow, Sabbath, March 14th, and again, probably many times in the next few weeks.

There's so much more information that's happened even today that we wanted to have a chance to give you some new information to hear from Dr.

Wes, you've just been on this and it's been a part of you because your training, your background, your interests.

And from 2 weeks ago when we first sat down and started talking about this, I know that there are at least 3, 500 or 4, 000 people have watched that conversation that we had.

I don't know how many watched today, but so many things have happened.

As an example, our church where we're sitting right now in Fallbrook, California, today, our elders met with our pastoral team and we made the decision to suspend live services.

We're going to be doing a live stream tomorrow and for the next few weeks, but along with all the churches in Southeastern California as well as Southern California.

I understand there's some in Michigan, Pioneer Memorial Church, I believe, is also gonna be live streaming tomorrow.

And I know Chattanooga area, and there are probably many other churches that we haven't even heard yet.

In addition, West, you know, it's interesting, I don't know if you heard this, but the North American Division and the General Conference in the last 2 days have made a decision to bring all the people that are traveling back home, wherever they are in the world or wherever they are in the North American Division, and no more travel by our division and General Conference people for the next 3 months.

That is so encouraging, Dan, because we have learned from recent studies that every day that we wait to limit our contact with the people around us increases the risk, and actually increases the risk a month later of serious cases by 40%.

So what little changes that we make right now can dramatically increase the risk or decrease the risk of what happens a month out.

And that is because of the exponential change, the compounding effect that occurs that keeps going until you make a change.

Scott Gottlieb, who is a past FDA commissioner for the United States, has been 1 of the most keen and most insightful interviewees on TV over the last 6 weeks.

And I noticed immediately that he was insightful and he's been saying for 6 weeks now that this is very very serious and just a few days ago he actually tweeted that just a 25% decrease in our everyday contacts.

In other words, instead of doing everything that we normally do at work, at home, at church, et cetera, if we just decrease those contacts by 25% in a given, on a daily basis, that would decrease the case rate of COVID-19 by 50% a month later or so.

1 of the reasons why maybe we haven't taken this seriously as we should have, even though you and I've been taking it seriously.

We normally have a problem, and then we have a way to solve it.

But what you're saying is that decisions that are made now impact what will happen a month from now, and I recall very distinctly that on January 31, when you made a presentation to a room full of people right here, which is about 6 weeks ago, you said the things that would happen, and they've all happened, almost right down the line.

And 1 of the things we want to talk about tonight is what will the next 6 weeks look like and maybe the next 10 or 12 weeks look like for people and how should they be adjusting to that.

What is actually happening right now in the whole scheme of things?

First of all, I was so elated listening to Trump's speech today, because for the last 6 weeks I had been dismayed, I've been just so discouraged that the government agencies haven't been acting.

They've been making excuses of why they can't get tests out and we gotta control this and it was just a fiasco.

And so finally Trump said, okay forget about government agencies, I'm gonna create a national state of emergency.

We're going to bypass those agency rules, and we're going to go right to business.

And something that apparently the CDC was struggling to do for the last 8 weeks, Roche and LabCorp and Quest did in like 2 days.

And so finally now we have access to considerable testing And then Trump also announced the fact that there's going to be every Wal-Mart, CVS, Walgreens, Target, is going to be make some of their parking lots available for drive-thru testing.

It's going to be done very carefully, where up to 200 people in their cars can be tested in a day in each location.

So we'll be learning more about that on Sunday evening, which will be on the 15th of March.

So we're now moving forward and decisions are being made and things are actionable.

But don't assume that because of these major decisions have been made in the right direction that we're out of the woods, because we're absolutely not out of the woods.

For instance, Just a few hours ago on Tucker Carlson, Tucker was interviewing Dr.

Michael Osterholm, who I've also been paying attention to.

Gottlieb are the 2 most logical and thoughtful scientists I've seen interviewed to date on this topic.

Isn't he from the University of Minnesota?

Osterholm is a professor at the University of Minnesota.

He has been on government task force at the national level for the president and state levels for the past 4 administrations.

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Series

Wes Youngberg on COVID-19

Optimizing Our Immune System: Natural Strategies for Preventing and Treating Coronavirus and Other Respiratory Infections

Transcript

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