On Sunday, philanthropist Michael Milken, who has been studying life-threatening diseases for decades, appeared on Fox Business with host Maria Bartiromo to discuss the coronavirus, and gave some hope, noting, “Testing is going to change dramatically. In Nebraska, they’ve announced they have the test down to two hours and I’m sure it will become faster.” He added, “We know the Gilead anti-viral treatment has already gone into patients. There are more than 30 anti-viral treatments that we are testing today.”
Fox News noted, “In February, Gilead Sciences, Inc. announced the initiation of two Phase 3 clinical studies to evaluate the safety and efficacy of remdesivir in adults diagnosed with COVID-19.”
Milken, who by co-founded the Milken Family Foundation in 1982, launched the Prostate Cancer Foundation in 1993, and founded FasterCures to speed up progress against all life-threatening diseases after federal funding slowed down, began by noting, “I think we all realize we are all on the same team. We are all pulling together and we will solve this challenge as we have in the past. My own efforts and those of our various foundations, we have directed all of their efforts here, particularly those in public health and faster cures, etc., to mitigating responses. And we’ve been focusing in six particular areas.”
He continued:
We need to make sure we are focused on education, on what we can do mitigate the cases, reduce the spiking that people are talking about, but also understand that technology, computers are a million times faster today. And as we know in cancer, there are more than 15 million Americans living normal lives today and more than 73 different cancers are linked by similar mutations. This data is available to us and we have experiences in Taiwan, Singapore, and other countries arrives us a roadmap around the world that gives us a roadmap of what our citizens can do.
As it relates to prevention, we have a lot of discussions and you’ve had them this morning on washing your hands, reducing social interaction, but there’s other things we know today because we have sequenced what is called your microbiem: the bacteria in your body. More than 90% of all the bacteria in your body is not human. There’s good bacteria that can prevent you from getting disease, focused on diet, what you eat, how you live your life, etc.
So it isn’t just the external things but it’s the internal things that can prevent you. What we do know in numerous situations: when there is a challenge, that the number of cases of the flu goes down. The number of other diseases as people are more focused on prevention. And it not only prevents other diseases but it might reduce the impact of this one.
Bartiromo noted that at one time, Milken’s prostate cancer indicated he would not survive, but he changed his diet and fought back successfully.
Milken, whose herculean efforts changed the outlook on prostate cancer in an enormous way, so much so that Forbes titled an article about him, “The Man Who Changed Medicine,” replied, “What we do know from numerous cancers and other diseases: your diet can change how your genes are expressed and reduce the growth of diseases like cancer and in some cases maybe even prevent you getting it. We meet people’s immune system and yes, there’s things like sleep and others that can energize your immune system and last year Jim Allison winning the Nobel Prize for this concept that energizing the immune system and quite possibly, turning it on can put your cancer into remission, in this case, melanoma, which took my father’s life in the 1970’s and has changed my life and focus forever.”
Milken offered positive news:
These six areas of education that we talked about, prevention, testing; testing is going to change dramatically. In Nebraska they’ve announced they’ve got the test down to two hours. And I’m sure that it will become faster. We can’t talk about all the mistakes or what went wrong in the past; we need to focus on how to ramp up testing, and the videos that you showed from the president’s press conference on Friday show you that just like Pearl Harbor, private industry and public partnerships are mobilizing today to deal with the testing problem. That will be behind us.
Treatment: what is working? We know the Gilead anti-viral treatment has already gone into patients. There are more than 30 anti-viral treatments that we are testing today. It was not that long ago when the leading talk show host, Oprah, went on television and told Americans that as much as one out of five Americans might die in the next three years. It did not happen. We do not have a vaccine for HIV and AIDS, but anti-virals have brought it under control for the vast majority of people in the world today. And so the treatment with anti-virals, the treatment with antibodies, and the things that can energize your immune system, and put good bacteria in your body are already occurring in cancer and Crohn’s disease and have been very effective.
So everyone is concerned about how long it’s going to take for a virus. There is a high probability that we will control this disease with anti-virals and other treatment long before we have a vaccine … And putting good bacteria into people’s bodies. There are numerous Americans that have had good outcomes. This virus has had very little effect on them. We could take their good bacteria and put it into other individuals.
He concluded, “We have solved these problems with polio, with AIDS and HIV, and we have made enormous progress with cancer and cancer drugs that we have might be the solution here. But we have to stop starting and building a health care system and then dismantling. We have to keep this in place so that every time this isn’t an emergency.”
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