That hypothesis made the rounds based on an article on Medium. Medium is a place where anyone can publish basically anything. Medium doesn't do any fact checking. The author didn't appear to have any significant biology/medical background based on some basic biology errors in the article. Turns out the author who used a pseudonym was actually a cryptocurrency blogger. And the article was later deleted after the author's identity was discovered.AtlAg75 said:
For the Dr.'s I am curious if you see merit in the below hypothesis. This comes from a friend of mine, a retired Episcopal Bishop. He is working with some team re: Covid 19 but I'm not sure who that is. I apologize if it has already been discussed, I just missed it if so. Here is the hypothesis he sent -
One of the most interesting hypotheses is that covid-19 is not attacking the respiratory system directly, but rather through our blood system. Many of the earliest symptoms, and late stage disease issues suggest that hemoglobin is being shorn of iron. This produces two problems: one, iron enters the bloodstream as a toxic oxidized free radical which our immune system detects as an emergency situation and devotes its major resources to, and two, the hemoglobin loses its ability to carry oxygen and the body starts becoming oxygen depleted. These two potential occurrences produce symptoms and consequences that some doctors believe are clearly being seen in many, even most, covid-19 patients.
If this hypothesis is true, it means we have been misdiagnosing the subsequent disease that the covid-19 produces. But the good news is.....if this hypothesis is true, then there is a clear path to treatment.......HZA. Hopefully they can move quickly to validate or debunk this hypothesis.
https://www.truthorfiction.com/covid-19-had-us-all-fooled-but-now-we-might-have-finally-found-its-secret-medium-post/
There is a Chinese research paper that suggests the heme attack hypothesis, but this is all based on computer modeling of protein homology. It has been a while since I have done computer modeling of proteins and I haven't read through the paper carefully, and, like most COVID science articles, it is a preprints that hasn't gone through peer review.
https://chemrxiv.org/articles/COVID-19_Disease_ORF8_and_Surface_Glycoprotein_Inhibit_Heme_Metabolism_by_Binding_to_Porphyrin/11938173/6
A general comment about protein homology modeling:
Proteins work because of their shapes. If the shape is complementary to another shape (protein, other molecule) the protein can bind to that other thing. Antibodies bind to viruses because they fit together. When two proteins have a similar shape, there is a high amino acid sequence, they might have a similar shape, and with a similar shape, they might have a similar function. It is a great way to get a good first guess at the function of an unknown protein. But you then have to go and see if the guess is right.