CLEVELAND, OH – General Colin Powell was 84 and stricken with a deadly multiple myeloma cancer when he died on October 18, 2021. Like many Americans who served in Vietnam and Southeast Asia the General was exposed to Agent Orange. Among the disease byproducts of Agent Orange are prostate cancer, amyliodosis and multiple myeloma.
Vietnam and Vietnam Era veterans have been stricken with multiple forms of cancer from our tours of duty in undeveloped Third World Asia. 95 percent of Udorn Thani residents near Udorn Royal Thai Air Force Base where I was stationed for a year in Thailand were Hepatitis carriers because of the fecal material in water.
General Powell’s Facebook page features a family message about his death. It came from CoVid or “flu” complications. My late father once described the flu as an ailing old man’s best friend. My late mother’s final days were flu stricken. My father chose morphine. An 84-year-old immune compromised man with cancer and multiple other ailments dying of the flu or covid before the “pandemic” was classified as a “death by natural causes.”
As someone who worked with medical records on a hospital oncology ward, I remember dying cancer patients with the flu also being stricken with diabetes mellitis and dying of congestive heart failure. Their lungs were too filled with fluid for them to breathe. A heart attack was triggered and the patient died. The physicians during my hospital career would write either “Code” or “No Code” when the expected heart attack was triggered. The terms were instructions to either call or not call a resuscitation team.
Powell was treated for prostate cancer in 2003. He was later stricken with multiple myeloma cancer that poisoned his blood and weakened his immune system even further. A human body that’s fighting multiple diseases at one time has an overworked or “inflamed” immune system that’s not strong enough to fight off a new viral invader like the seasonal flu that’s also known as covid. People simply taking medications for co-morbidities are not treating its root cause. They’re also not considering the side effects of medication that adds to their co-morbidities by creating new one’s for the immune system to fight.
Reports on the National Center for Biological Information’s (NCBI) website that’s under Dr. Anthony Fauci’s control have been advising physicians that Covid is not only worse in patients with multiple Myeloma cancer it also progresses the disease. Their immune systems are so weakened the CoVid injection offers them no value. In order for the vaccine to work the immune system has to launch a fight against it and store what it’s learned from the battle in the body’s bone marrow.
Powell’s bone marrow was already compromised – like every other multiple myeloma patient – with his blood poisoning disease. So at 84 his body was out of fight. This is explained in medical terms in an April 2020 report titled, “Multiple Myeloma in the time of Covid-19.”
“The immune system in patients with MM is compromised by many different factors and patients with MM are at increased risk of infection [7]. The mean age at diagnosis for myeloma is approximately 65 and elderly patients are more likely to have comorbidities compromising the immune system. Lymphopenia at diagnosis is a well-known risk factor for developing infections [8, 9, 10]. This is a result of the myeloma clone suppressing normal B-cell development and function. A loss of functional immunoglobulins seen in most myeloma patients can also contribute to the increased risk of infection. Decreased CD+4 T-cell count at diagnosis is also associated with increased infections [11, 12]. Patients with MM receive treatment that causes more immunosuppression and increases the risk of infection [13]. Lymphopenia worsens after starting therapy for MM [10] and CD4 counts decrease with proteasome inhibitor (PI) therapy [14], and the risk of zoster reactivation is up to 13% without prophylaxis [15]. Immunomodulatory drugs (IMiDs) cause neutropenia, which increases the infection risk. Steroids are well known to increase the risk of infections (including pneumocystis and fungus) and the combination with IMiDs and PIs increases this further. The infection risk is highest during the first 3–4 months of therapy. Prophylactic levofloxacin for 12 weeks in newly diagnosed myeloma has been shown to reduce deaths significantly [16]. All of the previous factors make MM patients more susceptible to the serious adverse events that could arise with COVID-19 infection. COVID-19 can intensify neutropenia [17].”
Powell’s prostate cancer treatment in 2003 was as devastating on his body then as it is on men today. He received shots to block his testosterone that scientists now know trigger dementia, increase heart attack risks with blood clots, leads to diabetes, stimulates liver disease, leads to strokes and stimulates hot flashes like those experienced by menopausal women.
He received radiation therapy. The treatment creates pre-existing conditions for the body’s immune system to fight. Men with prostate cancer typically have low levels of Vitamin D, zinc and the other minerals the immune system needs to have stimulated the apoptosis that would have prevented destructive cells from growing and destroying the prostate before spreading. Powell was stricken with both Parkinson’s Disease and dementia. All this means his body was so ravaged by his diseases and treatments that the flu or covid became the General’s saviour.
What does this mean for other multiple myeloma cancer patients? That question may have been answered in an April 2021 report titled, “COVID-19 vaccination appears less effective among patients with active leukemia, myeloma.” The italicized words are cut and pasted directly from the report.
“In one study, Yair Herishanu, MD, associate professor in hematology and head of the CLL service at Tel Aviv Sourasky Medical Center in Israel, and colleagues found that individuals with CLL had a substantially lower rate of immune response to the two-dose BNT162b2 mRNA COVID-19 vaccine (Pfizer, BioNTech) compared with healthy age-matched controls.
“Patients with CLL are predisposed to develop infections due to inherent immune defects related to their primary disease and as a result of therapy. The mechanisms underlying the immunodeficiency in CLL may also reduce response to vaccines,” Herishanu told Healio. “We found that the antibody response to BNT162b2 mRNA COVID-19 vaccine in patients with CLL is markedly impaired and affected by disease activity and treatment.”
In a research letter, Evangelos Terpos, MD, PhD, professor of hematology in the department of clinical therapeutics at National and Kapodistrian University of Athens in Greece, and colleagues reported that older patients with multiple myeloma also appeared to have less robust responses to the BNT162b2 mRNA COVID-19 vaccine.
“Our knowledge from vaccines against other viruses have suggested that the response of [patients with myeloma] is lower compared with healthy individuals,” Terpos told Healio. “The key message of our study is that the first dose of the BNT162b2 mRNA COVID-19 vaccine produces low levels of neutralizing antibody response among elderly patients with multiple myeloma compared with controls of similar age.
“Responders to the first vaccine dose seem to be patients who are away of treatment with normal noninvolved immunoglobulins,” Terpos added. “More data are needed to know the results of the second dose as well as the results among younger patients with multiple myeloma. However, it is totally necessary for these patients to receive the second dose of the vaccine.”
General Powell didn’t suffer from the flu. The flu ended his suffering. What he left in his death was another answer to a group of people whose afflictions are similar to those that burdened his body. Every report of a study I’ve read on the NCBI website Dr. Fauci oversees counts morbidities as factors in fighting the seasonal flu or covid. Coronavirus according to the University of Texas’ Medical Book of Microbiology is “the seasonal common cold.”
Every cancer is bad. Multiple myeloma or this leukemia’s effect on the bone marrow that stores the body’s immune responses like a library to fight off disease when it’s needed is similar to the librarian saying a book is checked out. It was a killer before. Now it’s treatable but with side effects that grow worse the longer the person lives. There’s also the variable about the “stage” of the cancer.
The General’s bone marrow arsenal had been depleted. God called him home. The flu was the vehicle.
The question left for everyone else is, “how many co-morbidities is your body fighting for your age?” The longer you overwork your immune system it appears the more you leave yourself defenseless against new viral invaders. I’ll end on the conclusions of the April 2021 Israeli report.
“The introduction of new therapeutic agents, such as immunomodulatory drugs (IMIDs), proteasome inhibitors (PI), and monoclonal antibodies in the treatment of multiple myeloma (MM), lead to increased survival rates. 5 However, several of these novel treatments are associated with an increased risk of infectious complications. 6 We recently reported that MM patients receiving daratumumab were at increased risk for bacterial and viral infections. 7 Pathogenesis of MM results in the suppression of the adaptive immune system and leads to low levels of immunoglobulin production. Reduction of immunoglobulin levels is seen in more than 70% of patients with MM. 8 Such immunoparesis (hypogammaglobulinemia) is correlated with shorter overall survival (OS) and progression‐free survival (PFS). 9″
