There is a very interesting hypothesis floating around. It's brand new. Do you like your brand new hypotheses? That's why you come here for the brand new hypotheses. You know what the old ones are. So I will not present this with confidence. So there would be some things that you hear first in my Periscopes that might turn out to be kind of important. But there might be other things you hear that turned out to be nothing later. So with the understanding that it could go either way and I don't have an opinion on it, I'm just going to pass it along because it's so darn interesting.

So there's a growing body of anecdotal information. And I'll see if I can do my best to explain this. That the mechanism for why this virus is killing people, specifically the pneumonia lung part, maybe we're looking at it all wrong. Meaning scientists and doctors. And the argument for that is that the way the lungs look to the doctors who handle these things is exactly like high altitude pulmonary edema. And I don't know the details but it has something to do with damage to your lungs if you're at high altitude for too long.

So apparently doctors who know what that looks like, and there's a whole checklist of okay the lungs look like this, does it, you know just blah blah blah. So there's a pretty long checklist to show that you have this high altitude pulmonary edema. And at least on the internet, if you can believe random things on the internet, COVID-19 meets all of the checklist. So that doesn't mean it is high altitude pulmonary edema. It means it has the same checklist. So that raises a question. You know do we even understand what's going on here?

So the hypothesis goes like this. And this is not mine. I'm just passing along. That the damage from the virus is in the blood before the lungs. So in other words the blood becomes damaged to the point where it can't hold oxygen. And then it doesn't matter what your lungs are doing because your blood can't hold the oxygen efficiently anymore. So then the lungs go into some kind of bad state without the oxygen I guess.

So furthering this hypothesis is the fact that there's anecdotal but not yet clinically proven evidence that hydroxychloroquine, the malaria drug, might work. And I'm told again I'm way out of my depth here so just you should discount everything I say now. You should forget you were even here. Yeah save him. Or you know if anybody asks you what you did recently just say nothing. I took a nap. I was not listening to a crazy hypothesis that doesn't have sufficient credibility yet.

But I will tell you that I'm hearing this from smart, really smart people and from doctors. So this is a full crackpot theory. So that at least two people with MD behind their names have been saying this in public. Hey it looks like this high altitude thing. And it would also explain why the malaria drug works. Because apparently malaria has that same quality if I understand it right. I need a big fact check on this if anybody can help me. That malaria affects the blood not so much the lungs. And it might be exactly why the hydroxychloroquine appears to be working for the COVID-19. Because it might be doing something protective with the blood the same way it protects the blood from the malaria. Is the hypothesis.

Now what are the odds I would put on this? I wish the only reason I would put the odds of this being this alternate explanation being fruitful is that there are an awful lot of experts looking at this thing. So it would be weird to be and unexpected if we had gotten this far and somebody would have an aha moment of this magnitude. Not impossible. Do not rule it out whatsoever. So I've seen nothing that would rule it out. But I'm so unqualified that you know I can't rule it in or out. But I would say it falls into the class of things which in general are unlikely.

And as the, let's call it the Perry Mason moment, for those of you old enough to remember an old TV show Perry Mason. The Perry Mason moment is you know he's in the courtroom. He's a famous lawyer trying the case and he gets somebody who's in the audience to confess to the crime. Yeah that's the Perry Mason moment because it's the most unexpected outcome. Is that there's a defendant on trial and you're such a good lawyer that you get somebody in the audience to confess during the trial. So it's like a Perry Mason thing that we would find out this late in the game and all of those experts would not have sniffed this out by now. Leads me to believe it's in the category of unlikely things.

But I got to tell you that the people talking about it are smart people. So you're gonna have to weigh that. Really smart people talking about it. Really smart people. But it's in that category of things which quite often are not true. So keep an eye on that.