# Covid-19 and Coronavirus

Category: Conditions

Also known as: covid-19, coronavirus, SARS-CoV-2, spike protein, long covid

SARS-CoV-2 is a real coronavirus whose defining pathological feature, according to Ray Peat, is a spike protein that binds to and inactivates the protective ACE-2 enzyme. This enzyme normally degrades angiotensin II, a promoter of high blood pressure, inflammation, and tissue…

9 passages · 1 author · 2020–2022 · Most-cited: [Ray Peat](https://bioenergeticoracle.com/md/voices/ray-peat/index.md)

Canonical page: https://bioenergeticoracle.com/concepts/covid-19-and-coronavirus

## Synthesis

**SARS-CoV-2** is a real coronavirus whose defining pathological feature, according to Ray Peat, is a **spike protein** that binds to and inactivates the protective *ACE-2 enzyme*. [Source 2, 4] This enzyme normally degrades angiotensin II, a promoter of high blood pressure, inflammation, and tissue degeneration; by knocking out ACE-2, the spike protein unleashes a profoundly pro-inflammatory state. [Source 2] Peat argued that promoting the ACE-2 enzyme, rather than blocking it as initially advocated in medical journals, constitutes a *radically important defense* against infection and its symptoms. [Source 2, 3]

Peat was initially skeptical that the virus represented a uniquely virulent or infectious threat, citing German virologist Wolfgang Wodarg's observation that 5% to 15% of previous infectious lung disease was caused by coronaviruses and that evidence for increased harm was lacking. [Source 1] He later acknowledged the virus's reality and its engineered transmissibility, pointing to the published work of Ralph Baric at the University of North Carolina, which described the insertion and modification of the spike protein to enhance airborne spread between animals. [Source 4] Peat maintained that the virus's lethality was heavily dependent on pre-existing conditions rooted in **failed energy metabolism** and chronic inflammation, which prevent cells from returning to a stable resting state and amplify inflammatory signaling. [Source 7] He noted that the most toxic particles in smoke exposure overlap in size with the coronavirus, and that standard masks offer negligible protection against sub-micron particles. [Source 5]

Regarding the mRNA vaccines, Peat contended that they induce human cells to produce the same toxic spike protein, effectively turning the body into a factory for a substance that knocks out the basic defensive anti-inflammatory system. [Source 3] He warned that human cells possess **reverse transcriptase** activity, citing in-vitro research from Harvard and MIT suggesting that vaccine RNA can be integrated into the cell's genome, potentially causing permanent, heritable production of the inflammatory protein. [Source 3, 6] This integration, he argued, could lead to long-term consequences including immune system damage, increased blood clotting susceptibility from spike protein on blood vessel linings, and possible interference with fertility due to structural similarities between a vaccine enzyme and a placental protein. [Source 6, 8]

Peat situated the pathology of COVID-19 within his broader framework of inflammation and hormonal protection. He explained that inflammation triggers excessive uptake and retention of **iron**, regulated by the germicidal peptide *hepcidin*, which further drives degenerative processes. [Source 9] He identified **progesterone** as a fundamentally protective substance, highly concentrated in the brain, that counteracts the cellular excitation and inflammatory cascades central to severe outcomes. [Source 8] The emotional dysregulation seen in sick and elderly patients, he noted, reflects an underlying instability of the energetic and hormonal systems that normally allow rapid recovery from stress. [Source 7]

## People also ask

### How does the spike protein cause damage according to Peat?

Peat argued the spike protein binds to and inactivates the protective ACE-2 enzyme, which normally degrades the inflammatory angiotensin II, thereby unleashing a profoundly pro-inflammatory state.

### Why did Peat believe the mRNA vaccines could be harmful?

Peat contended the vaccines induce human cells to produce the same toxic spike protein that knocks out the body's anti-inflammatory defense, and warned that reverse transcriptase activity might integrate the RNA into the genome for permanent, heritable production.

### What role did Peat think progesterone plays in COVID-19?

Peat identified progesterone as a fundamentally protective substance concentrated in the brain that counteracts the cellular excitation and inflammatory cascades central to severe outcomes.

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## Cited passages

Passage numbers match the `[Source N]` markers in the synthesis above.

### Source 1 — Politics & Science: Coronavirus, immunity, and vaccines (Part 2)

Ray Peat · Interview · Mar 24, 2020

> **John Barkhausen:** Hey and welcome to Politics and Science. I'm your host, John Barkhausen. This week we return to part two of our conversation with Ray Peat. This was recorded on March 24, 2020, and we are discussing the Coronavirus COVID-19, which has caused a lockdown in the United States in many areas due to its expected high contagion rate and potentially serious mortality rate. Ray Peat has a PhD in biology from the University of Oregon, specializing in physiology and hormones. His newsletter is available at RayPeat.com. Ray, thanks for coming back on Politics and Science today. We're in the midst of this coronavirus pandemic declared by the World Health Organization and the CDC. Everyone is having a hard time and is very scared. I just listened to a podcast with a New York Times reporter talking to an epidemiologist saying that it's going to be very bad and we're not taking enough across-the-board measures. They argued that state responses are too piecemeal and there needs to be strong federal action to make sure everybody stays home. I wonder what your take is on that.
>
> **Ray Peat:** I am still not convinced that anything special is happening. Did we talk about the German virologist Wolfgang Wodarg?

### Source 2 — Link to audio interview: Ray Peat Interview - April 2021 - One Radio Network

Ray Peat · Interview · Apr 19, 2021

> **Ray Peat:** (6:15): Uh yeah, the workers at North Carolina in the Virus department (\*)published several papers, a long series, about 10 years ago, about how you can remove the nucleic acid section that describes specifically the protein that allows the virus to attach to human cell surfaces, so that if you inject that into an animal virus you can make it stick to certain receptor on human cells. The current Corona viruses contain this adhesive protein, which in the process of making the virus stick to the surface of our cells, inactivates the protein that it sticks too and that protein, the ACE-2 enzyme, angiotensin converting enzyme number 2, happens to be the degrading proteolytic enzyme that breaks down angiotensin to which is the promoter of high blood pressure, inflammation, degeneration, and all kinds of bad things in our body. And so ACE, the Angiotenin converting enzyme, they found that if you block that, or if you block the actions of the angiotensin 2, the short peptide, that you can relieve high blood pressure and at the same time it happens to relieve nerve degeneration. (8:27)They’re trying it in Alzheimer disease. Kidney disease, muscle wasting, age related muscle deterioration, muscle shrinking. Everything that aging and stress has been known to do, hypertension and cancer, all of those things. Are promoted by angiotensin so if you block them then you get these very surprising therapeutic results. And very early people found that these blood pressure drugs were therapeutic for the coronavirus infected people. But the medical establishment said “Well, that protein, ACE-2 enzyme is where the virus sticks, if you increase that enzyme, you’re going to make yourself more susceptible to the attachment of the virus. But it happens that if you don’t have an abundance of that enzyme, you’ll have have an over supply of the pro-inflammatory and degenerative angiotensin peptide.

### Source 3 — Link to audio interview: Ray Peat Interview - April 2021 - One Radio Network

Ray Peat · Interview · Apr 19, 2021

> **Patrick Timpone:** (10:29): So then what are we conjecturing then that the folks who are concerned, that get this jab, what it’s doing to them?
>
> **Ray Peat:** (10:39): That it’s causing our own bodies to start producing this horrible spike protein that knocks out our basic defensive anti-inflammatory system. That’s the sort of thing that people like Michael Yeaton are talking about. It’s leading one of the most horrible possible proteins to be produced by us adopting the RNA from the virus, so that we become virus-like, and produce our own toxic, pro-inflammatory protein.
>
> **Patrick Timpone:** (11:24): So that’s the reason why there’s so many arguments with the Tenpennies around and (intelligible), he’s gonna be in tomorrow, that there could be some really detrimental long term effects of this thing?
>
> **Ray Peat:** (11:35): Yeah, just out of thin air people like Fauci say “O, that isn’t how the cell works. The cell can’t integrate that into our genes, can’t reproduce that” (\*). Just no evidence he’s right. For over 50 years we’ve known that our bodies have reverse transcriptase that can integrate it into our genome permanently. A group at Harvard and MIT published in-vitro research showing that in fact human cells can and do incorporate the vaccine RNA section into the genes of the cell.

### Source 4 — One Radio Network: Ray Peat with Patrick Timpone — April 18, 2022

Ray Peat · Interview · Apr 18, 2022

> **Ray Peat:** Oh, yeah, the virus is real. coronavirus, but as these segments with special functions of making the spike protein especially transmissible to humans. And Ralph Burke described the way he and his lab developed the transmissibility and the insertion of the spike protein and the modification of the spike protein. That's all public information, patent descriptions, and so on.
>
> **Patrick Timpone:** And who's this Ralph Baric? What's his...
>
> **Ray Peat:** A professor, a researcher at University of North Carolina, tremendously supported by the government, Fauci in particular.
>
> **Patrick Timpone:** Are you aware that if coaches, postulates, or any autopsies were done on these COVID patients to prove Barak's assertion that there was something released in the air that people got?
>
> **Ray Peat:** Oh, in developing them, at first they were transmitted from animal to animal by contact. But then the... let them develop in ways that until they could put animals in different cages and blow the air from one into the other and spread the virus so it was definitely established in the lab to be transmissible through the air and autopsies have been done on the natural or whatever the current COVID germ consists of, and you can stain the tissues and show the presence of the virus getting into the lining of blood vessels, traveling to the intestine, the lungs, and even into the blood vessels of the brain.

### Source 5 — COVID-19 Lab Origin and Viral Engineering - Ask Your Herb Doctor - September 2020

Ray Peat · Interview · Sep 17, 2020

> ## Masks and Respiratory Protection
>
> **Andrew Murray:** Between Luc Montagnier, Nobel Prize winner, saying this virus is engineered, and Ralph Baric's lab in North Carolina saying the spike protein had definitely been altered, the latest to come to the fore is Dr. Li Meng Yen, a virologist in Hong Kong who has blown the whistle online. Her name is Li Meng Yen—you can type her name into YouTube. There was a Fox News interview with Tucker Carlson and a Loose Women post where British public figures and newscasters were interviewing her. She said categorically that it was manufactured and that she was threatened to be silenced or "disappeared." She is about to release verifiable evidence that this virus was indeed engineered. She says the Chinese Communist Party is completely behind silencing this. Okay, there's another issue that just came out. Dr. Lee Merrick has an interview, actually a video, talking about the futility of wearing masks. Last month we did a show on this question—the micron size of coronavirus is far smaller than an N95 mask can filter out. So you're going to get not only respired particles through the mask, but N95 masks are not proper bacteriological respirators. They leak air from the nose and around the folds. And they are not at all patent or competent.
>
> **Ray Peat:** A simple cloth mask is even worse because the cores are gigantic in comparison to the size of the virus, which is one-eighth of a micron in diameter. Recently, smoke exposure has been causing increased sickness and probably death from heart disease, respiratory problems, asthma, and kidney disease, overlapping greatly with things blamed on viruses. The smoke particles that are most toxic are just the size of the coronavirus and smaller, all the way down to about a tenth the diameter of even the coronavirus. So for big particles of soot or dust, an N95 mask is very helpful. But for even average-sized bacteria and especially the sub-micron size of the coronavirus and smoke particles, they do very little to protect you.

### Source 6 — One Radio Network: Ray Peat with Patrick Timpone — December 21, 2020

Ray Peat · Interview · Dec 21, 2020

> **Patrick Timpone:** Is there a potential then for long-term effects, two, three, five, ten years from now, that we'd have no idea of knowing?
>
> **Ray Peat:** Yeah, not only the damage done to the immune system, which has its repercussions depending on how basic the entry was, but being RNA and even our own DNA replicating enzymes, what we need for every cell to reproduce and to produce offspring. The DNA replicase enzyme happens to have the ability to function as a reverse transcriptase able to transcribe RNA into DNA, making basically genes out of this bit of viral RNA which can go into the genes and the person can then become a factory for making the spike protein this uniquely inflammation promoting a bit of information producing the viral protein multiplying it endlessly by possibly all of our cells. So we would not only produce increasing amounts as our body went through its normal restoration and growth processes, but being spreadable by our secretions and passed on to our offspring if people should live that long.
>
> **Patrick Timpone:** And so there could be then some validity to the idea that some are concerned about the potential issue of making women less fertile with this thing if they figured it out right.

### Source 7 — One Radio Network: COVID Testing, Exosomes, EMFs, Gray Hair, Vaccines, and Aging (June 15, 2020)

Ray Peat · Interview · Jun 15, 2020

> **Patrick Timpone:** so you you just go for things that are just interesting to you not necessarily always in the health realm?
>
> **Ray Peat:** no no I try to keep up a little bit on the news.
>
> **Patrick Timpone:** yeah yeah so you sent me your last newsletter thanks for that and you you were, you're saying that your the argument of this, and I'm just gonna read the first line, and I read it with Dr. Massey. A failure of energy metabolism limits the ability of cells to return from an excited active state to a stable resting state an unresolved excitation causes cells to emit signals indicating the need for repair inflammatory signals. Pre-existing inflammation is associated with high altitude sickness and the ability to get sick from the corona virus as well a chronic diseases, this implies that treatment for a so-called corona virus infection should be to reduce cellular excitation and inflammation and normalize energy production. It also implies that these treatments will have favorable effects on cell aging. So Dr. Massey was talking earlier, and I wonder if this ties in. so is it possible that the lungs and the cells were doing something in response to the body's fear or angst or anything or hmm.

### Source 8 — One Radio Network: Ray Peat with Patrick Timpone — June 21, 2021

Ray Peat · Interview · Jun 21, 2021

> **Patrick Timpone:** yes sir so these unfortunate uninformed souls who have taken this thing they could experience all kinds of whatever stuff a year from now two years from now three years from now that nobody's ever going to connect the dots to the spike
>
> **Ray Peat:** yeah already i've run into people who had a heart attack or a stroke just a month after getting the second injection.
>
> **Patrick Timpone:** Really?
>
> **Ray Peat:** I had no suspicion at all that there might have been a connection.
>
> **Patrick Timpone:** Even after a month after the injection, they weren't connecting the dots to that?
>
> **Ray Peat:** Yeah, the passage of time. They don't realize that the stuff has accumulated in their tissues and is slightly increasing. the tendency to form blood clots as long as there is any uh like any spike protein on the lining of your blood vessels for example you're the spike protein more susceptible to form blood clots when you're tired for example or having hypoglycemia Wow.
>
> **Patrick Timpone:** Dr. Ray Peat, stay there, sir. Dr. ray peters with his PhD doctor is all kind of yammies is that mostly progesterone why that would be in a male male kind of libido formula yeah um

### Source 9 — Ask the Herb Doctor August 2021

Ray Peat · Interview · Aug 20, 2021

> **Andrew Murray:** You're listening to *Ask Your Herb Doctor* on KMUD Garberville. From 7:30 to 8:00 o'clock, you're invited to call in with questions related to this month's topic of iron and its dangers. Ray Peat is joining us again. Good evening, Dr. Peat.
>
> **Ray Peat:** Good evening.
>
> **Andrew Murray:** When the subject of iron was suggested as a topic, I started looking at articles from PubMed and the National Institutes of Health. I wanted to preface the show with something I've written to let people know clearly where the show content is going and where the evidence is coming from. We know you've written several newsletters and articles related to the dangers of iron. It seems pertinent to the science surrounding the inflammatory nature of COVID, especially surrounding the fatalities in people receiving the experimental drug due to thromboembolic processes. This is added to the acute and chronic inflammatory processes stimulated by receiving this drug, which is related to the "smoking gun" of potential autoimmune disease in populations receiving it. Tonight, we'll be discussing the link between iron, estrogen, and the suppression of peptides like cathelicidin and hepcidin. We will discuss the experimental drug for COVID-19 and the rising numbers of deaths reported to VAERS. With this in mind, and our thoughts firmly established in science, we're pleased to welcome Dr. Peat to discuss the physiology of inflammation and its relationship to COVID-19. Dr. Peat, regarding the serious outcomes of COVID—people on ventilators or those who have died—could you discuss the physiology of this process? Let's put some science to the mechanism of inflammation and look for a strategic solution.

_Generated 2026-07-20 from the Bioenergetic Oracle corpus._