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The Microbiome: Your Body’s Frontline Defense Against COVID?

While many doctors have pointed to the T-cells and antibodies as the main defense against COVID-19, local 25-year researcher and clinical trials expert Dr. Sabine Hazan says the microbiome may be the answer to why people who received COVID shots and those who didn’t contract COVID, and why certain demographics are especially vulnerable to the disease.

“Your bacteria in your gut determines your immunity,” Hazan, founder of Progenabiome in Ventura County, says. “I believe it’s not your T cells, not your B cells but your bacteria in your gut. … My interest is, why are some people surviving COVID and are not vaccinated, and what’s in their microbiome that’s making them survive?” 

The Morocco-born mother of two practiced gastroenterology in upstate New York before coming to California, where she founded Ventura Clinical Trials and, more recently, Progenabiome, a front-line lab for genetic sequencing research. She has participated in more than 300 clinical trials and says reflorization — a microbiome transplant via fecal transplant — may work well as a treatment in various maladies. For example, an Alzheimer’s patient remembered his daughter’s name after treatment, and one doctor reported that her two patients with alopecia areata re-grew hair.

Dr. Hazan is now using her insight into Parkinson’s disease and to identify COVID as a microbiome battle. She and her team discovered the presence of COVID in fecal matter and found that COVID could have penetrated due to an imbalance in the gut, or the virus itself altered the microbiome. She also discovered SARS-CoV-2 in some patients that never developed the illness.

Her biggest question this pandemic was, “Why in a family is one person catching COVID and another person not?” She sought to answer by analyzing both members. “What is protecting them short of a vaccine? Their microbiome is probably protecting them, and we’re demonstrating that.” 

Hazan also seeks to understand what specifically in the microbiome protects against the virus and how ivermectin, hydroxychloroquine and the COVID shot each affect the gut.

“We need to pay attention to the microbiome because the bacteria we identified as protective potentially is a bacteria that is lost as we age, that is lost in cancer patients, that is lost in neurological problems,” she says. “That loss of bacteria could be the culprit of why people catch COVID and why these high-risk groups are high-risk.”


Data on her COVID treatment findings is forthcoming, she says. Placebo-control trials, in her view, are flawed because they do not take into account the microbiome. 

“Are [they] really analyzing two apples, or an apple and an orange?” she says. “Because if you don’t have the baseline microbiome of the patient, your protocol is flawed, especially when you’re testing a virus and a therapy for a virus. Is it the microbiome that allowed the patient to survive COVID even though he got placebo? Or is it the placebo?”

For patients too sick or unwilling to be part of the clinical trial, Hazan gave the ivermectin combination therapy and watched oxygen levels as low as 75 percent return to normal with total success. “It wasn’t a one pill or one formula; it’s truly practicing the art of medicine, understanding the virus and how to build the bacteria in the gut that I believe protects people from getting really sick from COVID.”


“That’s been very empowering, knowing that you can beat a virus that everybody’s dying from and that by innovating different treatments, you can reach a cure in those patients,” she says. “Ivermectin has definite benefits. … The reason the world is waking up is because they’ve experienced — whether vaccinated or non-vaccinated — they’ve experienced not breathing and then being given ivermectin and then all of a sudden breathing in. This is the experience that I have with everybody.”

Hazan believes in a personalized approach to medicine that values the diverse needs of each patient — a practice she says was neglected by doctors during COVID-19.

“We’ve stopped the art of medicine because we assume that everybody is the same,” she says. “We’re not the same. So obviously, if we’re not the same, how can we possibly require the same formula for all? 

Added to the shot’s potential for harm, the one-size-fits-all inoculation strategy and the hasty studies that put the COVID shot on the market do not sufficiently address the shot’s effects on the whole body or its unique effect on different individuals, she believes. The shots may be effective for the high risk, but they could be a problem for the healthy population.

“The big mistake that’s being done right now is that everybody is at the same category on vaccines that were basically [at] fast-speed,” she says. “The research was done too fast on these vaccines. Think about it. What are vaccines doing on the microbiome? … What are the vaccines doing on the BRCA gene or the p53 gene? Did anybody look at it? It’s never a good idea to put everybody in the same platform. That’s why the world survives because of individuality — different races, different people. The beauty of humanity is in the diversity of humanity. Once you start incorporating the same formula for everybody, you’re globalizing, and we’ve seen what happens when we globalize foods around the world — we get globe-esity.”

If ivermectin has proven to be a safe, potential cure from COVID, and hydroxychloroquine has the same potential, why haven’t these remedies gained traction with the public? Nefarious politics and media, Hazan says.

“What’s happening right now is the political agenda,” she says, “because never in the history of pandemics have the governments been so involved in research. It was always the doctors and the scientists figuring it out. Never have I ever seen politicians talk about research. And if they want to talk about research, then I invite them to come in my lab and do the research because if they want to be the experts in science, they should at least have the knowledge of how to do research and how to ask the questions.”

While COVID brought political troubles, Hazan looks at the possibilities the curable virus opened to the world of researching COVID and other health problems.

“The silver lining for me is figuring out that some people are stronger in their microbiome than others and survived COVID,” she says.

The other silver lining is this virus is answering many questions medicine and science previously didn’t see. Are coagulation issues a viral etiology more than cholesterol or both? Is MS, PK, or Alzheimer’s a microbiome dysbiosis with possibly a viral trigger? Asking questions is science.

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