My MexiCOVID Adventure (Or Vaya Con Drogas)

As it turns out, Mexico is the Perfect Destination for a COVID Medical "Vacation"-- Here's Why:

Ajijic on Lake Chapala has so many wonderful things going for it, but all that will have to wait until another time. This article is just about COVID catching up with me on vacation two years into the pandemic and how I was able to apply “radical” knowledge to fight and win against the dread virus.

I didn’t actually plan on getting COVID when I booked a trip to Mexico this March, but, in hindsight, that would have been even smarter than the accidental infection I experienced. I know it sounds crazy, but you need to understand that as a sixty-something with a “few extra pounds” on my frame, I have been dreading the possibility of getting COVID for two years and severely limiting my lifestyle (like many others) to try to forestall what seems now to have been inevitable. In addition to being high-risk by age and weight, I’d also chosen to avoid getting vaccinated for COVID because of a previous vaccine injury by a flu vaccine that gave me a relatively mild case of Guillan-Barre Syndrome and a persistent neuropathy in my lower legs and feet. It was a difficult decision. The fear of getting COVID without the vaccine weighed heavily against my fear of repeating or worsening the neurological injuries I’d sustained years previous. But I chose to remain unvaccinated and hoped for the best.

Since reading Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s “The Real Anythony Fauci” last year, I’d become increasingly convinced that what “radical” doctors have been calling “early treatment” for COVID is much more reliable and science-based than mainstream media and the medical establishment would have us believe. With each passing week, my fear of traveling seemed to melt away and my confidence that I would be able to recover from COVID, if I became infected, grew and grew. So, when mi novia invited me to join her near Lake Chapala, I was ready to say “Si, Claro!”

It’s not that I have zero access to early treatment options (like Ivermectin) in the United States, it’s just that my Medicare-approved general practitioner refused to prescribe Ivermectin (IVM) for me and I had to rely, instead, on the much maligned apple-flavored “horse dewormer” products that the bleating edge of American medicine has mindlessly ridiculed for many months. So, when I arrived in Mexico, I quickly found my way to a Farmacia and bought a small box of two Ivermectin pills for about $8 USD ($160 MX). The “early treatment” doctors recommend one dose every 30 days for prophylactic (preventative) purposes, so unless or until you’re actually infected and need to up the dosage to once or twice a week, the cost is minimal. It felt good to take my first dose of human-grade Ivermectin in recognition that my two-layover air trip may have exposed me to the dreaded virus and it made sense to re-up my preventative dose a week earlier than my regular schedule would have required.

The first couple of weeks in Mexico went wonderfully except my companion had a bad tooth-ache. She was able to get a full-panoramic dental x-ray for $20 USD ($400 MX) which included e-mailing the images to a surgeon plus a copy of the film to take to any other dentist or surgeon for a second opinion. This might not sound like a great boon to my international readers, but, believe me, in the U.S., trying to get permanent records in your personal possession is no simple thing, for reasons that have never made sense to me. While we were at it, I got my teeth cleaned for $15 USD ($300 MX). While it’s true that dental services have nothing to do with COVID treatment, the quality, easy access and affordability of medical care of all kinds in Mexico cannot be overstated. As it turned out, the toothache was a temporary infection so surgery wasn’t necessary and we were able to return to walking around in open-air markets, the town plaza and outdoor-seating restaurants day after day. After spending two winters en El Norte, avoiding sharing indoor air with strangers without masks, this open-air everything was a profound liberation worthy of the revolutionary heroes depicted in the town murals.

Maybe I got infected on one of the crowded city buses I rode on. Maybe it was the local Walmart. Maybe a passing stranger on the street exhaled the virus into my air-space. I don’t know, but at the beginning of the third week, I got a very sore throat and a low-grade fever that ranged from 99.1 to 99.9F. For $10 US ($200 MX), I was able to get a quick COVID test, but the result was negative, so I just kept up my usual regimen of Vitamins C&D and Oregano Oil.

In addition to travelling with a digital thermometer, I also had a personal pulse-oximeter so I could monitor my oxygen saturation and general cardio stress. After a couple of days without improvement, I broke out one my U.S.-government supplied test kits and got a dose of bad news:

A very solid line under the letter “T” indicated a definite positive result for COVID. I had delayed my return trip by one week simply because I wanted to fly healthy, but now I was facing the prospect of COVID exile— As I write this, in March 2022, Americans are unable to return home to the U.S. until they are able to get a negative result on a COVID test. What if my case turned into a long-haul COVID case? What if I couldn’t get a negative COVID result for weeks? Or months? Feeling highly motivated, I went to the Front-Line COVID Care Consortium (Home - FLCCC | Front Line COVID-19 Critical Care Alliance (covid19criticalcare.com)) website and checked to see what their latest and greatest protocol was for beating the virus, which turned out to be a protocol recommended by Drs. George Fareed and Brian Tyson (Dr. George Fareed and Dr. Brian Tyson share early treatment protocol | News | thedesertreview.com) from December 2020 (and updated April 2021). It does give one pause to realize this protocol has been around for well over a year and that, if multiple study results showing hospitalization and mortality reductions for early treatment protocols averaging about 75% were accurate, many hundreds of thousands of people worldwide had died unnecessarily for want of access to this information that was being heavily suppressed, maligned and censored by internet gate-keepers masquerading as “fact-checkers”. Even as I write this column, Dr. Tyson’s account on Twitter is still suspended (@btysonmd).

But I was among the lucky ones. I’d been able to access the information about early treatment as well as lengthy interviews that convinced me of the veracity of these “radical” doctors’ claims about the safety and efficacy of these cheap, generic drugs in the battle against COVID.

Vaya Con Drogos — Go with the drugs. In Mexico, I was able to buy COVID early treatment medicines over the counter at prices Americans find difficult to believe.

And I was able to apply that knowledge when the time came that I needed it. Fortunately, I didn’t get infected in the USA where I would have required prescriptions (and many days’ lead time to get appointments in the sub-standard health insurance network I try to survive within). I was in Mexico and both Ivermectin (IVM) and Hydroxychloroquine (HCQ) were freely available over the counter about two blocks down the street at prices that make Americans want to return to the United States ready to mount a full-scale revolution Zapatista-style.

Emiliano Zapata says, “We don’t need no stinking prescription; We don’t need no stinking co-pay!” Viva la revolución! .

Within two days of beginning the protocol, my fever was gone and my temperature has remained normal since then. By the fourth day my sore throat was cleared and my energy was beginning to return. On the fifth day, I tested negative for COVID and was therefore able to fly home the sixth day. The seventh day I ran errands all day long and went to bed early. Today is the eighth day as I write this article. I’m no longer taking the protocol medications as my symptoms (except for minor congestion) have all cleared and I’m able to get back to normal (although I’m already starting to wish for another vacation in Mexico, perhaps with a little less medical drama this next time).

If I do go, now that I’ve had COVID and recovered, my natural immunity, according to recent studies, will afford me approximately ten times the resistance to COVID (and variants) as either of the big three COVID vaccines (https://www.medscape.com/viewarticle/968553)

I am obviously not a medical doctor and I definitely don’t recommend going to Mexico with the intent of getting COVID, nor would I recommend that you, dear reader, make the same choices or use the same treatments that I did. I urge you to consult your doctor (or maybe a doctor who’s more “radical” than your current doctor), do some of your own research and make up your own mind what makes sense for you and your family. This article is just a truthful log of my personal history and experiences. Your mileage will almost certainly vary.

The COVID pandemic is complicated on many levels— medically, politically, scientifically, sociologically— there is almost no aspect of our society that doesn’t interact with it in unexpected and often conflicting ways. We, as a society have a great deal we can learn about pandemics and about ourselves from the unfolding events sending their ripples out through our collective experience. Be curious. Be diligent. Be devoted to the well-being of everyone. Be careful. And, always stay as healthy as you possibly can! Good luck!

— mb