How Two Intrepid Doctors Went to West Africa to Destroy Ebola

Marc J. Seifer, Ph.D., author of more than 100 articles and a dozen books, including the acclaimed Wizard: The Life & Times of Nikola Tesla. Having starred in the 5-part limited series The Tesla Files. In his book Ozone Therapy for the Treatment of Viruses (Inner Traditions/Healing Arts Press, March 2023) Dr. Seifer examines how Ozone Therapy disables viruses, fights inflammation and bacteria, and enhances the immune system. The following article comes from that book and tells of the experience of two doctors who went to West Africa when the Ebola was rapidly spreading in 2014.

EBOLA’S LIPID ENVELOPE

HOW TWO INTREPID DOCTORS WENT TO WEST AFRICA TO DESTROY EBOLA

Marc J. Seifer

Over the past month, [Ebola] has traveled from Guinea’s remote forest regions near the Liberia and Sierra Leone borders and has already killed 83 people, including four in Conakry [capital of Senegal]. Now with 13 cases in [this] densely populated capital of two million people, health officials say the challenge of containing the outbreak has become more acute. Ebola has killed hundreds in rural Central Africa over the past four decades, but it is unusual for it to reach urban centers.

~ New York Times, April 1, 2014

On March 23, 2014, the World Health Organization reported that this West African outbreak was “the largest Ebola virus epidemic in history with over 28,000 reported cases and over 11,000 deaths within the countries of Guinea, Liberia and Sierra Leone.” Fear rippled throughout the world that if Ebola broke out of those three countries, maybe there would be no way of stopping it. At the outset, in the first few months of 2014, Guinea, Liberia and Sierra Leone were facing a similar experience that we are now facing with Covid-19. At that time, Ron Klain, President Barack Obama, Dr. Anthony Fauci and many other officials had no idea of precisely how contagious Ebola was. But one doctor here in America saw a solution.

Essentially, ozone therapy improves oxygen delivery utilization, kills pathogens and modulates the immune system. There simply is not anything like it in medicine anywhere.  —Robert Rowen, MD

A graduate of Johns Hopkins University, with a medical degree from the University of California at San Francisco, Rowen, who at that point had a 28-year career as an Ozone Therapist, knew that ozone therapy would kill this virus. When I asked if his religious upbringing played a role in deciding to go to Africa to deal with the pandemic, Dr. Rowen responded that it was not a matter of “charity,” but a matter of conscience. “It was the right thing to do. I knew I had a viable treatment for the disease, and withholding my talents would be a sin.”

In 2006, he had begun to put all the pieces of an important puzzle together. At that time, he was investigating such viruses as West Nile and also SARS, which were two coronaviruses, which Covid-19 happens to be as well. SARS had erupted in China in 2002 and spread to four other countries the following year. What Dr. Rowen realized was that ozone would disable the coronavirus in two major ways—by disrupting its ability to bond to a host and also by punching holes in its outer lipid cysteine envelope. Dr. Rowen also knew that ozone performs other functions, such as helping to trigger the release of various antibodies. In addition, the injection of oxygen, which was part of the therapy, would aid in helping to boost the function of the immune system.

Thus, when Ebola broke out, although it was not a coronavirus, Dr. Rowen studied its construction and realized that it too had, in his words, “the same Achilles’ heel,” a cysteine envelope (outer skin) that would be vulnerable to attack by ozone therapy. Even though he knew how deadly this virus was, he was undeterred. Following in a tradition that harks back to Dr. Albert Schweitzer, Rowen traveled to West Africa to teach medical personnel their ozone therapy so that they could stop this horrible pandemic from spreading.

During our interview, Dr. Rowen said that he was also concerned that Ebola could possibly “jump continents,” so part of his motivation was to protect the homeland as well.

In planning the trip, Dr. Rowen, who was located in California, decided to call one of his closest associates, Dr. Howard Robins, a podiatrist from New York, who had at that time worked for 25 years as an Ozone Therapist. “I’m going to go to Africa to fight the Ebola outbreak there, Howard,” he said. “Do you want to come along?”

Dr. Robins immediate response was, “Are you out of your #%&*%! mind? No way.” As Dr. Robins was in the process of hanging up, Dr. Rowen said, “Well, I’m going anyway.”

The duo had met several years earlier at an ozone therapy conference in Kuala Lumpur and quickly bonded. Both had traveled to Malaysia on their own dime as invited speakers to a conference on anti-aging. Of a similar age, they both were connected to their Jewish upbringing, which emphasized that one should lead a life “to do good works.” They also were in a field outside the mainstream, and so they felt much like brothers. But Rowen had another reason for calling. He wanted to use the particular ozone technique that Robins had perfected, which was different than the technique that is generally touted in Europe and America.

During the present-day Covid-19 pandemic, ozone therapy case studies and clinical trials are taking place in Ibiza, Spain, in Wuhan, China, in Sierra Leone and throughout Italy. Except for Sierra Leone, the other three countries use a method called MAH, which stands for Major Autohemotherapy. During this procedure a patient’s blood is withdrawn, treated with approximately 97% oxygen and 3% ozone and then reintroduced to the patient. This therapy in the Ibiza, Spain, clinical trial showed significantly shorter stays in the hospital for Covid-19 patients—one week for the treatment group of nine individuals as compared to four weeks for nine in the control group.

Since Ebola was so deadly, Dr. Rowen wanted to use another method which was much less complicated, faster to implement and would reduce greatly the chance of a medical doctor or nurse getting infected from contaminated blood. The technique that Dr. Robins had perfected is called DIV, or Direct Intravenous. In this therapy the two gasses, 97% oxygen and 3% ozone, are injected directly into the bloodstream of the patient. DIV is widely used, but many Ozone Therapists prefer the MAH method. Where MAH takes about 20-25 minutes or even longer and involves much more medical equipment, including canisters to contain the infected blood, the DIV method has no need for these canisters and the entire process can take place in three or four minutes. When dealing with large amounts of infected individuals, it was obvious to Dr. Rowen that his friend’s method was the better way to go.

Dr. Robins had also further perfected this technique, which he calls HR-DIV (Howard Robins DIV) by making use of the smallest needle available, one used on newborn babies. A tourniquet is used to raise a vein, a tiny butterfly needle is inserted, the tourniquet is released and the gasses are slowly introduced into the bloodstream. Dr. Robins began his practice in 1989 and performed over 40,000 treatments of MAH before he decided to switch to the DIV method. Since that time, he has averaged 200 treatments per week, which works out to over 200,000 times by 2014. There have been no embolisms, no serious side effects, and no patient of his has ever died. In Rowen’s case, he had performed “tens of thousands of ozone treatments by this time with complete safety.”

When asked about the inviolability of the DIV method, out of the literally hundreds of thousands of treatments Robins has given and overseen, only a handful of cases have had any type of allergic response, and some patients have experienced discomfort or irritation to a vein, but overall, Dr. Robins states emphatically, his method is safe. Compare that to the hundreds of thousands of Covid patients who have died on ventilators, or the numerous debilitating side effects and even deaths associated with the many drugs that are advertised on television for various illnesses. Either through the MAH method or the DIV method, ozone therapy, which has been around for well over 75 years, has been performed millions of times worldwide, and the number of deaths is merely a handful.

Dr. Robins told me that in less than a minute, he decided to call Rowen back. “I knew, of course, that ozone therapy would kill all kinds of viruses, so I agreed to accompany him to Africa because I didn’t want him to get all the glory.” Stressing that they were “not going to take a dime” for the venture, the two doctors received about ten ozone generators donated by Longevity Research, worth about $20,000 and raised additional funds for other medical equipment.  Covering their own travel expenses, the two doctors were not in this for the money. They wanted to cure the Ebola virus infection and through that publicity seek to educate that country and the world including America that ozone therapy was a safe way to disarm viral outbreaks.

About the Author

Marc J. Seifer, Ph.D., author of more than 100 articles and a dozen books, including the acclaimed Wizard: The Life & Times of Nikola Tesla. Having starred in the 5-part limited series The Tesla Files, he has given lectures at Brandeis University, Oxford and Cambridge Universities in England, West Point Military Academy, and the United Nations. Seifer has been featured in The Washington Post, Scientific American, MIT’s Technology Review, New York Times, The Economist, Nature, and New Scientist and has appeared on Coast-to-Coast AM, the BBC, NPR’s All Things Considered, and the History Channel. https://www.marcseifer.com/