As part of our mission to engage the wider public audience, Lifespan.io President Keith Comito has recently appeared on the Damage Report, a politics and current events show hosted by John Iadarola, political host for the online news network The Young Turks.
Regardless of anyone’s political leanings, it is important that we engage with the general public and remind everyone that aging, and its accompanying diseases, is a problem that everyone has in common, regardless of if they consider it to be one.
Aging is the ultimate nonpartisan issue. We all have a dream of when the vaccine is coming out, but vaccines don’t work with elderly people’s compromised immune systems. For them to work, we need to improve immune system protection.
Keith was invited to talk about the connection between COVID-19 and aging and how developing technologies that directly address aging in order to reverse age-related diseases could make Medicare for All more cost-effective and dramatically reduce healthcare costs in general.
If we fund immune system regeneration, and it’s successful, not only would it make everyone less likely to get COVID-19 but could cut the death toll down to 30% of what it is right now.
Keith makes a great point: if the immune systems of older people could be boosted or even rejuvenated so that they work as they did in youth, COVID-19 would have a harder time infecting them and putting their lives at risk, and they would also be protected from a myriad of other diseases, both infectious and age-related.
We have already seen some promising human trial results that show that it is possible to achieve this in humans, and there are other approaches in development that seek to rejuvenate the immune system in different ways.
Aging is a primary risk factor for a multitude of diseases, both infectious and age-related; therefore, it makes total sense to shift the focus of medical research towards developing the technologies that directly target the aging processes in order to improve healthy longevity and reduce the strain on healthcare and social security systems. It’s time that we start to take healthcare and how we treat age-related diseases in a new direction.