[nudephil (OP)]

We got the following from listener Gillian:

At the end of March I was at home isolating as I believed I had COVID-19. As I am over 70, I was anxious, and the illness seemed to be recurring for weeks. I read as much as possible and learned that COVID makes the blood sticky, so I made up a mixture of soy, lecithin, and vinegar, hoping it would thin my blood as I could not get to the doctor. As I already have familial high cholesterol I believe this concoction was helpful to me - if unpleasant to taste.

I also made a mixture of fractionated coconut and vinegar hoping it would work by dissolving the virus like soap. The taste is unpleasant but I rolled it round my mouth and swallowed slowly and feel it has helped me recover. However I have no way of testing whether the 'formula'  really dissolves the virus on contact.

Do you know of a lab where this formula could be tested? This is such a simple idea, one might have to put it all in Latin before anyone from Big Pharma would be interested.

Also I wondered if the cholesterol lowering drug tried in Israel is being used in the UK?

The drug I believe is fenofibrate - I found this ongoing trial in the US https://clinicaltrials.gov/ct2/show/NCT04517396

[evan_au]

I also made a mixture of fractionated coconut and vinegar hoping it would work by dissolving the virus like soap....I rolled it round my mouth...

The funny thing is that normal soap is very effective at dissolving this virus - the virus has a fatty coat, and soap is very good at dissolving fatty things. But its best to wash your hands with it rather than swallowing it.

Most people are thought to catch this coronavirus virus by breathing it in. I do not recommend using this (or any other concoction) and swirling it around your lungs. A mask is much more effective (and interferes less with your breathing).

[Bored chemist]

Most people who get the virus recover.
Even among the elderly most recover with no particular "treatment" beyond going to bed and resting- maybe taking aspirin.

So there is no reason to suppose that this mixture did anything (apart from maybe damaging teeth).
And, unless you also had a test- which you didn't mention, there's no strong reason to suppose that the infection you had was Covid 19. It's much more likely that you had the misfortune to get a couple of colds, one after another.

It's true that soaps damage the virus.
But coconut oil is not a soap, it's a fat and if fats damaged the virus we would all be immune- our bodies have lots of fats.

Vinegar is probably just about acidic enough to deactivate the virus but it's also acidic enough to kill most human cells.
You certainly could not introduce any meaningful concentration of vinegar into the lungs.
If there was enough to harm the virus, it would kill the patient.

[alancalverd]

But coconut oil and drain cleaner will make a cationic detergent that could save the life of an entire nation if ingested by a corrupt president.

[Bored chemist]

But coconut oil and drain cleaner will make a cationic detergent that could save the life of an entire nation if ingested by a corrupt president.

Anionic, and probably not sufficiently toxic to readily achieve the desired outcome.
Though a few grams travelling at mach 2...

[alancalverd]

Really? We made anionic laundry detergent and shampoo by sulfonating alkanes. Drain cleaner is mostly sodium hydroxide - much better at dissolving grease and hair, as we discussed in some other thread, to make (cationic) soft soap. 

[Bored chemist]

Soap is anionic.
It wasn't clear which sort of drain cleaner you meant; sulphuric acid also gets used for that but is now restricted because the Tories felt they needed to be seen to do something. (So they chose to use drain cleaners that are just as likely to disfigure, and more likely to blind people).

You would need fairly lively conditions to sulphonate coconut oil, but I'm sure it could be done.
But both the sulphonic acid derivatives and the soaps are anionic detergents so it didn't really matter which sort of drain cleaner you chose.

The quats are cationic.