Jama - Prevalence and Characteristics with Post-COVID-19 Condition Among Non-hospitalized Adolescents... - Selvakumar, Wyller et al, 2023

Dare I ask what prominent minimizers?

 

I didn't see that tweet. hm.

 

Monica Gandhi and some pediatrician who is always minimizing COVID. Absoud, or something like that. GBD signatories.

They literally don't notice that their replies are filled with trolls agreeing with them. Internet trolls are never right. Yet they always boost psychosomatic stuff. Seeing trolls agreeing with your position, especially with near universal agreement, is as good as it gets as a sign of being wrong.

Then again, those minimizers have been wrong about most things, so maybe they do notice the replies, they just don't notice that so many of their replies are trolls and bot operations.

 

I saw Gaffney heralding the findings recently. These people are such shameless purveyors of an ideology with a litany of contradictions, instances of groupthink, and disqualifying biases.

 

Long covid symptoms without the covid?

What if a large chunk of the population with symptoms fitting the definition of a post-infective syndrome never had the infection in the first place?

You’d be taking another look at that definition, the Back Page assumes, and that’s the position the World Health Organization may now be in with regards to long covid, or what it calls post-covid-19 condition (PCC).

An international team led out of Norway, with researchers from Australian centres including the Kirby Institute, have published a study in JAMA Network Open that may confirm your doubts about the stretchy and non-specific nature of the WHO definition of PCC:

https://www.medicalrepublic.com.au/long-covid-symptoms-without-the-covid/88760

 

One of the authors has written some clarifications on Twitter:

 

I’m seeing some almost euphoric responses from minimizers. I’m fearful that this could be a death knell for Long Covid as far as urgency and earnestness are concerned. The pool of legitimate scientists interested will dwindle, and the only think that may increase is the amount of donations to places like the Open Medicine Foundation. Some might call it alarmist, but in three years, nothing meaningful has transpired. I wouldn’t be stunned if that remained salient three, six, or ten years from now

 

I think this is sadly correct, although any sense of urgency or motivation was simply never there as the entire pandemic has been thoroughly politicized. As if medicine weren't already overly political. And the issue of chronic illness wasn't already completely politicized. This study means little, the simple passage of time has closed the window entirely. Every botched minimizing study before that one was similarly cherry-picked. I've never seen such a degree of bias, cherry-picking and selective interpretation, it's completely excessive. And the complete lack of reasoning. I'm constantly baffled at the lack of seriousness in the profession on some issues.

So it comes down to two scenarios: medical AIs, most likely as it's coming fast, or the next pandemic, which is guaranteed to go far worse than this one.

Meanwhile we can expect from medicine more recess at kindergarten stuff, more pseudoscience and the same endless loop of failure, with awards and congratulations all-around. This is just great, basically the only category of problem where the expert profession is an even bigger problem than the problem itself, and it happens to be the one that makes solving this ourselves impossible. Fan-tas-tic.

 

Trial By Error: New JAMA Article Seeks to Revive the Zombie Case Definition for CFS from 1994

"The long Covid narrative seems to bounce back and forth with each new study or review documenting contrasting findings—evidence of serious pathophysiological anomalies among sub-sets of patients followed by data that appear to implicate psychological and/or emotional factors in the generation of reported symptoms. A new study in JAMA Network Open falls in the latter camp and has promptly been touted by some as indicating that, when it comes to long Covid, there might be a lot less than meets the eye.

I recently wrote about the effort of the Collaborative on Fatigue Following Infection (COFFI) to revive a discredited 1991 definition for chronic fatigue syndrome (CFS), known as the Oxford criteria, as the basis for promoting their construct of post-infective fatigue syndrome (PIFS) in the context of long Covid. The JAMA Network Open article, whose authors include key members of COFFI, is a related attempt to rehabilitate a similarly obsolete 1994 set of criteria known as the Fukuda definition. In the article, they declare that “studies of PIFS have benefitted from an international case definition that is centered around the symptom of fatigue”–with Fukuda cited as the source."

https://www.virology.ws/2023/04/03/...the-zombie-case-definition-for-cfs-from-1994/

 

Health Nerd (Gideon Meyerowitz-Katz) on Twitter:

"A recent study on Long COVID in children has gone viral for purportedly showing that the condition in kids is not related to a previous COVID-19 infection. I don't agree" 1/n

(thread)

 

Note this reply to the tweet —

Spoiler: Twitter handle contains profanity

https://twitter.com/user/status/1643842166475636736

Prasad's substack —
https://vinayprasadmdmph.substack.com/p/bombshell-new-study-on-long-covid

 

Heh. Another notch on the "it's always worse in context and the more context you add the worst it is".

I am no longer surprised but the scale and intensity of bias and corruption in medicine are seriously extreme. Way too much Truthiness. It shows that there is no representation or accountability to patients.

 

This webpage listing Recovery Norway as the organisation for this project is of interest: https://dam-no.translate.goog/prosj...uto&_x_tr_tl=en&_x_tr_hl=en-US&_x_tr_pto=wapp

Elias Brodwall and Wyller are authors of the JAMA paper, and that Recovery Norway project seem to be the only time Brodawall is mentioned on the Dam website. They are listed as one of the funders of the JAMA paper.

The Dam website lists Magnvor Lunåshaug as the contact person for Recovery Norway, but there's no mention of here in the JAMA paper that I could see.

https://dam-no.translate.goog/organ...uto&_x_tr_tl=en&_x_tr_hl=en-US&_x_tr_pto=wapp

 

Recovery Norway promoting Vinay Prasad's video on this paper, titled 'Long COVID has nothing to do with COVID in kids! Loneliness and poor physical activity'

https://www.facebook.com/RecoveryNo...xsXVWpqNivL1vtGVnF3KMi9hi1xmQzY2fZF7cLst9fGRl

 

Interesting that the Fukuda CFS criteria showed a clearer difference compared to the WHO-definition of Long Covid.
https://twitter.com/user/status/1642683075535556609

 

Trial By Error: What is Recovery Norway’s Role in the JAMA Network Open Study of Long Covid in Young People?

"Undisclosed in the paper was that it was developed in partnership with a group called Recovery Norway, which identifies its members as “people who have experienced recovery from ME/CFS or similar illnesses.” (I learned about this connection on twitter; here’s a particularly blunt riposte to Prasad’s assertions.) Recovery Norway has been closely associated with the Lightning Process—a three-day “mind-body” program founded by Phil Parker, a British osteopath and spiritual teacher who once boasted of how he could “step into other people’s bodies…to assist them in their healing with amazing results.”

Norway’s most prominent Lightning Process practitioner was one of the co-founders of Recovery Norway. Of the 126 individual testimonials of recovery presented on the site, 75 involve the Lightning Process. Overall, 93 of the narratives involve ME/CFS and eight involve “post-covid syndrome.”

The JAMA Network Open paper indicates that the research was funded by the Dam Foundation in Norway, which supports health research in Norway. The page for the project on the Dam Foundation’s site identifies Recovery Norway as the “user organization” for the project. An accompanying Q-and-A with Professor Vergard Wyller of the University of Oslo, the study’s senior author, included further information. According to Professor Wyller:

“The project has been developed in collaboration with Recovery Norway, which organizes people who have experience of long-term symptoms after infections, including both kissing disease [glandular fever or mononucleosis] and COVID-19. Recovery Norway is also an applicant organization for Dam.”

Professor Wyller also said this: “In addition, we regularly receive input from an international user group linked to the COFFI consortium.” "

https://virology.ws/2023/04/07/tria...ork-open-study-of-long-covid-in-young-people/

 

Have the authors clarified why they left out Recovery Norway in the paper? Not sure if it breaks any formal rule, but it is not very transparent if Recovery Norway was involved in the project, to not mention them at all.