Long Covid in the media and social media 2023

(Ireland)
Research shows over 5% of adults actively living with symptoms of long Covid
https://www.breakingnews.ie/ireland...ving-with-symptoms-of-long-covid-1522654.html

 

Moved post

The Mystery of Long COVID Is Just the Beginning

There is a link at the top of this article which allows it to be listened to.

Title : The Mystery of Long COVID Is Just the Beginning
At Yale’s clinic, medical sleuth Lisa Sanders is trying almost everything.

Link : https://nymag.com/intelligencer/article/long-covid-treatment-lisa-sanders.html

...

 

New Study Suggests Underestimated Long COVID Cases

https://www.workerscompensation.com...udy-suggests-underestimated-long-covid-cases/

 

Only loosely Long Covid, although it does mention it. But I never could have imagined the extent of propaganda and mass beliefs could attain such absurd heights like this in, of all places, medicine. This is genuinely fall of civilization stuff.

It does mention COVID, but somehow still decides to blame most of this on the Big lie, and it really is a GIANT lie, that people have been "stuck indoors" for 2.5 years. I knew that the nexus of business and politics could be awful, but I could never have imagined that medicine could be the same. Damn is this all a teaching moment about our species.

The article mentions COVID, but says there is little evidence it could explain that. Even though it asserts that people have low immunity because of 2.5 being locked indoors, which is laughably false.


‘We’ve been constantly sick’: Why we can’t kick the ‘yo-yo flu’
https://www.smh.com.au/national/we-...can-t-kick-the-yo-yo-flu-20230907-p5e2v0.html

Australia is grappling with the “yo-yo flu”, where cold symptoms continually return, as a sharp rise in respiratory infections has been driven by an early flu season, continuing cases of COVID-19 and the circulation of nasty viruses.
...
Working in a pharmacy, Thai is used to being exposed to illness, but this year is different after two-and-a-half years of social distancing and mask-wearing.

“Our immune systems haven’t had a chance to grow and all of a sudden, the world is normal and all the germs are coming out, and our bodies don’t know what to do,” she said.
...
The Royal Australian College of General Practitioners vice president Bruce Willett said there were three factors potentially driving sickness rates: a range of viruses, a lack of natural immunity, and potentially long COVID-19.
...
Willett said Australians would also have limited natural immunity after two years of staying indoors, increasing their susceptibility to infections and secondary infections – though this was likely to be the final year of low immunity levels.

“If people catch COVID, a cold or the flu they can get secondary infections like sinusitis or ear infections while their immune system is weak,” he said.
...
Long COVID may also play a role, but Willett said there was limited data to support this hypothesis. The Burnet Institute estimates that 5 to 10 per cent of people in Australia have persisting symptoms for three months, or twelve weeks, after an initial COVID-19 infection.
...
“The newly emerging term ‘yo-yo flu’ refers to people getting sick consecutively week after week, maybe feeling like they’re getting better and then getting sick again, but it is certainly not a new thing,” he said.
...
Layton said different viruses might cause lingering symptoms such as coughs even when an infection has passed, while a rise in the number of people travelling more frequently might have led to the spreading of viruses.

Infections can be prevented with handwashing, social distancing, keeping a healthy diet, exercise and sleep schedule, and getting the flu vaccine every year.
​

What's truly absurd is the comment from Willett completely contradicts his other suggestion that low immunity from exposure could be to blame, by also blaming... too much exposure. This is seriously insane. We truly are no better at this stuff than people were in the Middle ages, and experts are leading the charge in this failure. Despite knowing far more, it's just a failure of politics and psychology, and not the psychosomatic kind.

 

https://www.npr.org/sections/health-shots/2023/09/09/1198342040/long-covid-causes-treatment-research

Unraveling long COVID: Here's what scientists who study the illness want to find out
September 9, 20237:00 AM ET

 

Fascinating look into the inner world of reactionary politics, the Brownstone institute is a libertarian "think tank" (i.e. opinion-havers paid by rich people) that has been hostile to any pandemic measures, ideologically aligned with the Great Barrington declaration, and how it strongly overlaps with psychosomatic ideology, which frankly can accurately be described as reactionary medicine. With a huge overlap over disability benefits, which seems of equal concern to reactionaries as it is for the big psychosomatic ideologues.

Hard to avoid some politics here, but their preferred belief about Long Covid isn't just close to the standard biopsychosocial model of chronic illness, it's the exact same: the old mythical nocebo and "self-reported" symptoms, aka symptoms (even though the preferred constructs of "chronic fatigue" and anxiety/depression are also self-reported, doesn't bother anyone).

The explanations are a bit different, but the fallacious reasoning is identical and so are the conclusions. Also, not coincidentally, they think HIV/AIDS is a big nothing. That kind of overlap between medical professionals and ideologues is supposed to be non-existent, and yet here we are.



Long Covid Is the New AIDS
https://brownstone.org/articles/long-covid-is-the-new-aids/

From 2020 on, researchers knew COVID was now the most lucrative game in town, which was quickly reflected in published research, with an avalanche of papers that Stanford Professor John Ioannidis called “The Covidization of Research,” noting that 3.7 percent of all science papers published from January 2020 to August 2021 were COVID-related
...
With the pandemic ending and SARS-CoV-2 entering an endemic phase with milder variants, how could officials clamoring for more money, power, and influence keep the gravy train rolling?

The answer to all of their prayers was Long COVID. As I’ve written previously, Long COVID consists of “anything bad that happens after you’ve had COVID.”
...
The broad and nebulous definition of Long COVID is compounded by studies that relied on self-reported symptoms, which could (and most certainly did) introduce bias. More importantly, several studies reported that Long COVID symptoms were more associated with the belief in Long COVID and a history of anxiety disorders than any measurable pathology. Any real long-term conditions post-COVID infection that does exist is thus likely hidden behind a larger, belief-driven, nocebo-effected population.​

I say it often enough that it's my signature, but it can't be said enough: health is political, healthcare is political, and medicine is political. The very beliefs that have ruined millions of lives because of psychosomatic ideology are echoed perfectly in reactionary politics, and from Internet trolls. It is also fueling the biggest wave of antivaccination and conspiracy beliefs against medicine in history.

And ironically, some of this criticism is entirely accurate, just for exact opposite reasons. Here they talk about LC being massively pushed and overfunded, hyped beyond reason, when the reality is that medicine still doesn't give a damn and has no plans to fund anything past what's already spent, and mostly wasted by apathy and denial. For the exact same opinions presented here from a libertarian/reactionary ideological perspective.

IMO this is the only way to really understand why chronic illness is so reviled in medicine. The reasons aren't medical, they are entirely political and ideological. That's why we find the exact same ideas in the late 19th century, blamed on "urban life" and other lazy nonsense.

Oh, and bonus: the author is a professor of microbiology and immunology. Wow. Couldn't even make this stuff up in a movie.

 

Letter to the editor: What Long COVID Prevention Strategies Suggest About Its Pathophysiology
https://academic.oup.com/ofid/advance-article/doi/10.1093/ofid/ofad466/7264811?login=false
Lao-Tzu Allan-Blitz, Howard Hu, Jeffrey D Klausner

Our hypothesis is analogous to the setpoint hypothesis in early HIV infection. The setpoint hypothesis argues that high early viral loads are associated with a higher subsequent viral nadir, or setpoint, which has been associated with more rapid clinical deterioration and progression to acquired immunodeficiency syndrome. 10 Importantly, the HIV viral setpoint is also dramatically reduced by early antiretroviral therapy initiation.11
...
Should long COVID be dependent on the initial peak and duration of SARS-CoV-2 viral load, one strategy for combating long COVID would then entail aggressively reducing viral loads during initial infection. If our hypothesis is supported by more definitive studies, indications for SARSCoV-2 therapeutics might be liberalized. Our messaging to the public would encourage individuals to continue testing and seeking early antiviral treatment with the aim of preventing long COVID. While much of our focus until now has rightly been on addressing acute SARS-COV-2 infection, with the waning severity of disease comes an opportunity to address and potentially prevent the long-term consequences of long COVID-19.​

To be clear: they're not making any direct comparisons to HIV or AIDS, just a similar mechanism of action for how the illness develops.

I don't know how valid this hypothesis is, but I find it very demoralizing how little interest there has been in trying to understand why some factors such as vaccination reduce odds of LC, and what they mean for its pathophysiology. The lack of interest in this is so baffling, so it's good to finally see someone bother going further.

 

https://twitter.com/user/status/1700914118474219806

 

Yes, it is isn’t it?!
I feel like this is an important avenue for study. I personally buy into it. Though I am sure there are other important factors also.

 

Threads, the Twitter alternative made by Facebook/Meta, is censoring several terms related to Covid. It appears to include words related to illness, as well as Covid, which would naturally include Long Covid. Searching for those simply comes off as "no results".

It appears to be a general filter, but of course those words don't have much in common: "Meta acknowledged that Threads is intentionally blocking search terms, but the company declined to provide a list of them. A search discovered that the words sex, nude, gore, porn, coronavirus, vaccines & vaccination are also among blocked words."

Paywalled: https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2023/09/11/threads-covid-coronavirus-searches-blocked/

 

Twitter thread on a FDA stakeholder meeting on Long Covid:

 

When there is a significant sex-skew in the disease, there's the potential for insights with trans people as a control group. I.e. do hormone/receptor levels dictate this difference or is it due to genetically determined factors, eg in the immune system?

 

Guardian: ‘You may have been poisoned’: how an independent Russian journalist became a target

Interesting narrative inversion. LC/ME becomes "must have been poisoned" because of the social milieu of the patient.

 

Opinion | Covid is here to stay. That means long covid is, too.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2023/09/12/long-covid-pandemic-kaine-treatment/

 

https://www.cdc.gov/vaccines/acip/meetings/downloads/slides-2023-09-12/04-COVID-Saydah-508.pdf

 

It's so good to see that it seems to resolve in about half, if I'm reading the graph right. Had a look at the report and on the second page they present a general framework for Post-COVID Conditions. They divide it in two:

Post acute sequelae of SARS-CoV-2 infection
- System specific pathology (e.g. lung fibrosis, stroke)
- Clinically significant symptoms with unclear pathology (e.g. ME/CFS-like, dysautonomia)
- On-going symptoms following MIS-C

General consequences of illness and hospitalization
- Post ICU syndrome
- Other complications of treatment or illness

 

Maybe it was poison. Maybe it wasn't. You can get doctors to know about things like LC, but you can't really make them understand it. "Up to 6 months", for which of course there are plenty of claims as such, from eminent sources. What a joke. And apparently they did joke around, until they thought it was serious.

Looooong way to go.

 

Also a mirror of how society is about COVID/LC, she didn’t want it to be true so when possible poisoning symptoms began she didn’t take steps address the possibility when it might have been possible to find evidence and get most effective treatment.

Though I don’t think you could run into a war zone or take on the government if you’re a look on the dark side type of person.