Prevalence and predictors of long COVID among non-hospitalised adolescents and young adults: a prospective controlled cohort study, 2022, Wyller et al

Dare I ask what prominent minimizers?
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.
 
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

 
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’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.
 
Psychosomatic advocates promote correlation when it supports their case. And ignore it when it doesn't.

How often do you hear them mentioning this study (on ME/CFS) that reported no correlation between actimeter results and self-report fatigue (for CBT)?

Psychological Medicine (2010), 40, 1281–128

Which is the study that White, et al, used to justify not using actimeters at outcome in PACE. Because they did not deliver positive results. That is, it falsified their claim.
 
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/
 
Note this reply to the tweet —



Twitter reply said:
would you be shocked to learn the authors of that recently released BOmBSheLL study questioning the authenticity of #LongCovid have deep ties to the @RecoveryNor (the organization psychologizing #MECFS and amplifying Paul Garner)?? buckle up because you're in for a ride [1/n]

some background: this week @jp_selvakumar and his co-authors released a study suggesting #LongCovid symptoms are just as prevalent in young people with no history of a #COVID infection and therefore the condition is psychosomatic. @VPrasadMDMPH, etc amplified their findings [2/n]

something just didn't feel right about this from the outset.. how does a PhD *student* with ~60 followers attract the attention of some of the biggest #LongCovid deniers with a tiny study out of Norway? and that's when i stumbled upon this webpage [3/n]

and who is The Dam Foundation? just one of the organizations wrapped up in Norway's thriving for-profit #LongCovid & #MECFS treatment industry. as you can see here, they bankrolled a @RecoveryNor study nearly identical to the one released this week [4/n]

this can't just be a coincidence, right? in both the newly published study and the one described here..
✅ focus is on 12-25 year olds
✅ researchers are faculty & students from the University of Oslo
✅ ~500 participants, control group is negative for #COVID antibodies [5/n]

now here's where the fun really starts. there's *no* mention of Recovery Norway in @jp_selvakumar's recently released JAMA study.. they just happen to have undertaken a nearly identical research project at the exact same university. c'mon!! what are the odds? [6/n]

just look at who @jp_selvakumar follows and try to tell me he (and his co-authors) went into this study with an open mind.. Natalie Shure, Adam Gaffney, The Health Nerd, Vinay Prasad and.. wait for it.. @Livelandmark (one of @RecoveryNor's founders) [7/n]

so where does this all leave us? well.. i'd say it's abundantly clear this #LongCovid study should be completely disregarded given the authors' preexisting biases. second, i think the authors should consider updating the conflict of interests section in their paper [8/n]

tldr; organization profiting from "curing" #LongCovid & #MECFS patients is now entangled with a research facility in Norway that's publishing papers in JAMA.. those extremely biased studies reinforce the notion that post-viral illnesses are psychosomatic. why? money, duh. [fin]

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.
 
Note this reply to the tweet —



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
 
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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/
 
Joel has written a short thread in Norwegian saying that their paper does only show that the WHO definition has little validity, not that LC doesn't exist.



I haven't seen a reply to questions on why Recovery Norway isn't mentioned.
 
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