A Covid Positive Milestone

Finally, herd immunity against apprehension?

Mid July the New York Times published a piece riding waves of Covid normalization fanfare. Elaborations alongside the piece included ideas like, “Covid is no longer different from influenza,” and “immunocompromized are not at increased risk from SARS Cov 2.” Unfortunately, I did not have the time to address these points, and I have had to look up the piece as well in order to write about it.

DALL E 2

To write about it, we must first run a google search to retrieve the piece.

Google search result, a narrative in of itself

Above, we have the result of a brief google search, which tells a narrative in of itself. July 17th it has been proclaimed that we have achieved a Covid milestone of some sort of relative normalcy in deaths by the virus. Additionally, we can see “normalcy” was proclaimed to be achieved by Feb 2021, before Omicron killed more people than any other variant.

Here we see a well-intentioned group, the WEF, propagating the propaganda Omicron was less severe. Recent studies have shown it was more severe for children.

Beneath the ‘normalcy’ piece we have the “Scientific American’s” response to the normalcy claim in the NYT, that there is little normal considering the death toll. Finally, we have the “New York Magazine” telling us exactly who is positioned to make the most sense of the situation and interpret the goings-on for us, in a digestible, common-sense way.

Briefly, I must side-step this train of thought to address another. I absolutely do not understand the kind of people who look to another to synthesize a situation and report back. Surely, holding any body in this esteem would only serve to make the reader susceptible to propaganda and fanciful narratives. I cannot understand the national academy members I have heard of who entrust op-ed columnists to such a duty as well, and I have indeed heard of them. Personally, the only individual whose editorials I have looked forward to and have used to shape personal opinion from is Lewis H. Lapham and that was in high school when I was a teenager. It was on matters of culture and state rather than science. If you are such a person, outsourcing critical thought, you should be aware of your susceptibility to glib arguments and homilies. Has one who has outsourced their opinions abdicated critical thought beknown or unbeknown to themselves? Does it require an admission of insufficiency? I do not know. I have never outsourced my opinions. Now to return-

Alongside and within this opinion piece published in the New York Times in July 2023, were the comments of Dr. Ashish Jha, the director, in part, of the US covid response. According to him, it was a misconception that the immunocompromised were at increased risk from Covid. The article riffs off of his comments, concluding,

“Most immunocompromised people are at little additional risk from Covid — even people with serious conditions, such as multiple sclerosis or a history of many cancers.”

Given the formatting, this was delivered as a statement congruent to and supported by Dr. Jha’s, who again, was orchestrating the US response. Furthermore, this piece does not comment on whether it is a small increase in relative or absolute risk. This is a disservice to the reader and has the potential to misinform. Interestingly, a third US government party, the National Institutes of Health published their own comments about SARS Cov 2 infection treatment guidelines the same month:

“Some patients who are immunocompromised have prolonged, symptomatic COVID-19 with evidence of ongoing SARS-CoV-2 replication despite receiving a course of antiviral therapy.”

Now reader, we will dissect these two statements. Statement 1 from the NYT seems to only consider the risk of death from the virus. Statement 2 considers the risk of prolonged symptomatic infection. Are there fates worse than death? That is up for debate. What is certain though, is that the NYT piece is making a desperate effort in its attempt to convey normalcy, as it had done in February 2021.

Outside of the piece but on Twitter, the author delivers his thesis, the coup de grace that was too emotive, speculative, and homilist even for the pages of the NYT,

“…the virus has turned into an ordinary illness.”

The virus has not turned into an ordinary illness. Symptoms are familiar things, borne from the immune response and appreciated grossly, through amorphous metrics. (Think cough, chills, sore throat, trouble breathing, headache, fever.)

Pathophysiology however, what the virus is actually doing to the body, tells a different tale of effects that SARS Cov 2 is able to do that ordinary illnesses do not. For example, even extreme lethal cases of flu do not send T cells into the brain. SARS Cov 2 does.

T cells on the brain. Andrew Yang, et al. Nature.

Scientists examined T and B cell changes after infection with normal viruses versus covid. Only Covid, not the normal viruses, caused missing unactivated naive T and B cells, something I warned about in 2020.

So we see the thesis, that the illness itself has transitioned into normalcy, is a falsehood that serves to smooth over what is happening physiologically.

There is a further, more disturbing issue of what was normal in 2019 versus what is normal today. A recent study found little difference in chronic T cell activation between Long Covid patients and controls who recovered from covid. However, it found a difference in chronic T cell activation between people who had samples taken before SARS Cov 2 infected humans in 2019 and after 2020. Meaning our controls post pandemic are not only dwindling, but that infected are being subjected to chronic T cell activation issues on a population level. Meaning basically, all people living after 2020 are subject to chronic activation, whether you have “long covid” or not.

When it comes to buying the notion it is a normal illness, caveat emptor. Also, I would question the motives of these people singing siren songs.

https://twitter.com/fitterhappierAJ/status/1308051767981150208

Stay safe out there.

AJ