Bird flu could be 100 times worse than Covid, Mainstreaming anti-vax beliefs, Regulating indoor air, and more
Bonus more on why Covid is really bad for you
Welcome to the latest issue of the Covid-Is-Not-Over newsletter! We’re at issue number 54 and 741 subscribers strong. I can’t express how grateful I am to all of you out there who have followed and supported me this past year or so. While I’m not doing this to be famous or become an influencer to make a lot of money, it would also be rather pointless to do all this work if nobody was paying any attention. So thank you all so much for your time and attention.
Who am I not feeling grateful for? The bullies out there, that’s who. The minimizers, the “experts,” the trolls, the anti-vaxxers, the anti-maskers, the grifters. The ones who are trying to impose their “Covid is over” mindset on everyone else. I’m thinking politicians, of all persuasions, from the doofuses and the calculating populists all the way the autocrats. I’m sure you have your own favourite category of politician that’s letting us all down.
And speaking of letting us all down, while we’re still up to our eyeballs in an ongoing pandemic, it’s looking like maybe another one is barrelling down on us. There’s not even a light at the end of the tunnel to confuse with a runaway train. Given the cast and crew we currently have in political office and public health, we could be in big trouble. Exactly that trouble is the mini-theme of this week’s newsletter.
After all that cheerfulness, I hope I’ve chosen a particularly joyful musical interlude. Though, if you listen to the words carefully, there’s a darkness underlying the party spirit there as well.
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As most have probably noticed, there is no paid subscription option for this newsletter. However, Substack does have an option where subscribers can pledge to subscribe “just in case” and a few kind subscribers have made that pledge. I very much appreciated the vote of confidence in what I’m doing here. What I’ve decided to do on a trial basis is to set up a “tip jar” on the Ko-fi platform. I’m not anticipating a huge surge of income from using Ko-fi but whatever revenue I do end up with, I plan to spend on supporting artists on Bandcamp. Sadly, who knows how long that will seem like a good idea.
Top Articles Everyone Should Read on Covid
Real Impact of COVID-19 Infection and Why We Should Care by Jeff Gilchrist, PhD
What COVID-19 Does To The Body (Fourth Edition, March 2024) / Pandemic Accountability Index
Let's Face It, Covid Trashed Our Immune Systems by Jessica Wildfire / OK Doomer
How the press manufactured consent for never-ending COVID reinfections by Julia Doubleday / The Gauntlet
Mounting research shows that COVID-19 leaves its mark on the brain, including with significant drops in IQ scores by Ziyad Al-Aly / The Conversation
What It’s Really Like to Live With Long COVID by Meryl Davids Landau / Prevention
Bird flu pandemic could be '100 times worse' than COVID, scientists warn by Melissa Koenig / NY Post
A bird flu pandemic with the potential to be “100 times worse than COVID” may be on the horizon after a rare human case was discovered in Texas, experts have warned.
The H5N1 avian flu has spread rapidly since a new strain was detected in 2020, affecting wild birds in every state, as well as in commercial poultry and backyard flocks.
But it has now even been detected in mammals, with cattle herds across four states becoming infected, and on Monday, federal health officials announced that a dairy worker in Texas caught the virus.
“This virus [has been] on the top of the pandemic list for many, many years and probably decades,” Dr. Suresh Kuchipudi, a bird flu researcher from Pittsburgh, said at a recent panel discussing the issue, according to the Daily Mail.
Preparing for the Spread of Avian Influenza (H5N1) by Sharon Astyk / Ko-Fi
Ok, I know we've been here before, but let's go over the basics on preparedness for another pandemic. God willing, it won't be needed anytime soon, but there's a solid chance it will.
So let's review, and talk about how H5N1 is likely to be DIFFERENT than Covid, and thus, how to use what we've learned but adapt it.
How to protect yourself against H5N1 IN GENERAL.
Are We Ready for the Next Pandemic? by Crawford Killian / The Tyee
A truly life-or-death, three-way struggle is going on around the world — a struggle to determine the response to the next pandemic.
On one side are the minimizers: right-wing and contrarian groups that have wanted to do as little as possible about COVID-19 and the public-health response to it. On another side are the maximizers: scientists and their supporters who hope for the best but want to plan for the worst.
And in the middle are the governments and health agencies trying to do the right thing, which is unlikely to be a compromise between minimizers and maximizers. Few governments and agencies have been blameless in their responses to the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic. But they know any change in policies or planning would be attacked by one side or the other — or both.
H5N1 Avian Flu: What Canadians Need to Know by Raywat Deonandan / Canada Health Watch
Canada has seen only one human case of H5N1, an individual who likely contracted it while travelling in China, and who later died from it. While almost all human cases globally have been the result of animal contact, there have been a handful of suspected instances of human-to-human transmission.
The fear, though, is that the virus will adapt and learn how to move efficiently from person to person, and that we are then faced with sustained human transmission. An unlucky mutation might do the trick, in which case the world will be staring down the barrel of a new pandemic, one that might challenge COVID in its severity and disruption.
But that mutation has not happened yet. So, the immediate human threat is to farm workers in close proximity to infected animals. At this stage it’s vitally important for public health to keep close watch on those individuals and their animal charges.
Will Biopharma Companies Shun Vaccine R&D In A New Pandemic? by John LaMattina / Forbes
The poster child for this is Pfizer. Despite having generated sales of its Covid-19 vaccine (Comirnaty) of over $75 billion in its first two years on the market, Pfizer’s stock price has declined 32% since the start of the pandemic. As a result, Pfizer is in the midst of a $4 billion cost cutting program. As Herper states: “Directing an entire 83,000-person company to take on a global catastrophe may not have been without consequences to the rest of the business.” Contrast this with Merck’s experience. Despite having failed in its vaccine efforts, Merck’s stock price has risen 56% over this same period – it was able to keep focus on its existing pipeline. Herper believes that this experience will impact biopharma going forward.
“But the lesson for large drugmakers is likely to be that when many big pharmaceutical manufacturers decided to prioritize a vaccine effort, they weren’t necessarily making a sound business decision. That doesn’t bode well for the world if there is another pandemic.”
Why a leading bird flu expert isn't convinced that the risk H5N1 poses to people has declined by Helen Branswell / STAT
I think you disagreed earlier when I used the word “reassuring.” But to me this pattern of becoming much better at infecting wild birds, and seemingly less inclined to infect people seems reassuring.
Well, let me explain why I don’t think it’s too reassuring.
We have never seen this scale of infections in mammals, and in such diversity of mammals. We have now seen more than 40 species of mammals infected during the last outbreaks, which is unprecedented. We know that flu is unpredictable. But we also know that adaptation of virus to mammals is not a good thing.
Many of the adaptive mutations that you see occur when H5 has infected marine mammals, or foxes or martens or minks have been seen with the viruses that caused previous human pandemics. And that I find not reassuring. And with 40 species happening at the same time all over the world, sometimes with little option to intervene, that is not so reassuring to me.
Preparing for the next health crisis: COVID-19 showed the importance of community-engaged research by Simran Purewal, Julia Smith / The Conversation
Participants were asked what they would do differently in future health crises. Some discussed the significance of holding informal check-ins with their teams to openly discuss professional and personal challenges. Others pointed to the need for knowledge and resource sharing with other community-engaged researchers, to break down silos.
Additionally, attendees underscored the benefits of interdisciplinary research teams, bringing together diverse skills and expertise. In health crises, they aim to work collaboratively with academics and service providers from CSOs.
Liberals joined conservatives to mainstream anti-vax beliefs about viruses and public health by Julia Doubleday / The Gauntlet
There are few groups so reviled in liberal circles as the anti-vaxxers. Seen as embarrassingly anti-science and anti-social to boot, the popular anti-vaxxer archetype is a shrill, loudly wrong grifter straight out of YouTube Medical School. They are not only uninformed, but dangerous. And their specific brand of ignorance invites a mocking condescension from those of us who self-identify as “educated” and “pro-science.”
There’s one big problem with liberal media outlets, individuals and institutions expressing this disdain today: they have, themselves, adopted many foundational beliefs of the anti-vax movement without even realizing it. While they express continued appreciation for vaccines, their underlying ideas about immune systems, illness, herd immunity, and the social value of public health have all aligned with anti-vaxxer ideology. I’ll unpack each of these foundational beliefs individually, but first I’d like to address why this has happened.
COVID can quietly linger in your body long after getting sick. What does that mean? by Julia Daye / Yahoo (Miami Herald)
“The fact that every new SARS-CoV-2 infection has the potential to become chronic is perhaps the single most concerning aspect of this virus,” Amy Proal, President of PolyBio, said. “We have compelling data that viral persistence is much more common than recognized which could have major health implications.”
Surveys spotlight pregnant women's drop in confidence over COVID vaccines by Stephanie Soucheray / CIDRAP
A new study details dramatically lower confidence in COVID-19 vaccine safety in pregnant and recently pregnant women in 2023 compared to 2021, despite evidence to the contrary, according to findings published yesterday in JAMA Network Open.
The Failed “We Want Them Infected” Movement Is Trying to Rebrand Itself As The “All We Really Wanted Was Poor Kids in School” Movement by Jonthan Howard / Science-Based Medicine
There was nothing exceptional about any of this. I can provide many similar examples of doctors cheering infections in unvaccinated youth, saying this would lead to herd immunity in under 6-months. They professed great gratitude to those willing to get infected- thank you, thank you, thank you– and mocked those who disagreed this would lead to herd immunity. They didn’t just want children in school, they wanted them there unvaccinated and without any mitigation measures. The reason for this had nothing to do with their education. Indeed, many of these doctors teamed up with an unapologetic child-labor advocate to push their policy of mass infection. Like Dr. Atlas, they too claimed worst was behind us in spring 2020 and predicted that COVID would be much less impactful than the flu.
We all know happened next. …
Instead of having the integrity to ask these questions, doctors who massively underestimated the virus and claimed that spreading it would quickly eliminate it, amazingly now act as if their pronouncements from 2020 have been have been completely vindicated. Today, Dr. Atlas has the audacity to write articles titled Covid Lessons Learned, Four Years Later where he dramatically laments “learning loss for children, especially in poor families” and “lost faith in public-health institutions.” Other people made mistakes, according to Dr. Atlas.
Scientists advocate for policies regulating indoor air / Cooperative Institute for Research in Environmental Sciences at the University of Colorado Boulder
A group of international experts, including CU Boulder’s Jose-Luis Jimenez, CIRES Fellow and distinguished chemistry professor, and Shelly Miller, mechanical engineering professor, presented a blueprint for national indoor quality standards for public buildings, in a paper published today in Science.
“The science is very clear that improving indoor air quality would have enormous health benefits by reducing both disease transmission and indoor pollution,” Jimenez said. “But we think that will only happen with legally binding standards.”
The authors addressed setting standards for three key indoor pollutants: carbon dioxide (CO2), carbon monoxide (CO), and PM2.5, which are particles that can lodge deep in the lungs and enter the bloodstream. In addition to the three pollutants, the authors suggest a fourth standard surrounding ventilation rates.
Four Years After Shelter-in-Place, Covid-19 Misinformation Persists by Kwasi Gyamfi Asiedu / KFF Health News
Four years later, people’s lives are largely free of the extreme public health measures that restricted them early in the pandemic. But covid misinformation persists, although it’s now centered mostly on vaccines and vaccine-related conspiracy theories.
PolitiFact has published more than 2,000 fact checks related to covid vaccines alone.
“From a misinformation researcher perspective, [there has been] shifting levels of trust,” said Tara Kirk Sell, a senior scholar at the Johns Hopkins Center for Health Security. “Early on in the pandemic, there was a lot of: ‘This isn’t real,’ fake cures, and then later on, we see more vaccine-focused mis- and disinformation and a more partisan type of disinformation and misinformation.”
Here are some of the most persistent covid misinformation narratives we see today:
COVID-19 pandemic continues to pose major challenge for healthcare system across Canada by Dylan Lubao / World Socialist Web Site
The federal and provincial governments have dismantled all COVID-19 public health measures as part of their “profits before life” policy of protecting the economic interests of the corporations and the wealthy. As a result, the SARS-COV-2 virus continues to infect tens of thousands of Canadians every week, killing dozens and afflicting hundreds with the debilitating effects of Long COVID.
Because of the governments’ information blackout on the pandemic, the task of informing the public of the continued threat of COVID-19 has fallen to civil society groups like COVID-19 Resources Canada, which publishes weekly data sets and risk assessments. …
The discrepancy between the sanitized official pandemic death toll and that compiled by COVID-19 Resources Canada illustrates the immense cover-up conducted by every level of government in Canada.
Officially, 51,710 Canadians have died of COVID-19 since January 2020. Taking into account the government’s reporting rate of 61 percent, the true number of people killed by the capitalist “profits before life” policy is 84,389, a number roughly equivalent to the population of the city of Peterborough, Ontario.
In effect, over 32,000 COVID-19 dead have simply been “disappeared,” their families told a mixture of official lies and half-truths to conceal the fact that their deaths were entirely preventable.
COVID-19 shatters decades of global health progress, slashing life expectancy by Tarun Sai Lomte / News Medical Life Sciences
In sum, the present analysis offered insights into the global disease landscape before and during the two years of the COVID-19 pandemic. The findings showed that, after three decades of life expectancy improvements and reductions in age-standardized mortality rates, COVID-19 disrupted trends in the epidemiological transition, reversing long-standing progress.
COVID-19 was the second leading age-standardized cause of death in 2021, profoundly impacting global life expectancy. It decreased life expectancy approximately as much as reductions in communicable diseases and NCDs have improved over decades. The study suggests that improved life expectancy outcomes could be achieved by leveraging past successes in mortality reduction.
Covid Is Bad for You
COVID-19 patients with neurologic symptoms have worse outcomes for up to 3 years, data show | CIDRAP
Severe COVID leads to higher risk of pulmonary fibrosis: research | CBC News
Blood donor study finds 21% incidence of long-term symptoms attributed to COVID-19 | CIDRAP
COVID-19 Virus Can Persist in the Body More Than a Year after Infection
Study finds survivors of severe COVID face persistent health problems lasting more than a year
They’re young and athletic. They’re also ill with a condition called POTS. - The Washington Post
Something pretty fun today for a refreshing musical interlude! Jimmy Fallon, The Who & The Roots Sing Won't Get Fooled Again with classroom instruments!
Sadly anti-vax is being couched in normalcy and seeping into even some surprising and unlikely spaces. Progress is not a guarantee, it's up to all of us.