Give children the same Covid protections as politicians, Fetishizing RCTs, Psychological entitlement, and more
Bonus introducing the Canadian Covid Society
Welcome to the latest issue of the Covid-Is-Not-Over newsletter!
As I go forward into the second year of this newsletter, the thing that still constantly amazes me is how we’ve been betrayed by public health. Or more precisely, how we’ve been betrayed by our economic and political elites who have completely captured public health institutions all across the world.
What to do? Maybe the thing to do is create our own grassroots and grow that into some kind of a public health infrastructure all our own? How about creating an organization that will do all the hard work of organizing and advocating for all of us, whether we’re patients, parents, seniors, children, Long Haulers or whatever.
That seems to me to be what the brand new Canadian Covid Society is all about. I support them wholeheartedly.
Introducing the Canadian Covid Society—because it is needed by The Canadian Covid Society / Canada Healthwatch
Four years of illness. Over 57,000 confirmed deaths in Canada. Three and a half million people with long-Covid.
Recurrent waves causing destabilization of our healthcare system from increased demand and a depleted healthcare workforce due to burnout, acute and chronic Covid illness. It’s time for Canadians to organize and advocate for patients, for ourselves, and for our kids. It’s time for better policy from our health authorities and politicians. It’s time for the Canadian Covid Society.
To this point, outside of government-funded vaccine awareness initiatives, Covid advocacy has been left to small, grassroots, self-organized, volunteer-run groups. Trying to fill informational gaps where Public Health has been absent, educating the public about risks in schools and workplaces, airborne transmission and how to prevent it, long-Covid, and the like. They have played a critical role in keeping all of us safe and pushing for better policy at all levels of government. Truly amazing.
But volunteers, working off the sides of their desks, caring for families, working full-time jobs, subject to burnout and long-Covid, can’t do this forever. It is time for a formal organization, funded by donations and grants, staffed by dedicated experts who can do the work that needs to be done in the years and decades ahead. Making the change we need to see, to navigate the long road ahead. …
To learn more and to get involved, visit The Canadian Covid Society.
I look forward to seeing what they have in store for all of us and, I hope, helping with their mission by working on collecting, organizing and disseminating quality information about the ongoing Covd-19 pandemic.
And speaking of the failures of our Public Health institutions, I’m following up my recent post on shenanigans at the CDC with a quick list of posts about the recent changes in their isolation guidance.
Time to roll up our sleeves and get to work.
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'Give children and teachers the same Covid protection politicians get': call for clean air in Lancashire's classrooms by Paul Faulkner / Lancashire Post
The cost of installing air filters in every classroom in the UK would be “eclipsed” by the health, educational and financial benefits of reduced absence and illness amongst pupils and staff who are being exposed to repeat Covid infections. …
“The Palace of Westminster [and] different [government] departments have been very quietly installing the best air cleaning filters…whilst at the very same time, telling everybody else to crack on [and that Covid] is not a problem.
“We don’t have to worry about the water we drink, because we invest in water treatment plants which filter and clean it to a high standard - it’s just one of those things we expect as a given. We wouldn’t drink dirty water, so why are we breathing dirty indoor air?” Mr. Watkinson asked.
Psychological entitlement: New research unveils link to pandemic non-compliance and conspiracy beliefs by Vladimir Hedrih / PsyPost
A series of three studies revealed that individuals with pronounced psychological entitlement were more likely to have visited non-essential venues such as buffets, spas, and casinos during the COVID-19 pandemic in 2020, and that these risky behaviors were related to heightened belief in conspiracy theories. The new research was published in the Journal of Social Psychology.
Conspiracy theories are beliefs that suggest significant events or situations result from secret, often malevolent, plots by groups or individuals. They typically contest the official narrative provided by authoritative sources, suggesting that powerful entities covertly manipulate events for their own benefit.
Research indicates that those endorsing conspiracy theories are more likely to refuse vaccinations and make health-related decisions detrimental to societal welfare, such as spreading disease. During the COVID-19 pandemic, various conspiracy theories emerged, denying the pandemic’s existence or misinterpreting the virus’s characteristics or origins.
Doctors Who Performatively Fetishized RCTs Aren’t Out to Advance Medical Research, But Rather to Sow Doubt & Mistrust by Jonathan Howard / Science-Based Medicine
At a more fundamental level, doctors had different standards for how knowledge could be obtained in the first place and even what constitutes an action. Any proposed measure to limit COVID was deemed an action whose benefit needed to be proven via an RCT. “It is scientifically and morally wrong to push policies year after year with no credible data they help,” wrote one doctor in an essay titled In Defense of the Randomized Trial that berated other doctors for not doing more RCTs. This doctor boasted that he was “one of the few who called for RCTs“, as if merely calling for RCTs was a genuine achievement.
However, these doctors’ demands for RCTs were applied very selectively, only to the benefits of mitigation measures they opposed. They did not need RCTs to make bold, confident claims that mitigation measures caused harm. While literally all observational studies that supported vaccines and mitigation measures were summarily discarded- “observational data has been used to support vaccines, but is plagued by confounding”- any small observational study that showed a whiff of harm was treated with the utmost gravity. With these studies, even a VAERS dumpster dive was lauded as a “bombshell“.
Similarly, removing mitigation measures wasn’t viewed as taking an action, and so these doctors didn’t demand RCTs to prove it was safe to take them away. They didn’t need RCTs to push policies that spread the virus. Pro-infection doctors didn’t demand RCTs before advocating for unvaccinated children and young adults to contract COVID.
Indeed methodolatrists never demanded RCTs to support their favored pandemic policies. The baseline was conveniently set so they were always right by default, and never had to prove anything. The burden of proof always lay with those who wished to limit the spread of the virus, never with those who wanted to infect young people with it.
Thus it becomes clear, methodolatrists performatively fetishized RCTs not to advance medical research, but rather to sow anger and mistrust about unwanted mitigation measures and the entire concept of public health. Methodolatry converts a study design into an epistemological weapon, as Dr. David Gorski recently explained.
Even healthcare workers face difficulty accessing long-COVID care, review suggests by Mary Van Beusekom / CIDRAP
The researchers identified five themes, which were uncertainty about symptoms, problems accessing services, the importance of listening and support, patient versus professional identity, and identification of ways to improve communication and services for long-COVID patients.
"Most participants described a deterioration in their ability to carry out everyday tasks, including clinicians concerned about the safety of their practice, and raised concerns over whether they would ever recover or return to work," the study authors wrote.
HCWs who did return to work said they worried about not being able to function at the required level or make sufficient contributions to their workplace. Many turned to social media for information and support, with some saying they were now better able to empathize with long-COVID patients and those with inconclusive test results.
An ER doctor's experience with long COVID – “My symptoms seemed endless” by Jennifer Hulme / Hospital News
Many people ask me what I want the public and physicians to know about long COVID. I think the first is that “the tests are not normal” – we are just not ordering the right tests. Every study of long haulers shows unbelievable pathology: immune dysregulation, mitochondrial dysfunction, neuroinflammation, brain damage, vascular damage, gut dysbiosis, poor perfusion of the brain, lungs and other organs. We just don’t have an easily accessible biomarker yet.
The second thing is that while there are no approved treatments for long COVID yet, there IS hope, and there are treatments that help! Antihistamines, antidepressants for neuroinflammation, aggressive treatment of autonomic dysfunction, or POTS, resting and pacing for post-exertional malaise – these things can help.
The third is that the best way to prevent long COVID is to avoid getting COVID. I use Can95 masks, nasal sprays and HEPA filters. And, if you do get COVID, have a plan to enroll in CanTreatCOVID to contribute to the science on long COVID secondary prevention.
And finally, we need a rapid acceleration of double-blinded, placebo-controlled, randomized clinical trials. Of the trials that are ongoing right now, only 12 of them are looking at pharmaceutical treatment of long COVID. This is in part because we don’t fully understand the root cause of post-viral illness – whether this is persistent virus, viral debris, reactivation of latent viruses, gut dysbiosis – and what is driving all of the downstream effects of end organ, vascular damage and microclotting.
Case report: 217 COVID vaccine doses haven't harmed man's immune system by Mary Van Beusekom / CIDRAP
A German man who claims to have received 217 doses of eight different COVID-19 vaccines for "private reasons" has a fully functional immune system and much higher concentrations of immune cells and antibodies against SARS-CoV-2 than those seen in recipients of three doses, researchers report in The Lancet Infectious Diseases.
"The observation that no noticeable side effects were triggered in spite of this extraordinary hypervaccination indicates that the drugs [vaccines] have a good degree of tolerability," senior author Killian Schober, MD, said in a Friedrich-Alexander-Universitat Erlangen-Nurnberg news release.
But the researchers recommend against receiving more than the recommended number of doses. "Current research indicates that a three dose vaccination, coupled with regular top-up vaccines for vulnerable groups, remains the favored approach," Schober said.
COVID tied to higher risk of inflammatory autoimmune diseases for 1 year by Mary Van Beusekom / CIDRAP
COVID-19 may increase the risk of autoimmune inflammatory rheumatic diseases (AIRDs) for up to 1 year after infection, according to a two-country study published today in the Annals of Internal Medicine.
The study, led by researchers from the Broad Institute at MIT and Harvard and from Kyung Hee University in Seoul, South Korea, analyzed national claims databases from more than 10 million Korean and 12 million Japanese patients aged 20 years and older diagnosed as having COVID-19 from January 2020 to December 2021.
The study period was dominated by the wild-type virus and then the Delta variant. The COVID-19 patients were compared with matched flu patients from the same period and uninfected controls.
Of the Korean participants, 3.9% had a history of COVID-19, and 0.98% had a history of flu. Among the Japanese participants, 8.2% had COVID-19, and 0.99% had flu.
Covid-19 may have small but lasting effects on cognition and memory / Imperial College Healthcare NHS Trust
Covid‐19 may have an impact on people’s cognitive and memory abilities that lasts a year or more after infection.
A new study reveals small deficits in the performance of cognitive and memory tasks in people who had recovered from Covid‐19 compared with those who had not had Covid‐19. This includes people who had long duration symptoms (known as long Covid) that had eventually resolved.
The research also shows that the cognitive impact was larger for people who were hospitalised, who had ongoing long duration symptoms, or who were infected with earlier variants of the virus.
The study, called REACT long Covid, is led by the team of researchers behind the REACT programme, which began as one of the world’s largest and most comprehensive coronavirus monitoring studies in 2020 and is supported by the National Institute for Health and Care Research (NIHR) Imperial Biomedical Research Centre
Unmitigated COVID is overwhelming hospital systems- globally. by Julia Doubleday / The Gauntlet
There’s no doubt about it, public health systems everywhere are underfunded. Since neoliberalism grabbed the wheel of economic policy in the 1980s, there’s hardly a nation on Earth that hasn’t engaged in budget cuts to public services.
This austerity was the backdrop into which the COVID-19 bomb landed. Unsurprisingly, healthcare systems already in crisis struggled to handle the influx of patients. Unsurprisingly, hospitals with already strained capacity found COVID pushing them past the breaking point. Unsurprisingly, already understaffed hospitals struggled even more as workers went out sick short-term, long-term, and even died in the early waves.
Interview with Dr. David Brenner of Columbia University on far-UVC 222-nm and the COVID pandemic by Benjamin Mateus / World Socialist Web Site
DB: Before we start, can you give me a one-minute introduction to why you and your publication are interested in far-UVC?
BM: In the context of the pandemic and the acknowledgment that respiratory viruses are airborne, the elimination of pathogens and prevention of these types of disease mean we must clean indoor air. As medical historians have noted, this is analogous to the English physician John Snow’s recognition that cholera was a byproduct of sewage-contaminated water, which led to a revolution in sanitizing water consumed by people and the reduction in rates of cholera.
I don’t think we can overstate it, but the sanitization of indoor air is really the next public health hurdle we must cross. In this regard, germicidal ultra-violet (UV) light, a proven technology in disinfecting rooms which has been around for more than 100 years, seems ready-made and at-hand for that task. It was for that reason I reached out to Dr. Edward Nardell of Harvard to speak to him about the history of UVC. We were also interested in the work you and your team were conducting with far-UVC 222-nm. The recent science behind 222-nm demonstrates it is safe to use indoors with people around while being quite effective. However, recently, scientists like Dr. Jose Jimenez, aerosol physicists from Colorado have raised concerns about the ozone emissions from these lamps and the secondary volatile organic compounds they produce. I decided to reach out to you to discuss all these issues.
Integrating wastewater and randomised prevalence survey data for national COVID surveillance by Guangquan Li, Peter Diggle & Marta Blangiardo / Nature Scientific Reports
To conclude, wastewater is a promising data source for disease surveillance. We have shown how it can be used to predict COVID prevalence at local level when anchored to disease data at a coarser resolution. The approach is transferable to other diseases and can be extended to include more than two data sources. The data integration approach presented here provides a foundation for building a cost-effective multiplex health surveillance system, to flag where and when additional resources need to be swiftly deployed to reduce the disease burden on the health system and on the population.
Severe COVID-19, death lowest by far among vaccinated Canadians by Mary Van Beusekom / CIDRAP
The incidence of COVID-19 infection and poor outcomes in the last half of 2021 was consistently lowest among Canadians who completed a primary vaccination series and highest among the unvaccinated, with the most severe consequences among those aged 80 and older of any vaccination status, the Public Health Agency of Canada (PHAC) reports.
'Flattening the curve' fell flat by Adam Kucharski / Understanding the unseen
How to convey COVID dynamics in an easy-to-grasp but accurate way was something I grappled with a lot in 2020. One realisation I had was to focus on susceptibility rather than just the shape of the epidemic. By late February, we had a good idea of what the infection fatality risk was in different age groups (despite the best efforts of some commentators to pretend otherwise). So we could estimate how many people we’d expect to have a given outcome (e.g. symptoms, ICU admission, death) if they were infected.
In interviews, framing the problem around susceptibility make it easier to communicate where we were and where we were going. Lockdowns and other reductions in contacts could temporarily reduce transmission but wouldn’t change susceptibility. The first wave might end, but if we went back to normal, the conditions were still ripe for another one. Vaccines or treatments – or a very large, damaging second wave – was the only way this pandemic was going to end. As I put it in one interview in mid-March 2020: ‘Whatever we do, we’re potentially going to have to face for a year or two.’
I made that statement in a few interviews during that period, and each time the interviewer was taken aback. A year or two? The ‘flattening the curve’ graphic didn’t show that. But I’d come to appreciate that oversimplifications weren’t helpful, and were increasingly damaging. We had to find a way to be usefully frank with the public. Despite all the uncertainty, people needed a conceptual toolkit to process the situation we were facing – and the situation we would continue to face into the future.
More on the New CDC Guidance
PERSPECTIVES: The CDC is gaslighting us about COVID (again). Here’s the truth. – Reckon
CDC announces new respiratory virus guidance, ends COVID isolation policy | CIDRAP
Covid Taught Us a Lot. The CDC Now Wants Us to Forget It. | The New Republic
3 COVID Experts on Why the CDC’s Isolation Guidelines Are Bad for Public Health | SELF
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New Black Crowes! Wanting and Waiting!