Pro-Covid universities, Calm-mongering, Shutting the door & not getting the memo, Bungling bird flu, and more

Bonus reminder that getting Covid is still really bad for you

Nov 01, 2024

white and black i love you print on brown dried leaves — Photo by Cory on Unsplash

Welcome to the latest issue of the Covid-Is-Not-Over newsletter! We’re now 1165 subscribers strong! Which is pretty amazing if you ask me!

A few quick hits.

I'm on Bluesky now. Follow me if you’re there. So far I’ve been pretty impressed with the amount of engagement on BlueSky compared to Xitter, which seems to be kind of hollowing out.

Give a watch to two recent videos on two different people’s experiences of Long Covid. Justin's Long Covid Story from the Canadian Covid Society and Grant Wakefield’s The Unravelling - A Scientist. An Artist, A Father.

I’ve added a couple of items to the list of “Must Read” articles on Covid. First, some advice on Simple things you can do to avoid COVID. Second, what might be the most interesting and important article I’ve read in quite a while, one that’s helped me understand what we’re all been living through, and one that I hope will help all of you understand our situation better as well. That article would be Calm-mongering by Arijit Chakravarty and T. Ryan Gregory.

Check it out. I’ve also excerpted a few paragraphs of the article below if you want to get the high points. Basically, calm-mongering is everything we’re living through. In fact, many if not most (all?) of the other articles I’ve highlighted today are really just different manifestations of that same phenomenon. For example, that Vanity fair article on our response to H5N1. How about those pro-Covid universities and underestimating early onset diseases? Many of the “What are we even doing?” articles I’ve featured over the months are also calm-mongering. Calm-mongering is the glue that’s holding our reality together, and that isn’t the most depressing thought of the day, I don’t know what is.

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And if you make it to the end, The Devil’s Handiman and a reminder that Covid is still really bad for you.

Some of Our Top Schools Are Embarrassing Themselves Over Covid by Gregg Gonsalves / The Nation

But just as the Federalist Society has established influence over law schools and the judiciary, the Covid contrarians and their supporters would like to do the same for medicine and public health, by mainstreaming their views—both in academic settings and then in public policy—by sheer brute force. They won’t give up, and they have the money and resources to continue their campaigns. Should former president Trump regain the White House, their fortunes will rise and these threats to academic integrity, and to the public health itself (through adoption of their views in practice) will go into overdrive.
And for anyone who thinks this is all academic, in mid-September, the surgeon general of Florida recommended against the use of mRNA Covid vaccines, just as we’re heading into respiratory virus season, endangering the lives of the residents of the state with quackery and pseudoscience. Of course, it’s the same Covid contrarians who have organized these meetings, who have been advising the DeSantis administration for several years now on pandemic policy. Shame on them.

Calm-mongering: Fine-tuning the potential emotional impact of risk is not the same as managing it by Arijit Chakravarty and T. Ryan Gregory / Monkeys on Typewriters

Almost five years into a pandemic that has no end in sight, we are at 1.2 million confirmed COVID deaths in the US, and most people have been infected more than once (meaning that the number of infections is far in excess of 150 million).
As this example shows, not only were these reckless warnings about panic unhelpful, they were based on false reassurances. They reflected a fixation of the media — and government officials at the time — on the health of the stock market, rather than the health of the public.
In fact — aside from some difficulty in finding toilet paper and flour in supermarkets — panic has not been a hallmark of the average person’s reaction to COVID. If anything, the public has been almost bizarrely sanguine about the prospect of being infected once or twice a year with a virus capable of persisting within the body, and causing long-term health issues, in young and old alike. That must represent success of some sort, especially if you consider it from the virus’ point of view.
Even now, as new developments unfold in the ongoing pandemic, the public would benefit from accurate and honest communication about the risks in real time. What they get instead is reflexive “calm-mongering” from public health authorities, politicians and the media in response to every new piece of bad news that has come down the pike.

Inside the Bungled Bird Flu Response, Where Profits Collide With Public Health by Katherine Eban / Vanity Fair

At that existential moment back in March, when the virus was first detected in cows, veterinarians involved in the response had every expectation that a well-honed network of experts, led by USDA scientists, would immediately rev to life.
But it didn’t. “Nobody came,” says one veterinarian in a Western state. “When the diagnosis came in, the government stood still. They didn’t know what to do, so they did nothing.”
Now, H5N1 has spread to more than 324 dairy herds in 14 states and has sickened at least 26 farm workers exposed to infected cows and poultry. Those numbers are widely assumed to be vast undercounts, as there is no formal nationwide surveillance program, many dairy farmers oppose testing, and few farm workers are being screened. …
This should be a story of heroism, cooperation, and an all-hands effort to defeat a wily virus that many scientists warn could mutate into a pandemic threat. Instead, it is a story of intimidation and obfuscation. The vets who sounded the alarm have been silenced, some even fired, and won’t discuss their experiences on the record for fear of reprisals. And the federal agency that was supposed to help thwart the virus instead has allowed for an unspoken “don’t test, don’t tell” policy among dairy farmers.
The USDA’s inaction, critics say, is attributable to its dual—and sometimes conflicting—mandates. It is responsible for the health and safety of the nation’s food animals, but it’s also in charge of promoting and protecting America’s $174.2 billion agriculture trade. And sick cows, with documented cases of a virus never before seen in cattle herds, could be very bad for business.

Exclusive: Emails Reveal How Health Departments Struggle To Track Human Cases of Bird Flu by Amy Maxmen / KFF Health News

Bird flu cases have more than doubled in the country within a few weeks, but researchers can’t determine why the spike is happening because surveillance for human infections has been patchy for seven months.
Just this week, California reported its 15th infection in dairy workers and Washington state reported seven probable cases in poultry workers.
Hundreds of emails from state and local health departments, obtained in records requests from KFF Health News, help reveal why. Despite health officials’ arduous efforts to track human infections, surveillance is marred by delays, inconsistencies, and blind spots.
Several documents reflect a breakdown in communication with a subset of farm owners who don’t want themselves or their employees monitored for signs of bird flu.
For instance, a terse July 29 email from the Weld County Department of Public Health and Environment in Colorado said, “Currently attempting to monitor 26 dairies. 9 have refused.”

Did I not get the memo? by Sabra Gibbens / CMAJ

Anyway, I’m headed to a conference in a sunny place next week. It’s mostly an excuse to get away with my family while I brush up on some topics of interest. Of course, I am packing respirators, a CO2 monitor, and a portable HEPA filter. Weirdo? Outlier? Yep. Don’t care. Maybe I feel comfortable doing that for this conference because I’m unlikely to have any ongoing relationship with the other conference attendees. I care more about preserving my health so that I can continue practising medicine, taking care of my community, and enjoying my family than what others might think of me.
I do miss the camaraderie. What would it take to get that back? I had been hoping that the whole medical community would come together to advocate for clean-air standards, masking to protect against airborne pathogens, better vaccines, diagnostics, and therapeutics for PASC. I now realize this is unlikely to happen. I cannot wait for the world to change. I’ve got to find something in me, a mindset that will enable the reconnection, the old sense of belonging and shared purpose. I’m looking. I’ll keep looking.

Many deaths attributed to natural causes during the COVID-19 pandemic may have instead been due to the virus / NIH National Institute on Aging

Several studies have found that mortality increased at the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic. While many of these excess deaths — higher than would be expected based on mortality patterns in earlier times — during the first 30 months of the pandemic were officially linked to COVID-19, a substantial number were reported as other natural causes. The timing suggests that many of these deaths could have been unrecognized COVID-19 fatalities or indirectly linked to pandemic-related disruptions in health care and society. Findings from an NIA-funded study exploring this question were published in PNAS.

The Danger of Underestimating Delayed Onset Diseases by Gregory Kirchoff, Arijit Chakravarty / Peer to Public

SARS-CoV-2 began spreading across the globe at the beginning of 2020. 4 years feels like a long time, but is well before the time it takes for many possible latent health issues to arise after an infection. We are already seeing that Covid-19 can cause significant long-term damage to nearly every organ system (symptomatically and asymptomatically), and may even be capable of viral persistence.
Heart disease, especially for younger populations, has been on the rise since the beginning of the pandemic. The mechanisms behind this are well established and are known to occur after mild, and even asymptomatic, cases.
The brain is another organ showing numerous mechanisms of adverse effects from mild and asymptomatic SARS-CoV-2 infection. One such example is the development of Lewy bodies in 8 out of 8 infected rhesus macaques. Lewy Body Dementia is a well established condition that takes years to develop. It can be difficult to find neurological sequelae because it is easy for patients and physicians to misinterpret symptoms as mental health issues. Consider the case study of two sisters who both reported severe neurocognitive problems after infection with SARS-CoV-2. Their symptoms were initially classified as “psychologic pandemic distress”, but they were later found to have profound brain hypometabolism.
A third long-term concern is cancer. SARS-CoV-2 can affect many mechanisms crucial to cancer onset, including cell cycle regulation and inflammation/proliferation signaling pathways. These mechanistic studies do not claim that cancer will happen, but they highlight the potential risk. How do we intend to find out?

Clinical and functional assessment of SARS-CoV-2 sequelae among young marines – a panel study by / The Lancet Regional Health

In this population of healthy young adult US Marines with mostly either asymptomatic or mild acute COVID-19, one fourth reported physical, cognitive, or psychiatric long-term sequelae of infection. The Marines affected with PASC showed evidence of long-term decrease in functional performance suggesting that SARS-CoV-2 infection may negatively affect health for a significant proportion of young adults.

A Plea to Maskless Healthcare Workers from Vulnerable Patients by BroadwayBabyTO / The Disabled Ginger

There's No Logical Reason to Oppose Mask Mandates In Hospitals
It's where the sickest people are, they have no choice but to be there AND where the strongest bugs thrive.
Masking would prevent a great many nosocomial infection and it would SAVE LIVES.
Please - push for masks in healthcare. If you're a healthcare worker who sees a patient in a mask - put one on for them. Don't make them ask.
Don't psychologize them. Don't betray the trust they've shown you. They've literally put their lives in your hands. Don't take that for granted - it’s not an easy thing for many of us to do.

Long COVID Is Harming Too Many Kids by Blake Murdoch / Scientific American (non-paywalled version)

It is understandably disturbing to entertain the idea that we might currently be recklessly allowing millions of children to be harmed by preventable disease. That may be part of why problematic studies such as these have gotten headlines. It is more disturbing, however, that almost no public attention has been given to infection itself as a potential cause of children’s behavioural and learning problems.
This makes no sense. We know that COVID harms the brain. Neuroinflammation, brain shrinkage, disruption of the blood-brain barrier and more have been documented in adults, as have cognitive deficits. These deficits have been measured as equivalent to persistent decreased IQ scores, even for mild and resolved infections. Millions of people have, or have experienced, “brain fog.” What, then, do we guess a child’s COVID-induced “trouble with focusing or memory” might be?
When you put together the estimate that 10 to 20 percent of infected kids may experience long-term symptoms, that many of the most common symptoms affect cognition, energy levels and behavior, and that children are being periodically reinfected, you have a scientific rationale to partly explain children’s widely reported behavioural and learning challenges.

Covid pandemic disproportionately affected younger Americans of color, says study by Melody Schreiber / The Guardian

Although older Americans had the highest number of deaths in the Covid-19 pandemic, younger Americans had the highest rates compared with the overall population – especially among people of color, according to a new study.
And in two groups – Native Hawaiian or other Pacific Islander and Native American or Alaska Native – working-age people (ages 25 to 64) had the greatest increase in mortality of any age group.
It’s “really devastating, because these are individuals who could be contributing to our society and, more importantly, contributing to their families”, said Utibe Essien, an assistant professor of medicine at the David Geffen School of Medicine at UCLA, a primary care physician and one of the co-authors of the study.

End ‘collective amnesia’ over COVID-19, says UN health agency WHO / UN News

Coronaviruses like COVID, influenza and respiratory syncytial virus (RSV) “must be taken seriously” as they are particularly dangerous for at-risk groups including the elderly, pregnant women and people suffering from existing or chronic illness, WHO Europe insisted, as it launched a region-wide protection campaign.
“Collective amnesia on COVID-19 has set in and this is concerning,” said WHO Regional Director for Europe, Dr Hans Kluge. “Individuals, communities, and countries understandably want to move on from the trauma of the pandemic years. Yet COVID-19 is still very much with us, co-circulating with other respiratory viruses.”

They're idiots. Why don't they trust us? by Kristen Panthagani / Your Local Epidemiologist

Shame-based messaging ignores a critical dynamic in vaccine hesitancy: vaccine refusal isn’t just about intelligence or lack of understanding of facts and data. Often it has far more to do with people’s values and identity.
Katherine Hayhoe, internationally recognized climate scientist and science communicator, recommends when talking about climate change, the solution is not just showing people more and more data. Instead, she recommends connecting over values they already hold dear. This allows them to incorporate new information into their worldview instead of trying to change a core piece of who they are.
Shame-based messaging does the opposite: instead of connecting with a person’s identity and values, it attacks them.

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.

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Steve Hill. Devil’s Handiman.

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