The dangerous delusion of immunity debt, Declining life expectancy, Long Covid and the brain and more
Bonus What are we even doing? staring the brilliant insights of Preston Manning
It’s Time To Return To The Early Victorian Era Principles Of Catching Every Disease And Dying Young, To Avoid A Lifetime Of Crippling Immunity Debt.
As we speed towards the winter holidays, probably what’s on most people’s minds is the pneumonia outbreak in China that seems to be spreading to many other places as well. This is a good article with some context about how worried we should be.
I seem to be posting a lot about the immune system damage from Covid in recent issues, and this issue is no exception. It’s not surprising for that to be an important focus for the newsletter, or in fact in any venue still worried about Covid. At this point in the pandemic, it’s Covid’s long term damage to our health (and by extension, to the wider society that has to cope with worsened individual health) that is the most concerning thing. So this issue’s mini-theme is the immune damage from Covid infection.
I like to use the idea of “What are we even doing?” to express shock and outrage over how governments, public health authorities and society at large are failing us. Failing to react appropriately to what is happening now, and failure to properly understand what’s happened during the pandemic up until now. The perfect example is the recent report by retired right-wing politician Preston Manning in the Canadian province of Alberta analysing how Alberta has done. The official name is the Public Health Emergencies Governance Review Panel, but really it’s the Shibshow Report. The idea is essentially that decisions should be by politicians and that they should mostly make use of “non-scientific evidence.” By way of this issue’s WAWED? I have included a list of readings about the report. Read it and weep.
Enjoy!
‘Immunity debt’ is a misguided and dangerous concept by Anjana Ahuja / Financial Times
The discussion swirling around immunity debt shows how easy it is for a plausible-sounding theory to circulate as misinformation. In this case, misinformation risks promoting the unfounded assertion that infections are clinically beneficial to children, as well as feeding the revisionist narrative that Covid measures did more harm than good.
Professor Peter Openshaw, a respiratory doctor and immunologist who studies RSV and flu at Imperial College London, says the current “high and unseasonal” RSV wave is assumed to be a result of lockdowns causing levels of immunity to wane in children, parents and carers, paving the way for a greater number of infections. But to frame this as an immunity debt, Openshaw warns, mistakenly suggests “that immunity is something we need to invest in, and that by protecting ourselves from infection we are building up a deficit that has ultimately to be repaid. This would not be a good message for public health: we would still have open sewers and be drinking from water contaminated with cholera if this idea were followed to its logical conclusion.” Delaying RSV infection may actually be beneficial, he adds, as the virus is deadliest to infants younger than six months. Globally among under-fives, one in 50 deaths is attributable to RSV.
It’s not the quarantine that made so many other diseases surge: It’s the COVID by Mark Sumner / Daily Kos
Scientists soon put forward an idea that became heavily promoted by news media and angrily talked up by pundits. That idea, as reported by CNN, was that there was an “immunity gap” caused by “lockdowns, physical distancing, wearing masks, washing hands.” This supposed immunity gap was blamed for the early surge in RSV and the resurgence of other diseases. As The Washington Post put it, “Experts agree that people did the right thing by wearing masks and socially distancing because of the coronavirus, but the lack of interaction with germs also made our bodies far less resilient to disease.”
This is, to put it kindly, bullshit. To put it more precisely, it’s deadly disinformation.
As that World Health article notes, the immune system is not a muscle. It doesn’t benefit from exercise and it doesn’t get stronger from repeated use. In fact, fighting off infection can leave the immune system depleted, even when that inflection doesn’t include a virus that directly attacks the components of the immune system. And COVID-19 directly attacks components of the immune system.
The Great Barrington Declaration and “natural herd immunity” versus public health three years later by David Gorski / Science-Based Medicine
I would argue that eugenics has basically won out over public health. Because SARS-CoV-2 killed mainly—although far from exclusively—the elderly and those with chronic illnesses, views aligning with that of antivaccine crank Del Bigtree, in June 2020 encouraged his followers to “catch this cold” in order to help achieve “natural herd immunity.” The unspoken subtext that reveals the eugenicist intent—usually denied and maybe even not acknowledged, but there nonetheless—is how Bigtree also ranted about those most at risk of COVID-19 having made themselves that way by engaging in high risk behaviors that led to chronic disease, such as drinking and smoking to excess and overeating. (Obesity is a major risk factor for severe disease and death from COVID-19.) Of course, the one risk factor for severe disease and death from COVID-19 that no one has any control over is how old we were when the pandemic hit, given that the risk of severe disease and death climbs sharply with age. I like to point out that, as much as GBD proponents claim that “focused protection” would keep the elderly safe, it couldn’t, can’t, and won’t, because unless you quarantine all the elderly indefinitely they will have interaction with the “low risk” younger people out there necessary to help take care of them. One only has to look at the debacles that occurred in nursing homes early in the pandemic to appreciate how “focused protection” was always a pipe dream, a concession tacked onto the eugenicist vision of the GBD to make it seem less eugenicist.
How Viral Infections Cause Long-Term Health Problems by Apoorva Mandavilli / The Seattle Times
COVID is not unique in this aspect. Scientists have long known that infection can set the body down the path of autoimmune disease. The classic example is Epstein-Barr virus.
About 1 in 10 people who have mononucleosis, which is caused by the virus, go on to develop myalgic encephalomyelitis/chronic fatigue syndrome. A landmark study last year even linked the virus to multiple sclerosis.
Many other pathogens can also seed autoimmunity — but only in an unlucky few people.
“We are all infected with a multitude of viruses, and in the majority of cases, we don’t get any autoimmunity,” said Dr. Alberto Ascherio, a public health researcher at the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health who led the multiple sclerosis study.
Infections with bacteria such as chlamydia and salmonella can inflame the joints, skin and eyes — a condition called reactive arthritis. Enteroviruses can mislead the body into attacking its own pancreatic cells, leading to Type 1 diabetes.
Like Epstein-Barr virus, dengue and HIV are thought to cause autoimmunity in some people. Still, COVID seems to foment a long-term reaction that is distinct, said Dr. Timothy Henrich, a virus expert at the University of California, San Francisco.
“There’s something specific about SARS-CoV-2 that seems to set it apart, in terms of the severity and duration,” he said, referring to the coronavirus.
Life expectancy for Canadians fell in 2022 for third year in a row, says StatCan / Canadian Press / Yahoo News
OTTAWA — Life expectancy for Canadians decreased for the third straight year in 2022, and more people died of COVID-19 than in any other year since the pandemic began, according to a report released Monday.
Statistics Canada’s analysis of deaths last year shows the average Canadian's life expectancy dropped to 81.3 years in 2022, a full year lower than the 82.3 years recorded in 2019. …
COVID-19 became the third-leading cause of death for Canadians last year, overtaking accidents and unintentional injuries for the first time since the disease emerged in 2020.
“This increase may in part be due to the exposure to new highly transmissible COVID-19 variants and the gradual return to normalcy,” the report said, pointing to reduced restrictions and the elimination of masking requirements.
The Current COVID Variants to Know, From Symptoms to Incubation Period by Carly Severn / KQED
The swell of COVID cases this summer was fueled, at least in large part, by EG.5 — then, the newest subvariant of the omicron variant of COVID. (Even though the World Health Organization has revised its naming conventions to reserve “Greek labels” only for “variants of concern,” some online unofficially named this new EG.5 variant “Eris” — like XBB.1.16 was nicknamed “Arcturus.”)
But after the summer of EG.5, a newer subvariant rose to become the most prevalent strain nationally: HV.1. And while HV.1 is still second to Eris in the Western region that encompasses California, Arizona and Nevada — its presence in the Center For Disease Control and Prevention’s online variant proportion tracker has been growing steadily.
Do You Have the Flu, RSV, COVID, or the Common Cold? by Kara Grant / WebMD
Common cold symptoms tend to come on fairly quickly, explained Chin-Hong. If you get RSV, on the other hand, it may take 4 to 6 days before symptoms show. Flu viruses are a totally different story.
“The special characteristic of flus is the abrupt onset of symptoms,” Chin-Hong said. “You might be minding your own business, feeling OK, and then all of the sudden you get in your car and you feel like you’ve been hit by a dump truck.”
COVID also has some unique symptomatic features. You may not have symptoms at all, or you might have mild, cold-like symptoms for a week before the symptoms worsen and the infection becomes more serious.
With COVID surging, should I wear a mask? by C Raina MacIntyre / The Conversation
Masks do work. A Cochrane review suggesting they don’t was flawed and subject to an apology.
Masks work equally by protecting others and protecting you. By visualising human exhalations too tiny to see with the naked eye, my colleagues and I showed how masks prevent outward emissions and how each layer of a mask improves this.
The most protective kind of mask is a respirator or N95, but any mask protects more than no mask.
Wearing a mask when visiting health-care or aged-care facilities is important. Wearing a mask at the shops, on public transport and in other crowded indoor settings will improve your chances of having a COVID-free Christmas. …
Finally, safe indoor air is key. Remember that SARS-CoV-2 spreads silently, mainly by inhaling contaminated air. Opening a window or using an air purifier can significantly reduce your risk, especially in crowded indoor settings like schools. A multi-layered strategy of vaccines, masks, safe indoor air, testing and treatment will help us navigate this COVID wave.
“Unforgivable” rise in deaths in children must prompt action, health leader warns | The BMJ by Elisabeth Mahase / The BMJ
The number of child deaths in England has increased by 8% in the past year, from 29.3 to 31.8 deaths per 100 000 children (3743)—the highest since data collection started in 2019.
Deaths in children aged between 1 and 17 years increased by 16% in the year to 31 March 2023 compared with the previous year, while deaths in children under 1 year old increased by 4%, showed data from the National Child Mortality Database. December 2022 saw 391 deaths altogether—the highest number in any single month since 2019.
Half of COVID survivors still had symptoms at 3 years, more reinfections amid Omicron by Mary Van Beusekom / CIDRAP
Three years after COVID-19 infection, 54% of adults in a Chinese cohort still had at least one symptom, most of them mild to moderate in severity, with higher rates of reinfection and pneumonia after the emergence of the Omicron variant, shows a study published yesterday in The Lancet Respiratory Medicine.
MRI study spotlights impact of long COVID on the brain by Stephanie Soucheray / CIDRAP
A new study comparing magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) images of patients with long COVID, fully recovered COVID-19 survivors, and healthy controls shows microstructural changes in different brain regions in the long-COVID patients. The findings will be presented next week at the annual meeting of the Radiological Society of North America. …
Among participants with long COVID, 53% of patients could not return to their previous level of independence and/or employment due to infection. Cognitive performance was impaired in 41%, 78% said they had fatigue, and 73% had impaired olfaction.
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. This will allow people to leave me a small gratuity. The tips start at $3.
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.
The Manning Shitshow: Public Health Emergencies Governance Review Panel
Public Health Emergencies Governance Review Panel final report
Preston Manning’s Prescription for a Pandemic Disaster | The Tyee
Preston Manning's fiction made real in his Alberta pandemic report | CBC News
Alberta COVID-19 panel chair urges federal Conservatives to weaponize his findings | CTV News
Imagining how Pierre Poilievre might respond to Preston Manning's COVID advice
Manning pitches report to CPC to further politicize public health - rabble.ca
Pandemic Report, or Conservative Campaign Propaganda? | The Tyee
Alberta premier dismisses concerns that Manning report used for partisan purposes after leaked email
Terence Corcoran: Why we need a COVID royal commission in Canada
Pandemic report with troublesome elements – Winnipeg Free Press
Allison Au is a young Toronto jazz saxophonist who is one of my favourite on the scene. I’ve always really loved her fluid and melodic improvisations. Enjoy!