The Silence of the Covid Cultists
Motivated by greed or true belief, the unscrupulous facilitators of mass death have resorted to studious silence, stubbornly repeating earlier lies, and shifting goalposts in recent months.
One by one, the Covid minimization myths have crumbled: that it is a mild, harmless, or even beneficial infection; that it is fading out or even already “over”; that mitigation measures are ineffective, developmentally harmful to children, or part of a tyrannical government’s program of social control; that there is any appreciable effort on the part of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention or the media to exaggerate the danger it poses; and most distressingly, that now there exists incontrovertible evidence that Covid is both deadly and insufficiently addressed, the purveyors of these lies (Leana Wen, Alex Berenson, Joe Rogan, Jay Bhattacharya, David Leonhardt, Glenn Greenwald, Martin Kulldorff, Vinay Prasad, Elon Musk, Jimmy Dore, Naomi Wolf, Bethany Mandel, Donald Trump, Joe Biden, Ashish Jha, Anthony Fauci and Rochelle Walensky along with virtually everyone who served in the American government over the last three years, and countless others—too many to name here) will ever show contrition or be properly taken to task for the thousands of death their disease spreading apologetics spoke into being. Instead, these individuals have been allowed to shirk responsibility and continue to be held up as experts, their lack of apology or even shift toward more cautionary rhetoric amounting to a deafening manifestation of guilt and shame, insofar as they are capable of honest self-reflection. The many declarations of victory over Covid (offered up almost monthly by the Biden administration) and the many denials of its deadliness and lasting ramifications for its victims are not only misguided—in light of the ongoing mass death and suffering, these tone deaf transmissions are offensive, the equivalent of dancing on millions of graves worldwide or mocking the distress of millions of orphaned children, the immunocompromised, and other potential victims. Knowing the disproportionate value of their apology and admission of wrongdoing among their undiscerning audience, their present silence, doubling down, and changing of the subject (see for example the immunity debt myth) is all the more irresponsible and galling. One recent example of mendacity gone off the rails:
The Provincial Health Officer of British Columbia explaining that masks do not work because we do not wear them.
Several more recent examples of the kind of dangers we should have known all along were being covered up and ignored:
Emergency wards remain busy two years after the first COVID-19 vaccines arrived in Ontario in part because the virus depletes the body’s supply of T-cells, leaving young and old alike vulnerable to secondary infections, says a University of Waterloo immunologist.
T-cells are the front-line soldiers of the immune system, and the number of T-cells typically increases when the body is fighting off an infection, said Barb Katzenback, who studies viruses.
“Individuals who are infected with COVID have many fewer T-cells,” said Katzenback. “That’s a problem for us because T-cells are a really important part of our immune system that helps defend us against infection.”
But at least three studies show COVID-19 actually kills off a significant number of the body’s T-cells, so even when a someone recovers from COVID, they are at a heightened risk for other viral, bacterial and fungal infections.
The journal Science Transitional Medicine:
The lung naturally resists Aspergillus fumigatus (Af) in healthy individuals, but multiple conditions can disrupt this resistance, leading to lethal invasive infections. Core processes of natural resistance and its breakdown are undefined. We investigated three distinct conditions predisposing to lethal aspergillosis—severe SARS-CoV-2 (severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2) infection, influenza A viral pneumonia, and systemic corticosteroid use—in human patients and murine models. We found a conserved and essential coupling of innate B1a lymphocytes, Af-binding natural immunoglobulin G antibodies, and lung neutrophils. Failure of this axis concealed Af from neutrophils, allowing rapid fungal invasion and disease. Reconstituting the axis with immunoglobulin therapy reestablished resistance, thus representing a realistic pathway to repurpose currently available therapies. Together, we report a vital host resistance pathway that is responsible for protecting against life-threatening aspergillosis in the context of distinct susceptibilities.
The Annals of Internal Medicine via WBUR:
The researchers, from Harvard and Brigham and Women's Hospital, compared federal data from March through December of 2020 to the same period in 2021.
"And we found that in those months in 2021, there were roughly 21% fewer COVID-involved deaths. That translates to nearly 75,000 fewer deaths," Czeisler said. "However, we found 500,000 more years of life lost."
"Years of life lost" is a measure that takes into account the age at which someone died, compared to how long they might have reasonably expected to live based on typical lifespans.
During the first year of the pandemic, many of the people who died were over the age of 75. But that trend changed significantly in the second year of the pandemic, Czeizler explained. As the median age of people dying began to fall, the researchers calculated more lost years of potential life.
"So that was a quite a dynamic shift," he said. "We found that the median age at which people were dying decreased by nearly a decade, down from 78 years in 2020 to 69 years in 2021. That's kind of astonishing."
The study found that in 2021, the number of years of life lost per COVID death increased by 36% compared to 2020.
Fortune on the highly transmissible new variants:
It’s unlikely that the XBB.1.5 subvariant is solely responsible for the increase in hospitalizations, given recent holiday gatherings and other seasonal factors known to drive up cases each winter. But the increase concerns experts given that the new variant was recently declared the most transmissible yet by the World Health Organization, and also due to New York’s track record as a bellwether state for the rest of the country when it comes to COVID.
It’s “certainly possible” that the regional rise in hospitalizations is a sign of things to come for the rest of the nation, Dr. Michael Merson, visiting professor at New York University’s School of Global Public Health, told Fortune. XBB.1.5 is expected to spread west in increasing volume in the coming days before eventually becoming the country’s dominant COVID strain.
Because the variant is so new, it’s unclear how well vaccines and prior infection protect against it. That adds to the uncertainty about any increase XBB.1.5 may cause in hospitalizations—or whether the new strain is generally more of the same, albeit more transmissible.
Long COVID encompasses multiple adverse outcomes, with common new-onset conditions including cardiovascular, thrombotic and cerebrovascular disease, type 2 diabetes, myalgic encephalomyelitis/chronic fatigue syndrome (ME/CFS) and dysautonomia, especially postural orthostatic tachycardia syndrome (POTS). Symptoms can last for years, and particularly in cases of new-onset ME/CFS and dysautonomia are expected to be lifelong. With significant proportions of individuals with long COVID unable to return to work, the scale of newly disabled individuals is contributing to labour shortages. There are currently no validated effective treatments…
Reinfections are increasingly common. The impact of multiple instances of COVID-19, including the rate of long COVID in those who recovered from a first infection but developed long COVID following reinfection, and the impact of reinfection on those with pre-existing long COVID is crucial to understand to inform future policy decisions. Early research shows an increasing risk of long COVID sequelae after the second and third infection, even in double-vaccinated and triple-vaccinated people. Existing literature suggests multiple infections may cause additional harm or susceptibility to the ME/CFS-type presentation.
There is also early evidence that certain immune responses in people with long COVID, including low levels of protective antibodies and elevated levels of autoantibodies, may suggest an increased susceptibility to reinfection…
Long COVID is a multisystemic illness encompassing ME/CFS, dysautonomia, impacts on multiple organ systems, and vascular and clotting abnormalities. It has already debilitated millions of individuals worldwide, and that number is continuing to grow. On the basis of more than 2 years of research on long COVID and decades of research on conditions such as ME/CFS, a significant proportion of individuals with long COVID may have lifelong disabilities if no action is taken. Diagnostic and treatment options are currently insufficient, and many clinical trials are urgently needed to rigorously test treatments that address hypothesized underlying biological mechanisms, including viral persistence, neuroinflammation, excessive blood clotting and autoimmunity.
The journal Heart Failure Reviews:
Our results, based on a large population of more than 20 million people, demonstrated that COVID-19 recovery subjects had an additional 90% risk of developing HF [heart failure] within 9 months from the acute infection. This risk was directly influenced by age and previous history of HT [hypertension] and resulted higher in the early post-acute phase of the infection, as demonstrated by the meta-regression. Furthermore, the absence of any correlation with other cardiovascular risk factors or comorbidities suggested that the risk of incident HF might manifest even in subjects at relatively low cardiovascular risk. The high heterogeneity observed may be partly explained by the differences in baseline characteristics of the population enrolled, immunization against COVID-19 infection, pre-existing cardiovascular risk factors, or previous HF history. Although sensitivity analysis confirmed the robustness of our results, our estimates should be carefully considered.
Further research on the topic Covid heart complications:
The Center for Infectious Disease Research and Policy at the University of Minnesota:
In a large, multicenter study published today in Pediatrics, a team led by Vanderbilt University researchers followed 15,137 COVID-19 patients aged 2 months to 17 years released from 52 US children's hospitals participating in the Pediatric Health Information System database from March 2020 to March 2022.
Of the 15,137 patients, 82.1% had a primary COVID-19 diagnosis, and 17.9% had a secondary diagnosis of COVID-19 and a related complication. A total of 37.1% of children had a complex chronic condition (CCC), and 9.8% had at least one previously diagnosed neurologic CCC.
Seven percent of patients developed a neurologic complication, the most common of which were fever-triggered seizures (3.9%), non–fever-related seizures (2.3%), and encephalopathy (brain damage or disease) (2.2%).
Despite the overwhelming seriousness of revelations such as these, the Covid cultists must preoccupy themselves with pseudoscientific “safety concerns” about the infinitesimal chance that vaccines could be linked to heart disease, the economic and developmental drawbacks of largely nonexistent lockdowns and quarantines, or, in recently resurfaced cultist Leana Wen’s case, the idea that anyone is interested in overcounting Covid deaths (she even repeats the “death from Covid/with Covid” false dichotomy, a favorite among denialists):
According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, the United States is experiencing around 400 covid deaths every day. At that rate, there would be nearly 150,000 deaths a year.
But are these Americans dying from covid or with covid?
Understanding this distinction is crucial to putting the continuing toll of the coronavirus into perspective. Determining how likely it is an infection will result in hospitalization or death helps people weigh their own risk. It also enables health officials to assess when vaccine effectiveness wanes and future rounds of boosters are needed.
She continues, offering this baseless assertion about deaths which might be getting misattributed to Covid, which might cause the “skeptical to be more skeptical”:
If these patients die, covid might get added to their death certificate along with the other diagnoses. But the coronavirus was not the primary contributor to their death and often played no role at all.
Dretler is quick to add that the imprecise reporting is not because of bad intent. There is no truth to the conspiracy theory that hospitals are trying to exaggerate coronavirus numbers for some nefarious purpose. But, he said, “inadvertently overstating risk can make the anxious more anxious and the skeptical more skeptical.”
Her ultimate concern? “To be clear, if the covid death count turns out to be 30 percent of what’s currently reported, that’s still unacceptably high. But that knowledge could help people better gauge the risks of traveling, indoor dining and activities they have yet to resume.” Here we see that the underlying concern is a purely economic return to some conception of “normality,” (or, more worryingly, the illusion of a normality which will never return either way, given inevitable mass hospitalizations, absent workers, and resultant social and supply line stresses).
Needless to say, her disease apologetics have been met with typical backlash among qualified medical professionals:
More about the phenomenon of mass undercounting here.
Like climate change, Covid is simultaneously a horrifying ever-present threat and a pressing opportunity to save countless lives. Despite the completeness of these minimizers’ victory over good sense and the sanctity of human lives, the potential to finally reign in this disease cycle is enormous and shockingly simple. Until recently, China was one such success. Many denialists will of course never admit to their mendacity, due to financial or other material concerns—their dishonesty can only be corrected punitively, by deplatforming or shaming them in the court of public opinion. And the true believers, many of whom denied the reality of Covid even as they lay dying of it, are similarly difficult to reach. For them, even the loss of a loved one does not deter the survivors from the rationalizations in many cases, and the media is hard at work convincing us that periodic deaths to this highly preventable disease have become just a regular occurrence Americans must accept to return to “normalcy,” akin to the existence of heart disease or cancer.
Our total capitulation to Covid (even in America’s most cherished national institution, its military) is incomparable to these other diseases, which are mitigated and prevented regularly through preventive medicine, screening, and healthy lifestyle choices. The kind of denialism practiced with Covid would equate to a cancer patient finding a new lump and assuming that it was a benign growth or that alerting their physician would be evidence of paranoia, weakness, or something more sinister. It is not sufficient only to minimize Covid, as this denialism can only take the normalcy advocates so far—disease spreading itself must be celebrated as a communal, even laudable goal, with those who seek its elimination or avoidance brushed aside as party poopers or sociopaths in addition to shut-ins.
This is the same kind of attitude shown to those of us who seek to reduce our carbon footprint by adopting a vegetarian or vegan lifestyle: even friendly admonishments or curiosity carry the assumption that doing so is some bizarre, Herculean task which is an unrealistic lifestyle for the vast majority of people. Yet all we are doing is foregoing animal products or wearing a mask in public. We are, in the end, by and large so insecure as a nation that we are willing to unmask and gamble with our own lives and the lives of others rather appear concerned or frightened.
Ironically, by spurning masks and non-pharmaceutical interventions, the Covid cultists have ensured that the disease will always be a threat and that vulnerable individuals, those who care about them and their own health, and service workers will never be able to safely unmask, even if any of them wanted to. The real outcome of denialism of any stripe is identical: climate change denialism results in worsening conditions and the necessity of “expedient” measures to save lives and livelihoods in the short term (efforts which end up accelerating emissions—air conditioning for example) in the same way that free market dogma created conditions of desperation in which the poor are forced to parasitize (and infect) one another and accept piecemeal solutions which only postpone the real, necessary reforms by appearing to solve, or band-aid, any particular short-term crisis. Remote learning, for example, is not preferable to in person learning by any measure except one which is defined by the presence of a widespread, potentially deadly virus, whose persistence is the result of misinformation and preoccupation with in-person interactions. Denialism also “trickles down” to the population, who see leaders adopting a head in the sand approach and feel more comfortable adopting mendacity whenever it suits them:
Many Americans have admitted to lying about COVID-19.
The lies include misleading others about whether they were sick and if they were following recommended public health guidance to reduce the spread of the virus, according to the study published Oct. 10 in JAMA Network Open.
The most common reasons 42% of Americans reported telling lies included desiring to feel “normal” and wanting to “exercise personal freedom,” the researchers found.
An a previous article, I dissected the insecure, insincere bluster of toxic masculinity and the many calls (some even from the left) to emulate the underhanded and manipulative right-wing exploitation of young males especially via direct appeals to a sort of hypermasculinity. We are told this young male ennui is insurmountable and inborn, nothing which could ever be remedied or elevated, a form of capitulation to existing conditions which mirrors the idea that stopping Covid would be impossible—our society depends upon a very specific form of unmasked economic and social interaction, as well as the herding of mostly poor and vulnerable individuals into hellish, unventilated, and, when working from home or other equivalently safe options exist, unnecessarily crowded public spaces. The elites can freely choose to protect themselves and avoid these encounters or embrace the risk; the rest of us were never given the option.
No less than the CDC Director herself has repeated numerous falsehoods about Covid, principle among which is the importance of handwashing to prevent an infection which is now known to be transmitted solely through the air. Her second piece of advice would be a good one if not for the CDC’s own relaxation of recommended quarantine periods, the lack of safety net and sick pay which would allow anyone to miss work, and the tendency of a large proportion of Americans to lie about Covid infections. That the CDC has historically left masking out of its public health suggestions (not mandates) entirely ought to be a world-shaking controversy, let alone the as-yet ignored potential of air filtering and cleansing technology which has been available but left unused for years:
Among the greatest failures, indeed crimes, of the COVID-19 pandemic, has been the coverup and distortion of the science of airborne transmission, the way in which SARS-CoV-2 spreads from person to person. As the fourth year of the pandemic begins, the vast majority of the world’s population has virtually no understanding of this science and what measures must be taken to prevent viral transmission.
Implicated in this coverup are the World Health Organization (WHO), the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) and other public health agencies and governments throughout the world…
Vaccines and therapeutics aid in reducing the risks of developing severe and life-threatening disease should someone become infected. Though important adjuncts for a comprehensive approach, they are not preventive measures.
Respirators like N95s are also critical, but should serve as secondary layers of protection. The use of passive systems that do not rely on “personal initiative” have great value and ensuring the continuous elimination of pathogens within enclosed spaces would be ideal. Throughout the world, air filtration and ventilation systems must be modernized and fitted with high-efficiency particulate air (HEPA) filters.
One of the most powerful “passive” technologies available, which has been almost entirely ignored throughout the pandemic, is that of far-ultraviolet (UV) irradiation, which can disinfect and inactivate pathogens on surfaces, as well as in water and air. This report will review the more than 100-year history of scientific research and real-world experience with the use of UV irradiation.
Keeping up with so many fonts of misinformation can be difficult, but without a reckoning of their past behavior, these charlatans will continue to lie and slink away from the light. From June, a reminder of possibly the most characteristically perplexing denialist statement of the pandemic:
A deservedly and widely-maligned figure, Leonhardt recently resurfaced after months of absence with an irresponsible piece charging that Covid mitigation efforts (such as they were) harmed children developmentally, effectively sacrificing their wellbeing over the (implicitly overblown) concerns of adult safety and well-being:
For the past two years, large parts of American society have decided harming children was an unavoidable side effect of Covid-19. And that was probably true in the spring of 2020, when nearly all of society shut down to slow the spread of a deadly and mysterious virus.
But the approach has been less defensible for the past year and a half, as we have learned more about both Covid and the extent of children’s suffering from pandemic restrictions.
Data now suggest that many changes to school routines are of questionable value in controlling the virus’s spread. Some researchers are skeptical that school closures reduce Covid cases in most instances. Other interventions, like forcing students to sit apart from their friends at lunch, may also have little benefit. [This article is an editorial and concedes that “school closures reduce the number of contacts children have, and may decrease transmission”].
One reason: Severe versions of Covid, including long Covid, are extremely rare in children. For them, the virus resembles a typical flu. Children face more risk from car rides than Covid.
Car accidents are indeed deadly to children, despite mitigation efforts. What Leonhardt is arguing for in the case of Covid would be the abandonment of car seats, seat belts, speed limits, air bags, and crumple zones because their existence may cause children to feel momentarily sad or contribute to a developmental roadblock which is both exaggerated (on the other hand, the impact caregivers’ preventable deaths and long-term health complications have on millions of children is rarely discussed) and in fact necessitated by the efforts of propagandists like Leonhardt, whose efforts ensure the virus will never leave us. Returning to the car analogy, his argument would have us all driving Teslas on autopilot, because acquiring other automobiles or controlling them ourselves is too difficult. The true popularity of masking as an idea, and even the widespread support for China’s “authoritarian” lockdown measures up to their unfortunate relaxation last year, show that even if popular preference decided prudent pandemic response, the minimizers’ and denialists’ influence is both undue and artificial, yet still criminal in its predictable outcome.
These charlatans killed, enfeebled, and forced into perpetual seclusion many millions of people, albeit indirectly. They will never face justice for their facilitation of this modern medical holocaust unless they are reminded constantly of their part in it.