It really, really sucks.
Nowadays I'm almost fully ok, the only smells I haven't recovered are body odor (which I can smell, it's just really different) and feces and trash, which for some reason smell in a very particular sweet way, kinda like rotten meat.
That last one, for some reason, seems to be really common, since several friends that also lost smell have had the same exact change.
(Not trying to downplay covid-19. Just pointing out that it's not an unknown side effect from this type of disease)
I wonder if we have special "wiring" for enhancing human-produced smells? Kinda like how the brain is capable of distinguishing human faces by small details that we don't see that well for other species.
I do miss those odors, to be honest...
What I'm just surprised by is how my smell totally recovered after 6 weeks, but then months later this semi-sweet aging strawberries smell kicked in (with many things, but mainly ethanol-containing products). My covid experience itself thankfully was fairly benign too.
If my olfactory neurons repaired themselves, then what triggered disrepair months later?
To be clear, I've been on the keto diet since January, and that definitely can produce fruity alcohol breath as a natural byproduct, so when I ran this concern with my GP, they said it's very likely not covid, and more likely my diet. But that didn't quite sit well with me, and now that you and others on here mention your experience, I'm more convinced this is some kind of odd post-covid long-term effect. TBD!
Wow that is weird, hadn’t heard of that one yet, and seems kind of dangerous. Is he taking extra precautions to stay hydrated?
Here's an example (no affiliation, just the ones with the best SEO, I am not a doctor): https://abscent.org/learn-us/smell-training
[1] https://heritageradionetwork.org/episode/live-datta-lab-feat...
Hope you recover fully.
Edit: since someone asked for citations, here is a CNN link
https://us.cnn.com/2021/04/03/health/long-haulers-vaccine-we...
I follow the "This week in virology" podcast and they have discussed this extensively as well. Dr Daniel Griffin, cited in the CNN article is a weekly contributor on this podcast, and has mentioned the effect in question multiple times.
Loss of sense of smell is not psychosomatic. Unfortunately, viral infections can cause sometimes permanent loss.
Please. add. citations.
Citations are more relevant for when people are making a claim than for when they are investigating a claim.
I can't recommend reading the World Obesity Atlas pdf enough as it provides possible explanations for the disparities in cases and deaths we've seen in different societies.
[1] https://www.worldobesity.org/resources/resource-library/covi...
[2] https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/excess-weight-and...
"I held off on a COVID vaccine because I wanted to wait for data with positive signals for both pregnancy in the short term and long-run fertility. I’m trying to get pregnant, and those are the two things I care about most.
Vaccine data is so politicized that it’s actually somewhat difficult to find full studies, results discussions or data sets as a layman, because every search term redirects you to “yes, get vaccinated right now, your concerns are merely ignorance”
The other study that concerns me shows that the vaccine’s lipid nanoparticles— which carry the RNA instructions for the spike protein — move beyond the deltoid muscle they’re injected into and accumulate in other tissues, and seem to accumulate in ovarian tissue preferentially.
That study looked at a very small sample, but given what we think we know about the spike protein — it likely causes some degree of tissue damage on its own, independent of the virus — it’s something that definitely demands further study
Anyway, I feel like I need to come clean at this point. For a long time I was avoiding the vaccine because I wanted to hold out for more data. Now I’m actively choosing not to get it because what I’ve seen is providing the opposite of a positive safety signal for my purposes.
It’s really important that I clarify I’m not at a high risk of exposure. I generally don’t work or even socialize outside my home. Lockdown life frankly doesn’t look that different from my preferred lifestyle. If I were a high exposure risk I would think about this differently
I’m in the process of getting a prescription for prophylactic ivermectin, which has also become extremely politicized — to the point of becoming a censored topic on some platforms. I’m not giving advice, here. I’m not making broader efficacy claims. I’m just trying to be honest
COVID is no joke. You do not want to get COVID. “Long COVID” symptoms should concern you even if you don’t think an infection would kill you. But the vaccines are very new and skipped a great deal of otherwise required safety testing, and some of this data is really worrisome."
https://mobile.twitter.com/webdevMason/status/14056498962128...
At this point hundreds of millions of people have taken the various vaccines. There clearly are no major short or medium term effects (other than the reported, rare side effects).
Also you can literally read all the documents provided to the FDA concerning the efficacy and safety of the vaccines. There isn't a giant conspiracy, all the original studies and data are in the open.
I don't think their decision is unreasonable. I'm personally not looking at the same factors, and think of covid vaccination differently. I'm guessing you do, also. I personally don't see a problem with that. Who am I to tell force someone else to my way of thinking?
The information is not hard to find. Yes, there are a lot of pro-vaccine resources and anti-vaccine resources as well, but it’s obviously not hard to find the source materials.
Lots of things harm us as a group, and we accept them. We don't, and can't, aim for zero risk.
I will not tolerate a society that does this, fortunately I'm in a position to hurt it by simply not getting vaccinated. I have no doubts that it's perfectly safe and I'd be fine, with the bonus of being more protected.
So yes. You are the reason I'm doing my part to ensure we'll never achieve herd immunity. Good job.
Don't think of it as hurting a society that upsets you, think of it as hurting the individual people who get a serious disease through no fault of their own and suffer and die from it. It's very unlikely you'll hurt any of the people who have upset you - they are probably all well vaccinated.
There are all sorts of actions you could take to promote bodily autonomy, and I'd support them, but if you're really choosing to do this one out of spite because some small section of society has offended you, then I would encourage you to find a different way to express your distress.
> So yes. You are the reason I'm doing my part to ensure we'll never achieve herd immunity. Good job.
Along with your old fashioned view on bodily autonomy, I'd suggest you take a old fashioned view on personal responsibility too and try to avoid blaming others for a choice that you are making.
Two outcomes: either my not taking the vaccine has no impact on society as a whole so it doesn't matter, or it helps having a negative impact in society as a whole and therefore it also directly or indirectly hurts the groups who upset me (be it via further restrictions, health or economic downturns), in which case I feel vindicated. Most importantly: in both cases my actions spite those who would pressure me into doing it which by itself is a good enough outcome for me.
That last argument goes both ways: people who feel it's acceptable to bully me out of my autonomy should take personal responsibility for the choice they are making, so dismissing that argument is effortless on my part.
edit: I should point out that for very personal reasons I won't be getting in to, autonomy over the self is something that I hold very close to my heart.
I phrased it that way because I worry that in seeking to spite society as a whole you're missing the fact that you'll likely hurt specific individuals. Most of whom have nothing to do with the reasons you want to spite society.
> in both cases my actions spite those who would pressure me
They really don't. The people your actions (and public support of them) will most likely contribute towards hurting (and possibly killing) are those who are sick in other ways, or those who hold similar views to yourself.
If you live in a democracy, there are much better, well tested ways for you to promote bodily autonomy without deliberately taking actions most likely to harm people you agree with or the sick and weak. I'd love to see the cause of bodily autonomy promoted in ways I could respect, but this action won't help with that.
> people who feel it's acceptable to bully me out of my autonomy should take personal responsibility for the choice they are making, so dismissing that argument is effortless on my part.
Well, I think it's a poor dismissal. If people are bullying you, then they need to be responsible for their bullying, not for what you do in reaction to it. If you're really insisting on people being responsible for other peoples reactions, then don't you worry what you'll be responsible for when people react to your behavior?
It's my opinion that allowing yourself to be so affected by other people's views (whether it's towards spite or compliance) is fundamentally a less good way to live than deciding what you think is right and living according to that.
I do understand the extreme self-hurting aversive reaction to behavior you don't like (and there are places for it), but the internet has made that kind of attitude dangerous - you'll find bullies on every side of every topic, and to let which bullies your filter bubble rubbed you against dictate your behavior in serious ways is to cede way too much of your precious autonomy.
From my POV there is a heavy stigma associated with anti-vaccine activists downplaying and disbelieving the very real stats about covid sicknesses and deaths.
At this point the COVID vaccines are among the most "tested" medicines in history just on merit of their huge scale deployment, with them only truly lacking much insight into what happens after 2 years, which is something we hardly know about COVID itself.
Get it, whatever it cost you, because it's your duty.
Even the blood clots that were found with AZ and J&J are happening with the virus itself at higher rate.
So it's just a simply choosing lesser risk.
There was also heavy disinformation campaign against AZ because AZ was the only non-profit vaccine made and its presence was standing in the way of Sputnik V being introduced into EU[1]. J&J has similar issues and it wasn't affected as much. Pfizer[2][3] was also targeted similarly, but the problem was that not much could be found on mRNA vaccines. I guess the worst one was some inflammation of hart in young people that resolves on its own.
[1] https://www.biospace.com/article/russia-sees-opportunity-in-...
[2] https://www.rferl.org/a/russia-pfizer-covid-disinformation-s...
[3] https://www.euronews.com/2021/04/29/eu-slams-russia-and-chin...
The "Russian disinformation" argument doesn't really work either, because Russia targeted mRNA vaccines specifically. The Sputnik vaccine (in theory) has the same problem as the AZ and J&J vaccines, also being based on viral vectors.
The fact that the lab leak hypothesis stopped being a heterodoxy despite long being censored by big social media networks by non-medical professionals pretending that by citing politifact they were proxy medical professionals was shrugged off and censorship didn't even pause. Negative feedback has no effect on the strategy even when it reveals a stunning lack of expertise on the part of the censors. We even saw papers like WaPo just quietly retroactively correcting headlines and continuing to dish out Pinocchio ratings.
I don't find the data to convince me of the anti-vax argument at all, save for potential arguments that there might be an angle to freeride at least short term off other people mitigating covid through vaccination and non-vaccination measures.
I'd love to learn more about this but run into the walls your described about everyone dismissing your worries. Where is this data?
This is really nasty, I'm inhaling litres of it per year while vaping.
The only argument that has made sense to me is the Freerider argument, or "both COVID and the vaccine have unknown effects so I will try to avoid both" because COVID cases are currently so low particularly when bolstered with "I'm open to taking the vaccine especially if cases go up but want to delay for more data for now". I'm sceptical it's going to be possible for anybody but a marginal minority to be a Freerider who doesn't vaccinate/distance/wear PPE long term because R0=5.7 in Wuhan during the initial outbreak so it seems like it takes mass scale efforts to reduce transmission no matter how one goes about it.
And did they do the same study against people who got the flu and other diseases?
Does this matter?
The same goes for this reported brain issue. If it is a real issue, comparing against other known issues will tell us how dangerous it is.
Who knows? Maybe there's a ton of viral infections out there that cause some form of brain damage and get no attention at all. Attention bias at play.
There's a lot of funding studying COVID, for good reasons. Why not use those findings to further other areas as well? We now have some interesting comparisons to look at. Might be even more good reasons to promote getting your annual flu shot.
If we believe in science, probably.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/health/long-haul-covid-vaccin...
You can trust Mother Nature more than a bunch of creepy pharma-scientists. Didn’t you see Godzilla?
I'm not informed enough to comment on the content of your post, but this is a horrible way to start a productive discussion.
Neither do people who make blanket pronouncements about an entire broad demographic of people, after labeling them with loaded & vindictive terminology.
But yes, terrible way to start productive conversation but even when linking and putting the effort in the HN intellectual mob has already ideologically and shallowly investigated and come to shallow/poor conclusions and downvote and don't bother engaging further: how is someone downvoting a good beginning to a productive conversation?
I’m also not trying to have a productive conversation with you - you started this thread with a post that basically said “woe is me, I’m going to get downvoted” and then you got downvoted. You didn’t cite any sources and I don’t really care enough to dig through your comment history to find where else you did cite them, because I am not invested in this enough.
And, digging through my comment history, it was 3 or so comments below the comment I made saying to reference it - but you assumed and instead put more effort writing this reply than to actually quickly look to see if your assumption was correct or not. But since you're relatively lazy - making assumptions - here, I've gone into my history and pasted the links for you:
Related links on Ivermectin:
As in, 90% (probably more because asymptomatic people are never tested) of people actually have no symptoms at all and seem to go along fine with it? Or are you talking about something else?
Have they established with certainty that in the control group there were no-one with COVID19 infection in the first place?
Prisoner's dilemma at play.
meta edit: I don't like your post becoming completely gray and therefore up-voted you. It's a view that many people hold and it needs to be answered not by screaming "down-vote the selfish!" but rather with good arguments.
The Delta variant is the only one you should be concerned about from here on. And a single dose of vaccine only provides minimal protection against it.
For your scheme to be safe, you would need about 80% of people around you to have 2+ doses of a high-efficacy vaccine, and ideally all with Pfizer over Astra, given their relative efficacy.
There's a greater than zero risk you're going about this wrong and will end up catching a new variant. Vaccination works, if you ACTUALLY GET THE SHOTS.
Cheers
So I think the risk of getting infected in fall may well be significant enough to make taking the vaccine a good decision.
Plus of course by vaccinating you no longer need to worry about minimizing infection risk, you don't need to get fake certificates to access things that are restricted to vaccinated people, you are free to travel to developing countries without risk.
Also if you don't vaccinate now and the pandemic somehow has a resurgence you will have to rush to vaccinate then and stay at least month in full isolation while others who are vaccinated are freely going to events instead of doing the isolation now that events haven't fully resumed yet.
Having to test regularly may be less of a bother in life, if you lose this stupid vaccination lottery..., if you want to play on the convenience note.
I’m pretty well aligned with this and I’m not sure why it’s getting the downvotes.
COVID has never been communicated to me as something serious for my age group. Maybe I’m misinformed, but I’ve never feared getting COVID. I was _terrified_ of needing hospital care _during a hockey stick_.
COVID was communicated to me as a hospital killer. I was terrified I’d have a bad time and not get the care I needed or, worse, steal care from someone else in a zero-sum game. And it wasn’t just COVID during that window. If we “hockey sticked” and exceeded hospital capacity, any care I needed (heart problems, broken bones, different virus, etc.) would all be wrapped up in the same zero-sum game.
I quarantined for months, then socially distanced, and now I’m pretty much back to life as normal. What changed for me: my perceived risk of my local hospitals getting knocked over by COVID is now close to zero. In my eyes we’ve weathered the storm.
Am I missing something?
I don’t believe COVID has a monopoly on your narrative (chain of transmission leading to death). I’m asking if I should be special casing COVID, or treating it like any other virus.
You've asked "what am I missing?" and from your narrative I'm asking if you're missing the morality.
I live in a community that hasn’t taken COVID seriously. Any chain of transmission I carry on would likely be “fungible” in my mind - If it wasn’t me, it would be someone else.
Strong anti-quarantine, anti-mask, anti-short-time-to-market-vaccine.
But mixed in are a lot of _strong_ pro-vaccine folks who collectively have offset the need for masks to keep the hospitals from falling over. They’ve carried the torch of public good in my mind. They’ve offset the primary risk of this pandemic.
I’m on the fence and it feels like my decision isn’t consequential beyond personal risk and daily interactions (friends/family). If I transmit, I feel like it would be in a hurd where transmission was likely anyways and I was a randomly selected path vs an amplifier.
I wore a mask to offset risk of transmission to keep hospitals online. But injecting myself with a novel vaccine… I feel like I’m better off rolling the dice on contracting COVID and re-rolling to get side effects, vs rolling the dice once for the vaccine.
My choice has been reduced to a personal choice. It’s the same choice I make when I travel for the holidays. Example: I get the flu vaccine when I go see elderly or young family members. But right now I don’t feel it’s a moral imperative for COVID where, if I pass on a vaccine, I’m a horrible person who doesn’t care about my fellow man.
Does that make sense or am I off base?
Would be nice to have some data, instead of a ton of articles that say the same old "most symptoms go away within a few days". How does one decide whether to vaccinate or not based on such information? What is most? What is few days?
Some side effects are extremely common, like shoulder pain. Acceptable if it goes away in a week, let's say. But if there's a risk I'll have it for 3 months or forever, I'd like to know how common is that to make a calculated risk assessment. < 1% probably acceptable. >2-3% probably not.
And this will only be more apparent with time and more studies. The study I managed to find tracked people only for 8 days, had a nice graph of symptoms fading away with time. Mind calming exponential decay. :) Good, but 5% still had some symptoms at day 8. How many do have them at day 60?
I don't understand why such information has to be so hard to find for normal people, who don't spend days searching around on google scholar.
The mRNA vaccines are designed to express the spike protein in a membrane-bound form; very little is found floating free. See https://www.deplatformdisease.com/blog/spike-protein-circula....
Additionally, the mRNA vaccines express a modified spike protein that is stabilized in its "prefusion" state (as seen on the virus itself before it binds with a cell), and the resulting complex seems to have somewhat fewer effects even when it does interact with a cell.
But, why not to be worried:
- It's a normal process and most cells will be replaced.
- The effects would be tiny, especially compared to an infection with the real thing. If this was causing widespread issues, we would know by now.
- All studies done so far indicate that only a very small amount will enter systemic circulation.
It's a classic risk tradeoff, and the risks of taking the vaccine are much smaller than the risk of getting the real infection (billions of viruses replicating vs. one-time dose, real spike protein vs. stabilized spike protein).
What is the significance of either of those?
I'm curious about this line of reasoning. We've been testing mRNA treatments for other diseases for about 25 years now. The approach was abandoned for gene therapy because the effects weren't long lasting. We have follow up data on people who participated in those studies, and to my knowledge there aren't any documented negative long term effects. We know what the vaccine encodes, a spike protein, which is produced for a few weeks and the the mRNA wears out and is cleaned up by the cells. The proteins also don't persist in the body for very long. The other ingredients in the vaccine aren't anything special.
History also demonstrated that negative vaccine reactions typically happen quickly, and not years down the line.
With all of that in mind, why would one be concerned with long term effects? Is there something I'm missing? Is the position one of maximalist caution? If so, are you applying that to other areas of your life?
Polyethylene glycol, for one, has never been used before in an approved vaccine. It is thought to be the cause of some rare anaphylactic reactions.
There are dozens of other compounds in the Pfizer vaccine; the reason for them being there and their effects are, for the most part, a trade secret.
[1] https://www.sciencemag.org/news/2020/12/suspicions-grow-nano...
> natural way that keep population in balance
This is essentially a faith based belief, and not something rooted in personal risk as you previously mentioned.
> All these vaccines are keeping more kindling for a bigger fire down humanity's timeline.
Viral infections don't just kill you or you'll be fine. There are expensive (to society) effects of lots of people having diminished physical and cognitive capacity after infection. More over, by not being vaccinated you are imposing extra risk on anyone you contact who is unlucky enough to be in the narrow slice of people who are vaccinated but still susceptible to infection.
I don't see how you can argue from a perspective of unknown vaccine risk and some sort of concept of needing a virus to kill "excess population." That just seems perverse to me.
There's a limit to how much armour you can wear. There's always a cost.
And lets say each vaccine harms you just a tiny bit, which they clearly do. How much is the accumulated damage from all the vaccines we currently take or will need to take into humanity's future vs a naturally evolved immunity.
I don’t think this is supported by evidence at all.
The strongest hunch that something is off with an animal population, is a low fertility rate. You have negative, declining reproductive rate hovering around 1.6
That isn't some systemic malady, it's a scar. I've got one from cutting myself shaving, but shaving isn't really a problem.
> You have negative, declining reproductive rate hovering around 1.6
This is clearly because people are choosing to have fewer children as they get richer. And is a bizarre point as you earlier argued that the virus killing people was good for "natural balance."
It's really hard to believe you're acting in good faith here and not just trolling.
Evidence is provided of adverse effects here for the US. https://vaers.hhs.gov/data.html
"During this time, VAERS received 5,343 reports of death (0.0017%) among people who received a COVID-19 vaccine.: https://www.cdc.gov/coronavirus/2019-ncov/vaccines/safety/ad...
For Canada:
There have been a total of 7,408 reports (26.3 reports per 100,000 doses administered) up to and including June 11, 2021.
https://health-infobase.canada.ca/covid-19/vaccine-safety/
2. That's just one plausible explanation you are given without questioning. It might be true to some extent, but its not the only reason for the decline.
Western Women are not able to have children in large numbers, some are struggling to even have one and are spending thousands of dollars on IVF fertility treatments now into their 40s trying.
"About 10 percent of women (6.1 million) in the United States ages 15-44 have difficulty getting pregnant or staying pregnant, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC)."
https://www.womenshealth.gov/a-z-topics/infertility#:~:text=....
Regarding your naturalistic argument, I doubt that you have the same outlook when it comes to other aspects of life. There is no shortage of natural causes of death that we try to avoid in our everyday lives. Unless you are proposing that we use COVID as an opportunity to literally and explicitly cull the human population, I don't think that reasoning holds water.
https://robertroybritt.medium.com/odds-of-dying-what-you-sho...
Car Accidents are around 1/103. I've been to India car Pollution probably kills more.
Will you give up driving to make the roads safer for others? How about just give up google, because apparently they paid for some of the GOF research labs.
And you worry about the long term side effects for the vaccine's one protein, but only focus on the treatment (and not the side effects) for the virus that has 29 of them and tries its best to multiply itself. Do you see how this line of reasoning doesn't seem to compute?
Though even that is highly dependent on where you live, who you interact with, if you travel, etc. Lots of vaccine skeptics tend to share views and group, which makes conditions ripe for mini-outbreaks.
"Other people got the vaccine so I don't have to" is logic that looks sound on the surface but I think recent skepticism has shown that enough people all playing this card has the potential for disaster/devestation that is easily avoided.
Anyhow, you should talk your physician about this stuff, who is an authority who can give you information and help diffuse worried in a meaningful way.
That's because the herd around you has been vaccinated. So you are OK with others getting vaccinated for your benefit but wouldn't do your part to benefit the herd. Awesome!
Maybe your post is parody. Can't really tell.
Shouldn't they be okay with getting vaccinated? They did it for their own reasons, and that's a good thing, but they're not martyrs or saints.
So does the virus. And all of our data shows the virus is much, much worse.
P(Complications|Covid) has a calculatable probability.
P(Complications|Vaccine) is not, because we don't even know if they exist. And further, we strongly suspect they don't.
In other words, I think you're trading one hand for (at best) one in the bush.
When you’re healthy you get the vaccine for others, not yourself.
Studies so far show no difference in baby outcomes.
Rather than injecting yourself with mRNA which will create long-term antibodies in your organism which will be reactivated any time something like COVID19 appears again in the nature, it's probably safer to rely on COVID19 treatments are are short lived (as in, metabolized) and reduce the viral load swiftly.
> Once the instructions (mRNA) are inside the immune cells, the cells use them to make the protein piece. After the protein piece is made, the cell breaks down the instructions and gets rid of them. [0]
You seem to be arguing against the principle of vaccination in general.
[0] https://www.cdc.gov/coronavirus/2019-ncov/vaccines/different...
It's part of how your body's automatic anti-virus system works. It has a very clever system, where some cells learn to recognise foreign proteins.
There is no spike protein actually in these T cells. They are just trained to recognise spike protein, waiting to mobilise quickly to pretect you from it if it's detected in future.
Why would you not want that?
Do you have some evidence that your spike-specific T cells themselves cause harm, in a way that your other thing-specific T cells do not? (It's not impossible, but seems unlikely.)
That's... supposed to be bad?
if I had the option of choosing an effective HIV vaccine (god if only!) and HAART, I'd definitely choose the vaccine. HAART is apparently really rough on people.. it ages you.
One really cannot, and should not, use this kind of reasoning for what should be a private, personal matter.
[0] https://www.reddit.com/r/CovidVaccinated/ (Note the "I am not anti-vaccination" qualifiers in most submissions.)