It’s a huge claim.
Even just speaking to someone for more than a few minutes gets me winded.
I used to work on my feet 8 hours/day making gears, and gear like objects.
[1] https://www.hormonesmatter.com/recovering-from-post-covid-mi...
But: how do you separate out the effects of the viral infection from the effects of the societal upheaval and stress of the last three years?
(If you somehow weren't exposed to the upheaval, then please forgive my assumption.)
It's not the same. Covid got me bad.
But strangely, only after the third dose of vaccine. Right after it in fact, and ever since.
But it's possible we will learn we are coupounding effects on a lot of fronts: stress from the situation, covid itself, unexpected side effects from the vaccine, and maybe something else.
Hard to tell.
But yeah, this is not regular run of off the mill, stress response.
As for the upheaval: some experienced it as such, for me it actually reduced stress considerably because I didn't have to travel for work anymore which normally would take about 25% of my time and was always super stressful, it also caused a lot of follow on stress because that 25% needed to be made up for somehow.
My stress level really didn't rise, but my ability to move and do things fell off a cliff.
The linked paper focuses on telomeres and genetic markers for ageing. Since Covid directly impacts the lungs, I wonder if the symptoms you described are related to lung damage or to another mechanism such as the one the paper proposed.
Hope you get well!
It could just be (does anyone know?) that when new viruses pop up like this, the target species often just takes a global health hit that includes not just deaths and acute illnesses but other effects on broader time scales. Maybe this is normal in human, primate or even mammalian history, part of the bumpy evolutionary road, but we didn't really know how much of an effect there is to be had until now, or the soon future?
If true, it's kind of a kick in the guts for modern humanity, as we've probably had a good run on pathogens in recent history (at least globally, with the spanish flu being the obvious recent precedent) and didn't really appreciate that there are still "monsters" lurking out there in Earth's shadows that we're not really "better" than.
I also wonder, if there's truth to the above, to what extent modernity, or at least this (perhaps) middling phase of it, is part of the problem, where high urban population densities can transform what were relatively rare and local pandemics into more common, global and devastating affairs ... ?
But thing is it also is just severe and didn’t become just another cold or just another bacteria.
Some viruses just knock a species out, like this virus which gives Tasmanian Devils a lethal facial cancer: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Devil_facial_tumour_disease
There’s a lot of just-so stories about how things are bad till your immune system strengthens upon encountering all the viruses and then everything is ok.
Bollocks. Half of kids used to die before adulthood and it was mostly due to disease.
We associate disease as being mostly mild now because we took decisive action over a couple centuries to reduce, treat or prevent the worst diseases.
We were left with the ones that seem inconsequential, and the flu, which was consequential.
The bet is that Sars-cov-2 is inconsequential because it shares a transmission mechanism with the other inconsequential viruses and because it often feels inconsequential in the acute phase.
Hopefully so, we won’t really know the long term effects for a long time. Post-polio syndrome takes decades to manifest in a patient, as does multiple sclerosis from EBV.
Yes, and this is why the current strain of anti-vaxx sentiment is so dangerous: if enough people buy into that crap then eventually we'll get below the immunity levels required for these diseases to remain suppressed, there is a noticeable uptick in unvaccinated kids since COVID, about -1% for now which is manageable. But if it would get higher it could lead to trouble.
And then there are the vaccinations that have simply been postponed on account of COVID-19:
https://www.who.int/news/item/22-05-2020-at-least-80-million...
Over time this will eventually be caught up.
Pneumonia's main risk factor in children is malnutrition. So it's food, not medicine, that's cured the world of child pneumonia.
Diarrhea's main risk factor is contamination of food with feces. Again, the food, and its production, storage, and transport sanitary conditions. Washing with soap is the medicine here, not vaccines.
Malaria's transmission vector is mosquitos. This one you do need a vaccine for, but these mosquitos only exist on the equator.
So while your claim that half of kids used to die mostly due to disease is technically correct, it's actually malnutrition and living in shit that allowed it to happen, and it's our natural immune systems that prevent it (when healthy), not vaccines.
As we are plagued by media panic over every minor flu, it can be difficult to form an accurate picture of what's actually deadly.
You should still eat healthy though, your immune system evolved precisely to deal with this problem, and it works very well when fed.
There is a long list of diseases we effectively blocked from killing people:
* Almost anything bacterial
* Measles, mumps, rubella, polio, diphtheria and other commonly immunized childhood diseases
* Smallpox, which we eliminated
No country has anywhere near a 50% child mortality rate now, even when diarrhea and pneumonia are present. They’re the dregs of the scourge of disease we mostly controlled
See here for some descriptions of common childhood diseases of the past: https://www.nature.com/articles/pr200425
But was it by vaccines? The book "Dissolving Illusions" argues it wasn't, and that smallpox vaccination was a failure similar to the one we just witnessed with COVID vaccines (which are unambiguously a failure by the criteria on which they were originally presented to the populace).
It builds the case by citing many historical texts and news reports from the time when Jenner had first developed his vaccine, showing how it was at first advertised by him as granting 100% immunity only for many cases to emerge where the vaccine failed or outright gave people full smallpox infections. It also shows how the authorities went into denial and became utterly totalitarian, forcing vaccine mandates on people, refusing to accept that Jenner's invention wasn't perfect and forcing children to take it against the will of the parents, some of whom went to prison rather than allow their child to be vaccinated.
It concludes by arguing that smallpox was actually wiped out in the west (along with many other illnesses) by the general improvements in health and sanitation in the 20th century, rather than a vaccine that was very far from being 100% effective.
There was a time when I would have ignored this sort of alternate history take on medical consensus. But having just lived through an event exactly like the one the book describes it all sounds extremely plausible. COVID vaccines went from 95% effective and so clearly able to stop transmission that it was ethical to force people to take it, to "it doesn't stop infection or transmission or sickness, but it does reduce severe disease, let's hope that's not because it's inducing tolerance to spike protein in which case it'll actually be creating more serious disease without that being correctly attributed to the shots".
Lots of tables of figures if you'd like to peruse them, although its more concentrating on Polio. Anyway I guess the point is, yes there is an alternative take, but just because you read that in a book doesn't mean you should believe what you read. A significant amount more research would need to be done and um the author makes enough mistakes to take this with something of a grain of salt.
Anyway, I flicked through the paper. It has a habit of making what it thinks are rebuttals but which either are agreeing with what the book says, or rebuts arguments she didn't actually make. If this is the highest quality sort of rebuttal that's out there then I guess I should read the book because it must be pretty solid.
Example 1. Humphries points out that the vaccine rollout was coincident with a change in how polio was classified, which was guaranteed to significantly reduce the rate at which polio was reported regardless of the vaccine because the prior classification criteria had been very loose. The rebuttal is that yes this is true, but there were still a "significant number" of polio cases being reported after the change. This isn't a real disagreement yet the author uses it to claim that Humphries has callous disregard for polio cases, a nasty ad hominem they constantly repeat. It reduces their own credibility as it's so unlikely to be true. She's a medical doctor, not a profession famous for its callous disregard of disease.
Example 2. Humphries points out that "more than half of the cases [in Michigan] were not polio virus related at all" and the rebuttal is that if you restrict to paralytic polio then that statement isn't true any longer, but, again, that wasn't the claim she made.
Example 3. Another non-rebuttal is to point out that the author of one of the studies she cites was a vaccine fan. So? She was citing the data, not the author's general opinions.
Example 4. The overall thrust of the argument here is that Humphries says the threat of polio was exaggerated, and the author admits this was true (redefinitions, FDR etc), but then claims again that anyone who objects is "callous" and it was OK if FDR was "dramatizing" his illness - which maybe wasn't even polio at all - because it spread awareness. Also that it doesn't matter if polio was actually rare because that's also true of childhood cancer and Americans care about that. Again a non-sequitur of a rebuttal that actually supports the points Humphries was making.
What a crap set of counter-arguments. They don't point out any mistakes, it's just a big set of disagreements over emphasis and tone. If anything this seems to reinforce the overall impression formed in the past two years that pro-vaccine people seem systematically unable to accept that tradeoffs exist, accurate data matters and misleading people to win their support is bad. They also radically over-estimate their own rationality.
On top of that, like the other one GP mentioned, one of its main methods of transmission is feces contamination. It's possible hygiene was also a major factor in stopping it.
Fatality rate of 0.2%. Worst fatal complication: Pneumonia, for which the biggest risk factor is immunodeficiency from malnutrition.
> mumps
Fatality rate of 0.04%. Worst fatal complication: Encephalitis, for which the biggest risk factor is immunodeficiency from malnutrition.
> rubella
This one's nasty when it infects a pregnant mother. All women should get rubella vaccinated.
> polio
Fatality rate of up to 30% and debilitating post-effects in up to 50%. You'd be an idiot not to get polio vaccinated.
> diphtheria
Penicillin works.
> Smallpox
Was eliminated with a vaccine that is no longer administered.
You said:
> We associate disease as being mostly mild now because we took decisive action over a couple centuries to reduce, treat or prevent the worst diseases.
My point is that the diseases were bad because there wasn't enough food to maintain healthy immune systems. That's not "decisive action", that's farming and trade. It was the cooking of food and the boiling of water and the washing with soap that prevented deaths from most diseases.
In researching this reply, I've found a respect for some vaccines though. But I still hold food and our natural immunity as the undisputed kings of healthy living.
> Fatality rate of up to 30% and debilitating post-effects in up to 50%.
Only if you developed paralytic polio. Those percents don't apply to the polio virus in general. Only 3% ever developed anything worse than flu-like symptoms, and paralytic polio was something like 10% of that 3%. (I'm going from memory here, these numbers are on the CDC website)
So we're talking an IFR around 0.1%, very close to the estimated flu IFR of 0.07%
We vanquished these diseases in the past 50-100 years mostly. My argument is that diseases did not just all become benign without intervention
Native Americans, to take one example, were incredibly healthy in their traditional lifestyles. This did not give their immune systems sufficient strength to fight off smallpox and other diseases.
Lets be real here. No one hangs out in bat caves for the lulz.
Im ok wearing masks and staying home at peaks, but let me die sometimes, we organize in countries to delegate to some extent but it went too far this time. Make the vaccines mandatory and force give it to people, if really that's the reason we re in trouble (I have 3 shots of the mrna).
I'm in Hong Kong where we can still go to jail for not wearing a mask, but even in Europe it went too far and the backlash was insane.
Anecdotally, same with me. After I got covid a few months back, despite being vaccinated 3 times, I then got the flu a month later which hit me harder than covid, and another month later I find myself saddled with a nasty infection right below the root of one of my molars, which baffled my dentist as the x-ray shows absolutely nothing there a year ago and I have very good dental hygiene.
His hypothesis is that covid weakened my immune system enough to allow other "bugs" that would normally be fought by my immune system, to thrive and take hold much faster than normal, including the random tooth infection.
Similar with some of my friends, afte they got covid, they were on a marathon of getting sick the whole winter season despite being young, vaccinated, fit and living healthy lifestyles.
Of course, Covid exists and needs to be treated seriously, especially for people with compromised immune systems. But it turns out, it wasn't nearly as deadly a threat to the average person as was initially feared.
If even remotely true, this is simply a statement about your economic standing and social circle.
Outside of work, most people I know work low wage service or gig jobs and they all got covid, most multiple times. Seven members of my church died of covid in the first 18 months.
Well i'm retired, and my brother is still a trucker. We're comfortable, but not rich.
> Outside of work, most people I know work low wage service or gig jobs and they all got covid, most multiple times.
I suspect the vaccine is to blame for the reinfections, and that years from now it will be confirmed that it had a negative effectiveness.
> even members of my church died of covid in the first 18 months.
If even remotely true, that says a lot about their advanced age and comorbidities.
Most members of my family have had it, multiple times. Most of my colleagues have had it. In fact, the majority of people in the UK have had it at least once. I am an outlier; I haven't had it to my knowledge.
There are some longer past explanations about this here in case it's helpful: https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...
The shots trained the immune system against the obsolete 2019 version of the spike protein, but our bodies can't tell the difference between the mutated versions and the original. They spot a SARS-CoV-2 spike and start making the same antibodies they were trained to, but those antibodies aren't fully effective because of the mutations. And unfortunately the body doesn't seem to be able to 'unlearn' this because people keep taking boosters, and/or it may be incapable of unlearning anyway even without boosters. It's a bit unclear.
The problem can be seen most clearly in UK government data because they were willing to show data on case rates by vaccine status pre-adjustment, which by the time they stopped publishing the data showed 3x-4x higher rate of COVID infections in the vaccinated cohort and still getting worse. That's why even the headline rates (subject to much invalid data game playing) showed effectiveness start at 95% and fall rapidly as the months went by.
Such problems have happened before, pre COVID. Fauci even noted in an interview that this can happen, safety testing is meant to detect it but the process was so accelerated there was much less time to see it than normal.
I don’t understand your comment. Do you mean it’s anecdotal based on sample size = 1, or is it an accepted fact (from your phrasing using “you”)?
As for anecdotes, I’ve had Covid too and that’s the only time I’ve been sick since.
Kind of like how searching “back pain [thing]” will show people reporting that everything causes back pain. Or listening to the most insecure bald guy in the world explaining how every dismal thing about his station in life has something to do with his baldness. Or the certainty in which someone will blame some random food item for why they are sick when it could have been anything they’ve eaten in the last few days.
It drives the value of anecdotes and conversation around covid to zero, or worse.
[1] https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/nation/2020/03/24/covid-...
A secondary point perhaps is that some locations did not have lockdowns or masks for the most part and still have low vaccine numbers. Some locations may have shut down schools at the beginning of 2020 but decided that even masks in schools were a step too far by August 2020. The US response varied wildly depending on location.
The current version is the "Pandemic is Over Act", H.R. 382.[1] This is the "declare a victory and go home" approach.
There's progress in nasal spray vaccines, but they're not really ready yet. There's one that that works in monkeys.[2] Human Phase I testing is starting. China and India have approved nasal vaccines.[3] Effectiveness is maybe 50%. Too soon to tell how fast immunity falls off. The US government is not funding work in this area.[4]
If an effective nasal spray vaccine is developed, even if it has a short immunity period, that could work. It might mean quarterly sprays. (COVID-19 antibody levels seem to drop off after about 90 days, which is why people get COVID multiple times.)
[1] https://www.congress.gov/bill/118th-congress/house-bill/382
[2] https://www.niaid.nih.gov/news-events/covid-nasal-vaccines
But that's disingenuous - we just spent 3 years handling our losses. One little article comes out on the economy blaming covid for worker shortages and you lose your shit. As proof we have probably 50 1000 comment threads on covid suffering and this one is dead after 100 comments.
It's beginning to look like having COVID-19 ages people faster than usual.[1] Hard to tell yet; that's the sort of study that takes years to gather data. More studies are turning up long-term damage. Here's one for COVID in kids.[2]
[1] https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-022-29801-8
[2] https://www.abstractsonline.com/pp8/#!/10619/presentation/67...