For me it's gotten better. I got sick in August 2021, the major effects (fatigue and brain fog) were most pronounced between September and February, and I've been steadily improving since. I think I'm somewhere around 80% pre-Covid capacity most days.
Her other symptoms, particularly the fatigue, do seem to improve (though the weather and being about to be outside impacts it a lot, so she had a huge setback 2 winters in a row now), though very slowly. I like hearing that for you the brain thing has improved over time too, thanks!
It's been a long ride, coming up on three years. Because of the symptoms I was prompted to invest in self improvement as well. I am much more diligent about regularly exercising, eating better, minding my mental health* and minding my sleep; and there are still bad days where I can't concentrate at all. But things are getting better overall.
* Every day I don't read or watch the news I'm happier.
Also, if that can help, contrary to my previous beliefs, light therapy is no bullshit. I thought it was another pseudo science but studies are in fact proving that it’s incredibly effective (but it’s pretty inconvenient to incorporate in your habits).
But I'm not really sure it was due to COVID or just simply being old (or due to been forced to live in a confined space for long period of time).
People have gotten older, have gone through mass societal change, and any other number of things in between.
I dunno if that is relevant - it's the symptoms (brain inflammation[1]) that is hypothesised to correspond with lower cognitive function.
Even if you did have COVID, but didn't get brain inflammation[1], you can still serve as a control.
[1] I say "brain inflammation"; the exact mechanism is explained by a comment upthread.
She's currently in oxygen therapy, we're positive about the effects but since it's dominating her life (and energy) at the moment it's hard to say what the effect is.
Look, this is anecdata. I’m not making a claim about this article. I just know that my wife got substantially stupider overnight 2 years ago (plus lots of other symptoms). Via a postcovid support group organized by a semi government club here in NL she knows a bunch more people with long-term postcovid and this is the one symptom they all share. Might well still be some weird sort of selection bias etc; again, I’m not saying this is generalizable science, I’m saying that my wife got noticeably less smart and it started at the same time as all her other postcovid symptoms.
There was a hefty dividing line among my friendship group after covid which was people who went down that route and people who went down the health and fitness route. The latter seem to be doing much better in all aspects even if they started in the former group.
I was running 10km once a week before. It knocked me off my feet entirely and I don't run often now which got to me for a few months. But I fought it and can do that again now if I need to. It hurt that it did that to me but it taught me how fragile things are. Also to note I'm a qualified mathematician but some days to months I can't add numbers together and this turns out mostly to be I'm tired or not in the right state of mind rather than anything persistent. Lots of causes - best to look for the obvious ones first.
(Also, no drinking. That would be madness. Nobody in that group drinks at all anymore, it would set back their recovery by a lot)
For example, she had a cold last march which totally knocked her remaining bits of physical energy out of her, and she worried that she wouldn’t be able to come on a planned family trip to the zoo, because of the lengthy walking involved. She shared that worry in the group and another woman said “but then just rent a wheelchair at the entrance and get yourself rolled around most of the time! That’s kinda confronting, “I’m now a person who sometimes needs a wheelchair”, but it’s also very constructive and awesome if you get over that and it helps you get out of the house. We did that trip, it was super awkward (esp when she stood up from the wheelchair and everybody could see that well actually, her legs work fine), and we had a great time and for the first time after a big outing she wasn’t sick in bed for 3 days after.
Btw, a sidenote, “just go sporting” is terrible advice for people with heavy postcovid. Look up “post exertional malaise”. You gotta build it up very carefully, never push yourself too hard. It’s very hard but it appears to work (given enough patience).
On a similar note, I had some mild PTSD symptoms until I looked into it, then I started having additional symptoms(or at least I was noticing them now). On the flip side having ChatGPT4 combine my PTSD with phenomenology, positive psychology, and CBT, I think I'm close to cured. My favorite part was being able to disagree with chatGPT. When I disagree with humans, I feel like I was getting stuck in a loop.
Play along with it, I had some pretty eye opening moments during Eidetic variation of Phenomenology, but that was me personally. I think CBT/Stoicism may be able to help people who havent been corrupted by Nietzsche-like ideas.
At some point I was playing chess with my girlfriend after 4-5 days from getting symptoms, after 3 moves (so pretty much still in the beginning of the openings) my brain simply could not understand what I was trying to do, like I couldn't connect a previous thought to the next, there was an impassable barrier between these thoughts that I couldn't get through.
It got worse when I realised I had no idea what I was doing and while looking at the board I couldn't remember how the pieces moved, I looked at my bishop on the board and couldn't think where it could go. I started to cry, my whole job is to think things through, connect diverging thoughts, I got extremely scared I was going to lose this basic ability that enables me to do my job...
I lost the senses of smell and taste for about 10 days so definitely had neurological issues from COVID, the feeling of not being able to think properly was the worse of the feelings. The fever was ok, never broke too high and it was short-lived for about a couple of hours, feeling my heart was not comfortable but bearable and I wouldn't get too tired.
I'm so glad it was temporary, and so sorry for your wife having this lingering on her, I do not wish it to anyone.
It might not be clear what all the causes of long-covid, brain fog are but it's definitely possible for viruses to have long lasting and poorly studied impacts.
I appear to have recovered within 90 days, but I don’t know if I was left with permanent damage or not. I had no way to objectively test.
If covid was a bioweapon, it was a very well-planned one.
With ~98% of the population COVID vaccinated multiple times any vaccine effects would stick out like dogs balls.
If anyone wants to posit "vaccines cause { stupid | strokes | etc }" Then such correlations should be readily apparent in the before | after records of 26 million test subjects.
Currently the pooled deaths 15-44 are reported as below the long term 1,600 baseline ( https://euromomo.eu/graphs-and-maps/ ).
Regardless, I'm not sure if you have a point here that connects vaccination to significant numbers adverse after effects.
which clearly shows that all-cause deaths in England were higher among the unvaccinated.
Here is a Reuters fact check: https://www.reuters.com/fact-check/no-evidence-link-uk-exces...
>vaccination gives immunity to virus or that there are no side effects from vaccination
Who claims that? Nobody does or did. This is a familiar tactic: shifting the goalposts from vaccinations have very rare side effects and do not guarantee one hundred percent immunity to complete immunity and no side effects at all. Rarely does a vaccine provide complete 100% immunity from a disease, in rare cases it does, e.g. Polio. Also nobody ever claimed that vaccines have no side effects, they are just very, very rare. So rare that the expected benefits far outweigh any risk of side effects.
Fully vaccinated people can: -Visit with other fully vaccinated people indoors without wearing masks or physical distancing -Visit with unvaccinated people from a single household who are at low risk for severe COVID-19 disease indoors without wearing masks or physical distancing -Refrain from quarantine and testing following a known exposure if asymptomatic
Today, text is deleted and exists only in archive.
https://web.archive.org/web/20210310000819/https://www.cdc.g...
Calling someone, who have different experience and opinions, supported by studies as conspiracy theorist shows, how ignorant about this topic you are.
How are they doing their definitions now? Could not find it.
Meanwhile this new Dutch data looks quite interesting, maybe someone here would like to give it a shot:
https://www.cbs.nl/nl-nl/longread/rapportages/2022/sterfte-e...
https://opendata.ecdc.europa.eu/covid19/
By now there is a hell lot of data pointing at issues with the novel pharmaceutical product. Meanwhile governments all over the world continue to be reluctant to issue data on e.g. „long covid“ or immune system problems in vaccinated vs. unvaccinated, although this data would settle the debate once and for all if its outcome is in favor of getting the shots.
„Fact checkers“ have been shown again and again to be politically biased up to active manipulation. Only people who always agree with the politics they want to push have not noticed at this point.
>„Fact checkers“ have been shown again and again to be politically biased up to active manipulation. Only people who always agree with the politics they want to push have not noticed at this point.
Have they? Show me some of those manipulated fact checkers, please. With reputable sources, I'm not inclined to read bullshit.
>By now there is a hell lot of data pointing at issues with the novel pharmaceutical product.
Not really, no. Or show us some data.
>Meanwhile this new Dutch data looks quite interesting, maybe someone here would like to give it a shot:
conveniently only available in dutch, but online translators to the rescue:
>https://www.cbs.nl/nl-nl/longread/rapportages/2022/sterfte-e...
where the first paragraph in 6.4 translates as follows:
>The analyses show a lower or comparable likelihood of dying from causes other than COVID-19 in the first weeks after receiving a COVID-19 vaccine, compared to the vaccination status before receiving the respective dose. This holds true for all age groups and also for long-term care users. Based on these results, there is no population-level evidence that COVID-19 vaccination increases the risk of death due to an adverse reaction.
Oops. Well, you tried.
By now I have seen enough actual data - and on top of that a lot of sad „anecdata“ in my direct surroundings - to pay attention at least. Given its prevalence I am sure you have seen the anecdata as well. Have you called someone who claimed to have a vax damage or who told you a relative died from the vax a „conspiracy theorist“ yet?
One good alternative point to start your journey in 2024 could be the US civilian labor force disability data. And no, I won’t waste time to search for that for you, given that you began your „response“ by attaching a label because it soothes you mentally. It has all been out there for long time and has been linked countless times.
The little section you got from google translating is a government-approved interpretation of this data. I have seen several others. You can download the data and fact-check for yourself.
I'm not, don't worry :)
>Need to say, the psychogram of those who defend pharma relentlessly to this day is very interesting. I see anger, insults
The only one who is hurling insults and seems quite angry is you.
>fascist authority
ah yes, just call regulatory agencies "fascist", that makes total sense.
>attaching a label because it soothes you mentally
once again an insult instead of data
>The little section you got from google translating is a government-approved interpretation of this data
No it's not. It's what scientists say. Are they fascists too now?
People were fired for not taking a novel pharmaceutical product, warp-speeded by Donald Trump and sold as a cure-all. They lost their livelihood over exercising a fundamental human right.
In places like Canada they could not use public transport or leave the country. In some countries they could not enter supermarkets. Austria decided to fine them steeply and monthly. In the US 60% of one political side agreed with throwing them into camps and discussed it openly.
Across all media and in society they were labeled and treated as pariahs.
Meanwhile they observed obvious carnage in their friends and family and could only watch.
What did you do at the end of 2021 while all of this happened?
Not to her face, no. Not in those words, at least. But that’s because it would upset my mother to have to deal with her idiot conspiracy theorist sister complaining about me being rude, so I am scrupulously polite while dismissing all her crap and she is increasingly sensible about not mentioning it around me. Just as well I started this effort before covid happened or it might not have been enough.
> For the first mRNA vaccination, almost all [hazard ratios], for the different weeks after vaccination and different subgroups, are significantly lower than 1, which indicates a reduced risk of non-COVID-19 death shortly after vaccination.
Obviously vaccination is not supposed to reduce your risk from things unrelated to COVID-19 yet in their data it does. This isn't because it's some magical cure-all. It's because their data is biased. The correct hazard ratio is found only in the 12-49 age group.
As they say in their discussion, this is because "in the event of a very short remaining life expectancy, (a subsequent dose of) COVID-19 vaccination may be decided against ... Vaccination is also postponed in the event of a fever ... This is also called the 'healthy vaccine effect' and it is difficult to correct for this in observational research ... the results should be interpreted with caution"
They also have the problem that "people who have been vaccinated, but have not given permission for registration in CIMS, have been incorrectly classified as unvaccinated (5 to 7 percent of the people)" which means that "This will have influenced the analysis of the risk of death after the first vaccination, because in this analysis the unvaccinated person time served as a reference"
So this dataset is not usable for detecting vaccine side effects or induced deaths. It is a hopelessly corrupted dataset in which large numbers of people are misclassified and it's not a randomized study.
But this is public health research, so after saying results should be interpreted with caution they go ahead and make the totally incautious claim that "Based on these results there are no indications at a population level that COVID-19 vaccination increases the risk of death due to an adverse event." which is a false statement. Their data doesn't allow them to draw such conclusions.
The reason this topic is neuralgic is because if you want to be scientifically correct then you can't actually know whether vaccines reduced deaths or not, but people really want to believe they did. The trials that were supposed to unambiguously measure this failed, in the sense that they showed no effect on deaths and yielded incorrect conclusions about reductions in infection rates (the number started at 95% effective and then was regularly revised, this is not supposed to happen and was due to their time windowing problems). Then attempts to measure it using mass datasets collected outside of RT context all yield incorrect conclusions due to dataset bias, but are presented as definitive anyway for political reasons.
Science is truly in a bad shape :(
Is there any official data of this kind you would trust right now?
To be fair, I have seen enough by now; the main open question for me is what role endemic covid in all those believing the cure-all narrative and going out partying before milder variants came out played.
> By now there is a hell lot of data pointing at issues with the novel pharmaceutical product.
Where?
Given previous experience with people who years into this still want to be served everything on a silver plate, entering any discussion with you will be futile. You responded solely for the dompamin your brain gives you when you trample onto people that an "authority" presented you as outsiders to your tribe. No factual argument will convince you.
Even with all the easily verifiable information in this thread alone you did not make the effort to check for yourself, and are so convinced of your position that you aren't even embarrassed about demonstrating your ignorance.
It is incredibly easy to find by now. In mid 2021 you had to search, think about and analyze the excess mortality stats yourself to see the obvious signal, now it's being discussed widely. But you will never start this journey on your own out of fear your will be expelled from your perceived tribe.
> easily verifiable information in this thread
As others have pointed out, none of the information you've posted in this thread supports the conclusion you think it does. You questioned whether the ONS mortality data linked to by kadkadels had a problem you say ONS data used to have. It did not, as it was easy to see by clicking through the link. You haven't been able to produce any ONS data which ever had this problem, which is strange.
You then linked to some Dutch data which, when translated, concludes that "Based on these results, there is no population-level evidence that COVID-19 vaccination increases the risk of death due to an adverse reaction."
You did not check either of these links yourself, so it's a bit rich to criticise others for failing to do so.
There are at least two problems:
1. The statistically invalid time-windowing games the public health agencies all played in which people who had taken vaccines were classed as unvaccinated. The sibling comment talks about that. Prof Norman Fenton has shown how this yields incorrectly high calculations of effectiveness.
2. Healthy vaccinee bias, in which people who are about to die aren't vaccinated at all because there's no point, and the sort of people who take lots of vaccines tend to be obsessive about health and risk in other ways.
Problems like these with observational data are why drugs are put through trials before being launched to market. If we check the data for say the Pfizer trial, what we see is no effect on mortality and serious problems with statistical power also, simply because so few people were dying of COVID it was basically impossible to run a trial large enough to prove it had any effect.
>If we check the data for say the Pfizer trial, what we see is no effect on mortality
The point is that there are almost no serious adverse events occuring post-vaccination. There is no pharmacovigilance safety signal or concerning pattern wrt MRNA-vaccines. As we have seen in 2021 with the astra zeneca vaccine, post market surveillance worked and it was promptly investigated as soon as a safety signal emerged. EMA (and other regulatory agencies) communicated transparently about their findings and decisions.
Thank you for reminding me of this fine example of post-market surveillance, I almost forgot :)
As I have just replied to the other commenter, the ONS data he appears to object to categorises various "vaccinated" categories starting immediately after vaccination. The regulator's reply to Fenton makes this clear: https://osr.statisticsauthority.gov.uk/correspondence/ed-hum...
I assume this reply is what you refer to when you say that the ONS admit the data cannot be used that way. However, since that reply, the ASMR calculation now uses data linked to the 2021 census which covers around 91% of the population. Paul Mainwood graphed the ASMRs here: https://twitter.com/PaulMainwood/status/1627979309812965381
I see no evidence here that being vaccinated makes you more likely to die, which is what the original thread was about.
Invalid definitions are a very real and pervasive problem, not only being standard in the public health literature but also standard practice for public health agencies. Fenton has compiled a partial (!) list of papers and studies which do this:
https://wherearethenumbers.substack.com/p/the-very-best-of-c...
Note that UK HSA and studies using ONS data are shown to use invalid definitions.
> the ASMR calculation now uses data linked to the 2021 census which covers around 91% of the population
They say it does, but the UK government doesn't really the true population size. They've admitted this in the past. The 2021 census is unlikely to have solved it given that the civil service doesn't really want to know (if they could actually get full coverage, then they could identify every illegal immigrant). This showed up badly during COVID where more people came forward to be vaccinated than theoretically existed at all in certain age groups. They also told people that only a small percentage of the population was unvaccinated, but when the BBC commissioned a poll as part of a programme they were making (on misinformation!) around 25% of respondents said they were unvaccinated, a huge gap.
So the data quality here is of garbage grade in almost every respect, which is a scandal. People who just tune out and decide nothing governments say on the topic can be trusted are well within reasonable bounds.
The ONS mortality stats linked to by kadkadels at the start of the thread contain data related to people who received at least one COVID vaccine (counted from the day they received it, subdivided by time since reception and number of boosters), as well as an unvaccinated category who never did. This is clear to anyone who read the link that kadkadels posted.
Both you and armchairdweller falsely claimed that the unvaccinated category included people who received the vaccine less than N days ago, presumably because you believe that some deaths caused by the vaccine shortly after people receive it are hidden by these stats. But in fact, the vaccinated category starts from the day of vaccination, the unvaccinated tended to die more back when COVID was new, and the ASMR for unvaccinated and vaccinated converged by about the end of 2022, presumably because we've nearly all had COVID at least once so being vaxed now isn't doing a whole lot of good. Both the "vax did more harm than good" crowd and the "we should still be wearing masks" crowd are wrong.
Fenton is in HART, and HART are off their collective rockers, as we knew pretty early on when their internal chats were leaked. See https://www.logically.ai/articles/hart-files-anti-vaccine-my... and https://twitter.com/_johnbye/status/1421397013078360064 for example, and my own small part in pointing out that all the astroturfing groups identified by Neil O'Brien MP were hosted on a single IP address (HART almost immediately moved, lol): https://twitter.com/nameandnature/status/1352998804832870402
Though the prime mover, Narice Bernard, seems to have moved on to newer conspiracies involving "climate lockdowns" and "15 minute cities", people who conclude that nothing HART say on COVID topics can trusted are well within reasonable bounds.
The main problem with UK-specific death statistics is that they (the ONS) don't know the true size of the denominator.
Regardless of the above, due to widespread intellectual corruption in academia and the civil service, virtually no data on the topic of COVID or COVID vaccines can be taken at face value.
> Fenton is in HART, and HART are off their collective rockers
Your link says those messages came from a public chat room that literally anyone could sign up for. So Fenton has published things on a website that hosts a chat room where other people said things you disagree with. If that's your best counter to Fenton, and not some issue with his methodologies, then it's safe to assume you concede his points are correct.
https://www.npr.org/sections/health-shots/2021/12/05/1059828...
The ABS releases all manner of aggregate anon data, eg:
https://www.abs.gov.au/articles/measuring-australias-excess-...
The Australian states all have comprehensive medical records that have allowed people such as Prof. Fiona Stanley, an Australian epidemiologist to gain international recognition for their work teasing out relationships in many different medical disorders.
Access to fine grained records is limited to researchers for privacy reasons but the pool of researchers across the country is large enoug to rule out any conspiracy to keep secrets (unless someone is deep down a truther well).
Sweden let Covid go through their population in 2020. New Zealand allowed Covid to spread only in 2022. Both countries vaccinated their population during 2021. Sweden had a wave of excess deaths in 2020. In New Zealand, excess mortality started to increase in 2022. Excess deaths are correlated with the times of Covid waves, not with vaccinations.
https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/cumulative-excess-mortali...
Lots of people navigate through the cracks. The least you can do (as an individual) is acknowledge the corrupt system and stop spreading the 98% stat which is purely propaganda. And hold the politicians accountable.
> most got fake certificates.
I got vaccinated for COVID in Australia multiple times and never once got a certificate .. my ID and the fact of vaccination were recorded in the medical database which is where the vaccination numbers come from.
How many of the 26 million Australians in toto can you demonstrate faked their vaccination status?
The least you can do (as an individual) is back up your bogus smelling anecdata.
We very much want to stay out of the “covid vaccines are evil/fantastic” debate. It’s fruitless. I will not respond to any comment suggesting that somehow we’re wrong and well actually, it couldn’t have been caused by the vaccine / the covid infection, or that postcovid is an imaginary disease.
Different people respond to the vaccines and the real thing differently. But this is an anecdatum saying the vaccines were fine.
However the covid vaccines did not have any covid in them. So there is no way she got a taste of covid shittyness.
Most traditional vaccines consist of either killed or weakened forms of a virus or bacterium. These provoke an immune response that allows the body to fight off the actual pathogen later on.
Instead of delivering a virus, RNA vaccines deliver genetic information that allows the body’s own cells to produce a viral protein which stimulate the immune system to mount a response, without posing any risk of infection.
I know I said I wouldn’t respond to this but I can’t not. Do you understand what kind of asshole you’re being? You don’t understand how postcovid works because nobody does. Maybe it’s not caused by the virus but by the immune response, who knows. I’m telling you it started the day after her third jab. This is n=1 stuff, not generalizable science, but you’re suggesting that my wife is imagining things for 2 years and counting now, which you can apparently diagnose by reading an internet comment or two, and I’m saying you’re being an asshole to piss on people with real problems like that.
(The holy-vax crowd has discredited anything not approved by the marketing departments of the pharmaceutical industry from the beginning, so they won’t like this either.)
Maybe one of the downvoters would like to explain why he / she finds this question so emotionally triggering.
I think in at least some people the mRNA vaccines appear to work by suppressing symptoms (which also explains Pfizer's 95% effective, in that trial they only tested people who actually showed symptoms first), but actually they allow the virus to run rampant when the person is eventually infected. So the association is with the virus instead of the vaccines, and they assume it would have been worse without when we just really don't know.
Coming back to your point, is it possible that my family member - just by pure coincidence - happened to get covid immediately after each shot? 4 times?
> Based on these data, we hypothesize that the shift to anaerobic respiration causes an acid-base disruption that can affect every organ system and underpins the symptoms of PASC.
(Brain, of course, is also an organ, so brain fog and reduction in mental capabilities could easily fall under this.)
Now she spends most of the day in bed and the rest on the sofa and she can’t barely do anything, only crochet… maybe some cooking. Not even watch movies that have too much action, so she is watching black and white series now to have something to do without getting cognitively burnout. She lost her memory, her capacity to think, she has chronic fatigue and many other weird symptoms like easily getting senses overwhelmed by simple noises or smells.
We went to a lot of doctors, tried a few “remedies” from small scientific studies and internet: metformin, nicotine, lidocaine, multiple supplements and vitamins, some antivirals and many other things. Nobody is able to help her and most of doctors don’t even try to help or know anything about this new and growing condition.
Of course always the “psychosomatic” smart ass appears, but there are enough proofs already to tell them to shut up. Even the NIH director mentioned viral persistence found body tissues in a recent talk [1].
At least the awareness is growing and there are s lot of studies going on. So still some hope, but it won’t come fast.
[1] https://x.com/californiacodes/status/1780099073468764415
Yup, and, right on cue, they're all over this thread already coping. Sorry to hear about your wife's situation.