Cui Bono?

“twenty percent”, Out of 253,768,618, which amounts to 50,753, 618 adults over 18 suffering from this newly discovered disease

WSJ: The exaggeration of long Covid

Lingering symptoms after a respiratory infection are common. Most cases are too mild to worry about.

Dr. John Mackary, professor at the University of John Hopkins Schoo of Medicine:

Long Covid is real. I have reliable patients who describe lingering symptoms after Covid infection. But public-health officials have massively exaggerated long Covid to scare low-risk Americans as our government gives more than $1 billion to a long Covid medical-industrial complex.

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention claims that 20% of Covid infections can result in long Covid. But a U.K. study found that only 3% of Covid patients had residual symptoms lasting 12 weeks. What explains the disparity? It’s often normal to experience mild fatigue or weakness for weeks after being sick and inactive and not eating well. Calling these cases long Covid is the medicalization of ordinary life.

Two studies published this month put long Covid in perspective. The first, in the Journal of the American Medical Association, looked at a spectrum of wellness indicators in 1,000 people who recovered from symptomatic Covid or another respiratory infection. It found that 40% of patients who had tested positive for Covid “reported persistently poor physical, mental, or social well-being at 3-month follow-up.” For Covid-negative patients who had other upper-respiratory infections, the figure was 54%. Covid patients did better than non-Covid patients. While there are certainly unique hallmark conditions of Covid, such as loss of smell, any respiratory infection—flu, RSV, other cold viruses—can knock you down for a while.

The second study, in Lancet Regional Health, looked for long Covid in 5,086 children 11 to 17 and found that symptoms present during infection rapidly declined over time. The researchers found that among children who tested positive and negative for Covid “prevalence patterns of poor well-being, fatigue and Long COVID”—defined by its symptoms without the need for a past diagnosis of the disease—“were broadly similar.” (The study also found that loneliness in children increased steadily in the year after Covid illness.)

The National Institutes for Health has been intensely focused on studying long Covid, spending nearly $1.2 billion on the condition. To date, the return on investment has been zero for the people suffering with it. But it’s been terrific for MRI centers, lab testing companies and hospitals that set up long Covid clinics. I’ve talked to the staff at some of these clinics and it’s unclear what they are actually offering to people beyond a myriad of tests.

An Annals of Internal Medicine study ran an exhaustive battery of tests on 48 people with long Covid and 50 people without. The researchers found no biochemical or physiologic abnormalities in people with long Covid. “Levels of plasma inflammatory markers, levels of biomarkers for cardiac and central nervous system injury, and presence of select autoantibodies were similar between groups,” they concluded. The only medical factor that predicted long Covid was pre-existing anxiety, associated with a 2.8 times increased risk of developing long Covid.

Billions of dollars are at stake here: your money, their pockets. $1.2 billion for the NIH and its favored few, billions more for pharmaceutical companies, and I’m sure there are still more billions being printed and distributed to states and cities to alleviate and treat this phony boloney “disease”, with much of that dedicated to addressing the disparate effect of long Covid on minorities, women, and the LGBT+ - communities. As a bonus, extending the pandemic also extends the power of governments to control their citizens.

And don’t forget the research grant money, so beloved by our academics. The way you find funding for your work, money which in turn will allow you to keep your job, and justify your salary to the university that employs you, is to tie a proposed study to whatever currently fashionable scientific fad is circulating in your field. For instance, global warming. Here’s an example of that, a study of Arctic charr in Maine. Note that these fish have long been studied, so a new study might not attract fresh money. But what about the effect of global warming on those same fish? Aha! Here’s a million-and-a-half bucks, boys; have fun.

As a species, Kinnison said Arctic charr are remarkably plastic, meaning they can adapt to many different habitats and diets. In Maine, some populations specialize in eating snails, while others eat insects, and others prefer fish.

Christina Murphy, of the U.S. Geological Survey’s Maine Cooperative Fish and Wildlife Research Unit, said their plasticity makes Arctic charr well-known in academic and scientific circles.

“So we use them all the time in evolutionary studies in general in fisheries,” Murphy said. “And then to see them in Maine is really exciting, [notwithstanding that, according to the very same article they’ve been here since the last ice age — ed] because you’re finally face-to-face with a really famous fish, within the fisheries and evolutionary world.”

Murphy and Kinnison and a colleague from the University of New Hampshire recently won a $1.5 million National Science Foundation grant to study how Arctic charr fit into the food webs in the Maine lakes where they persist, and how this might predict their vulnerability to climate change.