COVID five year retrospective

What was known, mismanaged

And some explanations.

the current pandemic has killed more than 20 million people worldwide.

What follows is an attempt to put COVID-19 in context based on a focused consideration of a coronavirus literature that has become quite large (and intractable) in the past five years.  My priors are that the only way to address a scientific problem correctly is to go back to the beginnings so that the foundation of current research is as strong as possible. 

…

Research is beginning to show that T-cell exhaustion and long-term immune system damage follows SARS-CoV-2 infection, especially in people with long Covid.  Moreover, the proper testing of candidate SARS and by extension SARS-CoV-2 vaccines would require an animal model that reproduces severe coronavirus disease in humans.  During the initial research on a SARS vaccine, macaques were used after being used to confirm Koch’s final postulate that SARS-CoV is the etiologic agent of SARS. [4]  However, these monkeys did not always recapitulate the disease state in humans.  Early research on the COVID-19 mRNA vaccines used rhesus macaques as the experimental nonhuman primate.

Where do we go from here?  None of the foregoing is meant to cast aspersions, but it must be noted that the current COVID-19 vaccines are a rushed and unlikely technical fix for a problem that did not necessarily have to exist.  COVID-19 is the third serious coronavirus outbreak since 2002.  As has been noted by many, there was every reason to expect another coronavirus outbreak, one that could be worse than SARS or MERS.  So far, SARS-CoV-2 is the agent of a worldwide pandemic, and new mutations that make the virus more transmissible and/or virulent have been identified.  Given the apparent unpredictability of the course of a coronavirus infection (the sniffles of a common cold, enduring widespread and long-term organ damage, death) there is no good reason that coronaviruses have not remained a continuing commitment in biomedical research since the original SARS outbreak.

Musk, policy in the guise of efficiency

Social Security

Is in the crosshairs 

What is going on should be obvious. Musk wants to cut off your benefits and then have Congress use the savings to give himself a gigantic tax cut. But Social Security is incredibly popular, so he can’t be open about his intentions. Instead, he is trying to convince Americans that our Social Security system is overrun with massive fraud. The truth is the opposite.

More on long COVID

Twitter w link to the Gauntlet

in

this article aims to outline the basics of Long COVID. What the term refers to scientifically and colloquially, how it can present, hypotheses as to its pathogenesis/es, and where we go from here. It presents some broad definitions, explores some subcategories, and leaves you with the open questions and debates researchers and patients are asking, exploring and living out. There are still many things we don’t know yet. But what we do know, should be shared. 

Although a more severe infection increases your risk of Long COVID, most Long COVID cases- over 90%- began with a mild infection, due to the much larger number of mild infections. And recent studies have found that the risk of developing Long COVID is cumulative, meaning that three infections are more dangerous than one, five more dangerous than three, and so on. 

Immunity to SARS-COV-2 is short-term, and new variants are constantly arising because of our collective decision to continue spreading the virus. Since we must all expect, in the current “new normal” of recurrent SARS infections, to continue to be exposed to COVID, we must all learn the risks of exposure our government has failed to inform us about.