Allaxys Communications --- Transponder V --- Allaxys Forum 1
Covid-Pandemie und H5N1-Pandemie - das Ende der Menschheit und vieler anderer Tierarten => Covid-Pandemie und H5N1-Pandemie => Topic started by: Krokant on June 13, 2024, 08:00:31 AM
-
Endlich einer mehr, der sagt, was Sache ist.
Dies ist ein nur Anker. Bitte unbedingt das Original lesen!
This is only an anchor. Do read the original!
https://www.ineteconomics.org/perspectives/blog/from-long-covid-odds-to-lost-iq-points-ongoing-threats-you-dont-know-about
[*quote*]
The Institute for New Economic Thinking
Article
From Long COVID Odds to Lost IQ Points: Ongoing Threats You Don’t Know About
By Lynn Parramore
May 31, 2024 | Health
(https://pbs.twimg.com/card_img/1797412574901796864/49n8kJkc?format=jpg&name=small)
https://pbs.twimg.com/card_img/1797412574901796864/49n8kJkc?format=jpg&name=900x900
Stuck in a fog of misleading narratives, most of us don’t see the true extent of COVID’s persisting—and intensifying—threats. INET’s Lynn Parramore talks to Dr. Phillip Alvelda about the dangers we’re missing and the failures of public health agencies to inform and protect us. *This is Part 1 of a two-part interview.
We’re done with the pandemic, right? Well, heads up: it’s still here, and it’s quietly causing havoc in ways you likely aren’t even aware of. Getting COVID repeatedly – including asymptomatic infections you never knew you had — can damage your health for years to come and dramatically increase your chances of Long COVID. Low vaccination rates, waning immunity, and ditching precautions have left us wide open to a host of serious problems that are entirely avoidable.
Did you know that COVID is nothing like the flu, and yearly vaccines can’t keep up with its rapid mutations? Or that even mild infections have been shown to cause a drop in IQ points? How about the fact that 90% of Long COVID cases come from mild or asymptomatic infections? Or that repeat infections can make you susceptible to heart attacks, strokes, and diseases like measles, Polio, or Diabetes? Did you know that, at the current rate of infections, most Americans may end up with some form of Long COVID?
Probably not, because nobody’s telling you.
Dr. Phillip Alvelda, a former program manager in DARPA’s Biological Technologies Office, which pioneered the synthetic biology industry and mRNA vaccine technology, is the founder of Medio Labs, a major COVID diagnostic testing company. Alvelda has closely monitored COVID developments and points out that while we’ve grown complacent, it’s not solely our doing. He criticizes the failure of governments and health agencies like the CDC and the WHO to warn about Long COVID and reinfection, as well as their neglect of effective mitigation strategies and tracking systems. Disturbingly, he discusses negligence, and even deception, about what they knew, when they knew it, and how they protected themselves without informing the public. It all adds up to a grave injustice, he says, warning of what he calls the potential for a “lost generation” — our health needlessly risked. Amazingly, it’s all avoidable.
Alvelda talks to the Institute for New Economic Thinking about how what we don’t know will definitely hurt us.
Lynn Parramore: A recent Gallup poll says that 59% of Americans believe the pandemic is over. What’s the actual situation?
Phillip Alvelda: By no means is it over. It is a continuing pandemic that most nations are not only failing to address — but are addressing more and more poorly.
LP: So most of us are currently living in a false reality?
PA: That’s correct.
LP: What do we need to know about emerging COVID variants and the current effectiveness of vaccines?
PA: The key thing is that when we refer to a variant, we’re talking about a new strain of the virus that has mutated in a way that allows it to bypass the effects of the vaccine, leading to a resurgence because the older vaccines no longer work as well against it. So, the longer the time interval since your last booster, the less effective your immunity becomes, making it easier for you to catch the newest strain of COVID. That’s piece number one.
Number two, this means that we’re going to have successive waves of new variants until more stringent measures are undertaken to eliminate them. As long as COVID is only now immediately killing one and a half percent of the people that get it, the government seems to think that’s an okay death toll to live with.
When we’re talking about COVID, there are all sorts of ways for a government or even a public health organization to hide or downplay its effects, like tweaking or shutting off data or just not talking about it, but if you look at the increase in deaths and the ailments people are succumbing to, you can see that the COVID death toll continues. The really concerning issue finally starting to gain attention—something we’ve been saying for a couple of years—is the toll of Long COVID.
LP: Before we dive into Long COVID, let’s touch on current vaccine guidance. The CDC now recommends that people 65 and over get an updated shot if their last one was four months ago or longer. It also says everyone else over the age of 6 months should get an updated vaccine, but it says nothing about timing. With the virus mutating, that message seems muddled, doesn’t it?
PA: I agree, it’s muddled and it’s terrible – and that’s the way it has been throughout the pandemic. The CDC’s past claims – put out with certainty — that the virus wasn’t airborne, that you’re fine with 6 feet distancing, and so on – all that was wrong. And the problems of communication and guidance continue. The CDC is now saying that infected people can go out in public if their symptoms are improving and they have been fever-free for 24 hours without medication. That goes against science, which says that people can still transmit the virus for up to 14 days after infection. Even though a person might feel better, they can’t tell that they are, in fact, still infectious.
The UK and the US are among the few nations where public health agencies have been subverted, controlled, and confused by the political machinery. As a result, they’ve abandoned their public health mission and are merely making a minimal effort to maintain politics and economics as usual. The reality is that everyone, from infants on up, would benefit dramatically from receiving a booster every six months. What you need is the most updated vaccine available, whether that’s a booster of the most recent formulation or a new vaccine designed for a completely new set of variants. Essentially, you should be getting whatever is the latest available.
LP: So regardless of age or health condition, we should all be getting a shot every six months? Not once a year as we’ve been led to think?
PA: Yes, that’s correct. It’s that simple. Every six months. Health agencies are trying to get people to treat COVID like other diseases, even though it’s actually very different. They’re trying to get us used to the idea of getting an annual booster, similar to what you do for the flu. But COVID variants progress faster than that, which is why COVID is a very different situation.
LP: So it’s known that a shot once a year isn’t going to cut it, even though the CDC won’t come out and say it?
PA: That’s right.
LP: Let’s talk about the effects of repeat COVID infections on our bodies. Say, I’ve had an infection or two, but with very mild symptoms. What might these infections be silently doing to my immune system and overall health?
PA: Even a mild or asymptomatic infection can harm the immune system. It can make you susceptible to new diseases that might not have bothered you before, but now, with your weakened immune system, these new diseases can find a foothold and attack you. Also, conditions that may have been dormant or held in check in your body by your immune system could resurface now that it’s weakened – things like shingles, HIV, or a resurgence of herpes. We’re seeing resurgences of all those things in the general population. We’re also seeing a resurgence in measles, whooping cough, and polio — all these things that we thought we’d gotten rid of. Whooping cough cases have been exploding in the UK. Our mass herd immunity is weakened and those diseases are all coming up again.
Beyond that, getting a COVID infection can double your risk of heart attack, increase the risk of stroke by three times, and double the risk of diabetes. All these things happen as a result of your COVID infection, and they persist for as much as two years, even if you had a mild or even an asymptomatic infection.
LP: Most people don’t seem to realize that half of COVID cases are thought to be asymptomatic. So if I’ve had the virus – and I may not even know it because I didn’t have so much as a sniffle. Yet I still may have future health consequences, even years later. That’s pretty sobering.
PA: That’s right. And the scary thing is that now this is not a speculative thing. We know that the virus attacks and kills the neurons in the brain any time you are infected. We can measure the shrinkage of your brain matter. Even an asymptomatic case of COVID can result in IQ points lost. Neuroscientist Danielle Beckman and others who specialize in brain pathology microscopy have been studying how the virus infects and damages the brain — including brain abnormalities still showing up in people two years after recovering from a COVID infection. She regularly posts images and videos on X.com that show the virus destroying neurons.
A recent study in the New England Journal of Medicine reveals that people who have recovered from mild COVID-19 cases lose about 3 IQ points. Those with long COVID see a 6-point drop, while ICU patients lose 9 points. Just getting reinfected was associated with losing an extra 2 points in IQ. A peer-reviewed study just out reports that 90% of Long COVID patients had mild or asymptomatic initial infections.
LP: My guess is that the majority of people have no clue about this.
PA: Tens of millions of people don’t know it. And they don’t know that there’s a surge in incidences of a whole bunch of other diseases that really are because of the Long COVID effect.
You don’t realize that all kinds of symptoms you might be experiencing actually come from Long COVID. The challenge is that the virus can attack you anywhere in your body. You’re vulnerable wherever you happen to have a weakness to begin with. The cognitive impact might show up as anxiety, depression, or lack of emotion. You might experience postural tachycardia, which means that when you stand up, your heart rate shoots up. Or maybe you just can’t exercise the way you could anymore. You’ve lost lung capacity.
My friend Bryan Johnson, a high-profile billionaire, is spending two million dollars annually to rigorously monitor his system, focusing on markers that indicate the age of each of his organs. He had an asymptomatic COVID infection that aged his lungs 13 years.
LP: Wow. A case with zero symptoms did that much damage to his lungs?
PA: That is correct.
LP: Why isn’t this kind of information all over the media?
PA: I think the real problem is that the mainstream media has been kind of decimated by the current business model and they’re less capable of doing real journalism anymore. They just publish the stuff that comes to them. The major channels of information are, unfortunately, propaganda channels from governments. The World Health Organization (WHO) denied the fact that COVID was airborne for a long time. It took them until the end of 2021 to unequivocally admit it. They denied it despite the fact that in 2020, aerosol experts were warning that the virus was airborne, and scientists even signed an open letter pleading that health agencies and governments recognize this reality. But the WHO’s prolonged process of correcting the mistake led to a great deal of confusion – and sickness and death.
It came out recently that in February 2020, the WHO put out an office memorandum about a return to their Geneva office scheduled for May 2020. In the memo, the WHO disclosed that they’d upgraded all of the air handling systems as well as their filtering systems. While they were telling the public at large to wash their hands and don’t worry, it’s not airborne, they upgraded all the airborne protections for their offices. They absolutely knew and they refused to admit it over and over.
LP: It certainly doesn’t produce confidence when they stuck to that stance despite the evidence and researchers’ warnings. We weren’t told that COVID was airborne, to our detriment. What aren’t we being told now that could hurt us?
PA: There are several things. For example, you could catch the measles all of a sudden. That’s what can happen with a weakened immune system due to COVID infections.
LP: When we hear about measles cases cropping up, we may think of vaccine hesitancy fueled by misinformation propagated by figures like RFK Jr. But you’re saying COVID-weakened immune systems play a role?
PA: Both of these things are happening. It’s sometimes hard to tease apart exactly which one is more important. But we know both are there.
LP: What aren’t we being told about Long COVID?
PA: We know about the ongoing seriousness of Long COVID because of the survey information and the continuing excess deaths. We also know of it because of the drop in labor participation attributed to long-term disability from disease. All of these things are coming through. We see long-term illnesses that only started to spike when the pandemic began, and really took off when all the mitigations were lifted.
There may even be active deception around this topic. A graph was recently put out by the ONS [Office for National Statistics in the UK]. The text on the graph states that the majority of Long COVID cases were contracted from cases people had more than two years ago, and at first glance, the graph seems to support the assertion. But if you look at the graph a little more closely, you realize they’ve monkeyed with the X-axis and the size of the bins [groups of data within a specified range] for each one of the bars in the chart. If you actually fix the X-axis, it’s clear that Long COVID has been skyrocketing in the last year. It appears that the ONS may have purposely manipulated the chart to hide the fact that Long COVID is exploding right now, because building such a jimmied custom chart takes MUCH more work than simply plotting the data.
LP: Why would cases of Long COVID be exploding now? Is it because more people have had multiple infections?
PA: Yes, that’s part of it. People are getting COVID because they’ve removed all of the abatements. During the last Omicron wave, more people were infected with Omicron than with any other variant that came before it. Another factor in the increase in Long COVID is that the booster and new vaccine uptake has fallen way down. In September 2022, new bivalent COVID-19 boosters became available in the United States, but only 19% of Americans got a shot. That means only 19% of people had any real protection from Omicron. People think, oh, I’ve gotten COVID, so that should give me some immunity. That’s actually wrong. It turns out that having COVID once gives you a little bit of immunity to that variant, but it doesn’t really give you much immunity at all to the next variant. So with new variants emerging every month, you only have about four to six weeks of immunity, effectively, from catching COVID.
So people are getting more and more vulnerable. More and more are getting infected. And unless people start masking or we start upgrading the indoor air quality, you’re going to see these patterns continue. Every time you have COVID, it damages your immune system a little bit more. And with every new infection, your chances of getting Long COVID increase – and not by a little bit. Today, the statistics in the UK and the US are pretty similar. Tulane School of Medicine’s Michael Hoerger calculates that the average US citizen has by now had COVID 3.2 times. He further estimates that if we continue with the status quo, the average American will have had it 7.3 times in four years.
LP: If the average American has already had COVID 3.2 times, that alone makes it a very different illness from something like the flu. I don’t know anyone who has had the flu three times in the last couple of years, do you?
PA: No. I don’t.
LP: And again, many people are getting COVID without symptoms, so they don’t realize they’re getting reinfected.
PA:. Correct. When the next wave of infections is here, everyone who gets it will be at greater risk of getting Long COVID. Each infection increases the cumulative risk.
LP: On the CDC website, it states: “Each time a person is infected or reinfected with SARS-CoV-2, they have a risk of developing Long COVID.” But it doesn’t say anything about the cumulative effect that makes your risk go way with each infection. Are they downplaying the risk of reinfection?
PA: That’s correct. And remember, people are having health issues that they don’t understand to be related to COVID. Even before the pandemic, life expectancy had been dropping for many in the US. For example, people without a bachelor’s degree have a life expectancy of 8 ½ years shorter than people with a BA. That was revealed in the new study by Princeton economists Anne Case and Angus Deaton.
Unfortunately, when you add the effects of COVID infections, life spans are going to be even shorter. Beyond that, your healthy lifespan gets shorter, too.
LP: In other words, you’ll end up spending a larger portion of your life dealing with health issues and a lower quality of life?
PA: Right. This is debilitating to our society and to the economy.
LP: How’s the labor system holding up under COVID’s continuing influence?
PA: We have the stats about people leaving the labor market and not coming back. We see the massive decline in the number of teachers, the massive decline in the number of hospital and healthcare workers — all these people that were on the front line that have had the most infections.
LP: With COVID mitigation efforts dwindling, besides getting boosters and updated vaccines, what other personal protections can help us in our daily routines? What steps should we prioritize?
PA: The most important thing to know is that there are certain physical things that the virus can’t escape, no matter how it mutates. As long as you have an N95 mask, that’s great protection for you. Anytime you’re going into a crowded place when the prevalence is high, put on an N95 mask, and don’t compromise with a surgical mask or even a KN95 mask. The KN95 masks are the ones with the ear loops. They don’t hold against your face tightly enough to protect you as well. A KN95 mask is slightly better than a surgical mask with about 40% protection. But a good N95 mask, like the 3M Aura, gives you like 99.5% protection, so you can be in an airborne virus-laden environment much longer and not catch it. So that’s number one.
Number two is that fresh air is king. Wherever you are, open the windows. Open the doors. Advocate for improved air quality standards. The most important place to do this is the schools. I’ll give you a couple of interesting stats. Of the pandemic infections that drove the spread of COVID, I believe the statistics show that around 80% of transmissions occurred at what we term “super-spreader events.” This means that one highly infected person can enter a room, saturate the air with the virus, and infect a lot of people. That’s 80% of the transmission of the whole pandemic. Of that 80%, 70% of it happened in schools. Most of that was in schools that had poor ventilation. And it’s entirely fixable.
All we need are indoor air quality standards. The standards that we need are at least seven air exchanges per hour. You need to measure the CO2 in the room to make sure that for the number of people that are in it, that you have enough fresh air coming in. If your CO2 gets over 800 parts per million, you have too many people in the room and, or not enough ventilation.
LP: What’s the cost of a device for measuring CO2? Is there an easily affordable device?
PA: Absolutely. You can get a $50 device that shows the CO2 concentration in a room. Every classroom should have this, and every office, every workplace. There are a couple of other things they should be doing, too. They can augment it with filtration with MERV 13 filters. If you can’t do it in the building’s HVAC infrastructure, you can make portable ones for about $60 [See Corsi Rosenthal Boxes]. The other thing that is super important and super powerful, probably the best thing we could do, is what are called germicidal UV lamps. If you set those up in a room, it’s equivalent to about 24 air exchanges per hour. So they’re even better than ventilation and filtering.
I should point out that there are, in fact, places that have installed all of these: fresh air, filtering, and germicidal UV lights. Do you know where they are?
LP: Where?
PA: The White House, Congress, Number 10 Downing, Parliament, the Reichstag, and WHO. All of our leaders have these protections and procedures in place.
LP: But not our schoolchildren.
PA: Well, the school where [former CDC director] Rochelle Walensky’s children go, they have these upgrades.
LP: But your average public school, not so much, I’m assuming.
PA: No. Part of the problem was that while the schools were given the money to do these things, but because the WHO and the CDC were not open about the airborne nature of the virus, they spent it on things that didn’t help, like surface cleansing, plexiglass shields, and gloves instead of on air quality improvement.
LP: Let’s hope your message spreads about the affordability of protective measures and the consequences of not having them – for all of us. Thanks so much, Phillip.
**Stay tuned for Part 2 of this discussion.
Lynn Parramore
Senior Research Analyst
Senior Research Analyst, INET
[...]
[*/quote*]
-
This is only an anchor. DO READ THE ORIGINAL!
https://www.ineteconomics.org/perspectives/blog/debilitating-a-generation-expert-warns-that-long-covid-may-eventually-affect-most-americans
[*quote*]
The Institute for New Economic Thinking
Article
“Debilitating a Generation”: Expert Warns That Long COVID May Eventually Affect Most Americans
By Lynn Parramore
Jun 13, 2024 | Health
In a candid discussion with INET’s Lynn Parramore, Dr. Phillip Alvelda highlights the imminent dangers of long COVID, criticizing governments and health agencies for ongoing preventable suffering and deaths.
* This is Part 2 of a two-part interview.
Think you’ve grasped the full extent of COVID’s ongoing impact? Think again. As Americans shrug off vaccines and forget indoor air quality, the virus stealthily continues its destructive path. This was pretty much inevitable without new guidance urging a change in strategy and nobody telling us the full truth.
The danger is clear and present: COVID isn’t merely a respiratory illness; it’s a multi-dimensional threat impacting brain function, attacking almost all of the body’s organs, producing elevated risks of all kinds, and weakening our ability to fight off other diseases. Reinfections are thought to produce cumulative risks, and Long COVID is on the rise. Unfortunately, Long COVID is now being considered a long-term chronic illness — something many people will never fully recover from.
Dr. Phillip Alvelda, a former program manager in DARPA’s Biological Technologies Office that pioneered the synthetic biology industry and the development of mRNA vaccine technology, is the founder of Medio Labs, a COVID diagnostic testing company. He has stepped forward as a strong critic of government COVID management, accusing health agencies of inadequacy and even deception. Alvelda is pushing for accountability and immediate action to tackle Long COVID and fend off future pandemics with stronger public health strategies.
Contrary to public belief, he warns, COVID is not like the flu. New variants evolve much faster, making annual shots inadequate. He believes that if things continue as they are, with new COVID variants emerging and reinfections happening rapidly, the majority of Americans may eventually grapple with some form of Long COVID.
Let’s repeat that: At the current rate of infection, most Americans may get Long COVID.
In the following discussion with the Institute for New Economic Thinking, Alvelda discusses the wider social fallout from this ongoing health crisis, which could be avoided with the right mindset and action. He raises tough questions: Without robust surveillance and mitigation measures, how do we prevent future outbreaks from spiraling out of control? Is our pandemic readiness up to par for looming threats like bird flu? How do we cope with a population ravaged by the lasting impacts of Long COVID? The answers are a wake-up call.
Lynn Parramore: You’ve raised concerns about Long COVID rates surging under the radar. The National Academy’s new 265-page report is eye-opening, listing up to 200 symptoms affecting nearly every organ, hurting your ability to work, lasting months to years. They say cases of Long COVID are rising in 2024. How is this impacting people’s lives?
https://nap.nationalacademies.org/catalog/27756/long-term-health-effects-of-covid-19-disability-and-function
Phillip Alveda: Some people can get Long COVID, and maybe it ages them a little bit, but it doesn’t change them very much. But for others, their lives are devastated. The daughter of a friend was infected in 2020 and started having seizures. She had to drop out of school and couldn’t exercise. It took her four years to recover. She was just getting back to health, but a strenuous workout, a few late nights studying, and stress triggered more seizures and a setback.
A new report commissioned by the Social Security Administration in 2022 says that Long Covid is a chronic illness. People see gradual improvement in symptoms over time, but a plateau may occur 6-12 months post-infection, and only 22% fully recover within a year. Others remain stable or get worse.
LP: Those people may never get to their former health.
PA: That’s right.
LP: A recent JAMA study found that US adults with Long COVID are more prone to depression and anxiety – and they’re struggling to afford treatment. Given the virus’s impact on the brain, I guess the link to mental health issues isn’t surprising.
PA: There are all kinds of weird things going on that could be related to COVID’s cognitive effects. I’ll give you an example. We’ve noticed since the start of the pandemic that accidents are increasing. A report published by TRIP, a transportation research nonprofit, found that traffic fatalities in California increased by 22% from 2019 to 2022. They also found the likelihood of being killed in a traffic crash increased by 28% over that period. Other data, like studies from the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration, came to similar conclusions, reporting that traffic fatalities hit a 16-year high across the country in 2021. The TRIP report also looked at traffic fatalities on a national level and found that traffic fatalities increased by 19%.
LP: What role might COVID play?
PA: Research points to the various ways COVID attacks the brain. Some people who have been infected have suffered motor control damage, and that could be a factor in car crashes. News is beginning to emerge about other ways COVID impacts driving. For example, in Ireland, a driver’s COVID-related brain fog was linked to a crash that killed an elderly couple.
Damage from COVID could be affecting people who are flying our planes, too. We’ve had pilots that had to quit because they couldn’t control the airplanes anymore. We know that medical events among U.S. military pilots were shown to have risen over 1,700% from 2019 to 2022, which the Pentagon attributes to the virus.
LP: I suspect that most of the time, people don’t realize that COVID or Long COVID is an underlying factor in things like accidents or just feeling more tired or foggy or generally unwell than usual.
PA: Correct. The surges in these incidents are exactly correlated with each wave of the pandemic — and I want to highlight here that they are correlated strongly with the COVID surges, and most explicitly NOT correlated with vaccine distributions. We know people are generally sicker today than before the pandemic. There are more people unable to work, there’s more absenteeism, etc. All of this has gone up overall, and it’s key to point out that we’re not just talking about older people. The people who are proportionately most affected right now are the caregivers of school-aged children.
LP: How do vaccines safeguard us from both the short-term and long-term effects of COVID?
PA: The latest boosters/vaccines do offer SOME protection from catching the disease. And while it varies somewhat from variant to variant, that starts at about 60%, peaking 2 weeks after inoculation and lasts for about 4 months, and then after that declines at about 4% decrease in effectiveness per month thereafter.
What they do very well is prevent bad outcomes in the acute phase of infection, when one is most likely — though not certain — to have symptoms.
What they do poorly is prevent bad outcomes in the post-acute phase whether one has had symptoms or not. Recent studies have shown that the very latest booster/vaccine only offers a 20% - 25% reduction in the likelihood of Long COVID. And if you’re not current on your boosters, you have essentially no additional protection from Long COVID. It’s this last bit of information that public health agencies are failing to openly and clearly disclose, and most governments continue to pretend otherwise, having yet to take meaningful action to stem a growing post-COVID pandemic of disability.
LP: You’ve criticized the track record of the CDC and the WHO – particularly their stubborn denial that COVID is airborne.
PA: They knew the dangers of airborne transmission but refused to admit it for too long. They were warned repeatedly by scientists who studied aerosols. They instituted protections for themselves and for their kids against airborne transmission, but they didn’t tell the rest of us to do that. They didn’t feel like it would be advantageous, to be honest.
LP: You’ve also criticized the Biden administration for glossing over the ongoing situation during his presidency. Why the reluctance to offer clearer guidance and warnings?
PA: It’s interesting, I take part in a Global Biosecurity Working Group that played a big role in defining the nine-point plan to address the pandemic that Biden used to get elected. But the minute he was elected, he put a hedge fund guy, Jeff Zients, in charge of the pandemic response. Zients decided the best way forward was to convince people that the pandemic wasn’t happening.
We’ve seen a very troubling memo sent in February 2022 by leaders of Impact Research, one of the top political strategy and polling consultancies for President Joe Biden, on how Democrats should position themselves on COVID. Impact recommended that they should declare it over, claim victory, and keep quiet about ongoing threats and mitigation efforts. You can read the memo on the US House of Representatives web server and see how the report suggests it’d be politically more expedient to convince people the pandemic is not happening than it is to actually address it. And that’s just what the Biden administration has done. They haven’t been following science. They followed the political advice.
The Biden administration discarded almost all aspects of the nine-point plan that could have halted the pandemic, saved lives — and by the way, done better for the economy than their exclusive reliance on vaccines. They used the CDC, the WHO, and the HHS [Department of Health and Human Services] to amplify the message that the vaccine is all you need and you don’t need to worry about anything else.
LP: How would you grade Biden on how he’s handled the pandemic?
PA: I’d give him an F. In some ways, he fails worse than Trump because more people have actually died from COVID on his watch than on Trump’s, though blame has to be shared with Republican governors and legislators who picked ideological fights opposing things like responsible masking, testing, vaccination, and ventilation improvements for partisan reasons. Biden’s administration has continued to promote the false idea that the vaccine is all that is needed, perpetuating the notion that the pandemic is over and you don’t need to do anything about it. Biden stopped the funding for surveillance and he stopped the funding for renewing vaccine advancement research. Trump allowed 400,000 people to die unnecessarily. The Biden administration policies have allowed more than 800,000 to 900,000 and counting.
I would further note that all the while, the White House has maintained the very strictest abatements to protect people who live and work there from the virus: In order to enter the White House, they have to have had no symptoms for 14 days, the latest booster vaccinations up-to-date, and a negative rapid test. They have nine or better fresh air exchanges per hour and all filters are upgraded to MERV 13. They have also installed 220 nanometer Germicidal UV lamps. After a positive test, you have to have a PCR Test negative to return to work. The White House admitted quietly on CSPAN that the protections were still in place in July of 2023 when an Israeli delegation was not admitted after testing positive for COVID, after claiming with much fanfare the prior April that the pandemic was over and that it was safe to return to work.
LP: All those precautions are certainly not happening at the workplaces of the vast majority of Americans and in our schools.
PA: No.
LP: So what would Trump’s grade have been?
PA: D at best. He screwed up on the distribution and he politicized the whole thing so that now half the country doesn’t think the pandemic is real, and too many are disregarding precautions and opposing public health efforts. Trump really started the destruction of public health in the United States.
LP: How can we push for more effective COVID action from the government? Where to start?
PA: I think the number one thing is holding the people accountable who gave the bad advice that led to so many deaths, and removing them from positions of influence. It boggles my mind that in the UK, the proponents of the Great Barrington Declaration, which advocated for a herd immunity approach, continue to advise the government. That’s still the policy in the UK, and it’s still the policy here. We’re still acting like Long COVID doesn’t exist despite the growing mountain of evidence to the contrary.
LP: For those who may not recall, the Great Barrington Declaration was a controversial proposal sponsored by a libertarian think tank in 2020, which got people thinking that a sort of global chickenpox party would be a good idea for COVID — that it would help us achieve herd immunity. The herd immunity approach to COVID is now widely regarded as impractical and unethical.
PA: Correct. And we now have irrefutable evidence that each additional infection a person gets does mounting cumulative damage to the immune system.
LP: If you had to sum up your greatest concern right now, what would it be?
PA: That we’re slowly debilitating a generation by refusing to take obvious precautions.
LP: The parallels between the COVID situation and the Spanish flu are striking. The data from that pandemic tells a story of a generation dealing with all kinds of incapacitation, with many facing lasting post-infection health issues like respiratory troubles, neurological issues, and psychiatric disorders.
PA: Oh, for sure. People really want to forget what happened.
LP: Today, you see folks getting sick in all sorts of ways – dizziness, vision problems, more colds than usual, etc. — and yet don’t imagine it could be COVID-related. There’s this disconnect happening.
PA: Yes. You hear people saying they have another flu and they’ve had a cough for two weeks. But there’s no flu in circulation — and few flu infections last for two weeks. People don’t have a clear understanding of how you can still contract the virus. In their defense, no one has told them plainly that just walking into a room where someone with COVID was 40 minutes ago could get you infected.
LP: And as you’ve noted, a key issue is that people often don’t realize they’ve been infected or reinfected. How accurate are the over-the-counter tests at this point?
PA: Not very accurate at all because they haven’t been updated. They haven’t been updated because the government stopped sponsoring the creation of those tests. The volume of testing has dropped so low, it’s just not profitable for companies to develop new ones anymore.
LP: If you’re sick, how do you find out if it’s COVID or COVID-related?
PA: This is one of the problems with Long COVID. Many insurance companies are not even recognizing that Long COVID exists. Those that do require that you have a confirmatory PCR test. But many people have had COVID and didn’t get the PCR test. The good news is that now there’s a nucleocapsid test. This test can show you that you have had COVID, even if you don’t have an active infection now. So that is something.
But it’s a battle. My friend’s child is covered by Kaiser and they are completely incapable and unwilling to do anything to help her because she’s got a myriad of symptoms and doesn’t fit into their neat stovepipes of medical disciplines. Her brain was attacked by the virus and her autonomic nervous system doesn’t work properly. She’s got heart rate control issues, severe anemia, and sugar metabolism problems that are akin to diabetes, but it’s not quite diabetes. She’s got seizures, muscle tremors, cognitive issues, and vision problems. All these things come and go depending on how her body is stressed. No one in Kaiser is steeped in Long COVID or the fact that all these symptoms come from the original source of a viral infection, just like HIV.
Some places offer help. There is a local Long COVID care clinic at UC San Francisco and another one at Stanford. But if you can’t get a referral to those people, you’re screwed. And by the way, these places are overwhelmed. They’re not taking a lot of new patients.
LP: Can you say more about what’s at stake if we continue this way, with the low vaccination rates and abandonment of abatement measures?
PA: What does this look like if we continue on the way we are doing right now? What is the worst-case scenario? Well, I think there are two important eventualities. So we’re what, four years in? Most people have had COVID three and a half times on average already. After another four years of the same pattern, if we don’t change course, most people in the U.S. will have some flavor of Long COVID of one sort or another.
LP: That’s a really alarming possibility — that most Americans could potentially have Long COVID in as little as four years?
PA: That’s what I’m saying. And we know that somewhere between five and eight percent of those people will be so debilitated that they will no longer be able to work.
LP: What would be at the top of your list to move us in a better direction right now?
PA: I would put in place indoor air quality standards with teeth, standards that have tough compliance penalties, and requirements that every tested location be measured and certified regularly. And that should start with the schools. Then I would go to superspreader venues: arenas and churches, restaurants, bars, and gyms, especially the businesses that are densely populated, like meatpacking and assembly lines and things like that.
LP: Say you’ve taken your individual precautions – you’re getting your vaccine shot every six months, you mask in crowded places. What if your boss says, “I’m not shelling out fifty bucks for a CO2 device to test the air quality”? What can we do?
PA: It’s an important question. OSHA [the Occupational Safety and Health Administration] has been largely sidelined. Their decision not to emphasize the airborne transmission message stemmed from their acknowledgment that if they did, it would shift liability from individuals avoiding droplet transmission to institutions responsible for maintaining air quality. And they did not want the institutions to have that liability. Now, without question, the CDC and the WHO have finally acknowledged that they’ve been aware all along of its airborne nature. Donald Trump admitted as president he knew it was airborne in February of 2020.
We’ve been advising them since that time that it was airborne. In May 2020 [atmospheric chemist] Kim Prather did the actual physical experiment that demonstrated unequivocally that it was airborne and briefed [Anthony] Fauci and [Deborah] Birx in the White House. They have known for a long time that it’s airborne and they have resisted. And OSHA has been effectively powerless.
But I think the key is now that everyone’s admitted that the virus is airborne, there needs to be new indoor air quality standards. The healthcare industry has to require that healthcare workers are given proper respirators, N95 or better respirators, and not surgical masks.
I’m encouraged by a recent Colorado ruling where a surviving spouse got a judgment for her husband who was a healthcare worker. The courts said that the illness he died from was due to COVID contracted on the job and the employer, a nursing home, is responsible. That happened for the first time a few weeks ago.
LP: That’s a bit of encouraging news. Which nations, by the way, are doing a better job than the US and the UK? Who can we learn from?
PA: Those that did the best job are the ones that were run by women, notably, New Zealand, Taiwan, Norway, and Finland. It’s also the ones that are run by scientists and engineers: Singapore, Taiwan, Japan, Korea, Germany. The ones run by right-wing demagogues have done the worst.
LP: How can advances in surveillance and tracking technology help us as we go forward?
PA: Well, they’re almost immaterial because the government has shut down all the subsidies for them. The CMS [Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services] system still wants to charge so much for testing that it’s not monetarily feasible to do it on a national scale. And the government just turned off the requirement that the hospitals report their occupancy anymore. We’re turning off all the surveillance systems to try and get people to forget the fact that it’s still ongoing. Each new variant, really it’s just a coin toss on how lethal it is.
Now we also have to be concerned about the bird flu and the responses and mitigation efforts associated with that. Bird flu appears to have a very high death rate from infection, as high as 58%.
LP: The situation with bird flu is certainly getting more concerning with the CDC confirming that a third person in the U.S. has tested positive after being exposed to infected cows.
PA: Unfortunately, we’re repeating many of the same mistakes because we now know that the bird flu has made the jump to several species. The most important one now, of course, is the dairy cows. The dairy farmers have been refusing to let the government come in and inspect and test the cows. A team from Ohio State tested milk from a supermarket and found that 50% of the milk they tested was positive for bird flu viral particles.
LP: The FDA says that the milk is safe due to pasteurization, but they’re telling some states to curb the sale of raw milk and to test cows. What are you most concerned about?
PA: There’s a serious risk now in allowing the virus to freely evolve within the cow population. Each cow acts as a breeding ground for countless genetic mutations, potentially leading to strains capable of jumping to other species. If any of those countless genetic experiments within each cow prove successful in developing a strain transmissible to humans, we could face another pandemic – only this one could have a 58% death rate. Did you see the movie “Contagion?” It was remarkably accurate in its apocalyptic nature. And that virus only had a 20% death rate. If the bird flu makes the jump to human-to-human transition with even half of its current lethality, that would be disastrous.
LP: Does the mishandling of COVID render the population more vulnerable to other pandemics?
PA: Yes, it does. We’re facing a population with weakened immune systems that resist adhering to pandemic controls. That’s not a good foundation for dealing with bird flu and other potential pandemics.
LP: Thank you, Phillip. I hope we’ll be talking to you again as the bird flu situation progresses.
Lynn Parramore
Senior Research Analyst, INET
Featured in this article
Phillip Alvelda
CEO & Chairman, Brainworks Foundry, Inc.
More from Lynn Parramore
From Long COVID Odds to Lost IQ Points: Ongoing Threats You Don’t Know About
Article By Lynn Parramore
May 31, 2024
Work Longer, Die Sooner! America's Dire Need to Expand Social Security and Medicare
Article By Lynn Parramore
May 8, 2024
Are You Ready to Dive Deep into China's Intellectual Odyssey?
Article By Lynn Parramore
Apr 25, 2024
More articles
Antitrust Policy and Artificial Intelligence: Some Neglected Issues
Article By Cecilia Rikap
Jun 10, 2024
From Long COVID Odds to Lost IQ Points: Ongoing Threats You Don’t Know About
Article By Lynn Parramore
May 31, 2024
The Second Coming? Trump vs. Biden
Article By Thomas Ferguson and Servaas Storm
May 17, 2024
The Institute for New Economic Thinking
Institute for New Economic Thinking
60 E 42nd St, Ste 450
New York, NY 10165
(646) 751-4900
Terms of Use | Privacy Policy
©2024 Institute for New Economic Thinking. All Rights Reserved
[*/quote*]