Questioning the Safety of the COVID Vaccines is Now a Thought Crime

re: Lies, Damn Lies, and Statistics: VAERS Reporting for COVID Vaccine Adverse Events vs COVID Deaths
re: The Dismal Anti-Science of Modern Medicine: “less than 0.3% of all adverse drug events and 1-13% of serious events are reported to the Food and Drug Administration”
re: Trust the Process of Science over Time, NOT Scientists and “Experts”
re: Vaccine Safety: “fewer than 1% of vaccine adverse events are reported”
re: Sebastian Rushworth MD: COVID Prior Infection vs Vaccination

Questioning the side effect profile and safety of the COVID vaccines is a critically important thing to do. But it is now a thought crime that gets you banned on social media. Ditto for reporting government statistics.

From a data and science standpoint, the COVID vaccine push is one massive anti-scientific train wreck. There is no serious science at work being done. Rather, it’s a massive propaganda push that ignores individual risk assessment and seeks to ignore or obscure the negatives, starting by willfully not collecting side effect data—which thus insures plausible deniability.

The press is the most active player in the suppression and mischaracterization and outright fabrication of news. For example, the press won’t report what people like Joe Rogan actually said about getting the vaccine, because it’s as reasonable and as responsible risk assessment it gets. No doctor could have done it better or more balanced.

Why aren’t we getting any answers or reporting on questions like this (there are dozens):

• Relative to other vaccines, how many deaths do COVID vaccines cause?
• Relative to other vaccines, how many permanent disabilities do COVID vaccines cause?
• Relative to other vaccines, what about existing or new auto-immune disorders, heart attacks and strokes, neurological and brain damage, particularly in people with compromised health including the blood-brain barrier?
• Why the incompetent tracking of vaccine side effects, and why is there no FDA plan to track vaccine side effects at all?
• How can anyone claim a medicine or vaccine is safe when less than 0.3% of all adverse drug events and 1-13% of serious events are reported to the Food and Drug Administration ?
• Why aren’t excitotoxins and the blood-brain barrier of concern with the COVID vaccine, as well as COVID itself?

Where is the data? Not collected/not known.
Where is the science? What science? The data isn’t there.

“Follow the data, follow the science”. Yeah, right.

Worse, ethical boundaries have now been obliterated by the FDA by approving the vaccine for people at nil risk—children. No risk assessment can justify giving an experimental vaccine to children that are not at risk. It is a grotesque violation of medical ethics, and any doctor or nurse giving the vaccine to children has violated the “first, do no harm” rule.

Sebastian Rushworth MD: “62% reduction in the relative risk of dying among covid patients treated with Ivermectin”

re: Sebastian Rushworth MD

Update on ivermectin for covid-19

Sebastian Rushworth, M.D.,  9 May, 2021

...Let's move on and update our meta-analysis. The reason we need to do a meta-analysis here is that none of the trials of Ivermectin is large enough on its own to provide a definitive answer as to whether it is a useful treatment for covid-19 or not... I've included every double-blind randomized placebo-controlled trial I could find of ivermectin as a treatment for covid. Using only double-blind placebo-controlled trials means that only the highest quality studies are included in this meta-analysis, which minimizes the risk of biases messing up the results as far as possible.

What we see is a 62% reduction in the relative risk of dying among covid patients treated with ivermectin. That would mean that ivermectin prevents roughly three out of five COVID deaths. The reduction is statistically significant (p-value 0,004). In other words, the weight of evidence supporting ivermectin continues to pile up. It is now far stronger than the evidence that led to widespred use of remdesivir earlier in the pandemic, and the effect is much larger and more important (remdesivir was only ever shown to marginally decrease length of hospital stay, it was never shown to have any effect on risk of dying).

I understand why pharmaceutical companies don't like ivermectin. It's a cheap generic drug. Even Merck, the company that invented ivermectin, is doing it's best to destroy the drug's reputation at the moment. This can only be explained by the fact that Merck is currently developing two expensive new COVID drugs, and doesn't want an off-patent drug, which it can no longer make any profit from, competing with them.

The only reason I can think to understand why the broader medical establishment, however, is still so anti-ivermectin is that these studies have all been done outside the rich west. Apparently doctors and scientists outside North America and Western Europe can't be trusted, unless they're saying things that are in line with our pre-conceived notions.

Researchers at McMaster university are currently organizing a large trial of ivermectin as a treatment for covid-19, funded by the Bill and Melinda Gates foundation. That trial is expected to enroll over 3,000 people, so it should be definitive. It's going to be very interesting to see what it shows when the results finally get published.

WIND: amazing to see a doctor just come out and say it: with Big Pharma and the entire medical establishment, it’s all about the money, not about helping people sruvive. But only very poorly informed persons could think otherwise about virtually everything in health care, which in character finds little to distinguish itself from a criminally negligent enterprise hell bent on maximizing profits.

Excitoxins in Food + COVID Breaking Down the Blood-Brain Barrier — a Vicious Combination with the FDA Asleep at the Wheel?

re: The Lancet: “substantial neurological and psychiatric morbidity in the 6 months after COVID-19 infection”
re: Vaccine Safety: “fewer than 1% of vaccine adverse events are reported”
re: The Dismal Anti-Science of Modern Medicine: “less than 0.3% of all adverse drug events and 1-13% of serious events are reported to the Food and Drug Administration”

Absence of evidence is not evidence of absence, particularly when you don’t find what you are not looking for, especially when it is not desirable to find it.

Excitotoxins include monosodium glutamate (MSG), aspartame (diet drinks), L-Cysteine. Think just about ALL processed foods, many “health” and energy bars, restaurant food, diet drinks The grocery store is in effect a neurotoxic waste dump. It is why you should eat only whole foods.

MSG can be legally disguised as “natural flavor”, hydrolyzed protein, various protein isolates, casseinate, yeast extract, beef flavor, chicken flavor, flavoring, spices, malt flavoring, etc. It’s a legal con-game.

Particularly in liquids, excitotoxins rise rapidly in the blood, potentially entering the brain as the neurotransmitters glutamate and aspartate, which the body needs and uses. For a healthy adult (a tiny minority?) with a fully intact blood-brain barrier, the excitotoxins may be largely kept out—for a while. But when blood levels stay high for a long time (always), some gets through. And not all parts of the brain have a blood-brain barrier!

Even in a healthy person some level of these excitotoxins will get through. But millions of people lack a fully functional blood-brain barrier, including in-womb fetuses, infants, children and teens, elderly, mTBI victims, etc.

Once into the brain, the excitotoxins selectively excite neurons that primarily use those neurotransmitters, damaging or killing those neurons by firing continuously.

So why don’t people show problems? Because neurons damaged and killed by excitotoxins are not necessarily ones that cause immediate clinically obvious problems. Instead, we see rising levels of all sorts of neurodegenerative brain diseases that start cropping up by middle age, as small but key parts of the brain are degraded or wiped out until “all of a sudden” some nasty condition pops out when a critical threshold of neurons is lost.

COVID and excitotoxin damage — a new vector for brain damage?

Put these facts together:

• Food manufacturers, restaurants can legally include excitotoxins in food as per the FDA, which long ago accepted studies since proven sadly lacking to outright fraudulent, as proving safety.
• The FDA assumes a fully functional blood-brain barrier. But a very large proportion of the population (in-womb fetuses, infants, children through teens, elderly, mTBI victims, etc) do not have a fully functional brood-brain barrier.
• COVID apparently damages the blood brain barrier.

Hypothesis: the combination of blood-brain barrier damage by COVID together with the modern diet high in excitotoxins could be causing or at least exacerbating brain damage in excitotoxin-sensitive neurons.

I scan all my food labels and strictly avoid processed foods and anything containing excitoxins. But it is very easy to be tricked by misleading labeling, and I only learned about some of those tricks in recent months.

Science News: COVID-19 can affect the brain. New clues hint at how

...Those results suggest that clots, inflamed linings and leaks in the barriers that normally keep blood and other harmful substances out of the brain may all contribute to COVID-related brain damage.

...

WIND: it’s a scandal that excitoxins have been perfectly legal in food for decades now. But the FDA’s job has long been to protect industry, not people.

So.... tens of millions of people with not fully functional blood-brain barriers were almost certainly seeing localized brain damage from excitotoxins already: fetuses, infants, children through teens, mTBI victims, elderly, etc.

With a damaged blood-brain barrier in COVID patients, how many more millions will be hurt by excitotoxins in food, with effects to emerge a decade or two from now, over and above the immediate clinical issues?

It’s shocking to me that the researchers are not asking the questions about the implications of a blood-brain barrier that is “down”, since food ingredients like excitotoxins as well as many prescription medications could have major implications for brain damage.

Watching otherwise smart people fail to grasp the implications is depressing.

PS: hospital food almost certainly contains excitotoxins. The inmates are runing the asylum.

Reader Comment: COVID-19 Reinfection

re: The Lancet: “substantial neurological and psychiatric morbidity in the 6 months after COVID-19 infection”
re: Vaccine Safety: “fewer than 1% of vaccine adverse events are reported”
re: The Dismal Anti-Science of Modern Medicine: “less than 0.3% of all adverse drug events and 1-13% of serious events are reported to the Food and Drug Administration”

Recovering from Long Haul COVID, I keep getting advice and suggestions (including from at least one physician) that vaccination might do something for LHC.

I have seen no science supporting that idea—it’s purely anecdotal bunk as far as I can tell. And it makes no logical sense—damage done by COVID isn’t going to be repaired by challenging the body to fight off proteins it itself is forced to manufacture (the mRNA vaccine for example). You don’t get stronger by asking the body to fight off a challenge while also repairing damage at the same time! Might that double helping cause further problems?

Peter K writes:

I’ve been catching up on your blog. I haven’t read the Lancet paper you cited, but from my anecdotal poll of friends, re-infection is more common than you may think. I used to live in a small town in Wyoming, and more than a handful of my close friends there have developed COVID-19 at least 2X. For many reasons the town was reluctant to institute mask mandates and physical distancing, and now many are vaccine averse. As you may be aware, a year ago Wyoming as a whole got hit hard, and many believed they would be immune this year. Interestingly, because they believed they were immune, many of them traveled, and got infected while traveling, even by car. My friends there who got vaccinated and then traveled, have been fine.

I hear you about the vaccine and possible clotting. I don’t like that they keep talking about frequency being statistically less than normal everyday occurrence of clotting. I want to hear about how they’re teaching healthcare professionals to recognize and diagnose, then treat this successfully. Figuring out the mechanism of the cause would be ideal, but I don’t think that’s going to happen in the near term.

WIND: blood clots in the brain are basically strokes, causing permanent damage. Some types of strokes do not manifest in any clinical way. So we are dealing with massive risk here, potentially.

I still am having a hard time with the “hit hard” statistics. The CDC reporting guidelines classify anything that even has a whiff of COVID as such. It was and is junk data collection violating decades of protocol—fake science that in effect was and is used generate hysteria. The true data will never be known, which makes rational public policy much harder. Let’s see the two and three year statistics, and just how much damage was done by the policies, vs COVID itself.

As far as Wyoming, it looks pretty typical: the elderly and those with comorbidities die at far higher rates. And as usual, the baseline death rate is not subtracted. Consider that a death merely suspected of COVID is a “COVID death” and a death after the vaccine is frequently ruled out as unrelated. How can the medical profession apply this double standard?

Reinfection with COVID

Reinfection is of course possible, as is infection after vaccination. But the science of such claims rests on dubious data integrity.

• PCR tests had and might still have a high error rate because of an absurdly high cycle threshold value, leading to many false positives never recognized as such.
• Testing for COVID with a baseline rate near the error rate, you get GIGO data. Scientific junk.
• The latest science shows that natural immunity is as good or better than any vaccine.
• Many people are nutritionally deficient and thus at high risk. The reinfection idea presupposes a weak immune system. Fix nutrition as a priority.

Basically I don’t trust a claim of “reinfection” not supported by BOTH (1) clinical manifestation of COVID symptoms and (2) at least two positive COVID tests on different days. Seems like junk science otherwise.

Assuming reinfection, you have to ask what is wrong with someone's immune system to get it twice. Probably severe nutritional problems, stress, etc.

Experimental COVID vaccine safety

Note that some vaccines like the J&J don't work for 1 in 3 people. That’s what efficacy of 67% means. So I would not be going with that option.

I have auto-immune issues—multiple symptoms, but most worrisome is my body attacking my thyroid as per the thyroid peroxidase test. Which started after my initial infection. The CDC says "no data" on what the vaccine might do to people with auto-immune conditions. It is all anti-scientific unethical speculation.

Maybe the vaccine would be trouble-free and beneficial to me, and maybe it would fuck me up by “enhancing” an auto-immune response. No doctor can say ! Where in the news do you read anything about side effects short of death and/or what happens 3/6/9/12 months later? Nowhere, and no one cares and no one is studying it as a priority, if at all.

The latest science says getting the vaccine means stronger reactions to the vaccine for those who have had COVID). That might mean a higher risk of adverse events. And what does it mean if the body has an auto-immune situation?

Willful ignorance by the medical establishment

The medical establishment is not looking for micro clots from the vaccine or any number of potential harms.

Nor is there any plan whatsoever to track side effects months or years from now across diverse groups. It’s a medical ethics clusterfuck.

Vaccine Safety: “fewer than 1% of vaccine adverse events are reported”
The Dismal Anti-Science of Modern Medicine: “less than 0.3% of all adverse drug events and 1-13% of serious events are reported to the Food and Drug Administration”

You don't find what you don't look for. And they are not looking. We could find a year or two from now that 80 million people were damaged somehow by the vaccine—no science can claim otherwise at present. While that’s unlikely, when no concerted effort is made to gather data rigorously, it cannot be ruled out.

Science News: COVID-19 can affect the brain (clots, degraded blood-brain barrier, inflammation)

re: The Lancet: “substantial neurological and psychiatric morbidity in the 6 months after COVID-19 infection”

Not good news for me and many others recovering from Long Haul COVID.

TIP: COVID infection appears to be able to damage the blood-brain barrier. Don’t damage your brain irreperably— avoid excitotoxins like the poisons they are, since the blood-brain barrier may be partially “down” with COVID and its aftermath. And even when healthy, the blood-brain barrier does NOT totally reject excitotoxins. Make sure that magnesium (brain protective) supplementation is part of your care, ditto for other important nutrients.

Science News: COVID-19 can affect the brain. New clues hint at how

27 April 2021, emphasis added

For more than a year now, scientists have been racing to understand how the mysterious new virus that causes COVID-19 damages not only our bodies, but also our brains.

Early in the pandemic, some infected people noticed a curious symptom: the loss of smell. Reports of other brain-related symptoms followed: headaches, confusion, hallucinations and delirium. Some infections were accompanied by depression, anxiety and sleep problems.

Recent studies suggest that leaky blood vessels and inflammation are somehow involved in these symptoms. But many basic questions remain unanswered about the virus...

...

....suggests that the virus is affecting the brain in other ways, possibly involving blood vessels... Damage abounded, the team reported February 4 in the New England Journal of Medicine. Small clots sat in blood vessels. The walls of some vessels were unusually thick and inflamed. And blood was leaking out of the vessels into the surrounding brain tissue. “You can see all three things happening at the same time,” Nath says.

Those results suggest that clots, inflamed linings and leaks in the barriers that normally keep blood and other harmful substances out of the brain may all contribute to COVID-related brain damage.

...

Inflamed body and brain

Inflammation in the body can cause trouble in the brain,... Inflammatory signals released after injury can change the way the brain makes and uses chemical signaling molecules, called neurotransmitters, that help nerve cells communicate.

...With these findings, it’s not clear that SARS-CoV-2 affects people’s brains differently from other viruses, says Navis. In her post–COVID-19 clinic at Mount Sinai, she sees patients with fatigue, headaches, numbness and dizziness — symptoms that are known to follow other viral infections, too. “I’m hesitant to say this is unique to COVID,” Navis says. “We’re just not used to seeing so many people getting one specific infection, or knowing what the viral infection is.”

...

Lingering questions — what the virus actually does to the brain, who will suffer the most, and for how long — are still unanswered, and probably won’t be for a long time. The varied and damaging effects of lockdowns, the imprecision doctors and patients use for describing symptoms (such as the nonmedical term “brain fog”) and the indirect effects the virus can have on the brain all merge, creating a devilishly complex puzzle.

For now, doctors are busy focusing on ways in which they can help, even amid these mysteries, and designing larger, longer studies to better understand the effects of the virus on the brain.

WIND: good luck getting help from doctors—note the complete absence of even the thought that nutrition might be involved! You are the only person in the world who can heal yourself. It is extremely unlikely that a nutrition-ignorant allopathic medicine doctor will have a clue, let alone be able to help.

These speculations are consonant with all the things I’ve been saying for many months now: the Long Haul COVID issues appear to be (1) neurological, (2) inflammatory, (3) auto-immune (which leads to inflamation).

The referenced “fatigue , headaches” are distinctly “not me” symptoms new to me since infection, ditto for numbness in fingers at night sleeping on my side, and at times (now gone) a feeling like dizziness.

No wonder I’ve needed 12 hours of sleep a day all too frequently for the past year. I feel like such a loser having to go to bed at 8:30 PM and get up at 9-10 AM, so to speak. I’ve had to learn to accept that as a physical necessity for now.

FDA and CDC OK resuming J&J COVID-19 shots paused over rare clot concerns

re: Lies, Damn Lies, and Statistics: VAERS Reporting for COVID Vaccine Adverse Events vs COVID Deaths
re: The Dismal Anti-Science of Modern Medicine: “less than 0.3% of all adverse drug events and 1-13% of serious events are reported to the Food and Drug Administration”
re: Trust the Process of Science over Time, NOT Scientists and “Experts”
re: Vaccine Safety: “fewer than 1% of vaccine adverse events are reported”

To do proper risk assessment, you have to know the risks of these experimental vaccines. Immediate risks, medium-term risks, and long-term risks. Immediate risks are hardly reported at all, and medium/long term risks are not studied at all.

But fewer than 1% of vaccine adverse events are reported and less than 0.3% of all adverse drug events and 1-13% of serious events are reported to the FDA.

How can these clowns claim safety in light of such incompetent data collection?

FDA and CDC OK resuming J&J COVID-19 shots paused over rare clot concerns

23 April 2021

Experts debated a warning for women under 50, but decided to reinstate the vaccine without one...After reviewing safety data on rare blood clots linked to the Johnson & Johnson COVID-19 vaccine, federal regulators said vaccinations can resume immediately in people 18 and older. The U.S. Food and Drug Administration and the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention made the ruling April 23 following a meeting of CDC’s Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices about the vaccine, made by Janssen, J&J’s vaccine division. 

“The American public should feel reassured about the safety systems and protocols we have in place around the COVID-19 vaccines,” CDC director Rochelle Walensky said during a news briefing April 23. The system to detect safety concerns identified a small number of cases of rare blood clots accompanied by low platelet counts. The pause gave regulators time to spread the word to doctors and the public about the risk, she said.

Some members of the CDC advisory committee said that they were concerned that the decision doesn’t adequately warn women of an increased risk of rare blood clots. J&J and the FDA have added information to fact sheets about the vaccine that warns of the rare side effect and provides treatment recommendations.

Sign up for e-mail updates on the latest coronavirus news and research

Health officials examined data collected in the vaccine safety reporting system known as VAERS, where anyone can report side effects from vaccines. They found 15 cases of blood clots, all in women, among 7.95 million J&J doses administered. Three women died. 

...

WIND: the last time I heard of “rare” complications, I get severe nerve damage from Metronidazole. Rare means incompetent reporting. The medical establishment is intellectually and ethically corrupt in failing to track side effects in so many areas of medicine. But willful ignorance means better safety profiles and high profits.

You do not find what you are not looking for.

Let’s get this quack science from the CDC and FDA straight:

• If there is not a severe life-threatening reaction, it’s A-OK? By what science can we expect that the gamut of risks here is either NONE or MAYBE DIE? Where is the science studying the whole gamut of blood clot issues? Who is to say that tens of thousands or even millions of people are not having undetected micro strokes in the brain or elsewhere?
• Vaccine Safety: “fewer than 1% of vaccine adverse events are reported”
• Less than 0.3% of all adverse drug events and 1-13% of serious events are reported to the Food and Drug Administration

The Lancet: “substantial neurological and psychiatric morbidity in the 6 months after COVID-19 infection” (Long Haul COVID)

Not good news for me and many others, but it explains a lot about the difficulties I’ve been having from Long Haul COVID.

6-month neurological and psychiatric outcomes in 236 379 survivors of COVID-19: a retrospective cohort study using electronic health records

06 April 2021, emphasis added

Neurological and psychiatric sequelae of COVID-19 have been reported, but more data are needed to adequately assess the effects of COVID-19 on brain health. We aimed to provide robust estimates of incidence rates and relative risks of neurological and psychiatric diagnoses in patients in the 6 months following a COVID-19 diagnosis.

...

Interpretation

Our study provides evidence for substantial neurological and psychiatric morbidity in the 6 months after COVID-19 infection. Risks were greatest in, but not limited to, patients who had severe COVID-19. This information could help in service planning and identification of research priorities. Complementary study designs, including prospective cohorts, are needed to corroborate and explain these findings.

WIND: that explains a lot—the brain fog, difficulty concentrating, vastly increased sleep needs, etc that I’ve been battling for a year now. Though the cognitive issues seem to finally clearin up.

The symptoms were similar to my concussion but I would rate them substantiall worse than that, with a more challenging recovery that oscillates far more. Luckily I experienced the anxiety stuff for only a few weeks after the infection; for me it has been almost entirely neurological (and not just cognitive).

But lately the cognitive stuff has mostly cleared up and what remains is severely impaired physical stamina that shuts me down and still demands 10-12 hours of sleep a day. That might be an auto-immune disruption triggered by the same infection, but it might be neurological—hard to be sure.

Sebastian Rushworth MD: COVID Prior Infection vs Vaccination

This is the kind of insight that I like to see: balanced viewpoint, and realistic about the limitations of studies. Regardless of the counfounding factors, it’s hard to argue with the massive risk reduction enjoyed by those previously infected by COVID.

COVID: Prior infection vs vaccination

24 April 2021, emphasis added

Antibodies are a “surrogate” marker. We think they might tell us something useful, but we can’t really be sure... we still don’t really know whether antibodies play a meaningful role in fighting covid or not. Correlation isn’t always causation. Antibodies appear to be a good marker for prior infection, but that doesn’t mean that they have a causal role in preventing a re-infection.

So, what we really need is a study that looks at the degree to which people actually get re-infected, not more studies that look at antibodies. Once we have that, we can do a comparison with the results of the vaccine trials, and then we will finally have a reasonably good estimate of whether prior infection or vaccination provides a higher level of immunity, or if they are equivalent. That is now exactly what we have, thanks to a study that was recently published in The Lancet.

So, on the face of it, prior infection is equivalent to the Pfizer and Moderna vaccines in terms of the level of protection offered, and much better than the Astra-Zeneca vaccine and J&J vaccine. In light of this, it seems completely unnecessary for people who have had COVID to get the vaccine. In fact, if the goal of governments is to get their populations to herd immunity as quickly as possible, it would make more sense to tell people who have had confirmed COVID-19 that they don’t need to get vaccinated. Vaccinating people who have already had COVID-19 means delaying vaccination of people who haven’t had it, which means delaying the onset of herd immunity.

There is one potential problem with taking the 92% number at face value, especially in relation to the results from the vaccine trials, and that is that this is an observational study, not a randomized trial, so there is significant scope for confounding...

...

The researchers attempted to correct for confounders to the extent that they were able, and came up with a modified risk reduction of 93%. But correcting for confounding is really a kind of guessing game. It isn’t a very reliable technique. And for all the confounders that are known and that can be corrected for, there are plenty more that aren’t known and can’t be corrected for.

...

WIND: one concern: I don’t understand how the false positive PCR test confounder is accounted for. But the results are so compelling that some degree of error is not likely to matter.

BTW, if antibodies are not shown to play a causal role in preventing re-infection, what does that say about vaccines whose efficacy is judged by antibody levels?

Also, it is not an established medical fact that a positive PCR test is actually a COVID infection.

Finally, it seems sketchy at best to assume that a vaccine could deliver the full in-vivo physiological response that an actual infection does. Time (years) will be needed to study that question.

Long Haul COVID: Consider Nutritional Deficiencies such as Thiamine, Vitamin C, Magnesium

I am not a doctor, so consider what follows as layman quackery. Consult your doctor for medical concerns.

A year after a mysterious infection which matched in onset, duration and symptoms, I’m still trying to get back to normal. The weird thing is that I have hardly ever gotten ill for some years now. Only this April 2020 infection was strikingly out of place and unusual.

Video: Long COVID: diagnosis, management, prognosis

This quote caught my eye because it matches my initial symptoms: “if you have shortness of breath √, diarrhea √, headache √, skipped meals during the first week √, 2-3X more likely to develop Long COVID”. Plus the usual fatigue as seen with 98%.

So-called Long Haul COVID ("Long COVID") is a misleading term because it is not a COVID infection. Rather, LHC refers to the myriad damages done to the body by COVID that linger, and that takes a long time to recover from. Hence I prefer the term chronic viral sequelae from COVID. But “Long-Haul COVID” is in widespread use, so I’ll stick to that.

Symptoms of Long-Haul COVID vary, but the key ones I experienced are common:

• Extreme fatigue, lack of energy making even simple tasks difficult. From double centuries to being too tired to walk half a mile on flat ground.
• Gastrointenstinal problems for months.
• Brain fog, difficulty concentrating, motivational problems.
• Mild headaches, something new to me in my life.
• Good days and bad days, but attempts to resume normal exercise can hit hard for a week or longer.
• Inflammation including rheumatic systems, aching in back and joints.
• Easily provoked lung impairment (treatable with quick results using 500mg of magnesium va ReMag). Lung symptoms resolved for me now.

For some people there are additional symptoms including mental health, cardiac problems, etc. Thing is, doctors tend to pigeonhole it into one area, like cardiology. While that’s a very necessary and worthwhile area of study, it is 'dangerous' in that it looks at only one area of damage—if the heart is involved it is likely that other things are too. It is also potentially dangerous in focusing on pharmacological drug interventions rather than nutrition. For example, I consider it medical malpractice to ignore critical nutrition factors like magnesium deficiency which are known to be a global public health crisis. Classic training means blinders on. We need this LHC thing to be worked on by cross-disciplinary teams, not specialists. Because when all you have is a hammer, everything looks like a nail.

In medical terms, we have a highly-variable clinical picture. Which means that it’s going to be very difficult for the medical establishment to get a handle on things.

IMO, the damage is primarily auto-immune and neurological, at least for me. I would say that brain/neurological and auto-immune issues are its hallmarks (for me). That does not rule out direct physical damage to the heart and other organs. But I’d bet that if the heart is damaged, other damages have also occurred. And for me, there is zero manifestation of any heart issues—totally normal heart rate throughout and with exercise as well (and I say that based on self recording heart rate during excercise for 20 years!). That does not rule out a heart injury, but if it’s there, it has no manifestations—and I’ve monitored my heart for 20 years.

No doctor and no pill is going to cure Long Haul COVID for you. Only YOU can do that by helping your own body heal itself.

• Eat a nutrient rich diet.
• Eliminate artificial ingredients of any kind, processed foods, sugars, etc.
• Therapeutic use of nutrients like Vitamin C, B vitamins, magnesium, Vitamin K2.
• Sleep, then sleep some more and whenever you feel the need.

Note that RDA figures for nutrients are weak sauce (and poor science), barely sufficient to avoid clinical deficiency symptoms. Real requirements vary by individual and can be vastly higher when the body needs to heal itself. Moreover, nutrient content of foods is likely to be less than claimed, being based on nominal findings from years ago when soils were better. And of course, the body may be unable to absorb many nutrients effectively!

The useless annual physical

I had a physical with a family medicine doctor last month, a relatively young doctor seemingly open minded. To his credit, he listened to all the my detailed issues. Well, he spent most of his time doing data entry and it looked like he was listening. Can you think and listen while doing data entry? I can’t. When we concluded, I asked the doctor directly:

Patient: “do you have any insight into any of these issues I’ve described?”
Doctor: no.

What a waste of my time and money*. Ditto for another internist.

Worse: for the past 35 years of my life, I got the blood work before my annual physical. Now, at least at Sutter Health, you get blood work after the appointment. WTF? Is this a new means to generate more appointments and thus more profit? All it did was waste both our time later via the mail system.

* I feel like I have some obligation to at least try to help doctors broaden their professional horizons. So at least I got this particular doctor to look at Subclinical magnesium deficiency: a principal driver of cardiovascular disease and a public health crisis (the one comment I got was “interesting”, so I don’t know if he really read it).

Possible nutritional treatments for Long Haul COVID

At present, I am trying high-dose Vitamin C (10 grams or more a day) plus B vitamins and magnesium and lots of fresh fruits and vegetables. I avoid all the bad stuff.

Nutrition is a complex ecosystem in which nutrients are synergistic. My approach now is to attack on all fronts, making sure I have no deficiences. There are signs it is helping me—brain fog has cleared, sleep needs are declining, and energy is increasing. But there are enough confounding factors that I’m not going to assert causality.

Magnesium deficiency

Magnesium deficiency is a global public health crisis. No-one can have full health without it.

Thiamine (Vitamin B1) and other B Vitamins

WHO: Thiamine Deficiency and its prevention and control in major emergencies

What medical doctor (99.9% being grossly ignorant of nutrition) can rule out a hypothesis like nutritional deficiency as a primary factor in COVID-19 and Long Haul COVID? Nutritional solutions are as a matter of practice and regulation de facto outside the scope of doctoring.

Long covid: How to define it and how to manage it

Dear Editor,

28 September 2020 Robert W Olney

The symptoms being reported by COVID long-haulers are the same as the known symptoms of thiamine deficiency disease, otherwise known as beriberi. Fighting the virus necessitates consumption of the body's supply of thiamine. Depending on the initial thiamine status, the outcome could be that the person is asymptomatic if they have a good supply and good nutritional status, or they could be mildly thiamine deficient, which could lead to long-hauler symptoms of beriberi, or, in the case of those particularly vulnerable such as the elderly, they could have a severe deficiency with results such as Wernicke's encephalopathy. 

...From this, I suggest that, rather than being the result of an extraordinarily virulent and pathogenic virus as seems to be widely believed, the pandemic we are witnessing is actually the result of a combination of a somewhat more severe virus than we have hitherto experienced, and a generally poor state of nutrition in the community as a whole.

...

High-Dose Vitamin C

Vitamin C is a powerful substance. There is an abundance of medical literature proving that once a threshold is reached, that Vitamin C can solve all sorts of health issues, having robust anti-viral, anti-biotic, anti inflammatory properies, in addition to being crucal for all sorts of physiological processes*. As well as being safe in outrageously high doses, bowel tolerance being the main “risk” if too much is taken all at once.

Medical establishment ignores Vitamin C

What is truly appalling is the total lack of interest in using intravenous Vitamin C (IVAA) for COVID patients, although a few brave doctors have shown it to be highly effective for treatment, this case being no accident. It’s just that the medical establishment has no interest in cheap effective treatments, preferring to label any such usage as quackery while failing to falsify it.

* Please don’t get fooled by “scientific” studies that allege to test Vitamin C by using the wrong dosage with the wrong protocols, thus failing to match any of the protocols for which it is claimed to work, then claiming it doesn’t work—a cesspool of intellectual fraud. The history of medical science is riddled with studies designed to fail, to protect financial interests, and vice versa.

Long Haul COVID: “Nature: High-dimensional characterization of post-acute sequalae of COVID-19”

A year after a mysterious infection which matched in onset, duration and symptoms, I’m still trying to get back to normal.

At present, I am trying high-dose Vitamin C (10 grams or more a day) plus B vitamins and magnesium too. So far after 5 days, I am getting a little better every day in terms of mental clarity and energy. There is an abundance of medical literature proving that once a threshold is reached, that Vitamin C can solve all sorts of health issues, having robust anti-viral, anti-biotic, anti inflammatory properies, in addition to being crucal for all sorts of physiological processes*. As well as being safe in outrageously high doses, bowel tolerance being the main “risk” if too much is taken all at once.

Confounding factors for me include a cracked/infected molar which was remove earlier this week. It has been an issue for 3 months, possibly longer but not to my knowledge. I cannot rule out that recent issues had some contribution from that tooth.

Medical establishment ignores Vitamin C

What is truly appalling is the total lack of interest in using intravenous Vitamin C (IVAA) for COVID patients, although a few brave doctors have shown it to be highly effective for treatment, this case being no accident. It’s just that the medical establishment has no interest in cheap effective treatments, preferring to label any such usage as quackery while failing to falsify it.

* Please don’t get fooled by “scientific” studies that allege to test Vitamin C by using the wrong dosage with the wrong protocols, thus failing to match any of the protocols for which it is claimed to work, then claiming it doesn’t work—a cesspool of intellectual fraud. The history of medical science is riddled with studies designed to fail, to protect financial interests, and vice versa.

Nature: High-dimensional characterization of post-acute sequalae of COVID-19

PDF

[I’ve highlighted all the things that have been a problem for me]

The acute clinical manifestations of COVID-19 are well characterized1,2; however, its post-acute sequalae have not been comprehensively described. Here, we use the national healthcare databases of the US Department of Veterans Affairs to systematically and comprehensively identify 6-month incident sequalae including diagnoses, medication use, and laboratory abnormalities in 30-day survivors of COVID-19.

We show that beyond the first 30 days of illness, people with COVID-19 exhibit higher risk of death and health resource utilization. Our high dimensional approach identifies incident sequalae in the respiratory system and several others including nervous system and neurocognitive disorders, mental health disorders, metabolic disorders, cardiovascular disorders, gastrointestinal disorders, malaise, fatigue, musculoskeletal pain, and anemia.

We show increased incident use of several therapeutics including pain medications (opioids and non-opioids), antidepressants, anxiolytics, antihypertensives, and oral hypoglycemics and evidence of laboratory abnormalities in multiple organ systems. Analysis of an array of pre-specified outcomes reveals a risk gradient that increased across severity of the acute COVID-19 infection (non-hospitalized, hospitalized, admitted to intensive care).

The findings show that beyond the acute illness, substantial burden of health loss — spanning pulmonary and several extrapulmonary organ systems — is experienced by COVID-19 survivors. The results provide a roadmap to inform health system planning and development of multidisciplinary care strategies to reduce chronic health loss among COVID-19 survivors.

...

WIND: medical science will be baffled for years to come by such complex issues, which is why it is best to realize right away that doctors are not a solution, but are part of the problem. It’s up to you to heal yourself. I mean emphatically, because medical “science” has long ignored nutrition and what works and is addicted to prescription drugs. That crowd is never going to take off the blinders. There will not be any Long Haul COVID pill.

Heal yourself the only way that can work:

• Eat a nutrient-rich diet.
• Eliminate artificial ingredients of any kind, processed foods, sugars, etc.
• Therapeutic use of nutrients like Vitamin C, B vitamins, magnesium, Vitamin K2.
• Sleep and reducing stress.

COVID-19: Mask Mandates for Children Mostly Harmful: Professor of Medicine

re: risk assessment
re: ethics in medicine
re: Great Barrington Declaration

Mask Mandates for Children Mostly Harmful: Professor of Medicine

...“In the case of masks, the evidence that children spread the disease even without a mask is that they’re much less efficient spreaders. It’s not like the the flu where children actually are efficient spreaders of the disease. In the case of coronavirus—for reasons we don’t fully understand—children even unmasked are much less likely to spread the disease to adults, than an adult is to spread disease to an adult,” he added.

Because children don’t wear masks properly in many cases, the already-limited benefit is lowered even further, Bhattacharya said. On the other hand, there are serious repercussions to child development when they and others around them are wearing masks.

“Children have developmental needs that require them to see other people’s faces. Learning to speak, for instance, requires seeing lips move. For slightly older children, they need to see people, the body, they learn body language, how to interact socially, by watching people. And when you ask them to wear a mask, you sort of cut that out. So you have harms on one side, and very little benefit on the other,” he added.

...

The World Health Organization (WHO) recommends no masks be required to be worn by children up to 5 years old and that policymakers weigh different facts when mulling whether to impose mask requirements on children between the ages of 6 and 11, such as the intensity of transmission of the CCP virus, which causes the COVID-19 disease, in the area where the child is and the latest data concerning spread from children.

...Some U.S. governors have mandated children wear masks. In Michigan, Gov. Gretchen Whitmer’s administration last week ordered children as young as 2 to don the coverings.

WIND: politician-mandated child abuse.

And on the suppression of discussion and dissent:

Bhattacharya also responded to how YouTube recently removed a video of a roundtable held by DeSantis, the Florida governor, that featured him and others talking about COVID-19 policies. YouTube has not responded to requests for comment.

“It’s absolutely shocking,” the professor said, adding that engaging in science means weighing different evidence about various matters.

“I think a healthy discussion, if they, if YouTube thinks that that children should wear masks, make that argument. Show us the evidence, show us your reasoning, and we can have a discussion,” he said about the video, which is still available on other sites.

“So they’re not actually trying to protect the public from in any effective way, what they’re trying to do is they want to warn the public that this is a dangerous idea. Well, if they’re going to do that, they have a moral obligation to actually make arguments. They just censored it. They want to create this aura of you shouldn’t hear this idea, as if it’s some banned book. Rather than arguing why the banned book is bad, they just say it should be banned. They’re the moral inheritors of book burners.”

WIND: the end of the age of enlightenment is upon us, courtesy of Google and its ilk.

COVID-19: Dr Jay Bhattacharya—The Deadly Consequences of Lockdowns

re: risk assessment
re: ethics in medicine
re: Great Barrington Declaration

Wikipedia: Jay Bhattacharya (born 1968 in Kolkata, India) is a professor of medicine at Stanford University and a research associate at the National Bureau of Economic Research. He directs Stanford's Center for Demography and Economics of Health and Aging. Bhattacharya's research focuses on the health and well-being of populations, with a particular emphasis on the role of government programs, biomedical innovation, and economics.[1][2]

Might require subscription/login.

Exclusive: Dr. Jay Bhattacharya—The Deadly Consequences of Lockdowns

General points:

• Focused protection is right choice—not “let it rip” and not lockdowns. Better for everyone and no harms from lockdowns.
• Biggest public health mistake we’ve ever made.
• Tradeoffs, how to weigh them, should be evidence-based.
• Large-scale conflation of personal values with the evidence ==> bad policies.
• Domestic and worldwide collateral damage from policies.
• Harm from lockdowns 10X to 100X larger than benefits (“orders of magnitude”).
• Every aspect of human health that can be hurt has been hurt by lockdowns.
• 130 million people at risk of starvation from lockdowns—poor people harmed.
• Late stage cancers that should have been caught.
• Doctors afraid to speak out.
• Aura of “you should not hear these ideas” for anything not following narrative.
• Panic and fear inflicted on populace.
• We’ve ended the conversations that would give us confidence in science.
• We’ve stigmatized COVID (as with AIDS) eg “what did you do wrong?”.
• Media stoke the panic, work to make the population scared, the scariest things imaginable, suppress good news. Huge negative public health consequences, propaganda role of the media picking sides instead of being news.
• Professionals have a responsibility to set aside politics.
• Should be a strategy of “focused protection of the old” and similar policies, vaccine is now a good solution.
• Tens of thousands of doctors have signed onto Great Barrington Declaration. Suppression... scientists are afraid to speak up, ad-hominem attacks, some people have gotten people fired. This kind of behavior in science!
• As per colleage Kulhdorf: the age of enlightenment is over. An end to free and open inquiry in science.
• Central most pernicious result is the Communist-China-derived idea of lockdowns. Hasn’t stopped spread of the disease, just caused harms.
• “I would not have believed possible as of February 2020... still stuns me how Western governments engaged in gross violations of human rights”.
• Incredibly unequal outcomes that violate human rights: working class regular folks have suffered, lost jobs, no school, etc.
• Mortality gradient in California is 3X between rich and poor, but it hardly differs in Florida.

Children and the young:

• Elderly are 1000X more at risk than children.
• Masks inflict great harm on young children, who need to be able to see faces to learn and socialize.
• It is NOT MORAL to expose children to lockdowns.
• 1 in 4 young adults have contemplated suicide vs 4-5% normally. Think about the anguish and pain that represents.
• Tens of millions of children thrown into poverty.
• Children are not efficient spreaders of COVID—much less likely than adults.
• Influenza far deadlier than COVID for children!
• Vaccinations have little benefit for children; use them for at-risk adults.

WIND: the cruelty of our politicians and their enablers in the public and press is grotesque.

If you’re still in the dark on this whole COVID fiasco: as a group, medical doctors are unqualified to decide COVID policies. That’s because they are not trained in fields like economics or risk assessment, as Dr Jay Bhattacharya is (as well as a Professor of Medicine).

See also:
Gov. DeSantis Holds Second Roundtable with Public Health Experts
Mask Mandates for Children Mostly Harmful: Professor of Medicine.

AEIR: The Lockdown Paradigm Is Collapsing

Where is the scientific evidence that lockdowns have had any benefits? Doesn’t exist.

The Lockdown Paradigm Is Collapsing

...The lockdowners are now dealing with the huge problem of Texas. It has been fully open with no restrictions for 6 weeks. Cases and deaths fell dramatically in the same period. Fauci has no answer. Or compare closed California with open Florida: similar death rates. We have a full range of experiences in the US that allow comparisons between open and closed and disease outcomes. There is no relationship.

The problem is that the presence or absence of lockdowns in the face of the virus seem completely uncorrelated with any disease trajectory. AIER has assembled 33 case studies from all over the world showing this to be true. 

Why should any of this matter? Because the “scientists” who recommended lockdowns had posited very precisely and pointedly that they had found the way to control the virus and minimized negative outcomes. We know for sure that the lockdowns imposed astonishing collateral damage. What we do not see is any relationship between lockdowns and disease outcomes. 

This is devastating because the scientists who pushed lockdowns had made specific and falsifiable predictions. This was probably their biggest mistake. In doing so, they set up a test of their theory. Their theory failed. This is the sort of moment that causes a collapse of a scientific paradigm, as explained by Thomas Kuhn in The Structure of Scientific Revolutions (1962). 

...The silence of Fauci in Congressional hearings is telling. His willingness only to be interviewed by fawning mainstream media TV anchors is as well. Many of the other lockdowners that were public and preening one year ago have fallen silent, sending ever fewer tweets and content that is ever more surreptitious rather than certain. The crisis for the fake science of lockdownism may not be upon us now but it is coming. 

...

WIND: sometimes things cannot be compared fairly—too many variables. But when the argument becomes “nothing can be compared” (states, countries, counties, etc), it strains credulity.

The hypothesis that “lockdowns work” has been falsified (ditto for masking). But pet theories and orthodoxies live a long time, and doubling-down like Governor Whitmer in Michigan... pathetic and cruel.

Science itself has been dealt a major blow by all this faux science nonsense. Dig below the surface and most of what passes for science, particularly medical science, is trash-talking bullshit, usually with BigPharma or BigAg or some other corrupting influence behind it. To wit:

Patient: I’m eating X and it’s fixed my problem.
Doctor: stop eating X! It’s interfering with your medication to control X!

CDC: Obesity, Race/Ethnicity, and COVID 19

Wy weren’t early, often and loud warnings promulgated about obesity?

CDC: Obesity, Race/Ethnicity, and COVID-19

...

Obesity Worsens Outcomes from COVID- 19

Adults with excess weight are at even greater risk during the COVID-19 pandemic:

• Having obesity increases the risk of severe illness from COVID-19. People who are overweight may also be at increased risk.
• Having obesity may triple the risk of hospitalization due to a COVID-19 infection.
• Obesity is linked to impaired immune function.2,3
• Obesity decreases lung capacity and reserve and can make ventilation more difficult.
• A study of COVID-19 cases suggests that risks of hospitalization, intensive care unit admission, invasive mechanical ventilation, and death are higher with increasing BMI. The increased risk for hospitalization or death was particularly pronounced in those under age 65.
• More than 900,000 adult COVID-19 hospitalizations occurred in the United States between the beginning of the pandemic and November 18, 2020. Models estimate that 271,800 (30.2%) of these hospitalizations were attributed to obesity.

...

WIND: it is vanishingly rare to see such powerful correlations, yet the government remained silent on “obesity kills” messaging, as well as targeted actions to protect at-risk people.

Was it 'woke' correctness, or just the usual incompetence?

And what exactly is a COVID death when the root causes usually include obesity? The CDC changed the reporting guidelines for COVID and only for COVID in an utterly anti-scientific ways. Better for the narrative, but at least the truth is out that obesity is a major risk.

COVID-19: “How Government Subsidizes Obesity” ... and More COVID Deaths

COVID is mostly a disease of the obese. Maybe it’t time to fix corporate-welfare government policies that kill millions of people prematurely?

But why we weren’t we warned early and often and loudly that COVID is a huge risk factor for obese people, rathern than destroying everyone’s lives with lockdowns?

AEIR: How Government Subsidizes Obesity

by Barry Brownsteinm April 20, 2021

... Our comforting conviction that the world makes sense rests on a secure foundation: our almost unlimited ability to ignore our ignorance.” In short, we don’t spend a lot of time wondering about what we don’t know. Kahneman warns that to “focus on what we know and neglect what we do not know… makes us overly confident in our beliefs.” Throughout the Covid-19 pandemic, the media and politicians have insisted we rely on the “judgment calls” of their proclaimed experts to guide policy. Facile but incorrect stories about lockdowns dominated.

Who Didn’t Come Back from Covid

Policy makers, politicians, and the media have largely ignored the cockpit of good health: the human immunological system.

...the vast majority (78%) of those hospitalized or dead from Covid have been overweight or obese. [WIND: according to the CDC]

...Many studies explain how obesity decreases resistance to infection. Obesity is linked to type 2 diabetes, hypertension, and heart disease, which increase the odds of hospitalization from Covid. 

The Covid survival narrative has focused attention on lockdowns, masks and vaccinations. Maher pointed out the role that obesity played: “People died because talking about obesity had become a third rail in America.” Maher continued, “the last thing you want to do is say something insensitive. We would literally rather die. Instead, we were told to lock down.

... A significant factor in the startling numbers of overweight Americans is the consumption of high-fructose corn syrup in heavily processed foods.... Sugar is heavily subsidized by the US government through loans, purchases of sugar, and tariffs on imported sugar. Government incentives have created a high-fructose corn syrup industry which didn’t exist prior to the 1970s. US sugar prices can be up to twice the world price.

...

WIND:

IMO, anything but 100% grass-fed beef is a health and environmental disaster (cows are not meant to eat grain, and the resulting nutritional profile of the meat is a health negative), ditto for high fructuose corn syrup and added sugars (though aspartame is far worse).

See also:

Obesity, Race/Ethnicity, and COVID-19

Challenge to the Narrative: “Facemasks in the COVID-19 era: A health hypothesis”

Real science is never settled, and anyone who has certainty on such things is not qualified to discuss it
— Lloyd Chambers

re: Time to Cancel the CDC for it’s “masks have about 1% effectiveness” Analysis?

When I see a clinical exercise physiologist write about face masks, I take note , since that area of study is highly relevant to masking vs physiology impacts. A regular doctor has no qualifications in such areas, IMO*.

Those supporting the narrative are going all-out to discredit this paper below, even as the CDC cannot show any credible evidence that masking as actually used by the public has any meaningful impact. Thus if there are negative effects of masking, then risk assessment comes to bear. Namely that if even a few harms of masking can be shown and we cannot prove benefits, it’s a no-brainer to cut out the COVID theatre (masking). Because negative plus zero is a negative.

Whose right? Dunno. But I’ve been trending to the “masks are COVID theatre” point of view as science has yet failed to prove masking has value. And there clearly are big negatives, since human interactions and pscyhology alone are biggies, setting aside the physiological aspects.

Ask yourself why both the CDC and WHO recommended against masks for the non-symptomatic before COVID. (Hint: it’s science based, unlike what we have now). Did science change the recommendations that existed forever, or politics?

Real science is based on a hypothesis followed by all-out attempts to disprove the hypothesis (and to prove it, both are needed). And that word is in the title below, which should say something about the intent.

Problem is, those issuing edicts despise a hypothesis that runs counter to the narrative. So we have seek-and-destroy, not inquire-and-assess.

Read all the parts about the negative aspects of face masks. I find those ideas far more credible than the totally unsubstantiated claims that masks do something about COVID transmission.

Still... face masks as badly-fitted and leaky as they as actually worn by the public leads me to posit that (1) they are unlikely to have any benefit for COVID, and (2) I doubt there are adverse physiological effects with most people, because of the massive leakiness.

* I have decades of self observation with extreme endurance exercise, hypoxia (high altitude), and years of masking for pollen/smoke—real-world perspective which few doctors have.

Facemasks in the COVID-19 era: A health hypothesis

by Baruch Vainshelboim
Cardiology Division, Veterans Affairs Palo Alto Health Care System, Palo Alto, CA

...

Conclusion

The existing scientific evidences challenge the safety and efficacy of wearing facemask as preventive intervention for COVID-19. The data suggest that both medical and non-medical facemasks are ineffective to block human-to-human transmission of viral and infectious disease such SARS-CoV-2 and COVID-19, supporting against the usage of facemasks.

Wearing facemasks has been demonstrated to have substantial adverse physiological and psychological effects. These include hypoxia, hypercapnia, shortness of breath, increased acidity and toxicity, activation of fear and stress response, rise in stress hormones, immunosuppression, fatigue, headaches, decline in cognitive performance, predisposition for viral and infectious illnesses, chronic stress, anxiety and depression.

Long-term consequences of wearing facemask can cause health deterioration, developing and progression of chronic diseases and premature death. Governments, policy makers and health organizations should utilize prosper and scientific evidence-based approach with respect to wearing facemasks, when the latter is considered as preventive intervention for public health.

Long Haul COVID: a Very Long Haul, with Similarities to Brain Injuries in mTBI/Concussion

It has been a year now since I was infected with presumed COVID.

Since then I have discussed Long Haul COVID (post-COVID damage to brain and body) a bit, writing back in December that I had cured myself, which seemed close enough to true for some months.

The term “Long Haul COVID” is a badly chosen one but it has stock. I prefer to call it chronic viral sequelae, a sort of chronic fatigue plus brain fog thing in my case.

A year later, I have not been able to resume even a baseline training schedule, let alone hard training*. At my best, always after 3-4 days of baseline training, and spite of feeling great and riding hard (“good days”) on a few days, I would suffer a setback of weakness for several days. That was the oscillating cycle since I popped out of the severe symptoms just before Thanksgiving.

In February things went so-so and then went a little downhill. Then March went downhill similar to last August—increasingly long periods up to a week of fatigue intermixed by several days of difficulty completing a baseline ride, dragging my sorry ass home and then skipping it for a day or three.

Over the past 6 weeks, that has turned into 7-10 day periods of not riding at all, saving my strength, which now relegates me to gardening. But the worst thing has been the return of brain fog, an inability to concentrate and being pretty useless some days to get work done. At present, I can manage a few hours of decent work and that’s it. I suffered through months of that last year. Active mental effort to stave off negative feelings is essential, but fortunately I mastered that after my 2018 concussion. But if you or someone is going through LHC, it's essential to be alert for depression or similar—seek support. But IMO it is extremely risky to use drugs (prescription or otherwise), which could well damage an already damaged brain and nervous system that is trying to repair and rewire itself.

The cognitive effects doctors discuss are very real and deeply disturbing—I would rate them as worse than my concussion because a concussion at least steadily heals and affects only parts of the brain.

Symptoms

• Overall lack of energy, easily fatigued.
• Brain fog, difficulty concentrating.
• Light headaches, feeling of pressure in head.
• Sometimes, joint aches or stiffness and other feelings of something rheumatic.
• Numbness in two small finger sfrom even half-bending arm while sleep (both arms), clearly a nervous system issue in Ulnar nerves. Odd feeling in hands and feet at times.
• Mandatory minimum of 10 hours of sleep a day, trending to 12 hours per day. Yet rarely being rested in the morning.
• Frequent overwhelming need for a nap by mid-afternoon.
• Asides from a positive thyroid peroxidase antibody test (but normal thyroid hormone levels) and mildly high bilirubin, no other clinical symptoms on blood work.

* Hard training in spring in previous years was riding 50 miles a day, every day, and getting stronger and stronger while dropping 10 pounds of body fat,

Working hypothesis

My working theory is that Long Haul COVID is primarily a neurological and brain problem, with myriad manifestations all stemming from damage to the brain and vagus nerves.

That’s not to say that physical damage cannot/does not happen, but it is crystal clear that in my case my physical body is as strong as ever, good endurance on the rare good days, etc. Only a brain/neurologial problem can explain the same body performing vastly differently overnight,

Doctors as a group pretty slow on the uptake on such things, but some seem to be finally catching on to that idea. But brain/neurological treatments are notoriously crude to non-existent. Heck, most doctors still prescribe chemicals for depression and similar without knowing a damn thing about nutrition or excitotoxins or anything about the role of magnesium deficiency with all sorts of mental and physical illnesses. Not much hope from that crowd.

Doctors won’t heal you—only your body can

Prognosis? No one knows.

If you expect a doctor to heal you, prepare to suffer. YOU are the only person who has any hope of healing yourself. Your body is going to heal itself as well as it can, which means you have to give it every chance to do so. No drug is going to fix this and only a fool could think otherwise.

• Eat a nutrient dense diet free of all artificial ingredients. Supplement key nutrients that are hard to get from food, such as magnesium, some B vitamins, Vitamin K2.
• No prepared meals, no canned soups, no aspartame, no MSG, nothing that might possibly have excitotoxins or inflammatory issues (e.g. added sugar).
• Aside from nutrition, sleep should be your #1 priority.
• Daily sunlight for its healing properties and Vitamin D.
• Stress reduction.
• Avoid prescription drugs unless absolutely persuasive needed.

I challenge any MD to give better advice than that above. Though I cannot rule out emerging treatments that involve brain and nervous-system stimulation, such as PONS.

Diatribe, a realistic one, on most doctors

Standard doctors have nothing to offer for things like this in their paint-by-numbers medicine, at least the ones I’ve seen. My annual physical was a total waste of time and money. The lack of any insight with both of my regular doctors (one an internist, family medicine) is especially disappointing and dare I say it... pathetic.

Specialists have even more siloed knowledge, where you play an expensive game of musical chairs shuttling between them. And I have yet to meet a doctor qualified to discuss nutrition, let alone suggest or even acknowledge that health can only exist with a robust foundation of nutrition.

Yeah, doctors are terrific for some things (like removing my cracked/infected molar tomorrow), but for improving total health—the profession is a dismal failure.