Ethics of Risk Taking

If you were having a lot of sex with various people -- or even if you just had a quickie with one person without any protection, then having unprotected sex with the next person becomes a moral issue. 

Maybe it's just the case for those of use who came to age when AIDS was finally getting some public health recognition. I wonder how much that concern has dropped. Right now it's still illegal to have unprotected sex if you know you're HIV+, but ethically, having prior unprotected sex means getting tested before having unprotected sex again. Just in case. Because you can never know if you've picked up something along the way -- not just the big one, but any number of sexually transmitted infections. 

Y'all Masking: The Solidarity in Safety

It's taken off so much, it's making Twitter almost unusable for anything else. Picture after picture after picture of people wearing masks in their daily life. 

At first it was just a fun little thing - let's all post pics of ourselves in masks! There have been several other times a bunch of people have done this, but this time it's really different. I think it's because of the mask bans:

The fight is more focused now. It's no longer a gentle encouragement that masks can help stave off illness, but a revolt against barriers to preventing the spread of disease. 

Just for posterity, I think OmniAstral started it all on July 3. 

And it actually affects me seeing person after person in my feed in a mask when I see literally nobody in real life wearing a mask outside my own family. My kids are absolute rockstars for ignoring peer pressure and continuing to protect their brains!! It doesn't just bolster my spirits to see such solidarity, it warms my heart that there are people who care to prevent the possibility of unwittingly infecting others in public places. 

Hope for Long Covid in IgG Study

Professor Akiko Iwasaki and team just put out a pivotal paper showing that "passive transfer of IgG from patients with Long Covid into mice recapitulates increased pain and other symptoms." IgG stands for Immunoglobulin G; it's the most common type of antibody found in blood circulation. Without enough of them, you get more infections!

The paper is titled, "A causal link between autoantibodies and neurological symptoms in Long Covid." Last September, they started by looking at Long Covid sufferers with neurological symptoms, and compared their antibodies and autoantibodies with people recovering and with uninfected people. Autoantibodies are antibodies produced by the immune system that attack a person's own proteins and can cause autoimmune diseases (lupus, MS, colitis...). 

On Psychosomatic Illness

I don't know anything about Fibromyalgia, yet I wince when someone says it's psychosomatic. I wonder about almost any conditioned considered psychosomatic now.

I realize I'm using the term in the vernacular to mean "it's all in your head". That's how it is largely understood even though, technically, psychosomatic illness can refer to anything without a medical explanation. People communicating with the public have to understand the common usage of the term as it's being heard.

Jane Brody wrote about the concern with this label almost a decade ago (in full at the very bottom):

"When I was given a diagnosis of breast cancer in February 1999, many friends and readers wondered: 'Why did you get breast cancer? You take such good care of yourself!' . . . It seems that many people believe that if you do everything 'right', bad things won't happen. But bad things can and do happen. And they happen to the 'best' and the 'worst' of us. . . . If you're blessed with good health, you can say, 'I did it.' But if you lose your health, you know that external forces beyond your control can get in your way. Healthy people tend to act as if beneath every sick person is a healthy person trying to come out. . . . 

Wasn't it Susan Sontag who pointed out that whenever the cause of an illness is mysterious, it's assumed to come from psychological problems or a moral weakness? And once science finally figures out the medical root of the illness, that assumption disappears. Will we one day have a better -- that is, more scientific -- understanding of ailments like chronic fatigue syndrome, fibromyalgia, Gulf War syndrome, multiple chemical sensitivities or any of the other current 'wastebasket' diagnoses that many medical and lay people consider psychosomatic? 

One Step Forward...

More good news about antivirals.

From Nate Bear: People are experiencing, 

"almost complete Long Covid recovery with the use of an HIV antiretroviral [ART]. There is obviously viral persistence in a proportion of Long Covid cases and the denial of this fact in the medical establishment is killing people."

So, because some people rushed to insist Covid is nothing like AIDS, and it far more like a cold, this possibility took years to be tested. But Maraviroc/Atorvastatin, a drug used with HIV, is having a very positive effect on Covid cases in individual cases. Clinical trials are just beginning. Imagine if we looked down this road four years ago instead of pretending there's no connection between two viruses that both hibernate in the body and damage immunity in a long term and deadly fashion! 

In other frustrating news, Nukit Far-UV devises are no longer available in Canada because Nicholaus Jeffers, Compliance Officer with Health Canada in the Pesticide Compliance Program, has made a claim that the devises are pesticides being sold without registration despite the fact that they are harmless to insects. Manufacturer Cyber Night Market wrote this response to the charge (and no longer delivers to Canada). 

The maple syrup and "polite Mad Max" analogies are perfect, but the gun comment at the end falls flat. She might have ended it with something about all the microplastics we're allowed to ingest. 

Infection Control Measures Work

A Lancet study found that there's little Covid transmission in schools WHEN infection control measures were in place. 

Since we stopped all mitigation efforts, hospitalizations for Covid in Ontario have increased year-round. We don't need lockdowns for Covid, but we do still need N95s until we can clean the air. 

From CP24:

"The review found that masking, vaccinations and test-to-stay policies were the best methods to reduce Covid-19's spread in schools and daycares. The effectiveness of strategies like mandatory quarantining, cohorting, and hybrid learning is uncertain and may have made 'little to no difference in transmission.'"

Still Not a Cold

 Some find the term "airborne AIDS" offensive, but we can't deny the similarities. 

After writing here every day since August 1st, I actually got distracted enough trying to barrel through my (likely) final tedious course. So this is a save-worthy thread entirely from HIV+ Long Covid advocate Daniel Brittain Dugger:

There was a golden opportunity for the West to exit the pandemic with the immune competence and cognition of its citizens preserved. Unfortunately, there was more concern about the suffering of individuals forty years ago than the suffering of millions today. There is little question but that we do find ourselves in the very same position as we were in during the 80s.

1. With both viruses, there is immune system dysregulation, including depletion of the CD4 compartment.
2. Both viruses are persistent, known since December of 2021 with the work of Dr. Daniel Chertow.
3. With both viruses, there is an aversion to the use of non-pharmaceutical interventions, such masks and condoms.
4. With both viruses, vaccines are not protective.
5. With both viruses, there is forward transmission, evidenced by the fact monoclonals have been wiped out.

It's Airborne, and It Can Cause an Immune Deficiency

Let's look at the claim that Covid should not be compared to AIDS or referred to as "Airborne AIDS".

One concern about comparing the two is that it makes Covid seem more frightening than it might actually be in a maximizing stance, overplaying the dangers, which could then lead people to turn a deaf ear as it sometimes does when anti-drug campaigns put pot and crack in the same camp. Lots of viruses affect the immune system without the comparison being made. However I think people comparing it aren't just looking at the immune system similarity, but also how it hibernates and then comes back to be even more devastating.

Another concern about comparing is from the other end, that Covid does so much more than deplete the immune system. That's just one of its many tricks.

What we don't know - and likely won't know for another decade or so - is if it ends up being as deadly later on. For people suffering from Long Covid, or really for anyone who ever got Covid (since it doesn't appear to clear the body), the comparison is terrifying. Two of my three kids have had Covid once. The idea that it's possible they have a condition that could have horrific effects that sudden strikes them makes me want to spend more time with them and make their lives as enjoyable as possible in case they're struck short. And, really, that possibility that our kids might not make it home after we kiss them good-bye in the morning is always there, but we really don't like thinking about it! That longterm prospect also makes me unwavering in my advocacy for N95s. 

And isn't it better to be safe than sorry?

A Genius of a Virus

We're starting to see more effects of Covid.  

Yesterday, biorisk consultant Conor Browne wrote about something many have been screaming into the void for some time now:

"A core part of the analysis I perform involves zooming out; that is to say, taking a very broad view of the effects of infectious disease on populations, rather than individuals. People often reply to my posts here with something like, 'everyone I know who had Covid is ok'. And that is almost certainly true because most people only know a few people well. 

However, when I zoom out to the population level, it is crushingly obvious that continued unmitigated transmission of SARS-CoV-2 is having increasingly damaging population-level effects. This manifests primarily as ever-increasing levels of disability caused by Long Covid, and, more perniciously, sequelae of Covid. Increased cardiovascular problems, increased autoimmune problems, increased diabetes etc.

For all the Fierce Raindrops: Lessons that Should Have Been Learned

Changing minds on big issues takes a long time and the work never ends. 

Anti-drinking and driving groups appeared in the early 1980s, like MADD, typically made up of survivors or relatives of victims who saw first hand that something must be done to prevent so many disabilities and deaths. I was a teenager at the time, and my circle didn't think twice about driving hammered. I remember people saying things like these boring old ladies should get a life and stop telling us when we can and can't drive! We were all pretty sure we could drive just fine after a few. Who are they to tell us otherwise? Breathalizer legislation was on the books in the 60s, and RIDE programs were legal in the 70s, but it wasn't until MADD came about that we got flooded with school visits and PSAs and then really strict penalties were enacted for drunk driving including jail time! And they we all sobered up about it, realizing our inconvenience in staying the night or going back to get the car in the morning doesn't really warrant potentially taking a life. 

Wheelchair ramps weren't an architectural requirement in public buildings until the 90s, but only after people with disabilities and allies fought for their rights to fully participate in society over decades, starting with Judy Heumann's winning lawsuit in 1970 against the NY Board of Ed that was preventing her equal access to the workplace because she uses a wheelchair. That was following by blocking traffic that got a weak bill passed, and then sit-ins that eventually forced politicians to listen and act. Check out Crip Camp, where activist Denise Jacobson said, "You can pass a law, but until you change society's attitude, that law won't mean much." And now we generally agree that everyone should have access to participate fully in society despite any form of disability. Right???

Early AIDS activists watched friends and loved ones die for years before they could get enough of an audience to have an effect on policy. "Sickness and death from HIV/AIDS was brought to a virtual standstill in the USA . . . by a vigorous public health campaign designed not around treating those who became infected, but by preventing infection in the first place." But it took years of activism, from 1979 to 1986, and many celebrities dying and children dying before public health started to issue PSAs, to actually teach the nation how to prevent the spread.

It takes a really long time to convince governments to impose safety measures that, in some way, affect people's freedom to do their own thing. It's not necessarily a bad thing on its own. to be careful about legislation, but it's very frustrating to be living during the activism phase watching so many children get sick. We've got children dying of Covid already. And lots of celebrities. But there's a huge coverup or spin or denial that has people claiming that, for instance, a fatal heart-attack at 13, 17, 27, and 44, all within a day of each other, is totally normal now. When my healthy friend succumbed to a heart attack in his early 60s, people were so fast to say that people die of heart attacks in their 60s all the time!! Instead of, you know, sorry for your loss. It's all ABC: Anything but Covid.

The Odds are Not EVER in Our Favour!

You either control a pandemic, or you let it control you. - Professor John Edmunds.

The CDC's estimate that 20% of infections will become Long Covid. 

Let's do some math!! If we take the lowest numbers out there, if just 10% of Covid infections become Long Covid, and almost everyone gets infected yearly since 2022, then in just 5 years, by 2028, half the population will have Long Covid, right?? 

Consider that Long Covid shows up in a variety of ways, sometimes like Alzheimers, sometimes ME/CFS, and many people can barely sit up in bed for 15 minutes at a time. Check out the documentary Unrest to get the picture. How will the schools (and all businesses and government and just about everyone) cope with THAT?? Who, in your life, will take care of you if you can't get out of bed or feed yourself? And who will take care of both of you if you both get it?

Faulty Wiring

We're hard-wired for immediate survival, so we need reminders to help us persevere longterm.

Short-Term Wiring

For decades I taught a course, the Challenge of Change in Society, which used the lens of social sciences to try to understand world issues and explore how we ended up with our current challenges and how to enact change. I taught about how media provokes consumerism and how to counter that, and why to counter that, in our daily lives for the sake of the planet, the people, and our own well being. I often stepped outside of the social sciences to draw on thousands of years of philosophies and religions that have understood that happiness isn't the result of an accumulation of things. 

I practice what I preach for the most part. Curiously, though, by about mid-July each year, I'd forget everything I had been teaching and end up on a shopping spree until I'd come to my senses. Ten years ago I wrote about how much I need government policies to restrain my habits - that we all do - or else we'll literally shop 'til we drop, as a species, which is happening before our eyes.

Barring that reality, and knowing this would be an ongoing, lifelong issue, I got a tattoo on my Visa-paying forearm to remind myself that my actions affect the entire world. I borrowed Matisse's Dance and have the characters circling a re-forming pangea. We need to come together on this, collectively, to reduce ongoing suffering: 

Accepting the Things We Cannot Change - Yet

We're really struggling to let go of our old familiar lives and realize we have to life differently from now on in order to keep going. 

It's a bit like Norman Bates keeping his mother in the attic. We can't move on fully when we've still got one foot in the past and expect everything to go on as it always has up to this the start of this tragedy. Our lack of acknowledgement of what's real is creating a horror show of our own making. Here are three recent threads to help further this point.

Media Taming of Covid

Every couple of months or so a headline tells us it's over or it's at least better, and we can all relax and go back to normal. T. Ryan Gregory curated a history of the "defanging and taming" of Covid:

"February 2021: "Superspreading drives the Covid pandemic--and could help to tame it" from a Nature article of all places!

June 2021: "With Covid tamed, it's a 'grand reopening' in California." They "turned a page on the pandemic"! 

September 2021: "With the virus 'defanged' by high vaccination rates, the Danish government dropped all remaining restrictions this month" in a Science article asking, "Will the pandemic fade into an ordinary disease like the flu? The world is watching Denmark for clues."

January 2022: "Now that science has defanged Covid, it's time to get on with our lives," from The Guardian.

February 2022: "Covid: How new drugs are finally taming the virus," from the BBC.

July 2022: "Covid reinfection has a silver lining--one that may help tame the pandemic," from Fortune. 

December 2022: "Is Covid a common cold yet?" from The Atlantic.

Covid, the T-Shirt

Last March I had the funniest experience as a trustee. We were required to attend a seminar about creating inclusive classrooms where everyone can feel comfortable belonging, about mental health and problems with students' executive functioning, and about understanding the brain and how to keep it healthy. Yet there wasn't a mask in sight from any of the presenters or staff or many of the trustees, and they said it would be impossible to bring in a HEPA unit to the room, and I definitely couldn't bring in a CR box. I wrote a bit about it at the time. All those involved didn't see the two-fold irony in this at all. First, they didn't (and likely still don't) see a disconnect between offering an inclusive setting where nobody who was immunocompromised in any way would be safe attending. And secondly, they didn't (and likely still don't) see a disconnect between talking about the health of the brain while refusing to do anything to prevent the spread of a virus that CAUSES BRAIN DAMAGE. 

I attended remotely and was lucky to at least garner that accommodation, but it didn't allow me to feel comfortable belonging in that room in the least. 

Now, in a similar unwitting quest for irony, the University of Waterloo just announced a fantastic change to campus: No more tobacco products.

They explained further that, "becoming a smoke-free campus is part of the University's ongoing efforts to foster a healthy and safe campus environment for all . . . it is our responsibility to create environments where health is embedded into campus culture and policy."

It doesn't start for another nine months, so smoke 'em if ya got 'em! 

Known Knowns and Known Unknowns

On May 27, 2022 , we heard the simplest possible explanation of what Covid does to our bodies and how to prevent the spread, but we gave a finger to that information in favour of business as usual. Change is hard. 

Between the time the CDC told people to unmask and Biden declared the pandemic over, and just a couple months after mask mandates were removed from the schools in Ontario, transplant surgeon and bioscientist (and LA Times owner and billionaire) Dr. Patrick Soon-Shiong explained what was definitely known about Covid (h/t Jesse International - transcript abridged a bit further down):

Endgame Vision

"Where there is no vision, the people perish." ~ Proverbs 29:18

In many versions of that passage it says with prophetic vision people cast off restraint, but I think vision works as well on its own and is more inclusive, and perish gives a clearer image of the end result. It doesn't mean we'll all be free without a vision guiding us, but that we'll all go haywire. The proverb actually goes on to say that we'll all still be happier if we follow the law - or moral restraint - despite a lack of vision, but I'm dubious about that part of it. It can be better for everyone if we're moral, but I'm not convinced it makes us all happier. All of Proverbs 29 is about turning away from evil motives and doing the right thing, but something that jumps out to me as vital is our need for a sense of where we're headed, especially during times of chaos, even while we pretend everything is normal.

This reddit post is making the rounds. It expresses the experiences many of us are having and asks some good questions about where we go from here:

Practical issue first: I'm not sure how living with minimal Covid risk is dwindling their savings away. Five N95s can last a month (rotate them, one/day of the week) for $10, and there are several organizations that provide them for free for people in need. So I wonder if they're not going in to work or quit their job or if they're taking cabs instead of the subway or something like that. If they lost their job just for wearing a mask, that's a different issue specific to a few states in the US and a few places outside there. 

Targeted Protection

If we can figure out that most accidents involve, say, red cars, then instead of everybody wearing a seatbelt, we could just get those people who are vulnerable to traffic accidents to wear seatbelts. Then the rest of us can be free to drive unharnessed. Imagine being able to lean forward without restraint! 

Clearly the problem with that is that, even if most people who are seriously harmed in collisions are in red cars, those accidents affect the rest of us. Many of us also get hit (or do the hitting), and the lack of seatbelts on anyone else will increase the number in the hospitals which increases costs of healthcare, increasing wait times, and which comes back to the taxpayer when taxes are increased to pay for it all - or when our corrupt government uses it to convince people that we need to privatize healthcare!

We can't ignore the fact that we're all interconnected. Even if we try to, that reality will come back to bite us in the butt. 

Yet, we're still trying to do that with Covid. 

Minimize Disease to Maximize Trade Throughout History

We know lots of official agencies and many governments are currently promoting hand washing but not masks, or they put wear a mask if you choose to at the very bottom of a list of options despite a well-fitting mask being the best way that individuals can protect themselves in public. Many are downplaying the risks caused by the upswing in cases because vaccines help us survive the illness, a bit, for a couple months each time we're allowed one. They're not letting the public know the important stuff: Covid is still here, still widely transmissible through people who appear to be perfectly healthy, still causing Long Covid (PCC) in 1 in 5 Covid cases, and we're about to resume hot-boxing classrooms with this brain-invasive virus. 

Unfortunately, all too many really trust that, if it were a problem, surely our elected officials would tell us.

But it's not like it's a new tactic for governments to minimize the threat of disease in a population. 

Covid on the Brain

Listen to me try to say all these big words in an 8 minute recording:

It's curious how many are completely unaware that Covid is a brain-invasive disease. It's the biggest reason I have to continue keeping the virus out of my body. It's not like a cold or flu that you catch and then recover from. It has staying power. 

I first read about Covid's affect on the brain in National Geographic back in December 2021, when they wrote about how it affects personality, and I wrote about it the following January. One person was "confused, hesitant, nearly catatonic," another "developed impulsive or irrational behaviour," and others "arrived at the hospital with severe depression, hallucinations, or paranoia." The article reports, 

"Now, almost two years into the pandemic, it's become clear that neurological problems from Covid-19 can linger or intensify. After recovering from the virus, an alarming number of patients remain shrouded in brain fog, suffering from anxiety or depression, unable to think straight or hold on to memories, and fumbling for words. . . . A study of 395 people who were hospitalized with Covid-19 found that 91% had cognitive issues, fatigue, depression, anxiety, sleep problems, or struggled with routine activities six months after they returned home."

Remember, that was in 2021.

Covid's Effects on Lymphocytes

A bit more on Cov-AIDS from Daniel Brittain Dugger because people need to be aware of the similarities between these diseases to, just maybe, provoke them to do everything they can to reduce transmission: mask, vax, and ventilate and clean the air. 

Long story short, Covid affects your immune system, making anyone who gets it open to getting all sorts of other things that their body would normally protect them from. The fewer times you get an infection, and the lower the dose of infection, the better off you'll be. DBD is arguing against the use of Paxlovid. Elsewhere he notes that those on HIV PrEP have the lowest rate of SARS-CoV-2 acquisition. It's just an argument being presented here, and I'm not an expert on it, so talk to your doctor if Paxlovid is right for you! This is a very complex one, so I explained some of the terms along the way. 

From October 2020

"As a member of the HIV community, who has endeavored to not only educate themselves about their own condition but that of a chronic SARS-CoV-2 infection, it troubles me that there is a population in decline that does not receive the attention it deserves: that of the CD4 lymphocyte."