What about "Long Covid?"

As the evidence continues to mount for the harms and lack of efficacy of the shots, and as ever-increasing numbers of us grow tired of being governed by fear, the Mandators have one last ace in the hole to play: the specter of Long Covid.

“Long COVID has resulted in a ‘mass disabling event,’” the Los Angeles Times intoned ominously, while the Wall Street Journal informed readers “Between two million and four million Americans aren’t working due to the long-term effects of Covid-19.”  

All this raises a question: just what is “Long Covid?

On 5 May 2020, Paul Garner, Professor of Infectious Diseases at Liverpool School of Tropical Medicine described his experience with COVID-19 in a post in BMJ Blogs:

For almost seven weeks I have been through a roller coaster of ill health, extreme emotions, and utter exhaustion.

Dr. Garner, a former military physician and fitness enthusiast before his illness, found himself besieged by a variety of complaints: malaise, tachycardia, tightness in the chest, “muggy head,” upset stomach, tinnitus, aches, dyspnea, arthritis, and more. He also told of joining a Facebook group where he met patients like himself, struggling to understand what was happening:

People suffering from the disease, but not believing their symptoms were real; their families thinking the symptoms were anxiety; employers telling people they had to return to work, as the two weeks for the illness was up.

Elise Perego, a researcher at the University College Institute of Archeology and sufferer of this condition, is believed to have coined the term “Long Covid,” which she first used as a Twitter hashtag on 20 May of that year. The first use of this term in the popular press was in a 25 June article in Sky News, which told the tale of Jake Suett, an ICU doctor in Norfolk who first developed symptoms earlier that year. What started out as tiredness and a sore throat soon turned into fever, dry cough, and shortness of breath. Twelve weeks later he was suffering from chest pain, breathlessness, blurred vision, memory loss, poor concentration, gastrointestinal symptoms, and shooting pains in his hands and feet, and was unable to return to work. The next month, the term was used for the first time in a medical journal, in an article in the BMJ.

On 6 October 2021, the World Health Organization had issued a definition of something called “post-COVID-19 Condition”:

Post COVID-19 condition occurs in individuals with a history of probable or confirmed SARS CoV-2 infection, usually 3 months from the onset of COVID-19 with symptoms and that last for at least 2 months and cannot be explained by an alternative diagnosis. Common symptoms include fatigue, shortness of breath, cognitive dysfunction but also others and generally have an impact on everyday functioning. Symptoms may be new onset following initial recovery from an acute COVID-19 episode or persist from the initial illness. Symptoms may also fluctuate or relapse over time.

This syndrome has also been dubbed long-haul covid, post-acute COVID-19, post-acute sequelae of SARS CoV-2 infection, long term effects of covid, and chronic covid, but “long covid” seems to be the preferred term, and that is the one we shall use here.  

Whatever you call it, the syndrome encompasses a vast variety of complaints, involving every organ system in the body along with systemic reactions such as fatigue, post-exertional malaise, fever, chills, skin sensations, weakness, night sweats – the list goes on and on. A study by British and American researchers and patient advocates listed sixty-six different symptoms and found the mean time to recovery exceeded thirty-five weeks. Another study by British researchers described three recurring symptom clusters in patients with this condition: a cardiopulmonary syndrome manifesting with exertional intolerance, dyspnea, fatigue, autonomic dysfunction, tachycardia, lung abnormalities, and chest pain; a multi-organ syndrome comprising general autoimmune activation and a proinflammatory state along with gastrointestinal symptoms, dermatological symptoms, and fever; and a neuropsychiatric syndrome including brain fog, dizziness, poor memory and cognition, mood disorders, headache, and chronic pain. Yet another British study found the risk factors for long covid were pretty much what you’d expect them to be: smoking, obesity, a wide range of comorbid conditions, and ethnic minority status. Perhaps surprisingly, age was not a risk factor, once all these other factors were controlled.

The CDC guidelines (revised 1 September 2022) stipulate that these is no test for long covid, and that the same symptoms can come from any of a variety of other health problems. Estimates of the prevalence of this condition in post-infection patients range from three percent to fifty.

It’s not a foregone conclusion that all cases of “long covid” have a common cause. Many studies employ a rather liberal definition of this condition (e.g., persistence of one or more symptoms after twelve weeks). And there is no way of knowing how many of these complaints might be due to any of the myriad underlying conditions which are known risk factors for this diagnosis. Still, there doesn’t seem to be any doubt that we’re dealing with a real syndrome here, in at least some cases.

Fortunately, we are told, help is on the way. A March 2022 article in Lancet Respiratory Medicine stated “There are encouraging emerging data that individuals who are vaccinated against COVID-19 are less likely to report long covid symptoms.” The CDC guidelines advise “Research suggests that people who are vaccinated but experience a breakthrough infection are less likely to report post-COVID conditions.”

The trope has been dutifully picked up by the legacy media:

“Research is showing that people who are vaccinated, even with just one dose, tend to have lower rates of long COVID-19 after catching the virus than those who are unvaccinated.” (National Public Radio)

“Vaccinations and boosters are believed to be helpful at staving off long COVID.” (Los Angeles Times)

“Not only will a booster with the new vaccines decrease the likelihood of infection and severe illness and help reduce transmission of the virus; it could also decrease the likelihood of developing long Covid.” (New York Times)

So does the vax really reduce the chances of long covid? Researchers at the Department of Veterans Affairs (which administers the largest nationally integrated healthcare delivery system in the United States) looked at VA records and concluded that the number of cases of long covid arising through “breakthrough infections” (i.e. infections occurring after vaccination) was reduced in comparison to that of a group of never-vaccinated matched controls – by all of fifteen percent. That works out to a less than one in five hundred reduction in absolute risk.

And there is no way of knowing how much of that paltry reduction in risk is due to clinician bias. Remember, “long covid” is a diagnosis of exclusion. Could it be doctors are less likely to attribute a patient’s complaints to “long covid” if that patient has already been vaxxed?

Anyway, it’s all a moot point. No one is denying the people manifesting the most extreme presentations of this syndrome are suffering. No one is denying these are serious adverse events. These patients deserve our compassion and the very best care modern medicine has to offer.

But all this begs the question of whether the shot reduces the frequency of the only outcome that matters – all serious adverse events. And Pfizer’s and Moderna’s own data – the data they have let us see – shows it does not.

And that’s in the short term. We don’t know what the long-term harms of these products are. We had a golden opportunity to find out, but the trials that served as the basis for approval of the mRNA vaccines were cut short by the drugmakers long before they were slated to end.

In the light of all this, efforts to terrify us into getting endless boosters by waving the bloody shirt of “long covid” are the height of mendacity.