Blocked and Reported
Blocked and Reported
Episode 161: Detective Herzog And The Millionaire Kitty Cartel
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Episode 161: Detective Herzog And The Millionaire Kitty Cartel

Katie goes undercover to infiltrate a secretive feline drug ring, Jesse investigates the data on Long COVID, and Rebekah Jones makes another surprise appearance
Image courtesy of Alison/Winnie.

I was alone in the office. Jesse was out at the FIRE Gala, but I was just happy to get away from my racist neighbor. It was barely half past two when Trace stepped into my office, casefiles in hand. The first one gave me a good chuckle. Apparently Elon had removed “legacy verification” from Twitter — meaning the only way to get a blue check now was to give him eight smackeroos a month. Everyone from Jason Alexander to SCOTUSblog was threatening to bounce, someone had impersonated the Big Apple itself, and Elon had footed the bill for LeBron James, Stephen King, and — her?! No way.

I gazed at the smoke detector above me, two rectangular holes where its batteries should be, and flipped to File #2. A writer for The Atlantic named Ed Yong had crossed the line from “journalist” to “activist” in his coverage of “long COVID.” Something about the evidence he used smelled fishy as hell. I put it to the side — this was one for Jesse to handle.

The last file was something else entirely. I took a drag of my cigarette, watching the smoke curl lazily towards the ceiling as I kept reading. An old grandma gets raided by the DEA for traffickin’ human growth hormone. No charges. Turns out what she was pushin’…wasn’t exactly intended for human consumption. Then the FDA busts a lady importing “beauty products” from Hong Kong. Confiscate her cars, her mansions. A spreadsheet she kept shows she moved a whopping $10 million worth of product.

“You think they’re connected?”

“A listener tipped us off. Said her cat needed meds, but they’re illegal. The dame says her vet pointed her towards a Facebook group that could hook her up under the table. I think they’re the missing link. Real secretive, though. Won’t talk to anyone who’s not a buyer, so I sent them an invite, pretending to be —"

Suddenly, the phone rang. A booming voice on the other end spoke. “Your invitation to join FIP Warriors® 5.0 has been accepted.

I stood up and brushed the flakes of weed off my trenchcoat as Trace unholstered his trusty snubnose revolver and adjusted his fedora.

“Start the car, Trace. Looks like we’re going undercover.”


Blue Checks

The backstory on King’s Hand

https://twitter.com/thatfrood/status/1335689951640494080

The results of the legacy checkmark removal

https://twitter.com/goldengateblond/status/1649162600826167296

https://twitter.com/thatfrood/status/1649179696226000897?s=20

https://twitter.com/realrickpaulas/status/1649136628915380226?s=20

Musk buys Twitter Blue for Stephen King

https://twitter.com/StephenKing/status/1649147510525423626

Long COVID

Ed Yong’s article on Long COVID

https://www.theatlantic.com/health/archive/2023/04/long-covid-symptoms-invisible-disability-chronic-illness/673773/

The CDC on Long COVID

https://www.cdc.gov/coronavirus/2019-ncov/long-term-effects/index.html

Evidence is mixed as to whether vaccines reduce the chances or severity of long COVID

https://www.kff.org/policy-watch/long-covid-what-do-latest-data-show/

Household Pulse survey on Long COVID

https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/covid19/pulse/long-covid.htm

Federal Reserve report on Long COVID

https://www.federalreserve.gov/econres/notes/feds-notes/long-covid-cognitive-impairment-and-the-stalled-decline-in-disability-rates-20220805.html

Survey about discrimination against those with Long COVID

https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0277317

Jesse’s response to the article

Singal-Minded
Shoddy Research Won’t Help People Who Actually Have Long Covid
Long Covid is a little-understood subject. The Centers for Disease Control certainly views it as a real thing, explaining that “Some people who have been infected with the virus that causes COVID-19 can experience long-term effects from their infection, known as post-COVID conditions (PCC) or long COVID…
Read more

The New Republic: We Might Have Long Covid All Wrong

https://newrepublic.com/article/168965/might-long-covid-wrong

Stuart Ritchie: Does Long Covid really exist?

https://unherd.com/2021/06/does-long-covid-really-exist/

Ed Yong’s first article on Long COVID

https://www.theatlantic.com/health/archive/2020/06/covid-19-coronavirus-longterm-symptoms-months/612679/

Jesse responds to an unrelated article by Yong

Singal-Minded
Another Gripe With How Journalists Write About Survey Research
I feel like I’m getting increasingly interested in the use and misuse of polling by journalists, and another pretty rich example just popped on my radar. It’s in an article in The Atlantic by Ed Yong, arguably the most celebrated journalist during the pandemic and a…
Read more

The Kitty Cartel

The Atlantic’s 2020 piece on black-market cat remdesivir

https://www.theatlantic.com/science/archive/2020/05/remdesivir-cats/611341/

Business Insider’s article

https://www.businessinsider.com/coronavirus-treatment-cats-fip-sold-10k-black-market-2020-6?r=US&IR=T

Robin says she doesn’t get kickbacks

https://www.reddit.com/r/cureFIP/comments/11qv50c/proof_that_robin_has_previously_claimed_they_dont/

OneZero: Inside a Facebook ‘Dallas Buyers Club’ for Cat Drugs

https://onezero.medium.com/desperate-cat-owners-are-buying-illegal-cat-drugs-on-facebooks-black-market-cd40bfe90997

Cure FIP exposes FIP Warriors

https://www.curefip.com/post/drama-fip-telenovelas

FIP Warriors

https://www.facebook.com/groups/804374446995270

FIP Global Cats

https://www.facebook.com/groups/595916822107282

Zen By Cat

https://www.zenbycat.org/

Discussion about this episode

Obviously the villain here is the FDA (as usual).

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Also came here to write precisely this. Great reporting by Katie, but I thought at the end, Jessie had the right of it with his typical, "it's complicated" shrug.

That said, the FDA is clearly the problem here. Consider the incentive structure: you're Gilead: you have a successful drug approved for use in humans (no small feat in the pharmaceutical world). There has been a discovery about off-label use in felines; but if anything goes sideways on that, it threatens to undo the laborious and massively-expensive work you've done going through Phase III human trials, whereas the potential upside (financially) is likely marginal.

We all agree selling a drug to cure a fatal feline condition is the right thing to do. Absent the possible liability with the FDA, it's also the smart and profitable thing to do. Gilead isn't refusing to do this because of moustache-twisting; they're doing it because they stand to lose more than they stand to gain.

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Came here to write exactly this. I understand the logic of "if complications occur with cats, someone needs to study them for humans too", but I'm struggling to see why this "someone" should be Gilead. (J&K have buried the lede here a bit, but the 2020 Atlantic article https://www.theatlantic.com/science/archive/2020/05/remdesivir-cats/611341/ spells this out in more detail.)

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FDA Delenda Est

CDC Delenda Est

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Oh, my gosh. One of the best episodes. Insane cat ladies, international smuggling, Newt Gingrich’s sister -- it has everything!

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This is like Stephon on SNL.

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i hate to say it but long covid just feels so “online.” with most diseases i can usually name at least a few people that have it that i know personally, but with long covid there’s nobody. it seems to be exclusively an anecdotal/self-diagnosed disease among white soys on twitter. and 99/100 times said person was already hyper-online, reclusive, quad vaxxed, etc etc. just feels like there’s almost personal stake having long-covid. i guess i also have personal stake in not having it, but isn’t that the same with any disease.

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I commented above about this, but it is real. My sister developed it long before the shots even existed and she is anything but reclusive. She was infected in March 2020 and suffered a cardiac arrest in May 2020 and arterial dissection in her brainstem in July 2020. She needs infusions of infliximab every 8 weeks to stand and walk. She has aphasia. At her recent neurology appointment, the neurologist stated that her myelin sheath had been "eaten through" by covid. They are worried about another clot or dissection so scheduled another MRI. These are highly qualified specialists at UPENN hospital in Philadelphia (I know everyone calls it HUP now but it will always be UPENN to me).

I saw what covid and long covid did to her. It is personal because it is DEVASTATING to lose friendships when people do not understand and say hurtful and cruel things. My sister is not a Meme, she doesn't have a twitter account, she is a real person with a real illness that really disabled her. I was there the entire time.

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So sorry. Your sister’s post viral symptoms are specific and terrifying, rather than vague or general. IIRC there is much evidence that this is a type of viral damage. The question is not about terrible cases like your sister’s (and I’m very very sorry she has been so horribly harmed) but about the ones more difficult to diagnose because the symptoms, like post viral fatigue, headaches, anxiety, could also be attributable to other causes than Covid. Those cases are really a mess, diagnostically, unlike, of course, your sister’s. I’m sorry anyone has said anything cruel about her condition--Covid has been so politicized, unfortunately.

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Since it's such a vague, poorly-defined syndrome, it can essentially be both real and fake at the same time.

For your sister, apparently it is a real thing.

That doesn't mean it's a real thing for everybody who claims to have it. I know a guy who claims to have long Covid (when he remembers) because every few months he feels like maybe he's a bit more tired than he should be.

Very few people (nobody?) seems to be claiming that it literally doesn't exist for anybody.

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This sounds like nonsense. Covid “ate through” her myelin sheath? Is it possible that its being worn down from Covid that then led to another syndrome? I don’t believe in long anything. Diseases can wear down your body for sure. I once had a pretty rough case of bronchitis that even with antibiotics wiped me out for over a month but that’s just kind of the disease. I don’t classify it as “long” bronchitis.

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Well my sister is back in the hospital since Wed of this week for complications from long covid but I'll just call up her rheumatologist and her neurologist and say release her? It's all good, Moltar from the internet says it's nonsense. I have been with my sister the whole time I and I know what happened to her. It's easy to say you don't "believe" in something when it isn't happening to someone you love. Iong covid and covid are real I've seen what they have done to her.

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Thanks I appreciate it. But for real, maybe she has something. I Just don't think it should be classified as "long covid." For instance, I sprained my ankle very badly about two years ago. That made it unable for me to run anymore for at least 6 months. Between that and working from home I eventually developed some very serious issues with my back muscles. I would never refer to that as "long sprained ankle." Even if the sprained ankle led to it, the back problems weren't a direct cause of the sprained ankle. It was many things that led up to it, and sprained ankles don't inherently cause back problems. I had some back muscle issues and I separate those from the sprained ankle. Just like I believe whatever your sister has may have been exacerbated or kickstarted by Covid, it could just be something genetic or something that would have happened anyways.

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LMAO maybe he says

Dude she's in the fucking hospital waiting for an MRI please just stop. You win the hip cool anti woke hyper rational awards. And if you think your sprained ankle is the same as what I saw my sister go through from an infection with a BIOWEAPON (covid ) in 2020 then I don't know what to tell you.

You think you know more than the doctors at UPENN please call them up and take over her treatment and cover her medical expenses then I could use the break I'm exhausted.

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The funniest thing is if you knew my views on things like elections and 9/11 and COVID & China/Russia you wouldn't think of me like some npc sheep who believes what the media says about covid lmao you would probably feel like a liberal compared to me LMAO. Ok back to work then going to visit my sister in the hospital then feed her cat. Good thing long covid is fake i can't wait to tell her doctors she is cured forever LMAO

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I never said I didn’t think Covid was real. I just think being weakened post infection from Flu or Covid isn’t unique. I certainly don’t think its a “bioweapon.”

If I had to come up with a conjecture its that your sister got Covid, got it bad and in her weakened state it either caused some other syndrome maybe genetic maybe bacterial to activate. I think whatever happened with your sister probably could have happened if she got a bad case of flu or some other bug that severely depleted her immune system.

All I am saying is I don’t think Long Covid is different than Long Flu other than that Long Covid is more likely to happen due to having less previous immune exposure.

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I have long covid. I got sick partying in Vegas. I have one social media account (TikTok, which I got after getting sick). I wish I didn’t have a personal stake in any of this.

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How do you know its “long covid.”

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As mentioned elsewhere in the comments, no— I, of course, can’t say that it’s 100% Long Covid given it’s a diagnosis of exclusion. But I do have a robust medical team that determined it was absolutely the most likely explanation after many tests (MRIs, lumbar punctures, etc.) to rule out differentials.

I can also see you are not asking in good faith, given you “don’t believe in long anything.” I wish you continued health, so you may never have to understand. Cheers.

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I know one woman who seems to have long Covid, and she’s 65ish and anti-vax; she barely even believed Covid existed before she got it. I’m confident she’s not faking because for her it really *is* embarrassing. I don’t think she would use the term “long Covid” to describe herself, and I don’t think she talks about it much, but she’s in the church choir with my dad and can’t really hide it. She’s just never fully recovered. Maybe it’s not so much ongoing viral issues, maybe it just scarred her lungs or something?

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Could this just be your lack of knowledge? I have a post-viral disease. One time I was asked to talk about my experience at a small event, and afterwards, I had four different acquaintances tell me they had Long COVID. I wouldn’t have known otherwise.

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Apr 22, 2023
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>the reputational damage associated with admitting to it could last forever

i think this is mostly the problem right now. my previous comment was pretty ignorant. i don’t mean to completely dismiss long covid, i have no doubt there can be long-term effects as with any disease, but it feels far too blanketing to me. as Katie and Jesse mentioned, the symptoms are all very broad and vague, which is ripe for self-diagnosis.

at this point i’d say it’s almost a branding problem; calling it “long covid” immediately dismisses any and all conservative attention, and it becomes a wave to ride as the next big trend for “disease influencers” (gross). i stand by my statement that there are people who literally stand to have financial and social gain if they have or claim to have long covid. it goes beyond advocacy of the damage covid could have on someone’s system. the loudest people make it their personality or job, and they’re the ones seen as representatives, unfortunately. it’s a social credit in some circles. all of which only serve to delegitimize the disease, something that I’m partially doing I guess.

also this is just my theory and maybe i’m overstating it, but i really think it stems from the trend of self-id and privileged, normal people looking for a victimhood badge to pin to themselves. again, only serves to delegitimize those who really struggle.

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What if we just stopped giving a shit about who is looking for a victim hood badge and who isn't? I have lupus. I've been to the ER alot over the past few years. In October, I'd been feeling off for a week or so and had a very high heart rate. I went to the ER and the doctor treated me like a neurotic little female drug seeker who wanted attention andmto collect diagnoses. Until the x ray found pneumonia (I aspirated on a chocolate chip cookie two weeks earlier-- a cat jumped on my lap and distracted me while eating it!). Did that doctor apologize ? Of course not. 2 years prior, I went to the ER 3 times for excruciating kidney pain and was treated similarly, bc I was there alone and I am a butch woman. The 4th hospital found stones and a kidney infection. Maybe if people cared less about "catching " fakers and more about helping sincere people, everyone would benefit.

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I just posted about this in the thread. Doctors and nurses can suffer moral injury from dealing with scammers all the time. You can start to see everyone as a liar. It's hard to keep expecting honesty and respect and getting let down all the time. It's a constant struggle to try to give everyone the benefit of the doubt.

Imagine a job where you have to be very physical, great in a crisis, good with technical equipment, super quick thinking and high emotional intelligence. All while dealing with a nutty populace.

It's terrible that people like you have to suffer for it. What they did was wrong. I just think that all the scammers share some blame.

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This is the thing with cops too. People are like "why do some cops treat everyone like dicks?" And the answer is a lot of cops, particularly in tough areas, end up dealing all day with people who will lie about anything, resist, fight, etc. Some people can stay positive in the face of that, many not.

It can undermine anyone's desire to give people the benefit of the doubt after a while.

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I also think there’s an issue with media/experts claiming that like 11% of people who have had COVID have long COVID and the cases of people who have had a bad reaction to a disease (which happens to multiple diseases). Those are two very different things and then they’re constantly getting conflated (because it fits a certain narrative). Add in vague symptoms and it becomes very murky very fast.

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Apr 22, 2023Edited
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Yes!

When my brother in law got engaged, My husband and I were concerned. His fiancee, Diana, had fibromyalgia. She had been in a gym accident, and was suing the gym because her injury caused her to get fibromyalgia. She got a financial settlement. After she got the money, she developed multi day migraines, chronic fatigue syndrome, and still had fibromyalgia.

Fast forward a couple years, and she became paralyzed while in a Lowes. During her hospitalization it became obvious that this was a conversion disorder; a hysterical illness.

The doctors said that confronting her with the diagnoses wouldn't do any good. So she went through a sham of an inpatient physical rehab stay.

The fake limp went away after a couple years. Right now she is having hypoglycemia.

All of her health problems make it so she can't work, though her kids are now independent young adults. So BIL continues to do all the work: working full time, shopping, cooking, cleaning, laundry and managing all the kids stuff.

I will bet you there is a 100% chance she is going to get long covid.

These people make it so hard for people who really do have long covid.

It's like ER doctors and nurses who have to deal with so many drug scammers that they are suspicious of everyone"s pain. The worst thing about the Boy Who Cried Wolf is that in real life it is other people who pay the price for the scammers.

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Apr 23, 2023
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But what if every person you personally know with a disease is a Diana? It's not a matter of emotional comfort to disbelieve a disease exists, it's pattern recognition.

When there is disease that all grifters claim to have, and there is no "smoking gun" test for it, it's asking for health care workers to just have faith. Which is fine- it's just really fucking hard.

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The cat story was riveting. I appreciated hearing about something so perverted by nuance that I couldn’t get outraged by either side. Great work Katie. My husband could overhear and said “I love these guys.”

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I bought GS from Robin. My cat got FIP in summer 2020. At the time I assumed there was some kind of mark-up despite the Atlantic article, but I had no idea they were making so much. I'm honestly not that bothered by the amount of mark-up per vial/pill, or even that they weren't transparent about it. GS saved my cat, and without FIP warriors, I wouldn't have had access to the specific form factor (small tablets) that I could actually get into my cat.

I'm much more bothered by the fact that some admins were essentially pocketing all that cash while others were doing all the actual work of triaging and helping with dosage etc. And that certain brands were being favored or even having adverse outcomes covered up. We did notice what appeared to be a difference in dosing between two batches at one point.

Also, I don't know if there was some separate drama back in 2020, but the Facebook group was completely shut down briefly and then a new one was created back then. No real explanation was given.

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I think people who say they have long Covid have one of four things that can be difficult to differentiate:

1) Unrelated illness

2) Covid-related psychological distress resulting in psychosomatic illness

3) autoimmune disease triggered by covid

4) lingering direct Covid damage.

I have personally developed a (usually) post-viral autoimmune disorder without remembering anything about the illness, suggesting it was rather mild at the time. (It was glomerial nephritis and I fully recovered.) I think post-viral issues are more common than people realize. It does not mean if you are more tired now than two years ago you have one.

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Autoimmune diseases are also very under-studied and many people with them find that the average PCP does not at all take a holistic approach to finding and treating the cause of their symptoms. This pushes people who otherwise were not "crunchy" into alternative medicine circles, which can also be very online. Lots of people with autoimmune disorders also report feeling a flare of symptoms after having Covid (including me!), which makes complete sense after an intense viral infection. People with chronic health problems also just might need 3-6 months to be completely back to normal, but that doesn't necessarily mean it's long Covid.

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Yeah I got long lasting post-viral issues after a bad dose of COVID-then-pneumonia.... and I figured it wasn't something unique because I had similar after a bad case of glandular fever a while back (including the nephritis that you had)

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Long COVID is real and people with it deserve treatment. But the Long COVID community has a quack problem. Dana Parish wrote a book about chronic Lyme disease and claims that Lyme disease causes MS (almost everyone with MS is infected with EBV). She's also one of those Zero Covid people. Diana Zicklin Berrent has claimed that Long COVID is like Adrenal Fatigue, which doesn't exist. People with Long Covid need good science so that they have effective treatments. It's also important for research to recognize that Long Covid isn't just one thing. People with the post-viral fatigue syndrome should not be treated with exercise. People who ended up with damage to their lungs and or hearts due to a severe case of COVID will probably benefit from exercise to increase their lung and heart strength. And people who have a lingering cough will probably get better with time. That also means that some people who think they have Long COVID may have something else. Some may have MS and some may have Lupus and they will need appropriate treatment for their actual disease. We don't want people finding out that the Long Covid they've spent 3 years being treated for is actually Lupus and in that time they've lost half of their kidney function. There was an article in a medical journal about two cases of advanced lung cancer that had been misdiagnosed as Long COVID. People are going to die from errors like that.

A good medical journalist would make sure that the patients they're reporting on have tested positive for SARS-COV2 either by PCR or antibodies. They should realize that patients are the experts in their symptoms but that doesn't mean that the patients know the cause of their symptoms. Even doctors often don't know the cause of their symptoms until they've done tests and they can misdiagnose people. I get the impression that Ed Yong has let his compassion for patients overwhelm his journalistic instincts. If you're a medical journalist and some of the activists for a particular condition have a history of advocating for fake diseases, you should report on that. It's also important to report on the range of scientific evidence on that condition, rather than just the science that backs the claims of the patients you've interviewed. He also seems to have fallen for the idea that it's somehow disrespectful to people with Long Covid to drop covid precautions when nearly everyone has some immunity. The good news is that infections with SARS-COV2 are now less likely to result in Long COVID, probably because nearly everyone has immunity, but he seems skeptical of that finding. THat's a bit concerning

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This is exactly it. I’m sympathetic to people who are suffering, whatever the cause. But it isn’t doing anyone any favors to blame a specific cause without strong evidence. That does put patients and doctors in a difficult situation when no specific cause is evident, but that’s always been the case. “Sometimes everyone feels like crap for reasons we don’t fully understand” is not very satisfying but it seems to be true.

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I have never enjoyed reading a podcast description more! Off to listen.

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I loved it, too!

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I've been skeptical of Ed Yong's long COVID reporting ever since his article about brain fog and long COVID: https://www.theatlantic.com/health/archive/2022/09/long-covid-brain-fog-symptom-executive-function/671393/

His asserted that:

"Brain fog isn’t like a hangover or depression. It’s a disorder of executive function that makes basic cognitive tasks absurdly hard" and gave an example of a woman who "“runs into a mental wall” when faced with tasks as simple as filling out forms. Her memory, once vivid, feels frayed and fleeting. Former mundanities—buying food, making meals, cleaning up—can be agonizingly difficult."

The woman might very well have long COVID, but Ed Yong's outright dismissal of the idea that brain fog could be like symptoms of depression really got to me because the description of her brainfog felt almost exactly like some of the problems I had because of severe depression. During my worst periods of depression, my executive functioning was sometimes even worse than that. That Yong wasn't willing to actually engage with similarities between brain fog and depression and just dismissed the idea they could be similar or the same bothered me enough that I actually emailed him about it. I never heard back.

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I have depression, which is well controlled with medication.

I got Covid at the end of last summer, and my dad died a few days into my illness. I spent the next five months with brain fog, exhaustion, terrible executive functioning, and poor memory.

Did I have long Covid? No! I was fucking depressed! I waited, and it went away.

I have a lot of joint pains in my ankle now. Do I have long Covid? No! I'm fucking 55 years old and joints hurt at this age. I am waiting, and it will go away.

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I've had times where I've spent hours of the day in bed or on the couch (for instance, when dealing with a ton of morning sickness) and it makes your body HURT. It gives you migraines. Your body is not designed to lay and sit all day, it's really not. I'm not surprised that the same people who are experiencing severe fatigue are experiencing muscle and nerve pain.

And I've definitely also had the "tincture of time" experience. But I do wish doctors were more explicit about saying "I want to see if this goes away with time, stays the same, or gets worse, because the treatments I have are pretty invasive and could even make things worse for you in other ways." A lot of them think that in their head but don't communicate it to patients, figuring that they'll come back if it doesn't go away. I think it doesn't foster a good relationship.

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I’ve seen what appears to be a negative spiral of inactivity and pain/fatigue in some people I know who are chronic illness sufferers (of various kinds). I’m not them, so who knows, but my own experience with depression and (separately, at times) fatigue is that the painful process of getting up and doing things IS the remedy to being unable to get up and do things. Which is really inconvenient and uncomfortable. And obviously it can’t be the case for everyone - some people surely do have conditions that require them not to get up and do stuff - but given my own, uh, lived experience, I find it hard to avoid being skeptical.

A large part of me would really like to just lie down and do nothing almost all of the time. I’m happy to call that “laziness” in myself, but it does seem to be something that not everyone experiences as much. But it doesn’t help to give in to it (more than the occasional nap). The less I do, the worse I feel.

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Same, but with my own chronic heart thing which has no cure and very invasive medical treatments, but responds very well to eating more salt and exercising. Which is easy to do when I feel great and really hard to do when I already feel like crap, because when I feel like crap moving around makes my symptoms worse, even though it will improve my symptoms if I do it every day for a month.

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Though thee pregnancies I suffered a cumulative 24 months of nausea and vomiting. Omg it sucked!!!

Honestly, the best my brain and body feel is when I'm backpacking and hiking around 10 hours a day. We always forget we are animals and we are born to move.

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I've had brain fog and have had close family members with depression, and it's not at all the same. Your mind feels weird, like someone flipped a switch, I couldn't write, I couldn't read, I couldn't concentrate on anything, this lasted for about three months, and then poof, it went away as suddenly as it started. I can't convey just how strange it was.

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I haven't listened yet- I will at work this evening.

I would to, before I listen, state that my twin sister has Long Covid from her 2020 infection. She was infected in March of 2020 and suffered a cardiac arrest in May of 2020 (a defibrillator saved her) and an arterial dissection in her brainstem in July of 2020. She now needs infusions of infliximab to stand and walk. I saw with my own eyes what covid did to her and I have spoken to her doctors, who are highly qualified clinicians and specialists at UPENN in Philadelphia. She had a recent appointment with her neurologist who stated that long covid caused her myelin sheath to be "eaten through." They are concerned about another clot /dissection so they have scheduled another MRI. She has aphasia, which is getting worse, and balance issues, which are getting worse. She takes a slew of medications for her heart and for her brain. I know long covid is not psychogenic. I will probably skip the long covid section here as I have lost friends in real life who laugh about it and call it fake knowing what I went through with my sister. I couldn't bear to add this podcast to something else I used to enjoy and like that views my family's nightmare as just another NPC libtard SJW meme disease.

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The podcast is not dismissive. And it’s more like the evidence is not as clear-cut as it’s being presented I’m with you that I definitely think long Covid is real but I also think that there’s a lot of diagnostic complications and complexities because it’s a long-term result of a new illness

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With any real disorder, there are the grifters and the wannabees who come along for the ride. For example Lyme Disease is real, and some people have acute symptoms after a tick bite. But the many more people on Tik-Tok talking about "Long Term Lyme Disease" with a host of vague symptoms that don't show up in any medical tests--are suspect.

Some people had terrible reactions to Covid infection, that landed them in the hospital, and caused permenent damage. But many, many others are just blaming a host of problems--ones that nobody can objectively diagnose on anything other than patient reports--on "Long Covid".

We've seen this time and time again with things like "Electromagnetic Sensitivity" (which nobody has), Celiac disease, where for every real person with it (which bring along serious medical issues that can be confirmed with a small intestine biopsy!) there's 100,000 grifters going "gluten free", Lupus, etc. And then there are the fake Tourette's people on Tik-Tok! Nobody doubts there is real Tourette's.

I think both the Left and the Right are subject to these. Look at all the ads on Info Wars for "miracle cures".

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Let me start with saying that I believe long covid is real, but it's not one disease. I know several people who have gotten it, though none of them have severe symptoms.

Kaiser Health News recently profiled three women with long covid. One of them had COVID and then ended up with depression. It's unclear how and infection with SARS-COV2 would trigger depression; her depression could have been triggered by the pandemic isolation. Even though she is a therapist, long covid is probably less stigmatized than depression triggered by pandemic restrictions. I know several people who will tear you a new one for saying that pandemic restrictions worsened your mental health.

When you read the other two patients' stories, there are puzzling omissions from their stories. One had a treatment plan with a cardiologist who then discharged her as a patient with no explanation. She then notes that she's seeing a cardiologist who still requires masks. The third one was a fitness instructor until covid and eventually ended up with breathing problems and ended up with brain damage -- though we don't know what the test was that determined she had brain damage and whether it was even valid. There's no mention of how severe their Covid was -- if you had a mild case, the likelihood is extremely small that you would end up with damage to your lungs or cardiac damage.

I don't think any of these patients are lying or griffin. However, it is possible that they have other illnesses and have been misdiagnosed with long covid. If it turns out the they have something like MS, they're going to get sicker because they're treating a disease they don't have instead of one they do have.

Here's the article.

https://kffhealthnews.org/news/article/long-covid-patients-end-of-pandemic-emergency/

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"She then notes that she's seeing a cardiologist who still requires masks." Around here all medical facilities still require masks!

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How is going gluten free grift? I have IBS and going GF has really helped me due to it being a soluable fiber diet. And not only did the popularity of the GF diet make GF foods better, it has made them more available and lower cost.

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I think the prevalence of people eating it who do not have allergies does result in some people taking gluten intolerance less seriously which can be a real problem for people with severe allergies. A friend who has coeliac disease told that she couldn't eat gluten-free sandwiches from a mainstream UK cafe chain because they did not actually make them separately, which could make her ill. (This was a few years ago so, it may be different now.)

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Finding restaurants that have a separate place to prepare GF entrees to avoid cross contamination hard, I would guess because it is expensive for a restaurant - more expensive than just using GF ingredients. Guaranteeing no cross-contamination is hard and also somewhat of a liability - if you say there is no cross contamination and someone with coeliac gets sick, it can result in bad reviews or even worse. So its always been hard to find restaurants that can do that. I have been GF since the mid 2000s and I can say it's so much easier to find restaurants that have GF entrees, label not just for GF but for vegans and vegetarians as well (my mom has dairy allergies so she chooses vegan because she knows it won't have dairy). So it seems to me a stretch to blame non-coeliac GF consumers for your friend not being able to eat a sandwich at a local cafe because of cross-contamination issues. Those are real issues for sure but they have always been issues due simply to the expense and logistics.

To say that a way of eating that helps multiple conditions is somehow trivializing one particular condition to me is absurd. Back when I started GF, I had one store in a 100 mile radius that sold food I and my son could eat and I had to order in bulk and buy a separate freezer to house it. Now I can get what we need at our local grocery store. Most of the time back then, I had to explain to people what gluten was. People seem to know a lot more now about gluten sensitivity - which is a misnomer: its not gluten in general but a specific gluten called gliadin - and coeliac disease.

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Thanks for your reply. I am very interested to hear about the issues for restaurants in dealing with allergies as it is not an aspect I know much about.

I do think you slightly misunderstood the thrust of my comment though. Someone had referred to going gluten-free as 'grift'. So, it would seem that some people take gluten allergies less seriously because of a large number of people going gluten-free without strictly speaking needing to.

I think that that attitude does lead to some danger for people with serious allergies although, I certainly was not blaming anyone for my friend not being able to buy a sandwich in a mainstream cafe chain.

As you are GF you see the scale of good and bad effects tipped decidedly in favour of good and I am not arguing with that just mulling over other potential consequences.

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People who have serious allergies are in some danger for sure, but I am skeptical its it's caused by people who claim to have those allergies when they do not. Coeliac disease requires that you ELIMINATE gliadin from your person - ingesting via your digestive system, skin and respiratory system. It's very difficult and its a high level above needing to be on a GF diet because you have a wheat allergy or IBS. And silent coeliacs have it especially hard because they don't have any discernable outward symptoms. It's not just that I see it as a net benefit that more people are seeking out a GF diet, others I know see it that way too, including those I know who have coeliac disease. But these are not data points we are talking about, they are anecdotal examples. You say that a "large number of people are going gf" - based on what data? This line of thought seems oversimplified and scapegoaty. If you took all of the so-called obnoxious people who claim a gluten sensitivity they don't have out of the equation, coeliac disease would still be really hard to live with because the bar of elimination is so high.

Calling it grift is hyperbole and inaccurate. Sure there are people obnoxiously making a big deal out of eating GF - there are people who do that about just about everything. That doesn't mean they are trying to swindle anyone.

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Thanks for your reply. It's really interesting to learn about coeliac disease from you. Frankly, it sounds like it is still not that well understood by the general public as I did not know that it could be ingested through skin or the respiratory system. I am definitely going to be going down the rabbit hole finding out more about this subject!

You are right that I probably should have said 'it would seem that some people take gluten allergies less seriously because of a perception that a large number of people are going GF without actually needing to' rather than stating it as I did not have data for that at the time. It was my speculation as to why the other commenter and others I have seen called it 'grift'.

As is always good in life you have encouraged me to look further into it and I have found some interesting information which gives me some thinking to do but, I am sure will be familiar to you.

1) There is some data to support the idea that at least some people are going GF without a diagnosis https://www.beyondceliac.org/research-news/mayo-clinic-80-of-people-on-gluten-free-diet-do-not-have-celiac-disease-diagnosis/#:~:text=An%20estimated%201.6%20million%20Americans,study%20from%20the%20Mayo%20Clinic. Although, clearly that is not the same as saying 'not needing to go GF'.

2) There is some data to suggest that 25% of Americans follow a gluten free diet when only 1 in 20 Americans have a sensitivity. But, how good is that data? I have learned to be a bit sceptical after Jesse's exposés. https://news.unl.edu/newsrooms/today/article/study-concludes-americans-self-diagnose-to-adopt-gluten-free-diets/.

Whether that is the reason for the view that some people like the other commenter see it as 'grift' is admittedly less clear. I agree it's hyperbole and inaccurate but, I am curious why you think the other commenter called it 'grift'? Maybe this is just an early example of culture war type stuff?

Also on a tangent, I just learned that women suffer from coeliac disease 2 to 3 times more than men https://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/2018/aug/07/not-just-a-fad-the-surprising-gut-wrenching-truth-about-gluten (which fits with the fact that 78% of auto-immune disease sufferers are women https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/why-nearly-80-percent-of-autoimmune-sufferers-are-female/). Which is fascinating. Someone here or the reddit page had suggested that might play into the sex disparity with long Covid as well. I wonder if that could be right?

Anecdotally, my aunt went GF without waiting for a proper diagnosis. She figured that as her doctor had suggested it was a possibility she might as well stop eating it rather than continue making herself unwell while waiting for the test. I actually think that was a perfectly reasonable thing to do and that is probably true of other people in the 'undiagnosed' category as well.

Anyway, thanks for opening my eyes up about the realities of allergies and restaurants etc. I actually saw something similar come up about sesame seed allergies but, hadn't quite put it together. https://www.allergicliving.com/2022/12/20/bread-suppliers-adding-sesame-as-seed-becomes-top-allergen/

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Apr 25, 2023
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No thanks, I'll leave that to you since you sound just as hysterical as they do.

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Multiple things can be true. It can be true that:

*COVID can cause some sort of lasting harm

*Different COVID variants behave radically differently

*Different people react radically differently to COVID

*There is a significant number of people who will fake symptoms for personal gain

*Psychosomatic illness is common

*Social contagion is a thing

None of these things, if true, excludes any of the others.

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I'm so sorry to hear of your sister's health struggles. The aftermath of infection-induced cardiac arrest and stroke is indeed life-changing and extremely serious.

I think that when most people are discussing the takes "long Covid," however, they are referring to more general symptoms of malaise, fatigue, etc that many people report after even mild viral infections. That is a very different scenario than the reality of severe long-term effects possible after a serious Covid (or other viral) infection that causes major complications requiring hospitalization, such as what your sister experienced. I would hope most people would not put your sister or her experiences in the former category.

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People like Whitney Dafoe can end up not being able to physically eat (or speak, for a while, before making a slight improvement under Abilify) because they have a post-viral condition that is referred to as “Chronic Fatigue Syndrome”. I think it’s not as black and white as it seems...either hospitalised or not, severe or generalised. Scientists haven’t discovered everything yet. Someone can have severe symptoms, and there’s no known test to show what exactly is wrong...and they can be still be extremely ill.

Generalisation does make it hard to get treatment, but without medical focus—especially when assuming that generalised symptoms without showing positive test results indicates a psychogenic illness—it’s even harder to end that generalisation. Someone could complain of fatigue, malaise, and aches, be unable to physically get out of bed because of it, and still not have a better words than that.

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I tf

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While certainly not as severe as post viral strokes, do not dismiss the severity of post viral fatigue. It’s not like being tired after a long day, I’ve often felt as though I have had a full on flu for months.

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I'm so sorry for your sister. My aunt appears to have developed POTS from COVID. She (a nurse, and her wife is also a nurse) just posted casually about every single classic POTS symptom as suddenly happening after she had COVID, and that she was frustrated by whatever the fuck was going on in her body.

I showed it to a friend who happens to have POTS (not self dxed, she had the full work up including tilt table and is doing so much better after finding the right blood pressure med), and she told me that on her support group at the hospital, there was a MASSIVE influx of new members who suddenly developed it after having COVID. Seems a viral infection is a common reason people develop this.

I honestly worry that the "long covid" concept creep is going to keep people like my aunt from getting treated for medical problems that we already have names for, and slow down research/treatments for people like your sister who are really suffering from something novel.

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And my wife got COVID in late 2020, and then was perfectly fine for 16 months and then suddenly came down with POTS. Sometimes people jsut get sick. It is not all due to COVID.

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It's absolutely possible it's coincidence, but the fact that my aunt developed these symptoms very shortly after getting sick, if not while she had active covid, is pretty suspicious imo.

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Honestly. I have ME/CFS and listening to this is painful. I am just as critical of many Long COVID studies—because those studies are often uninformed of post-viral diseases and their histories, all the mass amount of research that’s already been conducted, as well as the various subsets of Long COVID.

The idea that such a large amount of people are experiencing mass trauma because of COVID and developing psychogenic diseases is just...humans have been through so much. Throughout history, and past epidemics have brought with them a wave of post-viral problems. People don’t get like this because they got laid off from their job. Not to mention Katie talking about The New Republic article? I’m sorry about your sister. I might write a longer comment about this later on.

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Apr 23, 2023
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>But the list includes things like fatigue and difficulty concentrating which are pretty common to experience due to stress or depression.

Or just to experience generally even outside of that. But if you are 20 and it is 2005, you probably just say "oh I have been feeling shitty this last month". And if you are 45 and it is 2005 you just blame it on getting old.

But if you are in the modern era, the internet has whole communities based upon "medicalizing" normal human variation, and convincing people they deserve to be bedridden because they felt 80% for a month instead of 100%.

I always suspect you stick 100 CFS suffers on a farm and make them farm or die, and 90% of them are miraculously cured.

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You really don't understand the condition you're talking about. But I get that it is much more psychologically comfortable believe that people who are suffering from something that is intractable and poorly understood are just victims of themselves.

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I would be a lot more convinced by CFS if it wasn’t so socially transmissible and wasn’t clustered so strongly among lazy people.

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This sentiment reeks of personal bias and lack of data, in addition to the psychological mechanism I described in my previous comment.

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Yea you don’t seem biased or basing your thoughts on personal experience at all…

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True. I am biased. So let me add my personal experience to yours: the people I've known who have CFS aren't part of any cluster of CFS sufferers. What are the clusters you are familiar with?

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I didn’t know what CFS was when I got it. I thought that it was just chronic fatigue. I was like, “that’s definitely not what I have.” I had way too many serious symptoms. I was about to move abroad to my dream school for university and was extremely excited; I had to cancel all those plans.

I’m part of a local support group for those with the condition. I’m a good twenty years younger than the youngest group member (though, to be fair, one member’s son used to attend as he was also ill but no longer does.) A couple of them don’t have any social media. None of them seem to displayed any polarized political stance. Most of them had to leave a job they loved. They just got sick, and they lost so much because of it. And they’ve all had to fight to stop being treated as a psychological patient, or even as if they’re a “chronic fatigue” patient.

Sure, I’m biased. But I’m knowledgeable. I’ve followed every inch of research, because I’d do anything to wake up one day and find that this nightmare is just gone.

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No one on the internet has ever told me that I deserve to be bedridden, and “feeling 80 percent for a north instead of 100 percent” is so far from what “CFS” is. Where on Earth is your idea of the demographics of “CFS” sufferers coming from?

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Apr 23, 2023
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Oh gosh. I cringed at that so much...that’s not what ME/CFS is 😭 especially when the episode focussed on a condition where ME/CFS is a major subset.

Did you write a note somewhere about this? I still don’t know how Substack works 😂

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So you haven't listened to the podcast, and you have absolutely no idea what they said, but you'll probably skip the part about long Covid because... wait... why?! How does that make any sense to you?

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Because I am easily set off by hearing people dismiss it or read material that is dismissive of it, since the two best friends I've had since I was a teenager decided, even after knowing what happened to my sister, that they would be dismissive of it. Maybe that's dumb, but BaR is one of the few joys left I have in life and I don't want to end up adding it to the "people who think that the thing that destroyed my family is fake " pile. Even hearing material discussed that is dismissive of it makes my eyes water and my chest get tight. In 2020, as atms exploded through the night and smoke from the fires being set came through my window, my mother who was dying was moaning and screaming and I was getting calls from the hospital my sister was at. Anything dismissive of covid brings me right back there and I find it hard to breathe. Sorry if that's not like super cool anti woke enough for the comments here or whatever.

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The heterodox and rationalist communities overlap so much. I remember hanging around a clique of rationalists for a good while and always being amused that everything was oh-so principled, unburdened by emotion, and objective… until some close to home topic came up. Everyone (even the most “rational” or “objective” people on these here BARpod threads) inevitably has something that makes them tick, that’s incredibly human. But I unfortunately think these communities have empathy problems, and that’s very apparent with Covid in general and the heterodox crowd.

I can’t read long covid skepticism. Mentioned above, it’s my villain origin story— so I try to not set off my rage. I’m sure we’re both at a point where we only want to hear developments towards treatment options. After four MRIs, a lumbar puncture, two echocardiograms, countless blood tests, etc. to rule out differentials, I don’t need convincing long covid is real and the cause of my health issues. And some skeptical articles (and podcast subscribers) won’t suddenly “snap me out of it,” either (I wish!).

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True. People in this thread seriously are lacking empathy. Long COVID affects every single thing you do, and people cannot grasp the extent of that…I really wish I could just CBT myself out of ME/CFS (and comorbidities like POTS) but I’ve tried that and it’s made me much worse. It’s a nightmare.

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I get it. It is so heartbreaking to have had people I loved and trusted question it, dear wonderful friends I thought I would have forever and who I thought loved my sister, too. I tear up just thinking about it. I am sorry for all of your health issues and I know that covid is a horrible illness. I don't understand why we can't yet admit that it is a bio weapon. Bio weapons do not kill 100 percent of targets. Their goal is terror and discord, which is what has happened with n-sars-cov2. I WANT to listen to the episode but I usually listen to these at work and I don't want to get triggered (I know it is a dumb word but I really do have clinically diagnosed ptsd from what happened to my family) while cleaning a house (have two clients today). Weirdly the only episode I ever listened not at work was the interview with the YA author whose contract was canceled, when I had omicron in early 2022. I consider that one of their best episodes.

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For me, the skepticism is about the causality, not the health problems themselves.

I have no doubt you're having health problems and I would like to think that I'm empathetic.

But to say, definitively, that they're due to Covid? Maybe. I dunno. There's no agreed-upon explanation for what causes long Covid, or a test for it, etc. Just because nobody can come up with any other explanation for your health problems doesn't mean it's long Covid. People have been developing unexplained health problems since the dawn of time.

Statistically, some number of people will catch Covid every day. Statistically, some number of people will develop unexplained health problems every day. Thus, statistically, some people will develop unexplained health problems shortly after catching Covid every day. That doesn't mean Covid is the reason, even though I understand that such thinking is tempting.

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you and your family have gone through some scary moments. EMDR might be helpful to process those images and experiences that you recall so that you don't have to re-live that trauma so often. avoiding triggers is one way that can work when we have that control, but healing at the source can help us move forward for those times when avoidance isn't an option.

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I've thought about it. I have a counselor who is a veteran who specializes in ptsd. I see him today, later today. I guess we'll have a lot to talk about..

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I am sorry to hear about your sister's experience. That's must have been awful for you as well.

For clarity, I think what you are saying is that Covid was for some people a serious illness and it and its associated symptoms has left your sister with permanent health damage. In a similar way, that someone who contracts encephalitis might suffer permanent brain damage leading to symptoms such as fatigue, irritability, impaired concentration, seizures, hearing loss, memory loss and blindness or in a more simple example, someone I knew who was left with permanent lung damage from a bronchial infection.

I think this is different from the phenomenon that is being discussed and referred to as 'long Covid'.

What I had understood 'long Covid' to mean was someone who according to all available medical evidence was apparently better and had apparently no physical damage e.g. no lung damage but, still feels unwell. In other words a post-viral syndrome.

Your sister's doctor referred to 'long covid' to mean something quite different to that so, perhaps mine and others' confusion in this conversation comes from the fact that the meaning of 'long covid' is not quite settled in the lexicon. I do think there is a benefit to discussing the available research on 'long Covid' as a post-viral syndrome which is distinct from 'long Covid' as permanent identifiable health damage.

I do hope your sister's health can be improved or stabilised.

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I’m so sorry your sister and your family have experienced such a nightmare. It’s great she has a solid team of medical providers, but it’s also unfun to be in a position of learning along side the doctors with no truly helpful treatments or relief available.

I’ve been dealing with long Covid since summer of 2021. My case is far from the most extreme, and it’s still been hell. The fatigue and POTS forced me to fold my dog walking business and give up my favorite activities— the gym and going out dancing. On the good days, dismissal of long Covid is frustrating. On the bad, it sends me into a near homicidal, “ache like I ache” rage. So I’ll probably skip this segment, too.

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I’m so sorry about your sister--what she is going through certainly sounds like a nightmare. Even though covid is becoming more endemic, it’s important to realize how novel of a virus it truly is and how little we know of it’s long term effects. My mother, who is in her early fifties, had covid a couple months ago and ever since then developed arthritis in one of her knees, a symptom that we are pretty sure is a result of long covid. I’m with you on that we should not dismiss serious concerns especially when it affects those we love.

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Apr 22, 2023
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I would love for there to be more good research into post-viral conditions but at this point I fear another national health research institute would be ensnared in the same politics and perverse incentives that have corrupted the others. (Also there's a paywall so I couldn't see exactly what Tufekci proposed).

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I'll just leave my story with Long Covid here, it's now cleared, but I had symptoms for 2 years. Like many people I know with LC, I got infected early on in March 2020. The thing wiped me out, for people who have had Omicron only, Alpha was something else, I was very sick for 2 weeks, then it cleared, but I didn't fully recover until April 2022. I ended up in ER twice with chest pains. My hair fell off in large clumps. I had brain fog for about three months during 2020, I was literally stupid and couldn't read, write, or concentrate. I also had numbness and neuropathies. I was tired all of the time. My lungs hurt. I didn't want to be sick, I had been very healthy and active all of my life, I kept wishing it away, the doctors had no idea what was wrong with me, but I felt like crap all of the time. And then a combination of my third vaccine and third covid infection cured me. My guess? At least in my case Long Covid was caused by persistent viral load somewhere in my system, which kept triggering an auto-immune response. But honestly,I have no idea, but this crap is real, and the weird symptoms were so random that I thought that I was going crazy.

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my sister had a remittance of symptoms after her second shot, for a few weeks, like you describe. Covid is so weird. I would never wish anyone ill with it but I wish some people would understand. I am sorry you went through this.

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Thanks, I think that for a few people it was frustrating precisely because some of the symptoms sound completely made-up and random. "What do you mean the left side of your face is numb?" It was bizarre.

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Thanks for sharing. Going on 3 years here, getting more functional but still dealing with issues. Funnily enough, tinnitus started last week. I agree with the viral persistence theory because my condition vastly improved when I started taking antivirals. (I'm still very unwell but nothing like the full year of being bedbound this started with.) Very glad to hear you're feeling better, hoping I get there too

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I’m glad you’re doing so much better. I think we’ll find multiple causes of long Covid, but I definitely think the persistent viral load theory holds a lot of water. I did a bit better after getting vaxxed in that my heart slowed down a bit for a couple of months. I also seem better at sea level, I wonder about oxygenation issues as a culprit of mine.

The hair loss sucked, and I hope that’s over. I lost about half my hair over a 6 month period.

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Ed Yong's idea that we should privilege self-diagnosed long covid sufferers' personal testimony over objective medical data seems like a special exception.

For example, does anyone think it's likely that Yong would apply the same standard to people who claim to have suffered injury from covid vaccines?

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Apr 24, 2023
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That's true, but Yong argues that when reports conflict with objective data, we should prefer the reports, so for example if reports of long COVID don't correlate with the likelihood that a person has COVID antibodies or if the alleged frequency of long COVID doesn't agree with changes in disability claims, Yong doesn't find those to be a cause for scepticism about the frequency of long COVID.

"To a degree, I sympathize with some of the skepticism regarding long COVID, because the condition challenges our typical sense of what counts as solid evidence. Blood tests, electronic medical records, and disability claims all feel like rigorous lines of objective data. Their limitations become obvious only when you consider what the average long-hauler goes through—and those details are often cast aside because they are “anecdotal” and, by implication, unreliable. This attitude is backwards: The patients’ stories are the ground truth against which all other data must be understood. Gaps between the data and the stories don’t immediately invalidate the latter; they just as likely show the holes in the former."

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I will say that Ed Yong's book, An Immense World is quite good. Probably because it has almost nothing political in it. It's about animal perception and is excellent and detailed, and has content in it that I as a Biologist didn't know about.

Unfortunately when things get political, people get stupid. Ed is no exception. He has a bad case of internet poisoning like a lot of people.

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He strikes me as one of those brilliant people who's experienced a slow decline in clear-thinking thanks to social media. I've watched it in a few different people, and it's always sad. My hope is that Elon manages to kill twitter. NYT had an (optimistically titled) article "What was twitter, anyway?" My dream is that it actually does die and lots of people snap out of it.

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I would never have said this before last week, hell would have called myself a conspiracy theorist for saying it, but after recent revelations and Europe and the FDA pulling the original vaccines, I’ve had a bit of a change of heart.

I’m not anti-mRNA technology, it’s an amazing breakthrough, and I’m not saying anything against the current vaccines, but there might be another reason some of the vaccinated are feeling these long symptoms, specifically those who keep getting Pfizer boosters.

I’m a 30 year old male, healthy, had COVID alpha pre-vax and it felt like a mild hangover for half a day.

Later I got 2 doses of Pfizer and the 2nd shot crippled me. I mean that literally because at one point I actually collapsed. I didn’t feel like I would die but it was 2 days of absolute hell.

I’m going to actually “follow the science” here as new studies come out, and hell I could be totally wrong, I personally never had “long COVID symptoms”, but at this point it’s just hard to know what the truth is on a lot of things.

I’ve come to the conclusion to not dismiss anything, but instead to wait and see.

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The FDA did not "pull the original vaccines". The vaccines are still FDA approved. They ended emergency use authorization and recommend getting newer bivalent vaccines. They did this because we have a better vaccine now and a lot of people just never got the second dose. Your comment is incredibly misleading.

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That is my fault on the wording, all I ask is this, just keep an open mind. Dr. John Campbell’s analysis on these things is swaying me towards there being major problems with the original Pfizer vaccines in particular.

I’ll make a prediction, a concrete one, with let’s say, 85% certainty. In the next 5 months there will be very very convincing evidence that there was a lot more wrong with that original Pfizer vaccine than was originally stated.

Also, social media policies as they were at the time, I literally couldn’t say my own symptoms on social media when I had my adverse effects, granted I don’t use social media so guess it didn’t matter, but there was something wrong with that vaccine.

Not all mRNA vaccines, not the current vaccines, I have no clue about those, just the original Pfizer one.

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Wait, what?

The new vaccine IS the original vaccine.

Well, half of it is. The other half is basically the original vaccine but with the mRNA twiddled to match a more recent strain of the virus. Hence, "bivalent."

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Do you mean that literally though, as in the 2nd half of the bivalent vaccine was made and is exactly, and I mean exactly, the same just with the mRNA changed on the 2nd half?

I’m happy to engage with those with a deeper understanding on the science of it, AI is more my personal field but I have have found recent developments regarding this subject troubling. One of many students for example that caught my eye is: https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/36597886/

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Yes, I do mean that literally. At least that's what Pfizer is claiming. Half the bivalent vaccine is exactly the same as the original vaccine. I obviously haven't confirmed this myself (I have no expertise with chemistry or biology and have no idea how one might confirm it) but I have no reason to doubt them.

The article about the free circulating spike proteins is interesting. I don't know how that would happen. My understanding is that the spike proteins that a cell generates just kind of "poke out of" the cell. I don't know how they would get free of the cell. But, okay. It seems like this problem affects very few people. To overgeneralize, only teenage boys get myocarditis from the vaccine, and very few of them, at that.

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Look I’m no reflexively anti-Big Pharma leftie, but I’ve worked in major corporations before and I’ll say this, never take what any major corporation tells you as the gospel truth. Pfizer’s “legal issues” section on Wikipedia is a damn mile long, hell Moderna even sued them for literally the vaccine we’re talking about, which got a chuckle out of me.

Also, I’m going to withhold judgment on the exact age range on Myocarditis in males, and I’m not claiming I had Myocarditis, never went to the hospital, but I definitely had suddenly-collapse-on-the-floor syndrome.

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Well, I am anti-big-pharma, but at some point you have to trust what some people tell you about some things. You can't go around verifying everything in your life.

Plus, can you even _imagine_ the scandal and the lawsuit if somebody DOES discover that Pfizer is lying about their vaccine? They wouldn't risk it. While I can't verify the contents of the vaccine myself, I'm sure that e.g. Moderna has some motivation to investigate the Pfizer vaccine...

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Oh I can imagine the scandal, in fact I’m predicting it. Would it be any more insane than John Brennan (CIA director) telling Obama in Dec. 2016 that Russiagate was nonsense before getting a job at msnbc lying about Trump being a Kremlin puppet for years? It’s off topic but Jeff Gerth’s article in the Columbia Journalism Review, then Jacob Siegel’s breakdown of the disinformation nonsense in Tablet magazine show a scandal that would even make Pfizer having a vaccine made of Cheez-Whiz look like a joke in comparison. Those 2 book length pieces of investigative journalism in particular, admittedly, shattered my view on the extremes people would go to lie about things for power.

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Those are busted analogies. You're talking about scandals that hinged on human beings keeping secrets.

With an actual product, like a vaccine, you can buy the product and independently confirm characteristics of said product if you have the appropriate expertise.

Simply put, Pfizer can't lie about the contents of their vaccine because they would be too easily caught.

You might as well think that Chevy can lie about the number of wheels that their trucks have if they just commit enough to said lie.

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For most products I’d say that’s true, but for complex products? Well, that’s a different story.

I know a bit about machine learning. Machine learning is so confusing to most people that a company could probably get away for years saying they can read the AI code (they can’t) without a regulator knowing. On complex technologies it is the corporations who write the regulations, because no one knows what the hell they’re talking about.

My main interest may be AI but my degree is in finance. People in publicly traded corporations are incredibly shortsighted, you are slammed with doing everything you can for the quarter. Don’t believe me? Ironically I’m actually wearing an Enron shirt right now, I’m starting a collection, I still need WorldCom, Theranos, FTX, and my personal favorite, Credit Suisse.

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I see no reason to trust either Pfizer or Moderna (who hadn't created a pharmaceutical product prior to their mRNA product). I understand why, under the circumstances of fear over covid and a desperate need to get back to normal life people chose not to verify and to trust Pharma. But it is totally legit and rational to question the safety of a novel drug that was rushed through, especially with safety signal in VAERS that was setting off alarm bells for some of us.

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lol you started out being all like "just asking questions" then you really went for it. Take your antivax soapbox somewhere else please

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I’m not on an anti-vaxx soapbox. I told you, I’m pro-mRNA vaccines, I’m “just asking questions” about literally one vaccine in particular. If I end up being wrong, I end up being wrong. I’m not saying the Illuminati/Bilderbergs/NWO is out to enslave us all, I just think there is more wrong with 1 vaccine in particular than was immediately told, beyond it ruining my weekend.

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let's remember you started this conversation with a blatant lie about vaccines. you mentioned a doctor who has been debunked countless times for not understanding or intentionally misreading studies. you are just not coming off as a person seriously engaging with this

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“A doctor who has been debunked”, ok man, I’m not lying about keeping an open mind. Precisely where can you point me to find the running feed taking down every bit of Campbell’s analysis? If Campbell is a fraud then damn, fool me twice as the saying goes, busg I’m not an idiot. I know how to read a scientific paper. Telling me someone is “debunked” in a comments thread doesn’t do it for me. Debunked by whom? Gimme some evidence here.

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Literally just look at the Wikipedia page. He misunderstood death statistics in one popular video. He misunderstood or misrepresented vaers data in another. He completely made up or lied about ivermectin data in Japan. When a seemingly intelligent person consistently misrepresents or misunderstands things over and over eventually you can just dismiss them as liars. And if you earnestly have concerns about the Pfizer vaccine that hundreds of millions of people have taken the answers are out there. Either you don't want them or aren't sincerely interested in them

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Obviously I am interested in them seeing as I’m buried in this conversation in a Blocked & Reported comments thread, granted I have a lot of time on my hands while I get better at prompt engineering.

How about we end in a truce so we don’t break poor Jesse/Katie’s comment thread. We both just wait to see what peer reviewed studies come out, that fair?

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I'll do you one better. Write out more specifically the timeline and what kind of negative evidence you expect to come out. $500 to the charity of your choice if it happens.

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That’s bold, I like it, but I thought you wanted to remain anonymous, as I do? I really just need to stop replying on this damn thread, I’m worried I just casually dropped a hand grenade into poor Katie/Jessie’s comment thread. 100% you can think you have won, whatever it is you’ve won here, I don’t care, these threads are getting so long I’m getting confused as to what I’m responding to.

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Campbell hasn't been debunked.

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Hold on a minute, did I just get baited into arguing with a bot again? Your username looks like it’s from a cat running across a keyboard and you’re subscribed to no one. I really gotta stop taking the bait on this shit, whatever.

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My username is randomly generated and I have privacy settings on and you still sound silly

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Do you think you're on Reddit?

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I got both vaccinated and Covid, nothingburgers all around. I'm just still furious they kept lying about what exactly the vaccine was supposed to do and how dangerous the virus actually was. I got duped.

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I grew up in Michigan, and while it is true that there is no reason for anyone from Michigan to have a confederate flag, it is also true that that never seems to stop anyone...so maybe racist brother is not still in the aryan nation, just another Michigander with grandparents from Kentucky over-romanticizing the good old days of yore...

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There's no reason for anyone to have a Confederate flag except if you hate the USA and want to secede from it. Or you are racist.

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re-enactment enthusiasts?

edit: as a reason to have one I mean

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We have a family cottage in northern Michigan, and I hate seeing those stupid flags. They were the enemy, dum dums.

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Right? The best is up in the UP, it’s like if you guys were any further from the Mason-Dixon Line you’d be in Canada

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Every time I see one of those dumb things I want to try to get an ISIS flag and see how folks will react.

My wife is unamused every time we drive by the Stonewall Jackson memorial and I quip about it being the historical equivalent of putting up a shrine to Timothy McVeigh.

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Just to be clear he definitely is still a racist regardless

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The impersonation thing just doesn’t seem like that big of a deal to me. Twitter was artificially given way more cultural cache than warranted in large part because of their arbitrary verification policy. It’s a distorted reality where the media could spin any narrative about any event with the veneer of bluecheck legitimacy. It’s a silly website, not a place where serious discourse happens. If this finally forces the media class to acknowledge that, it’s a (probably unintentional) win in my book.

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This cat story has to be one of the best stories told and researched on the show. My only critique is that there was no joke made about CatTurd2. With how silly Jesse and Katie can be, it’s easy to forget that they’re damn good at what they do. And major props to Trace, he’s like the CNA at the BARpod hospital, mucking about in the dirty crevices. Salute to you sir, you deserve some scritches

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In med school we learn about this concept called somatic stress disorder in which a health condition can exist but that patients exaggerate the severity of the condition they often have disproportionate thoughts about the disease's severity, heightened anxiety and excessive time/energy devoted to this disorder. It's possible that the situation with long COVID can exist but that intentional isolation is exacerbating an existing condition thus resulting in this wide variety of symptoms.

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I still don't understand how someone could like devote time and energy to an arterial dissection in their brainstem or a cardiac arrest during a 104 degree fever. I am here telling people this happened to my sister, I was there the whole time. It wasn't somatic or whatever psychogenic shit people say. I will never get over what I had to deal with and the worst part was people I loved dismissing it. "I can't engage with your sisters illness, don't you think the hospital is infanitlizing her? " my best fucking friend said this to me. She had a DISSECTION in her BRAIN and was on ketamine and morphine for God's sake in the hospital. ANYONE would sound like a frightened child. I lost the closest friend I ever had over this. If only it all never happened. Each night I beg God just to please make it so it all never happened.

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I am not saying it's 'all' of the cases of Long COVID of course, just that it might explain some of these situations. Your sisters' seems very much a result of real physical symptoms

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Yeah a condition can be both real and over-diagnosed.

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So long COVID...basically the main thing that drives me nuts about these people is that like Ed Yong, they are way too credulous and not willing to consider alternate hypotheses.

I got COVID right at the beginning, second week of MAR 2020. At least most likely because they weren't testing people who weren't dying at the time in my area, and just sent me home. Then ~6 weeks later I was hospitalized with a serious lung infection, that they were sure was COVID related.

Since then (now 18 months later, my heart/lung function has never really seemed to get get back to 100%. I seem to get respiratory illnesses more often, and have had recurrent lung infection issues.

Long COVID...maybe...or maybe the fact that due to the lockdown 1I went from working out 4 days a week to working out 1 day a week, and then was also hospitalized for a bit, and overall put on 30lbs, plus I went from age 39 to 42 over the past few years, just means I am older, and fatter, and that is why I don't feel as well. Behavioral habits also changed, in terms of amount of time I spend online etc.

So many of these people don't seem to even consider the other possible causes, nor the fact that lots of different illnesses can have a post viral syndrome/permanent body changes. Anyway, I suspect like with most of these non-specific illness, most of the people are just in essence malingering.

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So many of the symptoms that are weakly linked to covid infections can be a result of lifestyle changes. When I'm less active (and I'm normally very active), I have a harder time sleeping, get tired more easily and am more nervous. Closing the gyms could have triggered a lot of people's symptoms. Another condition that has been anecdotally linked to covid is migraines. I have migraines and there are a ton of factors that can worsen them including weather changes, dietary changes, medications and stress. Migraines worsening after covid could be due to many things. The response to the pandemic disrupted a lot of people's lives. Attributing them to the effects of the virus rather than our response to the virus means that we don't have to ask hard questions like whether some of our responses did more harm than good.

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In this way it really reminds me of vaccine injury claims. SOME of them are very real and totally related to the vaccine recieved. And some of them are totally real and totally coincidental to the vaccine received. And some of them are psychosomatic (which is not to say not real, but very different). And of course some are just made up. And the number in the first category is a VERY small percentage of the overall total

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Yes! One of the things I was thinking about is that for every person who claims long COVID, there is on the opposite side of the political spectrum someone who believes they were permanently harmed by the COVID vaccine. That’s why it’s important to investigate these claims scientifically rather than relying on competing anecdotes.

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And honestly, especially in the "real but coincidental" category, I really feel for people. My dad had strokes when I was in high school that came out of nowhere and some combination of the treatments have worked to keep him clot-free for over 10 years. But although we hypothesize, we'll never really know what caused it, why the treatments worked, and we'll really never know why it happened RIGHT THEN.

But fast forward ten years, of he'd had an MRNA vaccine or covid right before I would definitely always wonder. And I can understand why people become really attached to certain explanations.

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I totally agree that vaccine injury is to conservatives what self-diagnosed long COVID is to liberals. I'd love to see a good study of the partisan divide of people self-reporting these conditions.

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Long Covid survey results are 100% useless without controls.

They should have also asked people if they had any new, long-lasting symptoms after... I dunno, getting the most recent flu shot.

A lot of people will respond in the affirmative to any survey ("I guess I _have_ been feeling a little tired...") just to be agreeable. This is one of the first things you learn in a psychology class.

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The whole blue check thing reminds me of the Star Belly Sneetches story lol

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I think the appropriate blue check move would to have been creating greater status symbols. Make other status symbols better don’t just get rid of the old one. Like if I had twitter I would subscribe to Katie and pay for her check as she is too pure and holy to spend $8/mos. That would have been the appropriate way of banishing the nobility monster.

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If you automatically gave someone a badge for having subscribers, and then even paid them the subscriber revenue, and just opted everyone into that program that probably would have side-stepped the whole issue.

If you’re a celebrity like Chrissy Teigen (who is low key kind of a monster) someone pays for your badge because you’re a beloved figure. You even get a special super duper badge based on how many subscribers you have so people can do all the status seeking things that people love to do.

If you’re the Clint Eastwood of Lesbians (I used to work in a sawmill and in my heart I have had a vision that this would be Katie’s sawmill name) someone pays for yours because you have a podcast that lots of people really like.

And if you’re someone that no one cares enough about to pay for their work you get a lesser badge.

And if no one wants your work you don’t get a badge and you have to readjust your sense of your own importance.

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Well it's always a good time when they start going into medical stuff. PE-RI-TON-I-TIS means an inflammation of the peritoneum, which is a membrane that wraps around most of your digestive organs (and apparently your cat's as well). The FIP virus was news to me, as a non-veterinarian.

In humans, peritonitis is a severe illness which can be fatal even with modern medical treatment. It is usually caused by gut bacteria when you have damage to your gut, like a ruptured appendicitis, a wound, or an abdominal surgery; less commonly without such an injury (spontaneous bacterial peritonitis) or an autoimmune cause. I am unaware of any virus which causes peritonitis in humans (and rudimentary searching did not turn up one).

There are lots of medical conditions which have a "dry" and a "wet" form, though these are subjective terms that I don't think have some ultra-scientific meaning that always applies. Gangrene can be wet or dry. Macular degeneration can be wet or dry.

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The real question with Long COVID that makes it culture war fodder is not whether immunologically naive people that were on ventilators in 2020 might still be suffering but whether any new post-vaccine COVID infection might nevertheless result in a high probability of being permanently disabled. That’s what makes people like Ed Yong think we should be shutting things down again every time there’s a new variant.

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Yeah, I tried not to post this because it's mean, but as to all this about Ed Yong's amazing reputation and awards: People have read and respected his COVID reporting because, like me, they're NPR-listening humanities grads in blue areas who didn't know much about COVID in March 2020 but sure knew they didn't want to get their information from Trump. Which was fine at that point, but three years later we have much better, published research on COVID; we don't have to care about Trump's opinions on the matter for the moment; and we can see that Yong has latched onto multiple aspects of the public COVID conversation (like taking anecdotes as something that matter more than scientific work!) that happen to be more popular than sound.

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I also feel like there’s this kind of stopped clock aspect to it: lots of people earned respect by being rightly worried about COVID before the mainstream, but now it’s turning out that maybe they just have a generally anxious disposition. We see something like this in financial reporting where someone will correctly predict a financial crisis and then spend the next decade incorrectly mispredicting crisis after crisis.

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Also Ed Yong was maybe the first mainstream journalist to talk about long COVID so he has a lot of his identity tied up with it.

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Exactly. "I predicted the 1987 crash!". Of course you also predicted the 1986, 1988, and 1989 crashes that never happened...

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This is critical and an excellent point. It's literally all anyone should care about. When that stat "10% of covid infections can result in LC" is thrown about we need to know what the hell that actually MEANS. For sake of ease, let's assume the 10% figure is not inflated. The following questions still need to be answered for the average person to know how to assess their own risk and/or for treatments to be researched and developed:

#1 of that 10%, what % were infected pre-vaccine, by Alpha variant?

#2 what is the % decrease in LC occurrence for Delta and Omicron variants?

#3 what is the % decrease, if any, in LC occurrence for vaccinated vs. non-vaccinated?

#4 what is the average time for LC symptoms to persist and/or clear (if they do)?

With this information people can make an informed choice about their relative risk. If we know it was primarily Alpha or Delta variants - no one's really catching those anymore; and if being vaccinated actually helps decrease the LC occurrence or symptoms, one can choose to keep up on their vaccines if they want to mitigate that risk.

I really appreciated Ed Yong's reporting early in COVID (I'm a total hawk who still wears a mask in crowded places and hasn't had it yet)... but I think his advocate stance of "scare all the people all the time" is just not helpful 3 years in. People now tune it out vs. gleaning something of use from the reporting. Sad.

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My sister was never on a ventilator, never given remdesivir. Her symptoms were "mild" for 3 weeks until her heart stopped (if brain fog so severe you forget where you live and call your sister to tell her you've been kidnapped while in your own kitchen is considered "mild").

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I work in drug discovery and agree that it would be great if these drugs could be legal, but the regulatory system makes it risky. Biology is complicated and all of the work of developing drugs focuses on humans and usually in a specific patient population. Seems like it should be possible to license drugs for human to animals with little regulatory oversight, but as Jesse always says "Its complicated".

For example, if you are making a drug and you find in IND (https://www.fda.gov/drugs/types-applications/investigational-new-drug-ind-application) that it kills dogs due to a biological pathway that doesn't exist in humans, the drug is scrapped. Not only is it scrapped, but patterns within the drug may be flagged by the FDA (IE if you see this part of a molecule, it may have toxicity issues), making it harder to similar drugs in the future. If I am remembering correctly (presentation by an Ex-Merck employee years ago now), this happened with one of Merck's early HIV drugs.

Perhaps someone out there can take this compound, which can be found in the literature (https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S1876034121001799#fig0035), and find novel chemical matter with similar properties using a virtual screen of something like Wuxi/Enamine. There also appears to be a pretty high resolution Cryo-em structure of the FIP virus (https://www.rcsb.org/structure/6jx7), so you could probably find a pocket for the drug even.

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I wonder how much has to do with animal testing - a drug that kills your test animals is not much use even if it doesn’t happen in humans.

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Yeah, I found it strange that they concluded it was the pharma company's fault. Any time there is some confusing market gap or quirk, it's nearly always caused by the government. Companies would happily sell to the cat owners if their sales for humans were not at risk.

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Is it just my toxic masculinity or does drama seem more prevalent in barbie-pouch dominated spaces?

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Drama, yes. Gang violence, wars, Huns, Vandals, the Crusades, that'd be the prostate-havers.

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Yeaaaah, none of that *passive* aggression for the prostate-havers, its true.

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Someone in the open thread mentioned that the Race to Dinner ladies had visited the Special Place in Hell ladies, so, against my better judgment, I gave it a listen. It wasn't as hard to listen to as I had expected. One interesting part is when the hosts challenge the guests' claim that as soon as a white woman leaves the room, all the other white women start badmouthing and gossiping about her. The dinner ladies refuse to admit that WOC act that way. But yeah, it's all women.

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Thanks for the heads up, I haven’t deleted that episode but am unsure if I’ll listen. Reading your comment I immediately thought of that scene in “Friday” where the mom is muttering under her breath about what a slut the neighbor is, then waves to her and cheerfully calls out “Hey girl!”

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It’s actually fine to listen to - I didn’t find it too cringeworthy at all, but pretty funny! It was so ridiculous that they were generalising all white women to be the same as these wealthy, spoilt, left wing American women of the sort who would attend one of these dinners, and getting angry when called on it! Like how dare anyone deny their lived experience of all these white women agreeing that they were bitches.

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I want to both laugh and slap you across the face for using the phrase barbie pouch.

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Well, don’t threaten me with a good time :)

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Women eat each other alive. There's nothing like hot girl-on-girl feminist infighting.

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Catholics definitely have middle names.

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John Fitzgerald Kennedy comes to mind.

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Maybe it’s an older tradition, but I know a lot of Catholics who don’t have middle names legally, but their chose confirmation names became their de facto middle names

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My grandma, a German ethnic and Catholic, born near Belgrade, Yugoslavia doesn't have a middle name. My parents gave me and all my siblings middle names. I think most of my (mostly Catholic) cousins have middle names as well. My niece and nephews all have middle names as well.

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I don't have a middle name!

None of my siblings do, or my dad. We are one those probably inbred Irish Catholic families.

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It’s more a generational than a religious thing. The previous generation of my family, born in Ireland, made do with one name, usually according to a formula, first-born took parent’s, second grandparents (if different!), then Saints, heroes, etc. Once we transplanted to England, they thought they could afford two. Because you needed to have a least one saint’s name to be baptised, you need a safe middle name if you wanted to give your child a new-fangled celebrity name, Wayne, Clint, Brie, Willow, etc. Ireland imported the same habit.

Similarly, English cricket until about 50 years ago used to be divided between the “gentlemen”, expensively educated amateurs who played for pleasure, and the “players”, professionals usually from a working class background. Easy to tell apart, as the scorecards showed initials rather than first names. The gents ran to as many as four, to honour illustrious ancestors, family estates etc - JWHT Smith for example, while the players generally had just one - G Boycott.

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I think there’s another explanation re: long covid too. It’s not completely abnormal to catch a serious infection and then continue to have symptoms for a really long time after the infection has gone. Eg in the UK a strain of RSV circulated in December/January and SO many people including me, my son, parents, and loads of friends still have symptoms months on: coughing, sneezing, lethargy, loads of mucus, loss of smell, fast heart rate. Obviously that can’t be long covid since we never had covid. It’s just that usually pre-covid we caught things every winter and experienced pretty mild and quick infections. Pre-covid there was no masking and the UK always had a culture of going to work/school with coughs and colds (it was actually considered weak to stay off work for a cold lol). But then because of covid we stayed at home for 2 winters in a row and didn’t catch the other stuff either, so our immune systems took a couple of years off which is why we’re having extreme reactions to colds now.

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About five years ago, I had three respiratory infections in a row. It took me a good three months to be fully recovered. The symptoms were quite similar to Long Covid, though I didn't lose my sense of smell. It was really annoying. I can attest that there wasn't any name for that, though my doctor nodded when I mentioned that it took me a while to recover.

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The problem with “long COVID” vs “long other URI” is only one is used to prolong the restrictions. That it can take some people several weeks to months to full recover from a serious URI makes sense. To have a long haul version of a mild infection that requires disability payments, work accommodations and further restrictions on the general public (mask mandates, school closures, etc...) doesn’t make sense.

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(I’m not saying btw I disagreed with lockdowns or masks, just that it was a change for our immune systems & we’re adapting to going back to the old system)

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As a dog lesbian who just broke up with a 5-cat lesbian veterinarian,,, this episode should have absolutely included a trigger warning! Expect to hear from my lawyer (my daddy) soon!

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Cats are great but five is objectively TOO MANY CATS.

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Holy shit! I just realized that every lesbian I've ever known was a dog or cat owner.

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LEGALIZE IT (FIP MEDICATION REMIX, IN MEMORY OF WINNIE)

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I think despair does lead to physiological symptoms. In The nervous system, the immune system, the digestive, the endocrine, etc. People in some sort of ptsd or neuroticism develop real physiological symptoms. They go to the doc, the doc says “it’s in your head” and in some sense it is, but it’s effecting the body. I’d you don’t sleep well, eat well, move well, socialize well, etc. there most definitely will start to be measurable poor health.

I understand the skepticism about long covid and all the internet diseases and I also understand why these people feel like their symptoms are dismissed. Bc, doctors sometimes act like these physiological manifestations of poor lifestyle and mental health are being faked or imagined. A symptom being a result of lifestyle; a somatic symptom of chronic stress, trauma or isolation; and a completely faked symptom are three different things.

A lot of chronic illness in our country starts as the first two types - poor lifestyle and somatic symptoms. The medical system dismisses them until the person develops diabetes or pots or a lot of these auto immune diseases that definitely are measurable disease. The medical industry is not set up to help these people out before the disease gets that bad. We don’t really have a public preventative health industry integrated into “medicine”. treatment for these illnesses often would involve drastic lifestyle change, even occupational and physical therapy, nutritional overhaul, improved mental health and better relationships. But that’s not what our medical system is set up to do. It’s not set up to help people be healthy, it’s set up to treat severe illnesses and injury.

The docs say these people aren’t “really” sick, but they are most definitely NOT healthy. The institutions that used to model healthy living - the family, the faith, really living in community in public meaningful ways, we don’t have enough of those environments anymore.

If we don’t think this is “really” effecting our children’s development and the chronic illness epidemic we are in denial. Our medical industry, a good part of our economy, runs on managing chronic illness while at the same time telling people that their symptoms are not real, until it’s bad.

Learning and practicing healthy living isn’t cheap and isn’t covered by insurance and we also mock people, especially women, who spend big bucks on wellness. ( not as much mocking of men into fitness, ice baths and supplements - Rogan and Huberman don’t get half the flack that female coaches for nervous system recovery and female adult adhd management get).

I don’t have long covid, but as someone who turned my health around over the past decade, I am sympathetic. I wasn’t sick, I just was not living a healthy life and didn’t know how to and it was leading to illness. The people who taught me and practiced with me were people who DID claim that they could help me, but also did not claim I had a disorder or disease - they told me the truth. I lacked self-regulation and social skills and it was manifesting in lifestyle choices and pathological bad habits of avoidance that were effecting my ability to sense and respond to my body’s needs and it was making me sick.

It’s easy to tell people their symptoms are real and they have a rare disease they don’t have. It’s easy to dismiss real symptoms and tell patients they are imagining their symptoms or that the symptoms would magically go away if the patient changes their mind.

The truth is more complicated. The symptoms are real. What’s happening in your body is mostly caused by what’s going on in your mind. And getting healthy will take time- time to learn to live in a more healthy way and time for your body to recover from the inflammation and impaired interoception and neuromuscular connection.

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I should probably stop commenting here as I feel myself getting upset, but my sister had a cardiac arrest. An MRI found a dissection in her brain, in an artery. These aren't things one simply wishes or feels themselves into. I have crippling depression and ptsd and anxiety and I've never "felt" myself into what happened to my sister. She had a 104 degree fever at the time of her arrest, BTW. 4 WEEKS after her taste disappeared and weird spots showed up on her toes. Couldn't get a test here without a fever....until it was too late!

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Totally agree. And I understand your strong emotions. I think one thing is long Covid from people who had severe covid and I do think tbe sequels of that need their own categorization apart from the other general long lasting inflammatory auto immune symptoms that are indistinguishable from somatic symptoms of a prolonged depressed anxious stress in lock down.

I think this is precisely why we need to recognize what are the long term symptoms of severe covid and what are the real long term symptoms of depression, isolation and despair and recognize how those can then ínteract and compound any illness.

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And Cait. I just want to add that I do not think somatic symptoms are imagined!!! I think that depression, adhd, autism, anxiety have physiological effects on the body that are very real and which do often respond to “real” treatments. What I was trying to point out is that just bc some symptom is comorbid with an unhealthy lifestyle or ptsd, neurodiversity etc, does NOT mean the symptom is imagined. All mental illness... which is neurological illness is going to have symptoms in the nervous system, which will cascade through the body. And if someone is struggling in a particularly bad bout of mental illness than all other pathogens and injuries will indeed have take a greater toll on the body which is already usually dealing with inflammation, dysregulation, etc. The physical symptoms being un well are real and they deserve the attention and treatment as if they are real. We mock people who seek out these treatments, we mock treatments that have a placebo effect, while disregarding how much we often need to do something that triggers the placebo effect. We need care

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An excerpt from a fairly good, recent write-up of the state of Long COVID research:

"One study of patients in an Israeli health network looked at the incidence of 70 commonly reported long COVID symptoms in 150,000 patients. The researchers found that patients who’d been infected were more likely than people in a control group to suffer for extended periods from certain symptoms, in particular loss of taste and smell, concentration and memory problems, difficulty breathing, weakness, hair loss, palpitations, and chest pain. But the difference between the infected and controls largely disappeared by the end of the first year, and to the extent that they remained, they affected a relatively small number of patients. For instance, 407 of the COVID patients reported having persistent concentration and memory problems at the end of the first year, while 276 of the controls also did. That meant that for every 10,000 people, only about 13 had cognitive difficulties that were attributable specifically to COVID.

"The researchers had gone into the project expecting to find a large number of chronic COVID aftereffects. Instead, they concluded that there were actually very few. 'As we analyzed the data,' the lead authors told Stat in January, 'we were surprised to find only a small number of symptoms that were related to COVID and remained for a year post infection and the low number of people affected by them.'"

https://slate.com/technology/2023/03/long-covid-symptoms-studies-research-variant.html

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One of my reasons for fearing that Long COVID may be the latest trendy self-diagnosis is that getting a bad diagnosis can hinder you from getting real help for whatever you actually have. I know people who have gone from one internet-cool diagnosis to another without finding relief from their symptoms.

For example, I have a friend with chronic depression who doesn't like SSRIs, so [they] have attempted to treat their depression with special forms of prayer and, more recently, decided that they have autism, all without trying to find a therapist who can offer mainstream (non-prayer) therapy and a psychiatrist who can at least try to help by adjusting medications/dosages. It hurts me to see my friend's suffering. It hurts extra to see the time my friend is needlessly losing to the latest diagnostic and therapeutic bunny trails.

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This episode was very timely for me. I just shared in the member thread that I will be starting my cat on chemo pills next week, and it’s only possible bc my vet has access to an out of state pharmacy that compounds generic drugs at 10% the cost of name brand. There is something slightly shady about it, I just don’t know exactly what it is, and I’m not asking questions. Vet’s words were “I have to tell people because some only want the name brand, but I’d do this treatment for my cat and it’s worked on countless others so I recommend it”. She needs a medical reason to use this type of drug and prescribes “for ease of administration”. Maybe the pills are smaller, I don’t know, I’ll find out next week.

Anyway, these solutions are a little “abnormal”, and I’m not sure I’d try them for my own health issues, but if not for the cheaper alternative there’s no way I could afford this treatment for my cat. So if she had FIP instead of cancer, and I had to go on a fb group and deal with strange ladies to do it I’d probably go through with that, too. If it was a limited time treatment and was even at the high end stated in the episode ($4k I think?) I’d be fine with that if it kept my cat alive. I’d be annoyed to learn that my money had lined the pockets of someone who claimed to not be profiting, but in the end I’d have a living, healthy cat when I otherwise would not have... so I’m not even sure I’d be “mad mad”. That’s what happens with a black market. The sellers take all the risk. She should have just been upfront about that because I don’t think many people would have batted an eye. When you adopt an animal you are signing up to take care of that creature. Most of us “pet folk” will do anything we can for our little buds.

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A doctor believing a person’s description of their symptoms is not the same as a doctor confirming a self diagnosis.

Self ID is moving from the trans community to other places in medicine. I’ve seen it with mental illness self diagnosis in teens. Now self diagnosis of Long COVID is a thing. Wild.

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And during HIPAA Pride Month, too.

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My immediate inclination is to think that long covid is in peoples heads and would be curious to see where claims of long covid break down by state (I haven’t finished the episode yet). The mind is a powerful thing and people can convince themselves of anything and manifest symptoms and I live amongst people whose brains were totally addled by covid. I also acknowledge that I don’t really know anything and could be totally wrong. I guess I don’t really care enough to take a definitive stance one way or another because I’m pretty wrung out as far as covid nonsense is concerned.

Side note, I work at a bougie food coop in Vermont and I had a customer ask me whether we carried quail eggs because her husband is apparently making all sorts of dietary changes due to long covid related issues. Living and working where I work throughout covid has been a challenge...

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My dick never recovered from the pandemic. I have schlong covid.

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I can absolutely one hundred percent without a doubt assure you that what happened to my sister was not in her head, or mine, or in the nurse that held her hand and prayed as they shocked her heart back to sinus rhythm, or the head of doctor that told her she had an arterial dissection in brainstem after fighting with the hospitalist to approve the MRI to find it, or the head of my father, who had to deal with visiting his dying wife in hospice then visiting his daughter in the hospital. My life will never, ever, be the same. I had tachycardia for 4 months after my covid infection- coming at times where I was not anxious and not engaged in vigorous activiy. This tachycardia abated when I began reading up on the endothelial system and diets that sypport it. Covid is not respiratory disease but a vascular disease. I wish that was more widely understood.

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There are boughie food co-op’s in Vermont? I’m shocked, shocked I tell you!

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I know. This is the real swamp and I dove in head first

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What a great episode! Honestly feels like there's been so much gender stuff lately, which is fine, it's a big culture war/ internet drama thing plus obviously relevant to Jesse and Katie's journalism but was so refreshing to have a full episode that didn't touch it.

I had an idea, what if they did one month a year with no gender/trans stories. NoGender November. Just bank up a bunch of stories on other topics and run those.

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Just waiting for twitter to become so unusable and annoying that no news outlets or important figures use it. It was never supposed to be an information hub and we’d all be better off if it somehow started losing influence.

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“Gayla” “Affadavid” I’m starting to wonder if Jesse actually went to grad school or if he is three fourth graders in a trench coat

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"gayla" is an acceptable pronunciation and I tend to associate it with more high-brow, PMC, people who want to sound fancy. Michael Scott would say "gayla"

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I would say “gahla”, is that incorrect?

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Hm apparently it is the third pronunciation listed.

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Sometimes words have more than one acceptable pronunciation:

https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/gala (edited to correct a typo).

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Almost no one says those words on an annual basis, easy to get wrong

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I work at a shelter and just recently we've had two cats euthanized for fip, so this episode was particularly affecting to me. I already knew about this drug but I'm glad more people are learning about it and eventually, hopefully it will be available here. One of the cats I had gotten really attached to and it was devastating when the shelter vet made the decision to euthanize. It's interesting that the story was paired with Jesse's about long covid, because FIP is really a diagnosis of exclusion. A lot of the symptoms can be a lot of things - especially dry fip (lethargy, loss of appetite, diarrhea), so not only are cats being euthanized for a curable illness, but I'm sure some kittens who might not even actually have it are euthanized when it be IBD or food allergies etc - especially in a shelter situation where they might not have the space/time/funs to figure out and try to adopt out a cat with a chronic condition

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I wish they could have explored the similarities between FIP (caused by FCV) and CoViD/long CoViD (caused by SARS-CoV-2) in a little more depth, but I guess it isn't really their area of expertise.

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I've become rather wary of diagnosing conditions as psychosomatic, it seems to have become a crutch to waive away conditions we don't understand. Especially because we don't have any good instruments for imaging the nervous system. And we've barely even begun to map the human connectome.

For the past few years I've had a series of recurring symptoms such as facial numbness, which are relieved when I stretch specific muscles in my back. The NHS diagnosis essentially went: "We can't see anything on the MRI, so it must be a psychological problem." Without investigating the possibility of neuromuscular issues, because the technology and theory for that is not well-developed.

I'm mindful of that article (Morris, Wooding, Grant – 2011) which claimed it typically takes 17 years for medical research to be put into practice by doctors.

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Nobody's really talking about diagnosing anything, though. We're talking about survey results.

X percent of people self-report some vague indication that they might be suffering from Long Covid.

Who knows what that number (X) actually means. Could be almost anything.

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Well yes. But I also mean from an epidemiological viewpoint, I've become more skeptical of the tendency to categorize patterns in self-reported symptoms as psychosomatic phenomena

I used to think medical science had a good handle on the interplay between mind and body. But after I had a condition repeatedly diagnosed as anxiety, which now just appears to be a back injury. I'm left thinking mainstream medicine has some serious gaps in its understanding of neurology. (It's possible that sports science is a few years ahead, but also more hand-wavy.)

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Have you been to a physical therapist? In my experience they're a better address for these types of complaints than doctors. I think 30-40 years ago being a GP was a lot more holistic, but nowadays if you can't see something on a test and there's nothing they can do to treat it, they just kind of shrug at you.

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Nobody's categorizing anything. I think you need to listen to the episode again. The Atlantic writer in question wrote an article about some survey data. The survey seems to indicate that 6% of Americans think they have Long Covid. The writer took that to mean that 6% of Americans have Long Covid. But who knows if that's accurate or not.

Maybe 5% of those cases are psychosomatic. Or 1%. Or 8%. Or maybe a high percentage of the cases are literally simply made up because people wanted to answer in the affirmative on a survey. The point is that we don't know and it's intellectually dishonest to simply take this survey data at face value.

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I, despite working in hospitals during the peak of the pandemic and traveling a lot throughout 2021 and 2022, have never had COVID either. I’m almost a little freaked out it.

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I have never had COVID, as far as I know. I was triple vaxxed per my employment at a hospital (though I worked most of COVID in an office alone), but I have no way to know if that is why.

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Or you did have it, and didn't get very sick. Or have you been doing antibody tests regularly?

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I did every time I had a little sniffle or whatnot. It’s possible but, I think, unlikely that I had completely asymptomatic COVID. I was also one of the very first people to get the vaccine in December 2020, but that hasn’t stopped anyone else I know from getting COVID.

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Long covid is sounding like chronic lyme, adrenal fatigue, and the like. Waiting for miracle ozone cures for it.

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Anyone a subscriber to Bulwark+? Started listening to their new Next Level podcast from last night with Abraham Josie Resiman (sp?). In five minutes she namechecks Jesse Singal as the reason so many states are enacting anti-trans legislation.

Ok...that's an exaggeration but she does identify Jesse's Atlantic article as the possible tipping point for when liberals decided it was okay to literally murder trans people. She also called Andrew Sullivan a fascist, so it was a very nuanced conversation.

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Bulwark+? Is that part of Jonah Goldberg’s Bulwark? I mean it doesn’t seem likely that Jonah Goldberg would be calling Andrew Sullivan a fascist, but “Bulwark” is such a distinctive name I gotta ask...

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JG helms the other Never Trump conservative media company, The Dispatch, which is IMO superior and hasn’t lost its bearings. You’re right, Jonah wouldn’t call AS a fascist.

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Derp, I knew that!

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Doesn't seem likely? I mean, JG did write a book called "Liberal Fascism".

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Two anecdotes in long Covid:

1- the majority of my friends who believe they have long Covid believe so because of a lingering cough- which is the most normal “long term” (if you consider a few months long term) response to an upper respiratory illness. It takes time to clear the mucus from your chest!

2- I had client recently pass away after a year and a half long struggle with long Covid that turned out to be late stage lung cancer. Dude objectively should have seen a doctor way sooner but thought it was normal post Covid symptoms for a man his age. He was a hippie type, and dabbled in alternative medicine, so in a different environment where long Covid didn’t exist as a concept I’m not sure if the outcome would have changed.

Edit: fixed “king covid”

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Yeah my parents took a really long to recover from a non-COVID respiratory bug that my kids gave them (my bad). They kept saying how tired they were, how they were still coughing after a few weeks, etc. I felt bad about it, but also it did make me think about how it applies to long COVID.

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I’m still mad about Steve Jobs, speaking of dippie cures that don’t work.

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My friend used this service for his kitten. The cat is fine now!

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As a dad of two cats (despite my username), the FIP story was illuminating and a little terrifying. I had to hold onto both my babies while I listened.

I demand J&K be nominated for the Pulitzer Prize for this story. Or at least the Purrlitzer Prize.

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I am so fucking healthy, mental issues aside, it's ridiculous. So regarding Long Covid, I don't understand it, it's true. But it's a coronavirus. I never heard of Long Cold. Or another virus, the flu, I never heard of Long Flu. It just seems weird that there is Long Covid. And if it is fatigue, or brain fog, that means nothing. And moreover, placebos are real. Ponder that. You could say it is a fake medicine, but it really works for a lot of people. It's real. So I put Long Covid in that camp, real but kind of strange.

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Post-viral illnesses exist in those, especially the flu. Just because you haven’t heard of something doesn’t mean it is non-existent.

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It isn't as strange as you think. Establishing causality in these sorts of situations is difficult, but it is very much an area of research how much of autoimmune disease and cancer may actually be caused by viral infections that seem minor (or are not even noticed). For example, it's been theorized that some infections might degrade the blood-brain barrier, exposing the body's immune system to the brain (which is normally an immunologically "protected site" that is separated from the rest of the body), which then causes the immune system to attack parts of the brain, leading to MS. It may be that some or all people with MS have "long Ebstein-Barr virus". But it's a challenging area to research.

There is a lot more uncertainty in medicine than most people think.

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Covid is not an orthomyxovirus. It is a chineric betacoronavirus with a retroviral fold and perhaps lyssaviral and bungarotoxin proteins were encoded into it. Not a cold. Not a flu. It is a vascular virus that attacks the endothelial system. See Ralph Baric's work on betacoronavirus induced heart damage in rabbits.

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I think maybe my generalized brain-fog was distracting me, why are we not believing some/many people have long Covid?

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because the symptoms people ascribe to long covid are a long list which includes some pretty normalish things that are frequently used by malingers chasing trendy diseases.

Fatigue, "brain fog" (used to be more often called "trouble concentrating", recurrent cough, achiness, headache. All things perfect healthy people experience sometimes as well.

So when people first started reporting long COVID there were examinations for physical damage, heart/lung damage, persistent low grade infection, etc. And while some people have these thing, many many people who claim they have long COVID look fit as a fiddle. So then the question becomes does Sally who used to talk about her chronic Lyme disease all the time until we made her come back to work or get fired, really have some new malady, or was she just used to sitting on her ass for 6 moths during the lockdown watching Netflix, and she is now depressed and out of shape and is misidentifying this (and her general desire to not work) as an illness and not a bad behavioral pattern to be overcome.

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Honest question? Is Sally a real person or some meme you made up in your head? My sister worked 3 jobs until she got sick and only "sat on her ass" AFTER her late March 2020 infection because she couldn't stand or walk until receiving infusions of infliximab 6 months later. Like, is Sally just some composite of people you have read about on the internet. My sister has worked hard her whole damn life. Why do people immediately jump to these weird composite memes instead of thinking that real people with real families lives were destroyed????

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? I literally said some the people have real damage. Defensive much?

When something is half fakers and half real sufferers (or whatever the ratio is), you are going to end up with a lot of people annoyed with and making fun of the fakers.

You don’t like that be mad at the fakers, not reality.

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You didn't answer my question. Is Sally a real person or a composite?

You're damn right I am defensive. My life has been utterly destroyed by the past 3 years. I have lost EVERYTHING. My band mate became a virus denier who believes covid is caused by 5G, chemtrails, and Satan and that the variants are all fake and caused by vaccines, that each vaccine is giving people different symptoms to seem like variants. I loved this band and this collaborator like a brother. My best female friend calls herself a "seer" and sent me emails about how I am engaging in demonic experimentation by getting the shots. My best friend I grew up with, who I called my brother, said unspeakable things about my sister after knowing what she went through and continues to go through. I dealt with all of this while caring for my late mother. What I want to know is who the hell gave you any kind of authority to say who is faking or not. Because my closest fucking friend in the world lumped my sister in with your composite of Sally despite knowing better. So yeah you are right I am defensive because I cry for hours every night about all I have lost due to covid and what it has done. So put that in your pipe and smoke it.

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I'm so sorry you went through all that. I hope your sister is recovering.

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Thank you for the recap, Martin. I honestly couldn’t remember why it mattered.

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Profiting from desperate families hoping to cure a loved one sounds like The American Way, no? Whether it’s cats or teenagers or grandparents, we are frantic to help or cure and there always seems to be someone around ready to profit from our desperation.

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I'm honestly really sad about the FIP drug group. I follow a few cat rescues on Facebook because I enjoy cat pictures (like everyone else online), and I watched one woman lose one of her "ambassador cats (she tries to raise awareness of wobbly cats/cerebellar hypoplasia and get disabled cats adopted, and takes in severe cases to her refuge) to FIP several years back, and so I vaguely knew about FIP Warriors from way back.

This kind of... I don't know what to call it exactly; it's not quite a gift but it's definitely unethical behavior, seems to be only done by women. The pattern of using "doing good" as justification for taking people's money under false pretenses seems to keep happening over and over. I'm not sure what to think, honestly - is it that power corrupts? Or are they so high on their own santliness that they think it justifies them cashing in?

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I’m listening to this while wearing my B&R hoodie

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I paid for a Twitter blue check almost as soon as it was announced the same way I pay for Substack, YouTube Premium, Patreon, Dropout.tv, No Agenda Show, Netflix, Hulu, ParamountPlus, DisneyPlus, Peacock, etc etc etc. I want the things I like to stick around.

Wow are comments always this active? I should check back here more often.

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"It was pretty gay" about the FIRE Gala *chefs kiss*

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Yes, absolutely 100% true–for proof just listen to the Fifth Column guys getting all bro-y and teary-eyed about the FIRE Gala on their podcast

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Amazin episode, this is why I’m a happy paying member.

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I dislike the “catch Jesse up on Twitter” start of the show and tend to fast forward through it while debating cutting back on this podcast. Especially annoyed by the angst toward Elon and twitter (dude, let’s all hold our catastrophizing for a minute and give Twitter a year(ish) to see what happens). So bored of the twitter blue conversation, I’ve been unfollowing people who mention it (Katie, still being the exception). Since the episode brought up Brianna Joy Gray, who I happily pay to listen to, I will mention that I was extra willing to pay for her podcast when she explained on twitter why she was paying for twitter Blue as people attacked her. Maybe BAR should reconsider.

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J&K's views on Elon and Twitter are some of their least nuanced, they're bordering on tedious at this point. No one is forcing anyone to buy Twitter Blue, so who cares whether others buy it or not? As for impersonations, it's not hard to tell whether the real account is the one with 900k subs created 10 years ago or the one created last week with 32 subs.

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I had read the Atlantic article about FIP drug smuggling when it came out. Thanks for the in-depth update on it. You'd think that by now there is enough information on the effectiveness of the drug for Gilead to licence it for veterinary use, but what do you know. I hope the people researching this find another drug, or even better a vaccine against this horrible disease.

About long COVID, I completely believe that some people get long-lasting debilitating effects from it. Post viral syndromes are a thing, I know some people who suffered from it. The issue here is more in the adequate definitions and studies around the phenomenon. There should also be a way to categorize the various forms it can take. Someone can experience long lasting effects from COVID in the form of loss of smell and not be otherwise affected, while others will suffer from debilitating fatigue. It makes no sense to lump them all together.

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Didn’t this blue check thing already happen before? I’m getting major deja vu but everyone is talking about it like it’s brand new

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Everyone already freaked out about these consequences when the changes were announced. Now they are making the exact same points again now that the changes happened. Double bonus coverage!

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Oh this is what happened, they allowed anyone to buy a checkmark so then people were posing as companies and celebrities. The biggest one was someone posing as Eli Lilly and announcing insulin would cost way less or something like that and it was actually kind of a big PR problem for them if I recall. Basically the same thing as now and the discourse was exactly the same

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I'll join the small crew of long covid weirdos commenting. Funnily enough, it was indeed the lying around for months too inexplicably exhausted to even watch Netflix or play video games that was why I sought out more podcasts and ended up listening to B&R. Got sick in April 2020, had been near someone who tested positive for covid and then got sick with all the symptoms myself, but due to testing unavailability I never got a positive PCR test, and then my antibodies showed up negative. Negative antibodies are supposedly not uncommon in long covid possibly because there is a correlation between a weak antibody response and not properly clearing the virus. But of course, in my case, I have zero proof I have actually had covid and no other explanation for 3 years of being totally debilitated. No health problems prior to April 2020 and have been tested for every other possibility since.

It's true that while it would be refreshing to be believed by doctors, I know that doctors who saw me were doing their job when they scratched their heads and gave general "I don't know" answers with no treatment options as I shelled out $100s I didn't have for each visit. There were some good doctors who'd say, "I don't know why your HR surpasses 200 when you exercise. We don't know much about long covid, but it is a possibility." A distressing amount, though, chalked the symptoms I couldn't easily prove (chest pains, nerve pain, debilitating fatigue/brain fog, palpitations, etc.) up to covid media hysteria and psychosomatic illness. Several times I'd actually believe it was in my head but get stuck in the same rut again because my physical symptoms were so limiting even when I'd resolved mentally to be better.

So basically, it is, indeed, complicated. Because the situation sucks so bad--you generally can't work, at least like you used to, so you become dependent on family members who may think you're faking it--being believed for something you have no proof of suddenly has very high stakes. And because treating it as a psychosomatic illness can make it worse, I'm wary of body-mind connection perspectives as well (I've tooled around with them quite a bit in attempts to try anything, but their ability to help what is ultimately a physical illness, likely one borne of viral persistence, is limited). Not that we should throw out logic or politicize an illness, just saying that logic must also account for the possibility that people who say they have long covid do have long covid and that our medical system, as is the case with me, is not currently equipped to measure or treat something that nonetheless is affecting a lot of people.

I will echo the call of BS on the 10% statistic, which obviously is just anyone who has at least one symptom for 3+ months. Watering down LC to such an extent is ultimately part of why it's so easy to dismiss the issue. "Oh yeah I had memory problems / lack of taste for a few months after covid so long covid isn't that bad." I'd consider long covid at least as the serious issue it's commonly discussed as intense or enough symptoms to significantly debilitate someone 3+ months on. I think I've seen a UK study try to measure this but it also wasn't specific enough. But I'd clock it at about 1-2%.

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At this point, you can see the Blue Check pollution. It would be a great service for many users like me (but obviously will never happen) if you could with one move block all the paying Blue Checks. That I might pay for!

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A big part of the problem here is that the Twitter accounts that I rely on most for Covid info are also those that jump on the bandwagon of I-hate-Jesse-but-I-dont-know-who-he-is. The cognitive dissonance is hard.

My 3 main categories of anti-imperialist leftists, gender critical and covid truthers.... there's basically no overlap. It's tough.

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I’m sorry Winnie didn’t make it. 😭 Great story though; I can’t believe it’s possible to make 9.6 million dollars as a middleman for illegal cat drugs.

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The last time I heard anything from Virgil Texas was when he wrote something for a conservative Catholic outlet whose name I forget.

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I can't believe there is actually someone named Virgil Texas. That sounds 100% like a fictional character, probably a detective.

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I don’t know his real name but he got his handle from the name of the town in David Byrne’s True Stories.

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That's amazing. LMFAO.

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I find it confusing that you concluded it was the pharma company's fault. The fact that the FDA would potentially punish the company for trying to give the drug to cats is much more of the problem than the company itself. They would very easily give the drug to the cats without the insane regulatory disincentive.

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Not really following Katie's apparent logic that one particular type of online loser (virgiltexas) was more deserving of identity protection than another type of online loser with similar following (say James Lindsay) simply because they inhabit one particular ideological bubble and not the other.....

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That’s not something I said nor is that something I believe

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I feel strongly about the chat function. Turn that shit!

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Historian here: Since episode 10, Jesse mention Kathie's wife name. At minute one mark.

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From 2022 so perhaps it’s already been raised here, but I just noticed this study that claims Molnupiravir is an effective treatment for FIP:

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC9612227/

I wonder if having more options will break the black market.

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Some people think paying for Twitter Blue is a way to support free speech and a vote against censorship. Just my take!

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I feel strongly about the chat option

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Apparently some other people are getting the new blue checkmark for free. Kiara has already gone mad with power:

https://i.redd.it/jykzj1i66rva1.png

(Her original tweet read "everyone who likes this tweet is cool".)

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Post a chat Singal

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Jesse has to check twitter to keep up on the Bodega Cats account, and in fact, that is the excuse Jesse should use for why he has to keep monitoring Twitter.

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