The Causes of Long Covid

We have giant populations of people who refused the vaccines. We also have a giant resurgence of measles now because those people are so large in number and so influential. Long covid is far more prevalent in those populations than anywhere else despite the seemingly blanket belief that covid was inconsequential among them.

The trials for the Pfizer vaccine came back as 95% effective. Not sure what paper you're holding saying blanket immunity for all time but it was probably political not scientific. It then did an insane pivot with omicron. Way too many mutations at once for any vaccine to accommodate.

The science is very broad and very clear on all of these matters. I feel bad if politicians or news agencies lied to you but my advice is to take an aggregate of every country / health authority in the entire world and disregard your own anecdotes / the Joe Rogans of the world. There's just no way that a conspiracy can be as far reaching as what you're implying.

Everything you are saying is happening. But because the suspicion seems more and more that it’s an auto immune condition of some sort, and that we are only catching the downstream effects as some of the immune dysfunction isn’t mapped yet, we are seeing the clusters that you say emerge - overwhelming numbers of symptoms, relatively incoherent connection.

But autonomic dysfunction, small fiber neuropathic and detectable auto immune dysfunction are all known and increasingly mapped positive markers for the condition. Have you read the latest studies ?

Everything I've personally seen in this space is exactly what I described: they start with a set of people who claim to have the illness, then go on a statistical fishing expedition to look for "signs of immune disfunction" (or whatever, but you're right that these researchers tend to focus on immune-related metrics), then use whatever signals they happen to find to create a class. This is not the same thing as what I'm talking about, and it isn't valid.

I'm not going to claim comprehensive knowledge of the space, but the papers I've read that make it into the high-profile journals are of this sort.

The papers cited by this Lowe article are better than most at least in the sense that they have control groups and are doing experiments. But let's be clear -- the first one is claiming to see "long covid" pain symptoms in mice who are injected with whole human IgG (a notoriously messy and subjective approach) [1], and the other is exactly the kind of fishing expedition I'm describing, where they indiscriminately look for "targets" of said antibodies [2]. The former is at least doing an experiment that I suppose could lead to some kind of claim of cause, but the latter (despite the exaggerated title) provides no evidence that the correlations they're seeing are meaningful in any disease process.

I guarantee that using the high-dimensional screening that the latter paper in particular is doing, I can take 1000 random people, split them into two arbitrary classes ("fooists" and "non-fooists"), and find some "statistically significant" difference in immune marker profile between them. That is the fundamental problem with the approach.

When I say that you have to start from an objective measurement of symptoms, it means literally that -- not starting from an assay result that is unlinked to any symptom.

[1] https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S266637912...

[2] https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S00928...

Aside: this lab is becoming infamous for this kind of statistical fishing expedition. It makes me cry for the state of science.