Updated 2024/12/13.

What do we know after five years of covid? That AJ Leonardi's warning has come true. That SARS-CoV-2 is harmful to blood vessels and the immune system by its very nature. That what hospitalized patients go through, the rest of us go through as well, but at a less dramatic end of the spectrum. That even when it sneaks past mucosal immunity and we never get the sniffles, it is vasculopathic and immune-dysregulating. If we judged every virus by the acute symptoms they elicit, HIV would be a cold.

Speaking of viruses that the immune system can't actually clear: there remains no available proof that this virus isn't one of them. This is a dire lack of evidence that implies a significantly elevated set of consequences for a pandemic that the WHO considers ongoing, because there is no lasting immunity to this motherfucker, whether by vaccination or infection.

It's pretty grim that in five years, none of the clinicians who have reassured us that covid is inevitable, fine if you're healthy, and definitely not social murder have been able to prove – not with a single histopathology examination or autopsy anywhere – that all covid isn't long covid. That all covid doesn't have a chronic phase that is subclinical until it's not. That the 80 or 90 percent of us who don't show the damage right away aren't succumbing to the same damage over years.

The burden of proof was always on them – on public health as an institution – to prove that it's a fine virus to catch over and over. That vaccines prevent SARS-CoV-2 from forming chronic reservoirs in our tissues instead of just keeping us out of the hospital. Instead, these clinicians exploited the gushing tendency of privileged liberals to engage in the most egregious forms of wishful thinking imaginable.

Now, as our vaccines continue failing to prevent transmission, the virus continues acquiring vaccine-evasive adaptations, causing harm that unfolds on the scale of years. What's already happened to the most vulnerable among us will happen and is happening to all of us.

It looks like tens of millions of missing people and uncountably more disabled. Like gut issues, chronic fatigue, tremors, and coughs that linger for months. Like strokes and heart attacks too young. Like autoimmunity or reactivated mono, herpes, TB, and cancer. Like aging faster and rising rates of dementia. It might even look like measles and polio vaccines that don't work as well anymore (this one's on me – there's no proof of that yet). The list will grow.

Here's an imperfect analogy for covid vaccination that nevertheless works on multiple levels: if a SARS-CoV-2 infection is like a car crash, the vaccine is like an old seatbelt that you need to replace often. "Crash" is some ambiguous threshold of significance, and the collision speed is the initial viral load. The seatbelt obviously doesn't prevent the crash – only safe driving and the safe driving of others can do that – but it does mitigate some of the harm. Now imagine that you never fully heal from the injuries and are in multiple crashes per year.

"What are you proposing we do?"

Act like the pandemic never ended, because it didn't. If you know you can spread an airborne virus unknowingly – and you aren't going out of your way not to, assuming you have the means – then you are spreading it knowingly.

If you're a parent with kids in school, ask yourself what you would do if a virus your kids were allowed to get over and over again were destroying their microvasculature and immune systems over time, because there is one doing that.

Ask your kid if any of their friends are too tired too frequently to play anymore. Have an explanation that centers the wear and tear their bodies are going through because of a serious virus that isn't going away. Help them understand that our bodies can't build lasting immunity to it because it's smarter than our bodies.

Believe kids when they describe problems with their brains or bodies that won't go away instead of dismissing or reframing them as some trumped-up maladjustment or social ailment.

Ask yourself why this kind of damage is allowed to be normal and what that says about the kind of world being normalized.

It should be said again and again: the Great Barrington Declaration was brought to us by the very same people who brought us climate change denial. Believing herd immunity is possible with a coronavirus is like believing industrial quantities of carbon dioxide aren't enough to raise the surface temperature of the planet. It's unscientific nonsense, and folks who know better when it comes to climate change should know better when it comes to covid.

Recognizing the science, but believing that nothing can be done about it is worse. Unlike the consumer carbon footprint, the chains of transmission that each person is responsible for are not dwarfed by corporations and militaries. Every single interruption in the chain saves uncountable lives. You can make more of a difference than you know.

References:

1. CDC – Reported Tuberculosis in the United States, 2023
2. Easy Chair – Reactivated TB is a Bellweather for Covid's Immune Harm
3. [Covid Fact Sheet]
4. HIV.gov – Symptoms of HIV
5. [The Myth of SARS-CoV-2 Clearance]
6. WHO – Coronavirus disease (COVID-19) pandemic
7. Nature Medicine – SARS-CoV-2-specific plasma cells are not durably established in the bone marrow long-lived compartment after mRNA vaccination
8. The Journal of Infectious Diseases – Deficient Generation of Spike-Specific Long-Lived Plasma Cells in the Bone Marrow After [SARS-CoV-2] Infection
9. [Why the Covid Vaccines We Have Are Not Enough]
10. Our World in Data – Estimated cumulative excess deaths during COVID-19, World
11. Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis – Population With a Disability, 16 Years and over
12. TIME – Long COVID Looks Different in Kids
13. Leslie Exp – Plague is a Racket: Disaster Capitalism and the Pandemic
14. Violet Blue – Huge, FREE covid safety resource list