Updated 2024/12/05.

Over and over again, AJ Leonardi has been proven right. Over and over again, it's been discovered that what hospitalized patients go through with covid, the rest of us go through as well, but at a much less dramatic end of the spectrum. This virus is harmful to blood vessels and the immune system, every time. Even when it sneaks past mucosal immunity and we never get the sniffles, it is harmful. If we judged every virus by the acute symptoms they elicit, HIV would be a cold or a flu at worst.

Speaking of which, there remains no evidence that this is a virus the immune system can fully clear. No, really – if that evidence exists, I can't find it, and you would make a lot of people happy if you can. What that would imply would change the course of the pandemic – which the WHO considers ongoing – since there appears to be no lasting immunity to this motherfucker, whether by vaccination or infection.

It's pretty grim that in five years, none of the clinicians claiming that covid is inevitable and fine and definitely not social murder or passive eugenics 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 comfy liberals to engage in the most egregious forms of wishful thinking imaginable.

Living through a once-in-a-lifetime pandemic isn't the hard part – nevermind that there are more on the way in this lifetime. It's seeing the way that denial is just as, if not more contagious than a virus. It's seeing the way that it compromises relationships that can't withstand the weight of informed and non-negotiable boundaries. It's seeing the neuroinflammatory way that this virus cannot be negotiated with – by wrecking the mental health from within – of those who were catapulted back to business as usual.

That's SARS-CoV-2. We're coming up on year six, and our vaccines to combat it are falling further and further behind. As they continue failing to prevent transmission, the virus continues acquiring vaccine-evasive adaptations. While any headstart we can give the immune system against a vasculopathic and immune-dysregulating virus is better than none, it is nevertheless insufficient to protect us from SARS-CoV-2 getting in and causing harm that unfolds on the scale of years. What's already happened to the most vulnerable among us will happen, is happening, to all of us.

It looks like tens of millions of missing people and untold thousands disabled. Like gut issues, fatigue, tremors, and coughs that linger for months. Like strokes and heart attacks too young. Like autoimmunity and reactivated mono/herpes/TB/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 vaccines 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 – distinct from a fender-bender – 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'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.

That's SARS-CoV-2. If "vax-and-relax" was the best we could do before the Trump administration cuts funding for research into better vaccines, then anyone left relying on them to save us from covid, bird flu and mpox better get used to nonpharmaceutical prevention strategies very quickly, or find out the hard way how vulnerable the immune system really is.

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. Violet Blue – Huge, FREE covid safety resource list