Updated 2025/01/23.

What do we know after five years of covid?

1. That SARS-CoV-2 is harmful to the immune system, and thus every other system, by its very nature — even when it sneaks past mucosal immunity and we never get the sniffles. (If we were to judge every virus by the acute symptoms elicited, HIV would be a cold.)
2. That AJ Leonardi's warning has come true — tuberculosis incidence has increased year over year since covid was allowed to spread freely, reversing decades of the opposite.
3. That there remains no available evidence that SARS-CoV-2 can be cleared.
4. That there is no lasting immunity, whether by vaccination or infection.
5. That the WHO considers the pandemic ongoing.

It is damning that not a single histopathology examination or autopsy has been produced to prove that anyone clears this virus, or that the silent chronic phase is somehow harmless. It is known that other latent and persistent viral infections are far from harmless, leaving open the unsettling implication that the 80 or 90 percent of us who don't show the damage right away are succumbing to the same damage over years — further accumulating with each subsequent infection.

The burden of proof was always on public health as an institution to prove that it's an okay virus to catch over and over, or that vaccines prevent SARS-CoV-2 from forming reservoirs in our tissues instead of just keeping us out of the hospital. Rather than meet that burden — or apply anything remotely resembling the precautionary principle — the tendency of privileged people to engage in the most egregious forms of wishful thinking imaginable was enabled full force.

Now, as our vaccines continue failing to prevent transmission, the virus continues acquiring vaccine-evasive adaptations, free to cause harm that unfolds on the scale of years.

An imperfect analogy for covid vaccination — that nevertheless works on multiple levels — is that 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.

Worldwide, this looks like tens of millions of missing people. In the US, there's been a sharp rise in the amount of people who report having a disability. The clinically vulnerable have been abandoned by those with the means and social leverage to act differently — and more importantly, to model an alternative — who are fine with enabling the silent spread of a virus only considered dangerous to some.

With no support given to those 'some,' they become expendable. As Anthony Fauci put it, "the vulnerable will fall by the wayside," a shameless admission of the eugenic attitude at the center of the desire to return to some mythic state of Normal. An admission that when neoliberalism holds the world (and our imaginations) hostage, eugenics is actually the norm.

"What are you proposing we do?"

Act like the pandemic never ended, because it didn't. If you know that 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 permanent 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.

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

Remember the Great Barrington Declaration? It was brought to us by the very same people who brought us climate change denial. Believing that herd immunity is possible with a coronavirus is like believing that 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. Someone can make more of a difference than they know.

References:

1. CDC – Reported Tuberculosis in the United States, 2023
2. Frontiers in Cellular Neuroscience – The impact of COVID-19 on accelerating of immunosenescence and brain aging
3. Easy Chair – Reactivated TB is a Bellweather for Covid's Immune Harm
4. HIV.gov – Symptoms of HIV
5. [The Myth of SARS-CoV-2 Clearance]
6. Nature Medicine – SARS-CoV-2-specific plasma cells are not durably established in the bone marrow long-lived compartment after mRNA vaccination
7. The Journal of Infectious Diseases – Deficient Generation of Spike-Specific Long-Lived Plasma Cells in the Bone Marrow After [SARS-CoV-2] Infection
8. WHO – Coronavirus disease (COVID-19) pandemic
9. [Why the Covid Vaccines We Have Are Not Enough]
10. Salon – Why long COVID could be a ticking time bomb for public health
11. Our World in Data – Estimated cumulative excess deaths during COVID-19, World
12. Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis – Population With a Disability, 16 Years and over
13. Death Panel – Covid Year Four (12/12/23)
14. Violet Blue – Huge, FREE covid safety
15. TIME – Long COVID Looks Different in Kids
16. Leslie Exp – Plague is a Racket: Disaster Capitalism and the Pandemic