> "There's always an easy solution to every human problem; Neat, plausible and wrong."
- H. L. Mencken
Something acute is severe by definition, but without the S we'd all be talking about ARS, so they added the Severe
There is no rethinking here from serious science (The BMJ is a really bad journal and one of the ones that supported this garbage), the science on infections has been clear for decades, every infection damages us. Covid especially so it damages the immune system directly suppressing CD4 and 8 T cells, B cells and other aspects. Its not a subtle change, in Long Covid research its become increasingly hard to find controls, many people without symptoms show the same blood based markers of immune dysruption and cognitive slowing.
No. It's a hypothesis, because nobody had any explanation for why flu "disappeared". You may not prefer that particular hypothesis, but that does not make it unscientific or political.
In fact, doing what you're doing right now -- trying to present the hypothesis as activism in order to remove it from the realm of reasonable discussion -- is inherently political.
> Covid especially so it damages the immune system directly suppressing CD4 and 8 T cells, B cells and other aspects.
There is no good evidence for this claim. We have robust T- and B-cell mediated immunity to prior Covid infection, and there are now hundreds, if not thousands of papers showing it. Please stop.
The general origin of this meme is the article linked in the piece, which, if you read the abstract you'll see is making a very limited claim, and cannot be used to support the notion that "Covid damages the immune system" in any long-term sense, particularly when we know the opposite is true from many, many other studies:
https://academic.oup.com/jleukbio/article-abstract/116/6/138...
Animats•1h ago
There's clearly a long-term aftermath, but it's not well understood. There are other diseases where that occurs, despite the initial infection seeming to be over. Chickenpox as a child can turn into shingles as an adult.[1] The virus is never completely cleared.
[1] https://health.clevelandclinic.org/can-you-get-shingles-if-y...
timr•39m ago
There's absolutely no reason to believe that SARS-CoV2 has similar capability, and those who cling to this hypothesis are engaging in pseudoscience. Viruses are not so complex that we would trivially overlook a feature that would literally change the phylogenetic classification in a dramatic way.
[1] https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC5584196/
privatelypublic•16m ago
You might think that, but in the past two decades theres been so many "how did we miss that?" in so many fields. I'll let field experts bring specifics up- I only know popularized examples like Roman Concrete. And the ever-easy Mars unit-conversion error.
timr•15m ago
PaulKeeble•38m ago
Finding Covid viral fragments in people long after the infection is very concerning, we don't know how its staying in the body or where but it seems likely its persisting.
ChrisMarshallNY•29m ago
Several variants of Malaria can be The Gift That Keeps On Giving: https://www.mmv.org/malaria/symptoms-and-treatments/relapsin...
timr•21m ago
ChrisMarshallNY•17m ago
However, from the article, it seems that they believe that COVID just whacks the immune system, in general, so everyone gets to belly up to the bar.
timr•16m ago
ChrisMarshallNY•13m ago
timr•4m ago
Look at the content of the article. Literally every quote in this piece is some scientist speculating. That's completely fine, and what scientists do, but the "journalist" is spinning it into a narrative of "scientists believe X", which is both true (some scientists can be found to support literally any claim), and misleadingly over-confident.