And it’s still serious
Dr Eric Topol writes about some new COVID studies in his newsletter today. Apparently, it causes accelerated vascular aging, Endothelial Inflammation and promotes Atherosclerosis and not just among people who were hospitalized with serious cases. It’s clear that the long term damage this thing causes in the body is still being understood. (And by the way, vaccination protects against this and many other long term effects of the virus so it’s really great news that RFK Jr and his band of snake oil salesmen are banning the research into the technology that created it.)
Try to avoid getting COVID if you can. There’s some evidence that the long term effects are worse for people who’ve had it repeatedly.
Topol concludes:
[W]e’ve now seen a third dimension of Covid’s potential effect on our arteries, from the early recognized endothelial inflammation, with its attendant propensity for clots (micro or macro), to promoting atherosclerotic plaque, particularly those with high-risk for rupture (precursor for heart attack and stroke), to now accelerated aging. These 3 dimensions are not discrete, but interdependent. Undoubtedly, we will learn more on the future impact of Covid on our vascular health, but for now we can say it is likely well beyond what is generally recognized or anticipated.
Covid is still with us, with a summer wave in the United States that fortunately is not nearly as severe as previous ones, likely accounted , at least in part, by the XFG variant, now dominant, not being more evasive of our immune system than prior SARS-CoV-2 variants. It is unsettling, however, to see the marked reduction of tracking Covid here (be it by genomics or wastewater) and the gutting of funding of mRNA vaccines and platform which have an enormous future role, not just vs infectious diseases, but also combatting cancer, autoimmune diseases and support for genome editing for rare diseases.
This is beyond Covid denialism, also representing anti-science, negating the extraordinary progress we’ve made over the past 5 years. Even in the new report we see evidence that vaccination is associated with protection for accelerated vascular aging, which goes along with many other levels of protection, including Long Covid.
It’s a crime against humanity in my book.
Here’s what Bobby Jr and Whiskey Pete are doing with their time these days when they aren’t destroying Americans health system and military: