The highly respected journal STAT has just published an article declaring that the dreaded “Long COVID is a new name for an old syndrome.” Preposterous! Incredible! Absurd! Ridiculous! Farcical! Toss in a few more synonyms!
No, not at all. Just late to the game. (READ MORE: Newsom’s COVID Coverup)
Twice in this publication, I wrote at length about the so-called “Long COVID,” first almost exactly two years ago and then in July of last year. The second article read:
“Do I have Long COVID? As many as 23 million Americans want to know, as more than 200 symptoms emerge.” So begins a recent article in Fortune magazine. “It gets stranger,” the piece continues. “Among the 200-plus symptoms identified so far are ear numbness, a sensation of ‘brain on fire,’ erectile dysfunction, irregular menstrual periods, constipation, peeling skin, and double vision.” This is according to a study published a year ago in the British medical journal the Lancet, widely considered the world’s most prestigious medical journal. And, oh yes, “The study identified symptoms involving 10 major organ systems—and the body only has 11.”
I wrote that while the individual symptoms are real, they are psychogenic — also called psychosomatic. They’re not from a virus; they are from a mental state. The alleged syndrome is so far removed from actual or acute COVID that a vast number of those claiming to have the long variety not only have no evidence of having had the acute illness but rather there is evidence they didn’t. How can you have an extended version of a disease you never suffered?
‘Long COVID’ Symptoms Pre-Date COVID
I also wrote that “Long COVID” was just a new name for syndromes that have been recorded for centuries, with the most recent most common name being myalgic encephalomyelitis/chronic fatigue syndrome (ME/CFS). This, in turn, is most often a manifestation of clinical depression.
And both articles were roundly ignored by the aggregate sites, along with everyone else.
No, STAT didn’t plagiarize me; there’s no reason to think they even read my articles. To claim otherwise would be to defeat my point. This was obvious as hell all along. I only beat everyone else to the punch because, heretofore, others who knew better were terrified to say so. As I noted in my previous articles, careers have been ruined by going against the conventional wisdom on psychogenic illnesses.
The problem is that all the money is in claiming psychogenic illnesses are organic because you can publish tons of articles in both the popular and scientific and medical media about causation, endurance, suffering, how the government doesn’t care, and so on. And you can fill them with awful anecdotes. Researchers can tap into a $1.15 billion U.S. government fund established for investigating the alleged illness. But to claim it’s just something that’s been around forever not only rains on the parade but ends it.
And the activist groups will eat you alive. You are negating their purpose. Organisms, living or not, don’t want to disappear — including activist groups. (READ MORE: Federal Mask Mandates? Vance Calls Dems’ Bluff)
A lot of people who think they have “Long COVID” really and truly are suffering, but you do them absolutely no good by telling them this is something new and mysterious and potentially curable with new medication when it’s old and known and treatable with therapy that leaves a lot to be desired (we have a long way to go on treating depression) but already exists.
Further, promoting “Long COVID” also promotes excess fear of the real COVID, thus promoting the horrific overreaction we witnessed in masking and locking down — the effects of which continue to hammer us — and give hope to those who wish to re-muzzle us. My older brother (who admittedly is high risk if he contracts real COVID) continues to mask, citing “Long COVID.”
It’s Just a Mass Psychogenic Illness
“Conditions similar to ME/CFS have been described in the medical literature for centuries,” notes the STAT article. “Although well-described symptom clusters similar to ME/CFS were reported as early as the 1930s, the term myalgic encephalomyelitis was first used to describe the condition in the 1950s, and ME was recognized by the World Health Organization as a disease entity in the 1960s.”
Although “Long COVID’s” prevalence has recently decreased to 6 percent of U.S. adults, they note that “there has been no significant progress in understanding its causes, prevention, or treatment. Long Covid still looms as the national health disaster many predicted. Everyone — patients, support groups, clinicians, researchers, and health care systems — is frustrated by lack of meaningful progress in research and patient care.”
But, they say, “The solution for this seemingly unsolvable puzzle is hiding in plain sight.” (Yes, as in the pages of The American Spectator.) “Long COVID is a new term coined for an old syndrome that has long bedeviled the ecosystem of clinicians, researchers, patients, support groups, and health care systems.”
So far, so good. But then they claim “the U.S. government rapidly anticipated and tried to blunt the force of this national calamity by investing in basic and clinical research. Hopes were raised in December 2020 when Congress provided $1.15 billion over four years to the NIH to launch its long Covid research initiative called RECOVER.” Meanwhile, the CDC and Veterans Affairs also got in on the act.
No, they weren’t trying to blunt the force but rather perpetuating it by paying a bounty. If a government pays a bounty on rat tails to encourage people to hunt down the vermin or cobras to eliminate the threatening creatures, soon enough, people will be raising rats or cobras for the purpose of turning in the tails or snakes for a reward. The terminology is “perverse incentive,” and that’s all that’s happened.
Meanwhile, “A 2022 paper projected the total U.S. economic impact in quality of life, lost earnings, and medical care spending at $3.7 trillion. That’s $11,000 per capita or 17% of the 2019 gross domestic product.” (READ MORE: America’s Drug Supply Depends on India and China. You Should Fix That, FDA.)
They really blow it by declaring, “Logic and reason dictate that acute SARS-CoV-2 infection causes long COVID.” They say acute COVID “triggers” a temporal association, but not “cause” in a mechanistic sense.”
Terminology like “logic and reason” is often what I call “bullying rhetoric,” as in “everyone knows” or “common sense dictates.” No, provide data. Indeed, as I observed in both of my earlier articles, huge numbers of supposed sufferers of “Long COVID” don’t have long anything. As I wrote in 2021:
An August [2021] study of 3,151 British (“long haulers”) in Pragmatic and Observational Research found only 17.2% were test-confirmed positive, A further 12% said they were told they had acute COVID, but no test was performed. And over 70% admitted it was merely self-diagnosis. An influential and scary article in the Atlantic reported some two-thirds of “long-hauler” patients had negative coronavirus antibody tests without making the obvious inference. An advocacy group study released in May 2020 found that only “About a quarter of respondents (23.1%) tested positive for COVID-19” but in “our analysis, we included all responses regardless of testing status.”
Very convenient, that.
But the STAT writers return on track. “There is an already extensive body of patient-care experience, guidance, and resources for best practice to build on in the clinical management of post-infection syndromes. This should be aggressively applied to the benefit of long Covid patients.”
Yes, yes, yes! We can help these people!
But the very worst thing is what we’ve been doing in letting them mentally tie their conditions (some of which may also be organic) to something new and mysterious. As I noted, people have literally committed suicide (according to their survivors) because they thought they had incurable “Long COVID.” We’re not being compassionate by appeasing the Long COVID lobby; quite the opposite.
Mind, as with any other psychogenic illness, this explanation has to be handled correctly. You have to reassure sufferers, “It’s not all in your head.” Sure, that’s where it originated. But the literature is absolutely packed with evidence that psychogenic illness causes terrible symptoms, including, yes, death.
Most headaches are psychogenic; that is, they’re from stress. Any part of the body can ache because of stress or because the sufferer thinks there’s an outside cause. In cases of mass psychogenic illness, vomiting is quite common. Vomiting is vomiting, whether from an old tuna fish salad or from a strange new smell in a school. One student throws up, and the observation and smell of the vomit causes a chain reaction. Can a person die of a “broken heart?” Oh, absolutely! In medical terminology, it’s “extreme emotional distress.”
Curious Cases of Psychogenesis Having Nothing to Do With COVID
As I write this, I’m in Colombia (not the District of Columbia, which is also spelled differently. I recently had to help my friend here, Evy, made somewhat famous in these pages for her brave struggle against Stage III cervical cancer, to pay for her twin daughters to get the Human Papillomavirus (HPV) vaccine.
Almost all cervical cancer is caused by that virus. Originally, the two-dose regimen (three for older children) was free in Colombia, and coverage was amazingly high. People like free stuff, and they don’t like cervical cancer. Evy is currently in remission, but I let her know quite frankly that it’s very possible she will suffer recurrence and death. Her older half-sister was diagnosed at the same stage, treated the same way, enjoyed a brief remission, and quickly went to her grave.
So why did we share the costs for a previously free vaccine?
After the initial success, there was a highly publicized outbreak of mass psychogenic illness in Colombia tied to the vaccine. As soon as I read the symptoms in a popular publication, I saw it for what it was. They were classically psychogenic, such as headaches and fainting.
You may have heard that many young women fainted at Beatles and Elvis concerts. They truly did. But whether you like their music or not, don’t blame it for causing sudden unconsciousness and collapse. According to two German researchers writing in the New England Journal of Medicine, mostly it was caused by mass psychogenic illness — although they don’t use that specific terminology. (Curiously, female fainting is now much less fashionable than in the 1800s, with only part of that attributable to corsets also going out of fashion.)
Further, the Colombian outbreak initially occurred in one small town on the rather primitive north coast before YouTube and social media spread it. That’s a major red flag. If a vaccine is truly dangerous — and some have been, either intrinsically (for example, the U.S. swine flu vaccine in 1976 administered to prevent a faux epidemic) or as administered (the Dengue vaccine in the Philippines) — it will be dangerous everywhere. Not just in one geographical area. This was after two years of vaccinating almost three million Colombian women with no reported hitches.
As one medical journal article noted, “No organic association between adverse reactions and the HPV vaccination was found.”
Too late. It also reported. “The events had shaken public confidence in HPV immunization and by 2016, vaccine acceptance fell to as low as 14% for the first dose, and 5% for the full dosage.”
Thus, it was taken off the free list, although it’s still subsidized depending on income level. Damned if we were going to see Evy’s twins possibly go through what their mother and aunt did, so we shelled out for the vaccine that, according to the CDC, “can prevent over 90% of cancers caused by HPV” when given at the right ages.
(Incidentally, another red flag is too many symptoms. I asked the MS AI chatbot Bing if “Long COVID” was real. Definitely, it said. I asked it to name even one other disease or syndrome with as many as 100 symptoms, much less over 200. It could not.)
But what of those allegedly suffering “Long COVID?” Many will continue to suffer regardless of anything we do. Can’t save the world. They will switch to (or back to) ME/CFS or one of its myriad cousins that I discussed in that first article. However, a certain percentage of people will improve upon hearing that their illness is not organic.
When I was in the Army, I had truly horrible outbreaks of urticaria that went far beyond the usual red, itchy hives. My lips and even arms became red and swollen. I was a pink Popeye. Doctors considered equipping me with an EpiPen in case I went into shock. But one day, while waiting in the infirmary, a wise fellow soldier asked me a few questions and responded, “You’re allergic to the color green!” More specifically, while now I’m proud to have served, especially as a paratrooper, at the time, I hated the Army. And still had three and a half years to go. As I recall, within a week of being advised my illness was psychogenic, the urticaria was gone. The three-and-a-half years of the Army remained.
We can help a lot of these poor people who are most certainly not faking it. But we have to stop using taxpayer money to pay a bounty to those who continue to tell them they have a bizarre new illness for which there is no cure. We have to tell them the truth. “Long COVID” is a fraud diagnosis. A horrible life-destroying, economy-destroying fraud diagnosis
Michael Fumento (mfumento@outlook.net) has been an attorney, author, and science journalist for over 35 years with a specialty in epidemics, both real and faux. His work has appeared in the New York Times, the Washington Post, the Sunday Times, the Atlantic, and many other fora.