The NIH's Billion Dollar Scapegoat/Cash Cow
funding expensive conclusions to discourage free thought
According to Stat News:
The federal government has burned through more than $1 billion to study long Covid, an effort to help the millions of Americans who experience brain fog, fatigue, and other symptoms after recovering from a coronavirus infection.
There’s basically nothing to show for it.
What are we really funding? I have some ideas about that…
Where’s the Urgency?
The crawling pace of the government’s long Covid efforts stand in stark contrast with the government’s wildly successful partnership with the pharmaceutical industry to get Covid-19 vaccines to market in less than 12 months.
Government and regulatory agencies demonstrated that “where there’s a will, there’s a way” when it comes to warp speed-style fast-tracking of the pharmaceutical products they deem necessary. Why the hold up when it comes to providing solutions to the 16 million Americans who currently report experiencing “long Covid symptoms”?
The National Institutes of Health hasn’t signed up a single patient to test any potential treatments — despite a clear mandate from Congress to study them. And the few trials it is planning have already drawn a firestorm of criticism, especially one intervention that experts and advocates say may actually make some patients’ long Covid symptoms worse.
Instead, the NIH spent the majority of its money on broader, observational research that won’t directly bring relief to patients. But it still hasn’t published any findings from the patients who joined that study, almost two years after it started.
(I have my own sneaking suspicion that weaving damage control and profitability into study outcomes is making this process take a little longer.)
Examining the funding and research to date makes an interesting study of its own. That study could easily be titled: How much can we spend on studies without ever coming to any conclusion that would be inconvenient to the medical establishment? or How can we collect the data we need to make long Covid a thing?
The STAT news article acknowledges:
The majority of the scientific findings to emerge from RECOVER so far have been based on small groups of patients or on electronic health records, rather than on the thousands of people who signed up to participate.
And finally, why the suppression of available remedies and protocols from groups like the Frontline COVID-19 Critical Care Alliance (FLCCC)?
The only trial (for treatments) to be formally announced so far will focus on Paxlovid, testing whether the drug alleviates symptoms by mitigating any ongoing viral infection in patients’ bodies. The study was supposed to start recruiting in January.
Indeed, the medical establishment has arguably spent more time and resources suppressing and maligning the scientists who tried to propose solutions early on than on creating solutions themselves.
Funding the Definition of Long COVID
Currently, there’s no approved definition of long COVID. From the NIH:
For many people, a bout with SARS-CoV-2, the virus that causes COVID-19, doesn’t end when the initial symptoms subside. An array of problems may linger for months or years after infection. They can affect nearly every tissue and organ in the body. Their effects can range from mild to disabling.
These lingering health problems have become known as long COVID, or postacute sequelae of SARS-CoV-2 infection (PACS). Studies to test potential therapies for PACS have been hampered by the lack of a standard definition of the condition. It also hasn’t been clear whether different sets of long COVID symptoms may reflect distinct syndromes that need different treatments.
In 2021, NIH launched the Researching COVID to Enhance Recovery (RECOVER) initiative. RECOVER aims to understand why some people develop long-term symptoms following COVID-19. It’s also testing ways to detect, treat, and prevent the condition.
Our taxpayer dollars are being distributed among universities, including Stanford, Yale, Emory, Columbia, Cornell and Rutgers to help create a new scientific consensus. In the meantime, long Covid, aka post-acute sequelae of SARS-CoV-2 (PASC), will readily be absorbed into both higher education and the medical paradigm if only by mere repetition. (If long covid doesn’t exist, how come I just spent 2 years and a billion dollars researching it?)
For example, Rutgers Robert Wood Johnson Medical School (RWJMS) is projected to receive approximately $30 million as part of the NIH-funded Researching COVID to Enhance Recovery (RECOVER) initiative to study long-term and delayed impacts of COVID-19 in children.
Rutgers will take the lead in a National Institutes of Health (NIH) study seeking to define long COVID – a term used to describe lingering COVID-19 symptoms – in children, including its evolution and how often it occurs. (emphasis mine)
$30 million to help define long COVID. How convenient.
In the study’s first phase, participants will provide blood and saliva samples and complete an at-home questionnaire. Qualifying participants will continue to the second phase, which involves an in-depth evaluation that will include bloodwork, an electrocardiogram and lung-function testing at the Pediatric Clinical Research Center at Rutgers Robert Wood Johnson Medical School in New Brunswick. Some participants may be selected for even more in-depth study, including brain imaging, cognitive testing and echocardiograms.
Children and adolescents are particularly susceptible to long-term COVID-19 symptoms, including brain fog, loss of stamina, pain, headaches, fatigue, anxiety, depression, fever, cough and sleep problems.
Notice how Rutgers has already asserted that “brain fog, loss of stamina, pain, headaches, fatigue, anxiety, depression, fever, cough and sleep problems” are long-term COVID symptoms and claims that children are particularly vulnerable. It’s a mind-seeding party trick we’ve seen before. These vague and common symptoms just became “long-term and delayed impacts of Covid in children”, presumably by way of a temporal association. (Imagine if temporal associations were acceptable evidence of vaccine reactions…)
Meanwhile, they’re collecting abundant biometric data that will allow them to connect dots to create a picture of long COVID. (Exactly what is the hypothesis here? And how do they plan to challenge it?)
There’s a reason you think of Zika when you hear microcephaly and paralysis when you hear polio. More importantly, there’s a reason most people will never stop to consider other culprits.
The Science of Scapegoating
Here’s a theory…
Linking vague and increasingly common symptoms to long COVID is decoy science to create the perfect scapegoat. It creates a new syndrome that public health and regulatory authorities can use to justify more research. That research will validate and standardize a novel diagnosis, which will then be matched with new tests, pharmaceutical solutions and protocols. The diagnosis will validate and explain away the suffering of millions of people and perpetuate our dependence on pharmaceutical solutions.
Importantly, all of this will serve to “settle the science” so that people will stop asking pesky questions about the potential role of other interventions and temporal associations.
Here’s some more framing that works Long COVID right into the study as a diagnosis:
“Our research will involve in-depth studies to assess whether anti-SARS-CoV-2 antibody responses differ between children who developed Long COVID, and those who did not,” explained Gennaro. “This work might help determine whether some antiviral antibodies have beneficial or harmful long-term effects, opening the way to various therapeutic scenarios. One strength of this endeavor is that key SARS-CoV-2 proteins used in the assays are produced in-house, in the laboratory of Abraham Pinter, professor of medicine at Rutgers NJMS, using methods they established in more than a decade of HIV research.”
Repeating these associations between Long COVID and anti-SARS-CoV-2 antibody responses overlooks the the potential impacts of COVID shots, which also produce antibody responses.
Here’s another correlation that omits the potential implications of COVID shots:
Among the first PASC recognized is Multisystem Inflammatory Syndrome in Children (MIS-C), a severe acute inflammatory illness, which typically begins unexpectedly about a month after the initial infection. Children with MIS-C have fever and other symptoms that may include inflammation of the gastrointestinal tract, circulatory system and skin that sometimes mimic another rare illness, Kawasaki’s Disease. Beyond MIS-C, children are also susceptible to what is commonly referred to as “long COVID.” A team of researchers at Rutgers have studied COVID-19 and MIS-C from shortly after it was first described in the United States.
Rutgers, which is currently working on both its own COVID vaccine and it’s own investigational new drug (IND) for post-COVID “long haul” symptoms, seems to be experiencing a bit of a disconnect when applying science to its own inventions. The institution touted it’s “success” in animal trials boasting “extremely high anti-spike IgG titers.”
Early research acknowledged the potentially dangerous impacts of COVID antibody responses in children with respect to MIS-C (multisystem inflammatory syndrome in children) and issued a warning about the risks COVID vaccines might therefore pose to children.
The discovery that high levels of antibodies against RBD are associated with MIS-C could prove helpful in diagnosing MIS-C, Zeichner and Cruz note. But there may also be other implications. If antibodies against RBD – or some subset of antibodies against RBD – contribute to causing MIS-C, there may be some subtype or amount of antibodies against RBD that are unhelpful, or even dangerous…
RBD is a component of many of the COVID-19 vaccines in development, Zeichner and Cruz write, so the new findings may prove important there as well. If some antibodies against RBD are associated with MIS-C or increased inflammation, it would be essential to carefully evaluate subjects enrolled in the vaccine clinical trials for evidence of increased inflammatory responses, particularly if and when those research subjects are exposed to and infected with the COVID-19 virus.
The possibility is an important reminder, they write, that the urgent desire for a vaccine must not eclipse the need for thoughtful, thorough testing.
But with regards to vaccines, there was no time for thoughtful thorough testing. And the Mayo Clinic and others submitted their verdicts at the start of the pandemic and never looked back.
MIS-C was first detected in April 2020. MIS-C is currently linked to coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19). Experts are still studying the cause of MIS-C and risk factors for getting it.
Only when these symptoms show up subsequent to vaccines do we see a demand for causal evidence and we should all be asking ourselves why. In the meantime, notice that COVID is guilty until proven innocent and the vaccines are innocent until proven guilty as our medical data is quietly collected and calculated. (Stay tuned to see if we ever learn the vaccination status of the study participants.)
Launching the Next Specialty in the Absence of Science
While there is currently no accepted medical definition, test, treatment, or cure for PASC, Dr. Linda Geng treats patients at Stanford Medicine’s Post-Acute COVID-19 Syndrome Clinic and claims that long COVID is linked to more than 200 symptoms and conditions, including fatigue and depression. In a recent NPR report, she explains:
"When you don't have any tests that show that anything's abnormal, it can be quite invalidating and anxiety-provoking."
However, validation is readily available. From the clinic’s website:
At the Post-Acute COVID-19 Syndrome (PACS) Clinic, we see patients who have tested positive for COVID-19 and are experiencing lingering symptoms for more than four weeks after infection. If a COVID test result isn't available, we also see people with classic COVID symptoms who were in close contact with someone who tested positive.
If you have fatigue, body aches, sleep problems, shortness of breath, cough, chest pain, palpitations, brain fog, headaches, memory loss, dizziness, anxiety/depression, blood clots, endocrine problems, gastrointestinal problems, psychosis, skin issues (“such as measles-like rash, hives, or redness and swelling of the hands and feet”), multisystem inflammatory syndrome, or PTSD subsequent to a Covid test or suspected exposure, you can be treated for long Covid. Because it’s probably long Covid.
(Fibromyalgia and Lyme are so passé.)
A Chinese Medicine Perspective on “Long Haul”
In my practice, we’ve been treating “long haul” conditions for decades. They are not new. We see them regularly in patients who are either unable to properly clear a pathogen or don’t completely heal from any variety of conditions. We generally see acute symptoms as the body’s attempt to clear or detoxify and chronic conditions as the result of an inability to do so properly or completely. It can be a “long haul” if you are unable to generate a fever and break a sweat, or if you don’t give yourself the proper time or rest to heal from a concussion.
In fact, Chinese medicine considers the acute symptoms associated with many common childhood infections with the clearing of “fetal heat.” Healthy children navigate these infections easily and their immune systems grow stronger as a result. This is in service to the child’s health. It doesn’t mean we’re not vigilant and careful - there are a number of ways we can observe whether a child is effectively navigating these infections and tools to support the healing process. But even conventional medicine recognizes the importance of priming a child’s immune system. Multiple studies have demonstrated an inverse association between acute infections and cancer development.
From a 2005 study in Cancer Detection and Prevention:
Exposures to febrile infectious childhood diseases were associated with subsequently reduced risks for melanoma, ovary, and multiple cancers combined, significant in the latter two groups.
In contrast, vaccines prevent that clearing and suppress a natural immune response. From a Chinese medicine perspective, vaccinations introduce pathogens/toxins deeper into the body where they are suppressed (at the expense of our own health resources). Generally these pathogens resurface when the body no longer has the resources to contain them or maintain dormancy - usually a time of illness, advanced age or weakness. At that point, the pathogen has been simmering, wreaking havok at a deeper level, and we see cancers, neurodegenerative diseases and other chronic ailments.
In other words, vaccines appear to help us trade acute infections for chronic disease because they prevent the body from effectively clearing pathogens/toxins.
And vaccines aren’t the only interventions that can do that.
What If…
What if it’s not one thing we’re seeing but rather a population-wide response to multiple assaults that both deprive us of real nourishment and force our bodies into overdrive and then leave us weak and vulnerable to EVERYTHING? Could it be that the low-grade oxygen deprivation from years of masking…plus the hyperinflammatory and blood-stagnating impacts of inevitable and repeated exposure to spike protein from both COVID and/or COVID shots… plus the constant fear-mongering and stress of uncertainty… the sedentary lifestyles and isolation promoted by lockdowns… plus the glyphosate that we’re finding in so much of our food… plus the accumulation of aluminum from vaccines and the environment… plus the constant exposure to EMRs from cell phones, smart meters and 5G towers… and the chemicals released into our atmosphere via geoengineering (I know they say they’re not doing it yet, but please… those are not contrails)… combine to create a toxic soup that enables every culprit to deflect responsibility?
Does this list of complaints (linked to electromagnetic radiation and wireless technology) look familiar?
The NIH has spend $1B+ (so far) to create a template for how you think about these symptoms, but you can think for yourself for free.
I highly recommend it.
I often wonder what the last 3 years would have been like if people were as focused on hearing and speaking the truth as they’ve been addicted to fear and ignorance. Covid 19 (as well as Long Covid) would have been long gone. Children would be engaged in what they do best - having fun, learning about life, experiencing new things - while the rest of us could continue to grow up and make the best of this treasure we’ve been born to discover.
Numerous diseases, including especially COVID-19 and resultant lasting infections and symptoms, are made very much worse by the fact that without proper vitamin D3 supplementation, most people have only a fraction of the 50 ng/mL 125 nmol/L circulating 25-hydroxyvitamin D their immune systems need to function.
Please see the research articles cited and discussed at: https://vitamindstopscovid.info/00-evi/ and https://brownstone.org/articles/vitamin-d-everything-you-need-to-know/ .
For 70 kg 154 lb bodyweight, with out obesity, 0.125 mg (5000 IU) a day is sufficient to attain this, after several months. This is a gram every 22 years - and pharma grade vitamin D3 costs about USD$2.50 a gram.
The whole of humanity needs about a tonne of vitamin D3 a day to attain these proper levels. This would, very approximately, halve ill health and largely eradicate sepsis, which kills 11 million people a year, worldwide. The annual cost of this (not counting putting it in once a week capsules and distributing these), at current prices, would be about USD$1B a year.
This would greatly reduce ill-health, medical costs, and the revenues of pharmaceutical companies.