Covid infections are causing IQ drops and years of brain aging, studies suggest
cbc.ca
cbc.ca
Medical journals and their associated media summaries are awash with low-certainty studies that get de-nuanced and overhyped. These studies are relatively easy to do - not to denigrate the work put in by the original study authors (it’s not their fault the press sensationalize their work). But for strong causative claims you ideally would have blinded controlled randomized trials. Sometimes such trials are not feasible, but that doesn’t mean you get to claim causation anyway just because the work to prove it is too hard.
'Covid infections associated with IQ drops and years of brain aging, studies suggest'.
You can even remove the 'studies suggest' part in that case to get just 'Covid infections associated with IQ drops and years of brain aging'
There are cases (enough to not be treated as just some random coincidence; with and without vaccination) where people after Covid had a sever reduction of cognitive abilities that they have problems filling out relatively simple forms. So we can clearly speak of a reduction of IQ.
And while there is a lot of research needed and a lot of open questions and already half a year (or so?) into the pandemic we did know from how we observed COVID affecting the brain that it likely will cause a reduction in cognitive abilities at least in some cases which matches the (very many) observations we had since then.
This also matches what we know from other older studies about other virus infections which have some similarity with covid, e.g. causing Neuroinflammation. So every thing we observe and do know about the underlying mechanics implies that there is very likely a causation. (Through we need more studies for Neuroinflammation.)
So scientist do need to research it more and do need to pin down the exact mechanisms this causes reduction of cognitive abilities in some cases to largely varying degrees and how much of it is a direct and a indirect e.g. psychological effect.
But for everyone else it best to assume that getting COVID might reduce IQ if they are unlucky. Because if you aren't a doctor, scientist or similar but just a random person who got COVID it kind doesn't matter if your IQ gets reduced by COVID directly or indirectly or just correlated due to some other factor you don't know about and in turn can't systematically avoid.
If “intelligence” is just the degree/quality of someone’s brain function then your intelligence does drop when your brain function is impaired, and you would expect that to be picked up in an intelligence test.
Culturally we may want to imagine intelligence as something constant and innate to somebody’s soul, but in reality it’s innate to a fragile and fickle organ inside your skull.
Which is also my issue with IQ tests and the relationship of the tests and what they measure. But that changes nothing: IQ tests are not supposed to measure _that_ variability of when you get sick. Or you wake up. Or you are drunk. It makes no sense to use a psychometric test completely out of the context of which it was validated and meant to be used, because then the results are not interpretable. People with that kind of post-covid syndrom have an illness and experience cognitive deficits because of that, but using IQ to measure intelligence in that case when what you actually (want to) measure is brain fog is absurd. That should require a brain fog screening, not an IQ test.
I always assumed it was because there are people born with impaired intellectual abilities, and having some measure of how impaired they are would be significant for things like edibility for benefits and management of their condition (e.g. goals for the school system).
If I do one sober, I have an IQ of 110, if I do it with my ADHD meds, it goes up to 120.
Is that because the meds make me smarter? No, it's because I don't lose attention after 10 minutes of test and can concentrate until the end. However, the numbers imply otherwise.
At some level, IQ tests measure your ability to take IQ tests. So it would make sense that your measured IQ would go up when you're on ADHD meds, since those will obviously have an effect on your ability to take IQ tests.
Why assume it if it's not proven yet? We had crazy assumptions on the way lightning worked, I'm glad we have empirical natural sciences now to counter these "wide spread assumptions".
Wrt covid and IQ. Say that during covid IQs measurably dropped: why says its not the WFH, the fear that was rampant or the mRNA vaccine that was massively injected? There for we need bigger studies, control groups, randomization. All of this is there for good reasons (and a lot of this was skipped in the development of mRNA vaccines for a bad reason: fear).
Zhao et al '24 [0] comes immediately to mind; operating on a radically different set of people and data sets from Al-Aly and the gang, they find substantial differences in simple reaction time between covid and no-covid groups.
It seems we're in a phase of the pandemic where denying long tail effects is going to become more prominent as concerning evidence continues to pile up. The name of the game is still to reduce your infection count as much as possible. Stay safe out there, share aerosols unprotected at your own peril.
[0] https://www.thelancet.com/journals/eclinm/article/PIIS2589-5... "Long COVID is associated with severe cognitive slowing: a multicentre cross-sectional study"
And here there is already a lot of replication for several years - plus direct observation of bleeding into the brain.
https://www.tcd.ie/news_events/articles/2024/trinity-team-di...
I know there was work recently that found blood tests can find various markers of long covid, I'd like to get this done - but it's not something widely available.
A relative has been getting strange post-viral like symptoms since before Xmas (though no obvious Covid infection), would be great to get them tested too.
Maybe something like people with lower IQ are less likely to do a job where they can work from home so they are more likely to have been exposed to the virus?
Also please ignore anyone that posts 'oh its just X' or 'just do X', whatever X may be. This is a complicated medical mystery that millions of patients have suffered from for decades if you include mecfs and postviral conditions. There is no X, patients have tried every possible X. Anyone who tells you its just X is revealing their lack of understanding of the issue (this happens every time this subject shows up on HN and elsewhere).
[1] https://me-pedia.org/wiki/Jarred_Younger
[2] https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCoVoOvIX90IMEZCbBf_ycEA
What we call long covid or mecfs or chronic lyme or fibromyalgia etc etc are all umbrella terms for symptom clusters so they lack some specificity and are likely multi-causal. There are many overlaps in LC and mecfs patient populations in studies (vs controls), so its likely a fair-to-significant amount of LC is actually what we call mecfs.
Much of the mystery and suffering of long covid would have been avoided if we'd invested anything in investigating these conditions pre-covid (mecfs has the least funding to disease burden and the worst quality of life of all major diseases), but the medical community generally didn't want to believe these diseases were real. Same thing happened with autoimmune conditions like lupus and MS before their mechanisms were discovered. All of these conditions predominately affect women.
[1] https://me-pedia.org/wiki/Persistent_infection_hypothesis
[2] https://me-pedia.org/wiki/Itaconate_shunt_hypothesis
[3] https://me-pedia.org/wiki/Metabolic_trap
[4] https://me-pedia.org/wiki/Glutamate
[5] https://me-pedia.org/wiki/Craniocervical_instability
Look, this is anecdata. I’m not making a claim about this article. I just know that my wife got substantially stupider overnight 2 years ago (plus lots of other symptoms). Via a postcovid support group organized by a semi government club here in NL she knows a bunch more people with long-term postcovid and this is the one symptom they all share. Might well still be some weird sort of selection bias etc; again, I’m not saying this is generalizable science, I’m saying that my wife got noticeably less smart and it started at the same time as all her other postcovid symptoms.
There was a hefty dividing line among my friendship group after covid which was people who went down that route and people who went down the health and fitness route. The latter seem to be doing much better in all aspects even if they started in the former group.
I was running 10km once a week before. It knocked me off my feet entirely and I don't run often now which got to me for a few months. But I fought it and can do that again now if I need to. It hurt that it did that to me but it taught me how fragile things are. Also to note I'm a qualified mathematician but some days to months I can't add numbers together and this turns out mostly to be I'm tired or not in the right state of mind rather than anything persistent. Lots of causes - best to look for the obvious ones first.
(Also, no drinking. That would be madness. Nobody in that group drinks at all anymore, it would set back their recovery by a lot)
For example, she had a cold last march which totally knocked her remaining bits of physical energy out of her, and she worried that she wouldn’t be able to come on a planned family trip to the zoo, because of the lengthy walking involved. She shared that worry in the group and another woman said “but then just rent a wheelchair at the entrance and get yourself rolled around most of the time! That’s kinda confronting, “I’m now a person who sometimes needs a wheelchair”, but it’s also very constructive and awesome if you get over that and it helps you get out of the house. We did that trip, it was super awkward (esp when she stood up from the wheelchair and everybody could see that well actually, her legs work fine), and we had a great time and for the first time after a big outing she wasn’t sick in bed for 3 days after.
Btw, a sidenote, “just go sporting” is terrible advice for people with heavy postcovid. Look up “post exertional malaise”. You gotta build it up very carefully, never push yourself too hard. It’s very hard but it appears to work (given enough patience).
On a similar note, I had some mild PTSD symptoms until I looked into it, then I started having additional symptoms(or at least I was noticing them now). On the flip side having ChatGPT4 combine my PTSD with phenomenology, positive psychology, and CBT, I think I'm close to cured. My favorite part was being able to disagree with chatGPT. When I disagree with humans, I feel like I was getting stuck in a loop.
Play along with it, I had some pretty eye opening moments during Eidetic variation of Phenomenology, but that was me personally. I think CBT/Stoicism may be able to help people who havent been corrupted by Nietzsche-like ideas.
I appear to have recovered within 90 days, but I don’t know if I was left with permanent damage or not. I had no way to objectively test.
If covid was a bioweapon, it was a very well-planned one.
For me it's gotten better. I got sick in August 2021, the major effects (fatigue and brain fog) were most pronounced between September and February, and I've been steadily improving since. I think I'm somewhere around 80% pre-Covid capacity most days.
Her other symptoms, particularly the fatigue, do seem to improve (though the weather and being about to be outside impacts it a lot, so she had a huge setback 2 winters in a row now), though very slowly. I like hearing that for you the brain thing has improved over time too, thanks!
It's been a long ride, coming up on three years. Because of the symptoms I was prompted to invest in self improvement as well. I am much more diligent about regularly exercising, eating better, minding my mental health* and minding my sleep; and there are still bad days where I can't concentrate at all. But things are getting better overall.
* Every day I don't read or watch the news I'm happier.
Also, if that can help, contrary to my previous beliefs, light therapy is no bullshit. I thought it was another pseudo science but studies are in fact proving that it’s incredibly effective (but it’s pretty inconvenient to incorporate in your habits).
With ~98% of the population COVID vaccinated multiple times any vaccine effects would stick out like dogs balls.
If anyone wants to posit "vaccines cause { stupid | strokes | etc }" Then such correlations should be readily apparent in the before | after records of 26 million test subjects.
which clearly shows that all-cause deaths in England were higher among the unvaccinated.
Here is a Reuters fact check: https://www.reuters.com/fact-check/no-evidence-link-uk-exces...
How are they doing their definitions now? Could not find it.
Meanwhile this new Dutch data looks quite interesting, maybe someone here would like to give it a shot:
https://www.cbs.nl/nl-nl/longread/rapportages/2022/sterfte-e...
https://opendata.ecdc.europa.eu/covid19/
By now there is a hell lot of data pointing at issues with the novel pharmaceutical product. Meanwhile governments all over the world continue to be reluctant to issue data on e.g. „long covid“ or immune system problems in vaccinated vs. unvaccinated, although this data would settle the debate once and for all if its outcome is in favor of getting the shots.
„Fact checkers“ have been shown again and again to be politically biased up to active manipulation. Only people who always agree with the politics they want to push have not noticed at this point.
>„Fact checkers“ have been shown again and again to be politically biased up to active manipulation. Only people who always agree with the politics they want to push have not noticed at this point.
Have they? Show me some of those manipulated fact checkers, please. With reputable sources, I'm not inclined to read bullshit.
>By now there is a hell lot of data pointing at issues with the novel pharmaceutical product.
Not really, no. Or show us some data.
>Meanwhile this new Dutch data looks quite interesting, maybe someone here would like to give it a shot:
conveniently only available in dutch, but online translators to the rescue:
>https://www.cbs.nl/nl-nl/longread/rapportages/2022/sterfte-e...
where the first paragraph in 6.4 translates as follows:
>The analyses show a lower or comparable likelihood of dying from causes other than COVID-19 in the first weeks after receiving a COVID-19 vaccine, compared to the vaccination status before receiving the respective dose. This holds true for all age groups and also for long-term care users. Based on these results, there is no population-level evidence that COVID-19 vaccination increases the risk of death due to an adverse reaction.
Oops. Well, you tried.
By now I have seen enough actual data - and on top of that a lot of sad „anecdata“ in my direct surroundings - to pay attention at least. Given its prevalence I am sure you have seen the anecdata as well. Have you called someone who claimed to have a vax damage or who told you a relative died from the vax a „conspiracy theorist“ yet?
One good alternative point to start your journey in 2024 could be the US civilian labor force disability data. And no, I won’t waste time to search for that for you, given that you began your „response“ by attaching a label because it soothes you mentally. It has all been out there for long time and has been linked countless times.
The little section you got from google translating is a government-approved interpretation of this data. I have seen several others. You can download the data and fact-check for yourself.
Not to her face, no. Not in those words, at least. But that’s because it would upset my mother to have to deal with her idiot conspiracy theorist sister complaining about me being rude, so I am scrupulously polite while dismissing all her crap and she is increasingly sensible about not mentioning it around me. Just as well I started this effort before covid happened or it might not have been enough.
I'm not, don't worry :)
>Need to say, the psychogram of those who defend pharma relentlessly to this day is very interesting. I see anger, insults
The only one who is hurling insults and seems quite angry is you.
>fascist authority
ah yes, just call regulatory agencies "fascist", that makes total sense.
>attaching a label because it soothes you mentally
once again an insult instead of data
>The little section you got from google translating is a government-approved interpretation of this data
No it's not. It's what scientists say. Are they fascists too now?
People were fired for not taking a novel pharmaceutical product, warp-speeded by Donald Trump and sold as a cure-all. They lost their livelihood over exercising a fundamental human right.
In places like Canada they could not use public transport or leave the country. In some countries they could not enter supermarkets. Austria decided to fine them steeply and monthly. In the US 60% of one political side agreed with throwing them into camps and discussed it openly.
Across all media and in society they were labeled and treated as pariahs.
Meanwhile they observed obvious carnage in their friends and family and could only watch.
What did you do at the end of 2021 while all of this happened?
> For the first mRNA vaccination, almost all [hazard ratios], for the different weeks after vaccination and different subgroups, are significantly lower than 1, which indicates a reduced risk of non-COVID-19 death shortly after vaccination.
Obviously vaccination is not supposed to reduce your risk from things unrelated to COVID-19 yet in their data it does. This isn't because it's some magical cure-all. It's because their data is biased. The correct hazard ratio is found only in the 12-49 age group.
As they say in their discussion, this is because "in the event of a very short remaining life expectancy, (a subsequent dose of) COVID-19 vaccination may be decided against ... Vaccination is also postponed in the event of a fever ... This is also called the 'healthy vaccine effect' and it is difficult to correct for this in observational research ... the results should be interpreted with caution"
They also have the problem that "people who have been vaccinated, but have not given permission for registration in CIMS, have been incorrectly classified as unvaccinated (5 to 7 percent of the people)" which means that "This will have influenced the analysis of the risk of death after the first vaccination, because in this analysis the unvaccinated person time served as a reference"
So this dataset is not usable for detecting vaccine side effects or induced deaths. It is a hopelessly corrupted dataset in which large numbers of people are misclassified and it's not a randomized study.
But this is public health research, so after saying results should be interpreted with caution they go ahead and make the totally incautious claim that "Based on these results there are no indications at a population level that COVID-19 vaccination increases the risk of death due to an adverse event." which is a false statement. Their data doesn't allow them to draw such conclusions.
The reason this topic is neuralgic is because if you want to be scientifically correct then you can't actually know whether vaccines reduced deaths or not, but people really want to believe they did. The trials that were supposed to unambiguously measure this failed, in the sense that they showed no effect on deaths and yielded incorrect conclusions about reductions in infection rates (the number started at 95% effective and then was regularly revised, this is not supposed to happen and was due to their time windowing problems). Then attempts to measure it using mass datasets collected outside of RT context all yield incorrect conclusions due to dataset bias, but are presented as definitive anyway for political reasons.
Science is truly in a bad shape :(
Is there any official data of this kind you would trust right now?
To be fair, I have seen enough by now; the main open question for me is what role endemic covid in all those believing the cure-all narrative and going out partying before milder variants came out played.
> By now there is a hell lot of data pointing at issues with the novel pharmaceutical product.
Where?
Given previous experience with people who years into this still want to be served everything on a silver plate, entering any discussion with you will be futile. You responded solely for the dompamin your brain gives you when you trample onto people that an "authority" presented you as outsiders to your tribe. No factual argument will convince you.
Even with all the easily verifiable information in this thread alone you did not make the effort to check for yourself, and are so convinced of your position that you aren't even embarrassed about demonstrating your ignorance.
It is incredibly easy to find by now. In mid 2021 you had to search, think about and analyze the excess mortality stats yourself to see the obvious signal, now it's being discussed widely. But you will never start this journey on your own out of fear your will be expelled from your perceived tribe.
> easily verifiable information in this thread
As others have pointed out, none of the information you've posted in this thread supports the conclusion you think it does. You questioned whether the ONS mortality data linked to by kadkadels had a problem you say ONS data used to have. It did not, as it was easy to see by clicking through the link. You haven't been able to produce any ONS data which ever had this problem, which is strange.
You then linked to some Dutch data which, when translated, concludes that "Based on these results, there is no population-level evidence that COVID-19 vaccination increases the risk of death due to an adverse reaction."
You did not check either of these links yourself, so it's a bit rich to criticise others for failing to do so.
>vaccination gives immunity to virus or that there are no side effects from vaccination
Who claims that? Nobody does or did. This is a familiar tactic: shifting the goalposts from vaccinations have very rare side effects and do not guarantee one hundred percent immunity to complete immunity and no side effects at all. Rarely does a vaccine provide complete 100% immunity from a disease, in rare cases it does, e.g. Polio. Also nobody ever claimed that vaccines have no side effects, they are just very, very rare. So rare that the expected benefits far outweigh any risk of side effects.
Fully vaccinated people can: -Visit with other fully vaccinated people indoors without wearing masks or physical distancing -Visit with unvaccinated people from a single household who are at low risk for severe COVID-19 disease indoors without wearing masks or physical distancing -Refrain from quarantine and testing following a known exposure if asymptomatic
Today, text is deleted and exists only in archive.
https://web.archive.org/web/20210310000819/https://www.cdc.g...
Calling someone, who have different experience and opinions, supported by studies as conspiracy theorist shows, how ignorant about this topic you are.
There are at least two problems:
1. The statistically invalid time-windowing games the public health agencies all played in which people who had taken vaccines were classed as unvaccinated. The sibling comment talks about that. Prof Norman Fenton has shown how this yields incorrectly high calculations of effectiveness.
2. Healthy vaccinee bias, in which people who are about to die aren't vaccinated at all because there's no point, and the sort of people who take lots of vaccines tend to be obsessive about health and risk in other ways.
Problems like these with observational data are why drugs are put through trials before being launched to market. If we check the data for say the Pfizer trial, what we see is no effect on mortality and serious problems with statistical power also, simply because so few people were dying of COVID it was basically impossible to run a trial large enough to prove it had any effect.
>If we check the data for say the Pfizer trial, what we see is no effect on mortality
The point is that there are almost no serious adverse events occuring post-vaccination. There is no pharmacovigilance safety signal or concerning pattern wrt MRNA-vaccines. As we have seen in 2021 with the astra zeneca vaccine, post market surveillance worked and it was promptly investigated as soon as a safety signal emerged. EMA (and other regulatory agencies) communicated transparently about their findings and decisions.
Thank you for reminding me of this fine example of post-market surveillance, I almost forgot :)
As I have just replied to the other commenter, the ONS data he appears to object to categorises various "vaccinated" categories starting immediately after vaccination. The regulator's reply to Fenton makes this clear: https://osr.statisticsauthority.gov.uk/correspondence/ed-hum...
I assume this reply is what you refer to when you say that the ONS admit the data cannot be used that way. However, since that reply, the ASMR calculation now uses data linked to the 2021 census which covers around 91% of the population. Paul Mainwood graphed the ASMRs here: https://twitter.com/PaulMainwood/status/1627979309812965381
I see no evidence here that being vaccinated makes you more likely to die, which is what the original thread was about.
Invalid definitions are a very real and pervasive problem, not only being standard in the public health literature but also standard practice for public health agencies. Fenton has compiled a partial (!) list of papers and studies which do this:
https://wherearethenumbers.substack.com/p/the-very-best-of-c...
Note that UK HSA and studies using ONS data are shown to use invalid definitions.
> the ASMR calculation now uses data linked to the 2021 census which covers around 91% of the population
They say it does, but the UK government doesn't really the true population size. They've admitted this in the past. The 2021 census is unlikely to have solved it given that the civil service doesn't really want to know (if they could actually get full coverage, then they could identify every illegal immigrant). This showed up badly during COVID where more people came forward to be vaccinated than theoretically existed at all in certain age groups. They also told people that only a small percentage of the population was unvaccinated, but when the BBC commissioned a poll as part of a programme they were making (on misinformation!) around 25% of respondents said they were unvaccinated, a huge gap.
So the data quality here is of garbage grade in almost every respect, which is a scandal. People who just tune out and decide nothing governments say on the topic can be trusted are well within reasonable bounds.
The ONS mortality stats linked to by kadkadels at the start of the thread contain data related to people who received at least one COVID vaccine (counted from the day they received it, subdivided by time since reception and number of boosters), as well as an unvaccinated category who never did. This is clear to anyone who read the link that kadkadels posted.
Both you and armchairdweller falsely claimed that the unvaccinated category included people who received the vaccine less than N days ago, presumably because you believe that some deaths caused by the vaccine shortly after people receive it are hidden by these stats. But in fact, the vaccinated category starts from the day of vaccination, the unvaccinated tended to die more back when COVID was new, and the ASMR for unvaccinated and vaccinated converged by about the end of 2022, presumably because we've nearly all had COVID at least once so being vaxed now isn't doing a whole lot of good. Both the "vax did more harm than good" crowd and the "we should still be wearing masks" crowd are wrong.
Fenton is in HART, and HART are off their collective rockers, as we knew pretty early on when their internal chats were leaked. See https://www.logically.ai/articles/hart-files-anti-vaccine-my... and https://twitter.com/_johnbye/status/1421397013078360064 for example, and my own small part in pointing out that all the astroturfing groups identified by Neil O'Brien MP were hosted on a single IP address (HART almost immediately moved, lol): https://twitter.com/nameandnature/status/1352998804832870402
Though the prime mover, Narice Bernard, seems to have moved on to newer conspiracies involving "climate lockdowns" and "15 minute cities", people who conclude that nothing HART say on COVID topics can trusted are well within reasonable bounds.
The main problem with UK-specific death statistics is that they (the ONS) don't know the true size of the denominator.
Regardless of the above, due to widespread intellectual corruption in academia and public health, virtually no data on the topic of COVID or COVID vaccines can be taken at face value.
> Fenton is in HART, and HART are off their collective rockers
Your link says those messages came from a public chat room that literally anyone could sign up for. So Fenton has published things on a website that hosts a chat room where other people said things you disagree with. If that's your best counter to Fenton, and not some issue with his methodologies, then it's safe to assume you concede his points are correct.
https://www.npr.org/sections/health-shots/2021/12/05/1059828...
The ABS releases all manner of aggregate anon data, eg:
https://www.abs.gov.au/articles/measuring-australias-excess-...
The Australian states all have comprehensive medical records that have allowed people such as Prof. Fiona Stanley, an Australian epidemiologist to gain international recognition for their work teasing out relationships in many different medical disorders.
Access to fine grained records is limited to researchers for privacy reasons but the pool of researchers across the country is large enoug to rule out any conspiracy to keep secrets (unless someone is deep down a truther well).
Sweden let Covid go through their population in 2020. New Zealand allowed Covid to spread only in 2022. Both countries vaccinated their population during 2021. Sweden had a wave of excess deaths in 2020. In New Zealand, excess mortality started to increase in 2022. Excess deaths are correlated with the times of Covid waves, not with vaccinations.
https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/cumulative-excess-mortali...
Currently the pooled deaths 15-44 are reported as below the long term 1,600 baseline ( https://euromomo.eu/graphs-and-maps/ ).
Regardless, I'm not sure if you have a point here that connects vaccination to significant numbers adverse after effects.
Lots of people navigate through the cracks. The least you can do (as an individual) is acknowledge the corrupt system and stop spreading the 98% stat which is purely propaganda. And hold the politicians accountable.
> most got fake certificates.
I got vaccinated for COVID in Australia multiple times and never once got a certificate .. my ID and the fact of vaccination were recorded in the medical database which is where the vaccination numbers come from.
How many of the 26 million Australians in toto can you demonstrate faked their vaccination status?
The least you can do (as an individual) is back up your bogus smelling anecdata.
We very much want to stay out of the “covid vaccines are evil/fantastic” debate. It’s fruitless. I will not respond to any comment suggesting that somehow we’re wrong and well actually, it couldn’t have been caused by the vaccine / the covid infection, or that postcovid is an imaginary disease.
Maybe one of the downvoters would like to explain why he / she finds this question so emotionally triggering.
I think in at least some people the mRNA vaccines appear to work by suppressing symptoms (which also explains Pfizer's 95% effective, in that trial they only tested people who actually showed symptoms first), but actually they allow the virus to run rampant when the person is eventually infected. So the association is with the virus instead of the vaccines, and they assume it would have been worse without when we just really don't know.
Coming back to your point, is it possible that my family member - just by pure coincidence - happened to get covid immediately after each shot? 4 times?
(The holy-vax crowd has discredited anything not approved by the marketing departments of the pharmaceutical industry from the beginning, so they won’t like this either.)
However the covid vaccines did not have any covid in them. So there is no way she got a taste of covid shittyness.
Most traditional vaccines consist of either killed or weakened forms of a virus or bacterium. These provoke an immune response that allows the body to fight off the actual pathogen later on.
Instead of delivering a virus, RNA vaccines deliver genetic information that allows the body’s own cells to produce a viral protein which stimulate the immune system to mount a response, without posing any risk of infection.
I know I said I wouldn’t respond to this but I can’t not. Do you understand how unkind you’re being? You don’t understand how postcovid works because nobody does. Maybe it’s not caused directly by the virus but by the immune response, or something else entirely, or a combination of 7 things, who knows. I’m telling you it started the day after her third jab. This is n=1 stuff, not generalizable science, but you’re suggesting that my wife is imagining things for 2 years and counting now, which you can apparently diagnose by reading an internet comment or two, and I’m saying it’s not nice to piss on people with real problems like that. Please try to be less dismissive.
Different people respond to the vaccines and the real thing differently. But this is an anecdatum saying the vaccines were fine.
But I'm not really sure it was due to COVID or just simply being old (or due to been forced to live in a confined space for long period of time).
People have gotten older, have gone through mass societal change, and any other number of things in between.
I dunno if that is relevant - it's the symptoms (brain inflammation[1]) that is hypothesised to correspond with lower cognitive function.
Even if you did have COVID, but didn't get brain inflammation[1], you can still serve as a control.
[1] I say "brain inflammation"; the exact mechanism is explained by a comment upthread.
She's currently in oxygen therapy, we're positive about the effects but since it's dominating her life (and energy) at the moment it's hard to say what the effect is.
It might not be clear what all the causes of long-covid, brain fog are but it's definitely possible for viruses to have long lasting and poorly studied impacts.
At some point I was playing chess with my girlfriend after 4-5 days from getting symptoms, after 3 moves (so pretty much still in the beginning of the openings) my brain simply could not understand what I was trying to do, like I couldn't connect a previous thought to the next, there was an impassable barrier between these thoughts that I couldn't get through.
It got worse when I realised I had no idea what I was doing and while looking at the board I couldn't remember how the pieces moved, I looked at my bishop on the board and couldn't think where it could go. I started to cry, my whole job is to think things through, connect diverging thoughts, I got extremely scared I was going to lose this basic ability that enables me to do my job...
I lost the senses of smell and taste for about 10 days so definitely had neurological issues from COVID, the feeling of not being able to think properly was the worse of the feelings. The fever was ok, never broke too high and it was short-lived for about a couple of hours, feeling my heart was not comfortable but bearable and I wouldn't get too tired.
I'm so glad it was temporary, and so sorry for your wife having this lingering on her, I do not wish it to anyone.
> Based on these data, we hypothesize that the shift to anaerobic respiration causes an acid-base disruption that can affect every organ system and underpins the symptoms of PASC.
(Brain, of course, is also an organ, so brain fog and reduction in mental capabilities could easily fall under this.)
Now she spends most of the day in bed and the rest on the sofa and she can’t barely do anything, only crochet… maybe some cooking. Not even watch movies that have too much action, so she is watching black and white series now to have something to do without getting cognitively burnout. She lost her memory, her capacity to think, she has chronic fatigue and many other weird symptoms like easily getting senses overwhelmed by simple noises or smells.
We went to a lot of doctors, tried a few “remedies” from small scientific studies and internet: metformin, nicotine, lidocaine, multiple supplements and vitamins, some antivirals and many other things. Nobody is able to help her and most of doctors don’t even try to help or know anything about this new and growing condition.
Of course always the “psychosomatic” smart ass appears, but there are enough proofs already to tell them to shut up. Even the NIH director mentioned viral persistence found body tissues in a recent talk [1].
At least the awareness is growing and there are s lot of studies going on. So still some hope, but it won’t come fast.
[1] https://x.com/californiacodes/status/1780099073468764415
Yup, and, right on cue, they're all over this thread already coping. Sorry to hear about your wife's situation.
"People with five or more hospital contacts with infections had an IQ score of 9.44 lower than the average."
https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2015/05/150521095016.h...
In my case it was just a vitimin D deficiency caused by working from home.
I don't doubt some people have suffered neurological damage, but I wouldn't be surprised if many are suffering the same as I was.
Are you actually responding to what I said, or are you just preemptively attacking what you (incorrectly) assume is an anti wfh statement?
If true, OK, I was wrong about WFH/hybrid being superior to RTO, I guess different people mean different habits.
One of the nice things that usually comes from WFH is a bit more flexibility in work time schedule. I usually go for a walk at least once during the day, usually to get groceries, and every other week I have to pickup my smallest daughter in primary school. And when the weather is nice and the days short in winter I would often do a 2 to 3h pause during the day to go for a cycling ride.
WFH doesn't mean you are chained to your desk from 8am to 5pm
Where I am, the sun isn't strong enough to trigger synthesis from October until the end of April.
After that you need a lot of skin exposed to get anything, which is difficult 'cos it ain't that warm.
There is a reason red hair appeared in Southern Scotland/Northern Ireland.
Five bucks says you won't find that.
Good, calibrated IQ tests measure something, and that something has a positive correlation with work efficiency in at least certain types of work.
That said, there are many types of IQ tests and some of them are in my opinion rather weird, for example anything where your score depends on your knowledge of English language or English history as I hear has traditionally been the case in US.
Around here it seems they try to make the tests as little dependent on language, history and even math as possible and the ones I have taken has largely been about:
- pattern matching (of these 6 squares with various patterns, which one doesn't fit in?)
- sequences (based on these 3 squares with patterns, which is the next one?)
- and that kind of stuff
These skills are things that are very real, very measurable and often linked to work throughput. Yes, I rarely visualize boxes in my head and rotate them and I rarely sift through through black and white squares with alternating patterns at work, but it seems the ability to do so is often linked to the ability to mentally single step code or spot patterns in bug reports.
It doesn't mean that you are good person if your score is high (or low) and it doesn't mean that you will be a good employee and not waste your time on HN.
Anyway, it seems obvious it's culture dependent. Given a person with usual western education and a person who's never dealt with shapes and abstract straight lines in their life - would you expect them to score similarly if they're both very intelligent people? These tests heavily rely on geometric puzzles which already make an assumption about education. The tricky question is how much does that affect differences you'd see between random people tested for comparison.
Then those ratios are what you compare across countries, which is significantly less-problematic.
Perhaps the actual change was bigger or smaller but the approach to measurement highlighted the change more or less strongly. There's no statistical validity to be had.
They're perfectly good for looking at changes over time within a population, you just have to be careful doing between-population comparisons (whether a test is "valid" at that point depends what specific question you want to answer).
1 - https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC9631485/
Do you have a more specific hypothesis of what wouldn't be found elsewhere? Because it looks like you'd be out of $5 from any takers currently.
https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/34973396/
> A significant proportion of individuals experience persistent fatigue and/or cognitive impairment following resolution of acute COVID-19.
> Ten studies analyzed data from Italy, nine from Spain, eight from the US, seven from China, six from the UK, three from Denmark, France, and Norway, respectively, two from Australia, Austria, Brazil, Canada, Egypt, Germany, Israel, Russia, and the Netherlands, respectively, and one from Belgium, the Czech Republic, England, Faroe Islands, Iran, Japan, Mexico, Pakistan, Singapore, Sweden, Switzerland, and Turkey, respectively...
https://www.medpagetoday.com/opinion/faustfiles/109672 -- an interview from 2 days ago where the NIH leader says covid is persistent for months or years in people and the MD interviewer did a double take.
Not sure why there's a shift happening, maybe some new publication? This has been shaping up for years now.
Faust: I just want to follow up on something you said a moment ago about where this virus can be found in tissues. Are you suggesting that long COVID is actually, the mechanism of that, is persistent live virus in humans?
Bertagnolli: We see evidence of persistent live virus in humans in various tissue reservoirs, including surrounding nerves, the brain, the GI [gastrointestinal] tract, to the lung.
Faust: OK. And you're saying this goes beyond the PCR's [polymerase chain reaction test] ability to get it in a regular swab so that we are missing chronic cases of SARS‑CoV‑2?
Bertagnolli: Correct. The virus can persist in tissues for months, perhaps even years.
Faust: OK. I think that's certainly one theory, but I'm not sure that that's settled. Is that fair? I mean, there's one thing between people who are autopsy, they died of viral sepsis, as opposed to people walking around. Is there a distinction there?
Bertagnolli: Our emerging data shows that the virus can persist into tissues in the long term, and I think that's really critical because it does help us think about possible ways to combat it, one being better antivirals. I think there's a lot of focus on developing new antivirals as a possible way of preventing long COVID, and the other might be more aggressive treatment with antiviral therapy upon initial diagnosis.
Faust: If that's the case, then it could be reactivated just like herpes is and shingles. Are we going to start seeing people get COVID not from infection, but from themselves in reactivation?
Bertagnolli: I don't believe I've seen or heard of any instance of that, and I don't think you can ever assume that one virus is going to act like another. Certainly every virus that we know of seems to have a different effect in the body long term.
Either way, if not covid, then I think at least the lockdowns did have an impact on my health and ability to stay fit.
This is not medical advice (and check with your doctor beforehand), but it feels like taking vitamin B12 and omega-3 supplements should be a pretty low-risk bet to try to improve your situation if you're experiencing the long COVID symptoms described in the article.
Lack of practicing talking and remembering stuff is bad for talking and remembering stuff, and it definitely happened long before I caught COVID, because I caught COVID super late
Why do you assume that you weren't asymptomatic?
40.5% of people who contract the virus have no symptoms.In general, there is an extreme lack of rigor seen in claims about long COVID. The best evidence available suggests most cases of "long COVID" are misattribution:
https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jamainternalmedicine/fullar...
That sounds like an observational study. It's hard to get from that correlation to the causation in the headline. The article does not mention this problem at all as far as I can tell.
That would almost be a natural sort of experiment, to compare the IQ of these and other population.
Though, you would have to have enough people in this group, not be too rare. And it would help if there was already a large population that was IQ measured prior to Covid, and could be re-measured.
It seems unlikely that such a scenario exists.
The idea that there is a control arm of people who haven’t gotten Covid large enough to power a real control here is farcical. Again, a problem of self selection for people committed enough to maintain a large level of isolation for multiple years.
Any causal study here should be looking at a differential in pre and post covid cognitive scores with a control of known uninfected participants in the same time window.
Why? Whether someone has ever been infected is testable. About 20% of the US population had not had COVID as of some point in 2023.
Why do you believe that 20% of the U.S. population hasn’t had covid?
My story is on my blog https://tunn3l.pro
Hasn't pretty much the entire population of earth been infected by COVID at least once at this point?
I really dont think we know what Intelligence is, let alone how to define it universally enough to make a quotient of it.
Accelerated brain decay with the last and current politics in the planet is basically guaranteed.
I am not talking about correlations.
I am talking about people with higher IQ can solve X problem that people with lower IQs can't.
Not the ability to spot back & white patterns on a screen.
The riches people are not the highest IQ people
The Noble Prize Winners are not the highest IQ people
The best sports players are not the highest IQ people
The best mathematicians are not the highest IQ people
The best musicians are not the highest IQ people.
None of the these have excellence that can be deterministically determined by IQ. So what exactly is it good for?
What it the IQ that also dropped to cause the civilization collapse?
As for China, I don't think that one ever "collapsed". It withdrew, but I don't think you can call it a "collapse" the way many other ancient civilizations did. Even Rome is a bit hard to call a full collapse: it degraded over the course of centuries, and eventually Europe turned to feudalism. The Roman Empire itself split apart, with the eastern part (in Constantinople) continuing for another 1000 years after the western side fell apart.
I think civilizations like the Assyrians and Hittites are better examples of civilizations that truly "collapsed": there's basically nothing left of them today, except some ruins.
I genuinely don't know why, but you do have to.
It may of course be true where you are.
The DSM does not even suggest an IQ test as part of the diagnostic.
Knowing 6+ people in several states with ADHD diagnoses (some as children, some as adults) none have had anything beyond questions with their physician… or diagnoses by a psychiatrist after starting therapy for a different issue.
https://www.cdc.gov/ncbddd/adhd/diagnosis.html
Once in the UK as a pre/early teen (2003~), and once in Sweden to be rediagnosed via a private company named Modigo (so, now I am not sure if it's standard as part of the healthcare system here).
Since I was 2/2 and that was 100% of my experiences throughout two countries, I thought it was the standard.
Your anecdote is not data.
Also makes no sense whatsoever as ADHD does not affect IQ in any form. It's a form of dopamine dysregulation, not a learning disability. Let's stop perpetuating this stupid myth.
IQ tests are designed by people that want to create automatons easy to quantify and categorize.
† My definition of intelligence is "ability to solve novel problems." With this definition, an uncontacted tribesperson can be as intelligent as a Nobel prize winner. The difference is education, and the type of problems they're facing, which is just a matter of context.
It's best administered to children to understand where they are relative to other children and makes little sense in adults.
That's why IQ is age dependent. A 12 year old with a 140 IQ should have the mental pattern matching recognition as a normal 14 year old with 100 IQ.
The standard deviation is based on the next year ups mean IQ and so on.
It doesn't necessarily measure intelligence, but in children it can be used as a proxy for intelligence since usually brain maturity is directly linked to intelligence.
These may not be the highest IQ people, but very few are low IQ (below 90).
A typical IQ score for a mathematics PhD graduate is a couple of standard deviations above the mean.
IQ is correlated with intelligence, and higher intelligence enables greater achievements.
If you had a specific test like you're after... that would be by definition not general intelligence, but rather some specific intelligence.
the best sports players and best musicians I would also suppose were higher IQ on average than normal sports players (I suppose this term means professional athletes) and normal musicians (professional musicians)
In the musicians category I wouldn't be surprised if the best musicians were also smarter than the general population.
In short I think IQ tests are a lousy metric, sure, but it is not a completely useless measure - just nearly useless.
On edit: clarification, fixed wrong capitalization.
The funny thing about specialists is that they can easily embarrass themselves when outside their field.
Watching your average politician talk about technology is a pretty great example of people speaking with zero context. Some of them clearly aren't dumb but they can get in over their heads with ease.
I seriously doubt that, actually. Are they more musically gifted? Sure. Smarter overall? I'm not so sure. It would be an interesting study.
I imagine the ones who are both successful musicians and businesspeople (i.e., they run the business themselves mostly, in addition to being musicians) probably are very intelligent, because that requires a broad range of skills. The ones who are just good at playing an instrument or singing some lyrics that someone else wrote? Not so much.
Is their world model limited to themselves, their family, their village, their country, their race, their world, their species, their system? Combined with their understanding of social dynamics at each level.
I think the average GenZ in the US is at beginning of global scale, which is great for acceptance of different cultures; but without understanding the social dynamics yet. Giving us “woke” because they understand different cultures have different contexts, this is good but incomplete. E.g. some cultures aren’t aligned with the entire species, like controlling women in a way that leads to bad outcomes as technology adds complexity to our social dynamics.
Measuring this perspective level would help us understand which cultural models work best in adapting with growth and are more likely to be sustainable post-scarcity.