The interesting thing regarding the COVID-19 fiasco is that citing multiple sources speckled throughout the period between 1970 and 2019 from the NIH's PubMed database supporting the claim that antibody prevalence, in the case of coronaviruses, had, at best, a weak correlation to disease severity constituted as misinformation. I still hold to the fact that SARS-CoV-2 is a naturally occurring virus that was exaggerated and sensationalized. To be honest, we have never tracked any disease as aggressively as we did with COVID-19. Because of this, it is possible that other common cold viruses may have similar mortality if they were traced and tracked as aggressively as this coronavirus. Other such cold viruses include rhinovirus, adenovirus, enterovirus, influenza, and parainfluenza. All of these cold viruses may also cause flu or flu-like illness ranging from mild to lethal severity. Even looking at the symptoms of the common cold, influenza, SARS, MERS, and COVID-19, there's little to no difference. Disease progression also does not differ. Interestingly, there was very little talk of hypercytokinemia (cytokine storm), the primary cause of death for the 1918 Flu, SARS, and MERS; and I suspect COVID-19 due SARS-CoV-2 being related to SARS-CoV and MERS-CoV as it is a SARS-like coronavirus. This would explain the anecdotal evidence supporting the efficacy of hydroxychloroquine treatment. Hydroxychloroquine is used to treat autoimmune diseases such as rheumatoid arthritis and lupus. Hypercytokinemia is an autoimmune condition that will lead to sepsis. You know, no one talked about that and no one really cares because these facts were not put forth by neither those supporting the claim nor those opposing the claim.
Literally every publication has found that cykotine storms are what ultimately kills people ill from COVID-19, and basically any other infectious disease due to it being a normal escalation step of the immune system getting overrun by viruses or bacteria.
A cykotine storm, that is caused by a heavy infection and not due to an autoimmune disorder, is a last ditch effort by the immune system to just mobilize every single memory cell, helper cell, and anything else it has access to whether they're relevant to the disease or not. The reason for this is that the body is already in the process of dying and it's a last ditch effort to kill the infection before it kills the host.
Hydroxychloroquine doesn't work as a treatment against covid-19 because it affects a different mechanism that may cause an incorrect activation of a cykotine storm, and is not relevant when the activation is "proper".
Another contributing factor was the overuse of ventilators. This likely led to poor sanitary maintenance of the machines and equipment, allowing pathogenic bacterial growth such as Streptococcus pneumoniae. Such poor sanitary maintenance would allow opportunistic lung infection leading to an increase in pneumonia occurrences. This pneumonia would need to be treated with antibiotics due to the presence of a bacterial infection. If left untreated, the likelihood of hypercytokinemia increases. Again, I never heard anyone speak of this as a potential contributing factor to the mortality observed during 2020-2021. Again, I assume most do not care regardless of their partisanized opinion on the matter. The last couple years made me painfully aware that people are generally opposed to reality outside of their precious pocket computer screens, those "black mirrors." The majority's preoccupation with the "hyper reality" of the digital metaverse makes them vulnerable to stupefaction.
Vast swathes of COVID-19 victims have been obducted and their tissues analyzed, no bacerial infections have been found at higher rates than expected, which means very low. However victims that already had a compromised immune system are more likely to get hit with a double whammy as the covid-19 gets worse and causes damage to the lungs, making a secondary infection more likely to take root.
I still seethe over the Forbes opinion article titled, "You Must Not ‘Do Your Own Research’ When It Comes To Science." This is because science is not some esoteric knowledge reserved for lofty technocratic initiates in which the profane plebeians are incapable of comprehension. The venerated expert does not hold a monopoly on what they consider to be "gnostic" truth. In this respect, I tend to agree with G.K. Chesterton's sentiment in Heretics (1905), in which I agreed with in 2019 and I was strongly affirmed in 2020:
You aren't doing research when you read a research paper and don't understand the intricacies of the subject matter, you're basically hoping the language is simple enough you can understand the words and then hope you have the knowledge to properly contextualize what you just read. And in things as complex as the immune system that is very unlikely to be the case unless you actually studied the subject.
There's an entire workfield dedicated to taking research papers and scientific studies jargon to translate it back into everyday English while also giving an abstract of the relevant context to help put it into perspective and communicate what it's actually trying to say to the masses.
Science communication is that field, and one great example that's relevant in this context is Philipp Dettmer and his book "Immune! A journey into the mysterious system that keeps you alive", which basically got written for the express purpose of taking one of the most complex systems known to mankind and actually attempt to help make it understandable to everyone and not just people who have studied the immune system for a decade or longer. And even then the book constantly reminds people that it is an oversimplification and that the actual deal is far more complex than can be condensed into 400 pages
i agree, why are you doing that, all i did was ask for accurate sources from institutions that havent lied to the public for years.
The CDC hasn't lied to anyone, it's an agency that has to collect and interpret data and as a result may have to readjust their position later as more data is collected.
The data they have collected has always been correct, the recommendations they have made based on the data they had at any given time, was always made with our best understanding of the science behind it and a big heaping of caution for safety.
Unless you presume that the CDC should be clairvoyant to only make true the statements at any given time the reality is going to be they're going to have to make educated guesses at some points, and those may end up wrong once the facts actually become known after it has happened and has been analyzed proper.
For example masks have been recommended because they inhibit how quickly and how far the breath of a person carries, which in turn means aerosol that may contain a viral load will also subsequently travel a short distance and fall to the ground earlier. And when we didn't know how big exactly the viruses were the recommendation was to try and wear any mask one may get their hands on just in case.
