Martin Griffiths, the UN’s under-secretary general for humanitarian affairs, is quitting because of long covid.
Although if you only glanced at the headlines about this news, you wouldn’t know it.
Almost all of them told us that his decision was due to ‘health reasons.’
Page after page of news headlines omitted the fact that the mysterious health reason was long covid.
Do we think if cancer or HIV had forced him to quit this would be omitted from the headlines and, in most cases, from the story itself? There was no mention of long covid in the Al Jazeera story, or in the Reuters story.
These headlines were all replicated from the original copy by the Associated Press, which will have been picked up and copy-pasted by other outlets. (Last year I wrote about how news agencies like AP and Reuters work, and how this is important in the context of covid).
We know from the one article reporting his full comments, in the development journal DevX, that Griffiths was infected with covid in October 2023. So his was a ‘mild’ omicron infection. I would also venture to guess that given his job, this was not his first infection. And that, as a man in his 60s travelling the world for the UN, he would have been highly vaccinated.
Which is to say Griffiths was not protected by vaccination and was probably not protected by prior infection. And he was not protected by the fact of it being nearly four years since the start of the pandemic. He was not protected by the propaganda that covid is over, nor the propaganda that says everyone who is going to get long covid has already had it. Because no research actually exists that suggests this is the case. On the contrary, re-infections appear to raise the risk of long covid.
In an email to staff, Griffiths laid out the effect of long covid on his ability to work:
“The truth is that my health has been affected by long covid and this has limited my strength to undertake the breadth of travel essential to my position. Because I cannot be sure to regain that strength fully, I need to step aside for someone to be selected and to take over.”
His resignation reminds us that things are happening that would not be happening if it wasn’t for covid.
Or, more specifically, things are happening that would not be happening without the political decision to allow SarsCov2 to run rampant. Without the decision to pursue herd immunity via infection.
An approach, which, you probably don’t need to be reminded, is still directly killing more than one thousand Americans and thousands of Europeans weekly.
How many are not dying, but are, like Griffiths, being disabled and forced out of work by an infection? We don’t know. Our public health bodies, in their mission to disappear a pandemic, have decided not to keep track of this inconvenient data point.
This is the central fact of life in 2024 that is being obscured by the covid normalising project: the world has changed.
It has objectively become more risky and more dangerous on the day-to-day level of social interaction. No one knows if they are vulnerable to long covid, a catch-all-term for a very large basket of health conditions. Vaccines nor prior infections won’t reliably protect. The only reliable protection is to not get infected with SarsCov2. This is the prevention method most harmful to business-as-usual, which is why we don’t hear about it.
This method demands major upgrades/installation of air filtration and ventilation, with schools and healthcare facilities the priority. It demands free tests and free infection-blocking masks, especially for patients and staff in healthcare. None of these are burdens on individual autonomy. They require government action, centrally and regionally, and they require money. They require public health education and information. They require us to remember that millions of people are still vulnerable to death from covid. And that everyone is vulnerable to long covid.
Above all, minimising the impact of covid on our lives requires a society.
Yet instead of minimising the impact of covid, the ruling class decided to minimise the virus and the disease itself.
A disease which, a TV documentary in the UK reminded us this week, can kill years later.
The documentary was about Derek Garraway, the husband of a popular British television presenter called Kate Garraway. Derek Garraway died in January from long covid after nearly four years with the disease.
The documentary revealed how Garraway, who had extremely severe long covid after a first wave 2020 infection, was denied an NHS carer despite being bed bound. It revealed that they had spent hundreds of thousands on experimental treatments to no avail. It revealed, therefore, that you can be famous and rich and still die of long covid because there are no cures, even if you go to the outer edges of medicine searching for them. It revealed that even being bed bound is not enough to qualify you for an NHS carer if long covid is the reason you can barely leave your bed. It revealed, in many ways, a society blind to covid, blind to its risks, blind to its consequences, and a healthcare system cruel in its denial. Yet Kate Garraway didn’t make the documentary to raise awareness of covid. She never said that the virus is still causing suffering daily. The public debate it has stirred in the UK is about the care system, rather than the fact that the reason the Garraway’s needed care was because of a virus that still exists everywhere and is causing new long covid cases daily. In many ways it was itself a tool of normalisation and denial.
Normalisation that has led to millions of kids getting long covid.
Latest estimates are that 5.8 million children in the US alone have long covid. This is only an estimate because of the aforementioned and deliberate lack of record keeping. We can safely assume tens of millions of children globally have long covid. This is truly shameful. And the lack of open, public debate about it is cowardice. Sheer cowardice.
Watching the discourse about the impact of the pandemic on kids being framed almost entirely around a few months of school closures and in-person teaching (the Guardian was at it again this weekend), without mentioning the virus that necessitated those closures invades and harms the brain far more than any other in general circulation, is just staggering. Last week neuroscientist Danielle Beckman said this about what covid does to the brain:
“I have spent hundreds of hours in the microscope looking at the worst viruses can do to the brain, including the Zika virus, HIV, Flu, and others. I've never seen the type of damage SARS-CoV-2 leaves behind after infection with other viruses.”
And society is just letting kids get infected with this virus on the regular, with zero efforts to reduce risks. Even though I’ve spent a lot of time trying to comprehend the whys, it still largely feels beyond comprehension. And let’s not forget most kids are unvaccinated. Are their brains super virus blockers and don’t need the protection from vaccines? Pushing vaccines as a critical line of defence for adults but not for children is total public health incoherence. Unless of course you actively want children to be infected. Which really looks like the case at this point. Let’s not forget that ‘kids can’t get or spread coronavirus’ was one of the earliest propaganda lines from grifting experts who pushed ideologically-driven herd immunity because they considered covid mitigations too disruptive to free market economics.
We mustn’t forget that herd immunity has only ever been the extension of libertarian ideology - an ideology that dominates global economics - to public health.
Any short-term economic gains that might be accrued by forcing mass infection on people are, however, quite predictably, being erased by the longer term impacts of a sicker workforce. High profile workers quitting because of long covid, like Martin Griffiths, are the canaries in the coalmine. A new analysis from economists in Cambridge has said long covid is beginning to harm the UK economy, and that this harm will only grow. This comes just a month after Germany officially entered a recession due to an unprecedented number of sick workers.
That was the week that was in long covid.
Another week of lies and propaganda and gaslighting.
Another week where people, including kids, contracted long covid because of the lies and propaganda and gaslighting.
As dispiriting as it is, I’ll keep documenting it because, naïvely, I believe that with knowledge things can change.
And from the ground up, in small pockets, there are outstanding examples of care, compassion and outreach.
From the show by Portland band Glass Beach that was fully masked to the activists distributing masks in the community or putting up awareness-raising billboards, to those raising money to erase medical debt, or the new websites helping people with long covid find clinical trials to participate in.
These are, dare I say it, examples of change.
As always, pessimism of the spirit, optimism of the will.
There are graphs showing the impact of long COVID in the United States provided by the St. Louis branch of the Federal Reserve Bank based on data provided by the Bureau of Labor Statistics. Notice the marked uptick in worker absence due to disabilities from 2020 on. Too, notice the stronger effect on women that were formerly in the workforce.
Women: https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/LNU01076960
Men: https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/LNU01076955
The BBC this morning has an article about how pupil behaviour has deteriorated since the start of the pandemic. https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/education-68674568 No link to Covid, of course but knowing the damage the virus does to the brain and the fact that pupils aren't vaccinated, it doesn't take a huge leap of the imagination to see that something isn't right here.