Mass Disabling Event Denial
Covid silence as UK disability numbers are revised upwards
In 2022 scientists said covid was likely to be a mass disabling event.
Mass media articles covered this forecast widely at the time.
The nature of the virus that causes covid, we were told, makes it so.
Unlike any other virus circulating at such constantly high levels, and able to infect frequently, Sarscov2 can attack every organ in your body.
Multiple infections will almost certainly mean it finds or creates a weakness somewhere, eventually.
Pronouncements, therefore, about a mass disabling event made sense.
Four years later, these forecasts are becoming our reality.
The number of long-term sick in the UK was revised upwards this week to a record high of more than 2.8 million after falling consistently until 2020.
In the US the numbers are skyrocketing. On current trends the number of Americans registered as having a disability will top 10 million sometime next year.
In Canada 27% of people now have a registered disability.
The same thing is being seen in countries around the world.
All since 2020.
The mass disabling event we were warned of is here.
But instead of headlines warning us that yes, indeed, those forecasts we wrote about are becoming reality, something strange is happening.
The very same media and politicians who warned about the threat of covid as a mass disabling event are now blaming everything other than the virus for the mass disability.
It’s as if they never wrote those stories two years ago.
So what are they blaming?
Lockdowns are a favourite, of course.
Just this week a story blamed lockdowns for forty years of lost productivity.
Depression from lockdowns and back problems from home working are also classics.
We’re supposed to believe the agent causing population level ill-health across the world is a social intervention that hasn’t existed for 2.5 years (and in some cases never existed), rather than a virus that exists in physical reality everywhere at all times.
In the UK the rise is also blamed on the disastrous state of the country’s national health service, the huge leap since 2020 brushed off as some kind of coincidence.
(The NHS is in a disastrous state, but this was the case well before the pandemic).
A politician in the UK who even sat on a long covid taskforce in 2020 tweeted furiously about the updated numbers and blamed….sugary cereals.
Not a peep about the new novel virus.
What must he tell himself? That for the last four years we have all become victims of Big Cereal?
It’s utterly delusional.
Media coverage of increased disability rates has rarely mentioned covid.
Medical professionals are now freaking out publicly about the rapid degeneration of population health and the denial that has taken hold.
Yesterday an Australian GP said she had never seen so many heart conditions and new onset autoimmune diseases diagnosed in young adults.
In response a British cardiologist begged public health authorities and governments to act to protect the public before it’s too late.
I’ve written extensively before about what I think is going on at a social level that is preventing not just action in accordance with the problem, but recognition of the problem itself.
Denial, delusion, social norms, optimism bias and the power of propaganda all play big roles.
But it’s also no surprise that societies built on supremacist foundations and eugenicist tales of the strong conquering the weak are unable to look honestly at physical, bodily deterioration.
It’s no surprise that ableist societies are disabling themselves.
A genocidal mindset is coming home to roost.
The truth is our relative privilege as citizens of the imperial core could only ever last so long.
Our comfort and safety has always been traded off against out-groups and the exploited, both historically and in the present.
We’re here on the back of the labourers who in 1850s industrial Britain lived to an average age of fifteen.
On the backs of indigenous peoples, whether in the global north, who still die many years earlier than the non-indigenous, or in the global south, evicted and murdered for new extractive projects.
On the backs of the over-worked, underpaid immigrants who nurse our kids or care for our elderly today.
On the backs of the children mining cobalt right now in the Congo.
On the backs of the chronically ill who for decades have been told to just get up and walk.
The sacrifice of bodies for the capitalist project was always going to catch up to us all eventually.
We were always in the line for the meat grinder, it’s just that others were first.
Safety, if you were ever lucky enough to feel it, was an illusion.
No one is safe until everyone is safe.
Despite the denial, for those of us paying attention, a mass disabling event makes this truth clearer than ever.
It is even worse than you may realize.
Autoimmune:
The degree of harm grows with each infection. These include a 13-14% risk of a new autoimmune disease with each infection. That is risk for an individual - impact for populations and society. Then add a similar 13-14% 'risk' of reactivating or exacerbating previously developed autoimmune diseases. Anyone with long standing autoimmune disease, likely has 6 or 7 autoimmune diseases in a complex, not just one. This means a near certainty of active autoimmune disease following every infection for those who already have such diseases. Each is disabling.
Immune destruction:
Each infection carries a serious level of damage to the adaptive immune system. Inside of 3 or 4 infections, a syndrome indistinguishable from AIDS may develop with even worse consequences in loss of adequate immune response to other diseases. As a consequence, diseases that were a nuisance, become dangerous or lethal.
Accelerated Aging:
Through at least three different mechanisms (organ and brain injury; methylation of the epi-genome; and truncation of the telomeres), each infection adds to the existing age. The biological age rapidly diverges from the chronological age. Each infection costs about 10 years equivalent of aging from damage to organs and brain. Each infection adds about 7 years in aging from methylation of the epi-genome. Each infection adds age dependent aging from truncation of the telomeres roughly equal to 35 years for new borns. 27 years for 20 year olds. 18 years for 40 year olds,10 years for 60 year olds - as assessed based on their biological age at infection, not their calendar age.
As a result, a new born infected three times one year apart is likely biologically something approaching 69 years age, Though it no doubt takes time for that to reflect in biological impacts.
Then there is the accumulating impact of clotting defects from damage to the complimentary immune system and long-COVID with immense impacts to every system of the body.
The point here being that much of this harm happens and cannot be undone by the time a second infection has occurred. The lag from the infection and recovery from those infections combined with the annual or twice annual rate of infection for most people, and the complete lack of efforts to inform the public or control the spread, and that we are now entering the fifth year of the pandemic mean that we are only now beginning to see the impacts accumulated from two years ago. These will no doubt rise dramatically over the next year and the years to follow.
The result will be catastrophic to society. By ten years, most of those who chose not to seriously protect themselves may be gone.
Then there are the things we don't know or aren't certain about. It is now fairly certain that SARS-CoV-2 increases the rates of cancer. Add that to the immune system damage and the results are not pretty.
"our relative privilege as citizens of the imperial core could only ever last so long."
Correct. And it is coming to an end right now. Covid or no covid, doesn't matter. Though
covid will no doubt accelerate what was already inevitable.