Your citation for aging caused by COVID is correct.
It is one of at least three mechanisms - epigenetic methylation. And it costs on average about 7 years of biological age per infection. So yes, avoiding this damnable virus is the single greatest life extension thing we all can do.
There is more.
The first observed impacts on aging are the cognitive decline from long COVID and the related organ damage. These are caused by the toxicity of the spike protein. Surgeons have noted repeated that patients who have had COVID look like they have organs that are far older than their chronological ages. Scientific studies suggest that this is the equivalent of about 10 years of biological aging per infection. And they are additive.
So again, the best thing to do to maximize life span is to never get infected. The second best thing to do is to never get infected AGAIN.
But it so much worse. The third and largest impact on accelerated againg by infection woth SARS-CoV-2 comes from truncation of the telomeres which cap our chromosomes. The length of our telomeres is inversely correlated to biological age. Our telomeres are longest as fetuses. With every cell division they shorten. It is a sort of countdown clock to death.
The length of our telomeres affects the function of our genes. It is one of the programmed mechanisms that controls age related changes. And when the tears become too short, during cell division chromosomes tend to cross-link and the end. When this happens our bodies identify the cells as defective and orders them to die. This is the wasting at end of life.
This study is the sentinel study that correlated the length of tears Covid infection.
what it suggests or shows, albeit with a small data set, is that there is a direct linear correlation between biological age and infection with SARS-CoV-2 (COVID), and changes in biological age.
However, this correlation does not intercept to zero. it just strongly that the worst impact is to the youngest members of the population. If this correlation is correct which it appears to be it implies that an infant infected and recovered from COVID becomes biologically 36 years old. This aging impact becomes less with increasing biological age.
There is no reason to believe or suspect of this correlation is to chronological age. Rather each infection and recovery increases the biological age, and that new biological age then becomes the basis for correlation with the next infection to the resulting biological age.
What this all means is that after three infections, no matter what age you start at, you are old, very very old. This has huge implications for individuals and more so for the population and society.
as we have had the pandemic ongoing for four years and most people have been infected at least 2 to 5 times, the impact of this aging is already locked into place. We now only await our bodies catching up to the aging impact which has already occurred. And then, to the impact on society at large. As you can imagine those will most probably be enormous.
And it appears that this is irreversible or largely irreversible. The harm has already been done.
However because our leaders and our experts so-called have decided to embark on a campaign of silence in order to get people back to work and shopping to "save the economy" we are continuing to accumulate even more damage which will further destroy society.
There is no solution to this problem, other than never being infected and never being infected again.
The next few years and decade will tell the tale. Do the genetic and epigenetic changes, and the biological damage to organs and brain truly correlate with age? We will soon know the answer to those questions.
I for one have chosen to be one of the survivors. How about you?
Have yet to expeince this, or even so much as the common cold (knock wood), for -at least- the last 15 years. Being somewhat introverted, evidently, has its upside. "Clean living" has never been my thing either, so I hope to never experience it at all, because I'm relatively certain, it would be my -last- "experience".
Also was caregiver for my 92 year old mother til she passed a few months ago, so I made extra sure to avoid any situation in which I -could- get, so as not to bring it home to her, she never got it either. I will continue "social distancing" wherever contact can be avoided, because I don't care for crowds anyway. I broke my rule a few weeks ago though, I went and got a haircut for the first time since covid began, I usually just cut it myself, and even -that- felt "risky" to me. Sure the vaccines keep people from dying, but not from getting it, I've got them all, but I'm still pretty sure it'll end me, so I for one, will remain hyper vigilant.
Words cannot express my disdain for the man, and his cult, who turned a virus -endemic- that, had HE not made the decisions he had, YEARS before it ever started, there is every possibility, would -barely- have been a "pandemic" at all. Ffs, we had "pandemic response teams" -abroad-, some right there IN China, he brought them all home, well before the pandemic, he dissolved the response team on the NSC; An instruction manual was created in 2014, explicitly telling him, restock national stockpiles of PPE, repair, and make more ventillators, etc etc, he never looked at it, personally, I blame ALL OF IT, on him.
It is truly difficult to wrap your mind around how "responsible" one man can be for the harm that ensued, and/or WHY, no one talks about it, tough to fathom, but there it is. So naturally, the dumbest Americans, are just dying to experience round two, and die they probably will, when thry do, I have zero sympathy for them....
"..avoiding this damnable virus is the single greatest life extension thing we all can do."
The good news is virology has been debunked from every conceivable angle and not a single aspect of it stands up to scientific scrutiny. The latest round of control experiments should be front page news (and would be if Big Pharma did not own the media).
This is in the context of 100 years of real world contagion experiments (smearing healthy volunteers with the snot and lung fluid of sick people etc) which have consistently failed to demonstrate contagion via this route. In other words, according to the science, colds and flus are no more contagious than scurvy - which was once considered highly contagious (and anyone saying otherwise was labelled a crazy 'scurvy denier').
Daniel Roytas has recently compiled the experiments into a book for ease of reference ('Can You Catch A Cold?').
After 100 years of failed contagion experiments, you might be wondering how lockdowns were justified in 2020. The answer is simple. In 2017 the BBC, Cambridge University and LSHTM (all funded by Gates) created a 'computer model' of contagion based on 30,000 smartphone apps and GPS data. They even made a TV show out of it ('Contagion! The BBC4 Pandemic')
The experiment involved no snot or sick people, and no biology whatsoever. It was entirely virtual/ digital / mathematical (ie a load of very impressive made up nonsense).
By their own admission this data set became 'the new gold standard' for pandemic modelling. It formed the basis of lockdown policy three years later, at the start of 2020.
We are currently living in a technological explosion which is unprecedented in human history. Confusing modern technology with science (the scientific method) is extremely dangerous, and is likely to result in injury or death. Certainly a shortened life expectancy.
No doubt more-money-than-sense Bryan Johnson dosed himself up on Trump's magic juice and put an old rag over his airway all day long to protect himself from imaginary sub microscopic demons. That, along with his other eccentric behaviour, would explain why he is looking so rough these days.
More on the 2017 smartphone 'contagion' experiment here:
Beats me, I think you might be replying to someone else, I said nothing of the sort. I said I never got it, and never want to cause it will probably kill me.
My adult child born in the 80's showed allergies to soy flour and protein as an infant which by age 2 expressed as a peanut allergy with anaphylaxis then the soy allergy once controlled by Benadryl developed into anaphylaxis. But interestingly despite living in a crowded area of Boston, traveling trains and planes and even a relocation to Anchorage for a year in 2020 and then a trip to Bangladesh in 2021 has never contracted COVID. They are vaccinated. I then looked into it and there are studies of people with allergies that cause anaphylaxis to be resistant to COVID. I found the studies published on NIH web site.
The only way to avoid COVID is to be a hermit for the rest of your life (and even then you'll still get infected)
I know this because I've tried it, and have been infected.
However, you will get infected with far lower viral loads, which is good for recovery. I was able to recover from long COVID and sustain that recovery for over a year, because I was isolating from people. At the time of the recovery, I'd had at least 3 covid infections.
Also, it is an American government bioweapon from Fort Detrick. There is a slew of evidence that it didn't come from China.
I have never gotten COVID, however, I have been wearing an N95 mask since Day 1. I live in CA, so I already had a stockpile of masks for when we get fires here.
When I do see people, I ask them not to do anything too crazy like a high exposure event, etc. If they want to do that, just make sure it's 3 days before seeing me. If they don't want to do that, then they don't get to see me and I am 100% fine with not seeing a friend like that.
When we do meet up, I make sure they take a CUE test to catch any early or asymptomatic infections, and I've found most of my friends are too scared to unmask around me and risk accidentally infecting me. We ALWAYS sit outside and I space the seating out so we're not next to each other, so I do continue to socially distance.
I can still all of the things I used to, and I haven't gotten COVID. I may be one of the few in a mask now and may be one of the only ones in an N95 but I could give a fuck.
I add goggles for doctor's appointments, since hospitals and doctor's offices are one of the most likely spots I'd get infected. Again, never been infected.
I"m SEVERELY immunocompromised so when i sick it's Biblical. A cold will cost me 6-8 weeks of my life. The flu (which I caught every year until 2020) would cost me 10-16 weeks of my life.
I spent my entire life sick - constantly. Going from one virus to a secondary infection 100% of the time. Rarely getting a break on illnesses before catching something else. I was on antibiotics every month.
Since March 2020 when I started wearing an N95, I haven't been sick. To be honest, I can't remember the last time I was prescribed antibiotics. Probably January 2020 after catching something at a NYE party.
This has been the healthiest I've been in my entire life. Not a cold. Nothing. I wish doctors had recommended masking to me prior to COVID. It would have changed my life.
So, it is possible to not catch COVID. You just have to make sure you're wearing a fit-tested N95 mask when you're out in public with the infected masses. Fairly simple, actually.
I’m very much alive and well. Like, very well. I’m so sorry for you that you’re life is so small that caring for others and yourself would limit it so much.
EDIT: Since posting, CUE HEALTH has gone out of business, so we've switched to Metrix tests (98% accuracy) for the moment and have ordered PureLife (99% accuracy).
100% agree. I got COVID in March 2020, before the news of the pandemic truly broke here in the U.S., but since then, I’ve masked with well-fitted N95s, and I haven’t caught it since. I haven’t even had a cold.
I am so glad this pandemic had somewhat of a silver lining for you. I have asthma since infancy and am now elderly but very healthy and on no meds other than asthma maintenance. I spent most of my childhood years rushing to emergency for asthma attacks; and even missed third grade because of it. Back then there was no maintenance medication, only emergency relief. Around age 12 I received allergy shots and again at age 40. So, I know how it is to be sick as a child. At age 16 my asthma went into remission so to speak and the athlete in me was able to break loose! My brother only 13 months younger than I am died at age 36 from an an asthma flare secondary to a virus that caused infection. He had no medical insurance (1988) having lost his job due to the virus and then the asthma; went to an emergency clinic received a breathing treatment and free inhaler and was dead two days later. Tragedy that could have been avoided if the doctor called 911 instead of sending him home with a free inhaler. His lungs were so infected he reported to doctor that he could feel crackling when he rubbed his chest. No x-ray, nothing. Just sent home and he died.
Yes, it requires great care and largely - isolation. That can't be changed so long as the government fails to inform and advise correctly. It won't be forever. With rising illness, disability and death there will come a time when things change dramatically. It won't be soon.
As to the virus coming from Ft. Detrick. That is nothing but conspiratorial nonsense. The virus arose naturally from recombination in bats in southern China / northern Thailand. Which is precisely where it or something very much like it was expected to come from.
Nah, it's from the US. Images of Google searches of pneumonia outbreaks across 2019 and 2018. There were none in 2018. Tons in 2019. Google later removed the hits from 2019.
No, it is not natural. It is a bioweapon that was funded and developed by the US government, and seeded in China at the Wuhan military games.
It is definitely linked to Ft. Detrick and Ft. Belvoir.
It is possibly linked to the Wuhan Institute of Virology, which is funded by the US government.
The culpability of China is an open question, the culpability of the US is a known fact.
Liberals are just as clueless as the conservatives. The vaccine can kill. The data is cooked. Masks work. It stays in the body for 2 years. It's a US bioweapon.
No. No. No! A bat bit an anteater that flew to Wuhan before it transferred it to people, then the whole city got sick and you couldn't find parking at the hospitals.
You'll forgive me for not taking you seriously, because your article directly contradicts my experience.
I had the best quality of life in my 30 years AFTER being infected by covid at least 3 times, and recovering through spatial isolation, antibiotics, and a few rounds of ivermectin (not the horse kind).
I then sustained this quality of life for over a year, working like a horse in the yard every day. Until I got reinfected again by a meeting I couldn't avoid.
Everyone I know, self and family included, who had vaccines and followed the public health guidelines never got COVID. None had reactions to the vaccines beyond a sore arm for a day or two, all are healthy, active, and doing well w/ zero side-effects. And none are, or have been, living as hermits. Aku, you’re being a bit too dramatic.
(Small points. If it had been a bioweapon there would have been a vaccine before it was released. If it was an accidental release, cases would have shown up in Maryland before China. Last,look at the history of influenzas jumping from animal hosts to people. )
Whilst it’s highly unlikely it was a bioweapon and more likely it was zoonotic you can’t simply dismiss the idea by saying there would be a vaccine before it was released. Firstly you don’t know there wasn’t a vaccine and secondly many bioweapons have no vaccine or remedy.
A bioweapon developed by a terrorist group where disruption and death were the purpose?
I agree with you.
One developed by China or the United States? Then I don't see them doing that without an vaccine in development as well.
I'm also suspicious that they would use a corona virus for their project which seems to mutate if the wind shifts at the same time a leaf falls but that's conjecture.
Now could it have been accidental?
As you said, not likely but not completely disproven.
But then given where it starts, that makes it a Chinese accident.
Now remember, Trump has pulled the CDC monitoring teams in 2017. So it's not a joint effort.
And an American accident would not be in an incoming hub. The first cases would start popping up in Maryland, Georgia, somewhere we have our labs.
It's comforting I think to people that this is human error because it means humans can fix it. Zoonotic diseases have been around since we have been around and all we can do is monitor and have precautions in place.
There was some discussion about how C19 got into the US. If I recall correctly , Wuhan is a central office for Chinas global chicken export (an eye proportion of global consumption BTW) and that there is a US office in New York from which delegates flew in and out of regularly.
If I were in the business of creating a bioweapon I wouldn’t be choosing a corona viruses with any ability to mutate - otherwise what good what a vaccine be. Further to that - if you’re creating a bioweapon at huge risk and considerable expense it wouldn’t be such a virus - much more likely a nerve agent with a very short half-life in open air.
In my opinion Capitalism and incessant growth lead to corona virus - digging up unsuitable land and swamps for rapacious building projects and felling ancient woodland with its bat populations, for example, is the mostly likely way C19 got int o humans - and the propensity for some Asian people eating rare animals in China for various medical and status reasons.
The exceptionalism of western thinking was severely dented by the fact the virus didn’t care who it infected in the world. And all the analysis fails to discuss this.
The British government was woefully unprepared and dare I say it , seemingly unconcerned about the virus. The Conservatives made several appealing decisions in the years before and during the epidemic and then threw money at it which was deftly vacuumed up by their cohorts. The hole in public funds left by the “missing money” will kill far more people than the virus did.
My adult child has never contracted it and travels widely as well as lives in a crowded city in an apartment building; traveled to Bangladesh in 2021 and made a long trip to Anchorage to relocate and live there for a year in 2020. I found studies on the NIH web site that link resistance to COVID with a diagnosis of anaphylaxis caused by food proteins. My child was diagnosed with anaphylaxis to soy protein and flour (not oil or lecithin) as well as peanut in the 80's. So, there are people not contracting COVID for one reason or another who are very exposed to people and places where the virus lingers and is spread, including my adult child. It is an open question whether the fool allergy/anaphylaxis protected them but there are studies on this as well as on what makes some of us generally resistant to COVID.
I’m interested in the bioweapon angle can you post/DM a link please. I always felt it was “convenient” that it was reported that the virus was detected in China.
It's a Neurological and Vascular Disease that causes immune system dysfunction. The acute phase of the infection can disable or kill you, but damn if that virus doesn't take up residence in the body and cause some fucking damage.
I have 3 close friends who have been completely disabled by COVID. The inflammation in their brains has left them with what I'd say sounds like early Dementia. I mean "Brain Fog" is a really nice way to sugar coat not being able to speak properly anymore or remember what you were saying CONSTANTLY while talking to people. Big yikes.
My primary care doctor of 12 years got COVID on the frontlines and died (before the vaccine).
And, I have quite a few extended family members that died in 2020 (before the vaccine).
And, quite a few friends have lost Aunts, Uncles, Cousins, and siblings to COVID - all unvaxxed.
Evangelical Christians living in "red" areas of the country who thought Jesus would save them and they didn't need a vaccine. Praying (shockingly) did not save their lives.
They died young too! Leaving behind spouses and young kids. Doing GoFundMe campaigns to help their widows.
I had one friend whose unvaccinated family lost SIX members from one birthday party. Six! Including the woman of the hour whose birthday it was - she died 3 weeks after that party. Whoopsie.
60% of infections are asymptomatic, and you'd never know if you had it if you had not tested for COVID, obviously. So, you can not say you have never gotten COVID.
That's like saying you low cholesterol, but have never once had any bloodwork to test your HDL/LDL. Just bc you never tested your cholesterol doesn't mean you have healthy levels, lol.
If you are going out unmasked, gathering indoors, etc over the past 4 years - you've gotten COVID and it's eating away at some part of your body.
Ok, cool. I'll make sure to get all my health information from a facebook group doctor and substack and not the experts in virology, immunology, and public health. Sounds like a solid plan. I'll see ya there.
In southern Missouri we just didn't contract it at rate like many areas except in crowded St. Louis up north. And black folks usually suffer worse.
And in 2 large area churches that I am familiar with it only took people who were going by way of whichever virus was next. VERY old or frail or compromised people.
My now 86-year-old mother-in-law got in early on and said she felt like she had bronchitis in the normal manner she always does, but did not miss any activities except a week at church to respect other folks.
She was 82. She's fine. No known lasting effect.
The whole extended family got it around that time except my household and 16 of about 20 tested positive and zero even missed a day of work.
Nobody has long Covid, and nobody is suffering any known lingering effects.
How can our experience be so different?
(I finally caught it about 6 months ago and it was an unpleasant summer cold and my wife too, who had a sore throat, but doom pandemic result is just not what we are seeing)
Are you saying that 60 year olds who have had three infections should be almost all dead as they are biologically ninety years old? This doesn't seem to tally with the mortality figures, in particular excess deaths. It also means I'm biologically 85 - so older than my mother.
However, there are a few things to bear in mind. These are my imperfect assessments in looking at the data. I am not a medical doctor. This is not and should not be used or though of as professional or medical advice. Specific cases and individuals need specific individual assessment by professionals.
First:
That damage has occurred does not mean you cannot do things to make it better. There are a lot of things to be done for specific issues, to reduce inflammation, to heal damage, to reverse methylation, and to lengthen telomeres.
The best answer of course is to avoid damage where ever and whenever possible, and to do those things anyway to improve health and hopefully extend life expectancy.
Second:
Our knowledge of how aging occurs is far from perfect. We have correlations . We have indications that the changes in methylation and truncation are not simply markers of age, but that they are involved in changes in biochemistry indicative of aging. I.e. that they are bidirectional, they both indicate age and influence biological age. But how true that is is uncertain.
Also, there is a spread in the data. It isn't a perfect or complete correlation. We can suspect that some particular amount of change corresponds to some particular amount if biological aging for a population of people on average. Not all will have the same impact. Some are less. Some are more. There are many factors that go into aging.
And though the correlations tell us a likely story about the whole body, there may be critical organs or systems which dominate and that we haven't figured out yet. That can make a large difference, So far, it seems that the markers do correlate. We won't know until a lot of people reach their ends of life that have been tracked.
Third:
For organ damage the answer is more immediately concerning. That comes from surgeons describing the conditions of real people's organs who have had COVID and later had surgery.
For someone aged 60, a lot of biological aging has already occurred. And though the correlations appear sound for populations as a whole, exactly how that impacts older folks individually is far less certain. Many people age 60 are biologically much older due to insults earlier in life or genetic differences Many are also biologically much younger.
If the data can be trusted, and if it means anything in my specific case, insults I had throughout life have left me 30 years younger than my physical age. The horrible impacts of my earlier life consumed those years. So maybe I get them back now. Individual cases are just that. Is that real. I may never know. Every day is a gift.
Fourth:
For the telomere truncation, the correlation from the data seems to reduce to zero change per infection about age 70. That is likely not true, and just an artifact of the randomness in real world data. But, it might be real. If so, I suspect that it only means that the telomeres have already been so shortened by life that it makes little difference any more.
Then too there is the issue there are many different things overlaying on one another. Which is dominant? And if the methylation and truncation impact age expression, is there a lag time until the body expresses that change? If so, how long is that? I haven't ween any data to clarify those questions, or to provide firm answers.
Unfortunately, the way science works is a bit like driving while only looking in the rear view mirrors. It tells us about the past. It can suggest the future, but it doesn't directly show it to us. When some big change like this pandemic comes along, it is like hitting a hard turn in the road. But because we are relying on the proven past to tell us what to do, there is a serious risk of running off the road or crashing into something.
We need to be looking instead at very imperfect indicators like these studies. They don't give us perfect answers or certainty, just a better set of hints. Using the driving analogy, they are like getting glimpses out if the side windows.
The data isn't showing what you say. The latest studies are instead indicating that epigegenetic factors such as DNA methylation are a better correlate of biological age than telomere length. It's a common error that just because something is easy to measure or understand then it's a more likely or viable explanation. It's the main method by which the alternative medicine industry makes a profit.
"Recent research findings, however, indicate that TL per se can only allow a rough estimate of aging rate and can hardly be regarded as a clinically important risk marker for age-related pathologies and mortality. Evidence is obtained that other indicators such as certain immune parameters, indices of epigenetic age, etc., could be stronger predictors of the health status and the risk of chronic disease." https://www.frontiersin.org/journals/genetics/articles/10.3389/fgene.2020.630186/full
Thank you for the linked opinion. There is a lot of interesting information.
However you have entirely missed the point.
ALL of these indicators point to the same basic conclusion. COVID infections cause dramatic aging impacts. Every infection adds to the impacts of previous infections.
At this point in the pandemic, the average person has been infected multiple times (3 or more). By the least impactful estimate of aging of all of these indicators, this implies an average aging of 21 years or more. That is a dramatic 7 fold increase in the rate of aging by any measure. That makes 20 year olds 40 year olds, and 45 year olds into retirees.
By six years into the pandemic (two years from now), that converts 20 year olds into retirees!
And that is the least rapid aging correlate.
By the estimates reported by surgeons, we are already facing half our population now being biologically old.
Consider what that implies to the burden on our health care systems over the next several years. Consider too what that will do to the ability to work (especially to manual labor) and hence to productivity. That is directly correlated to financial and corporate performance, and societal well being.
It very much appears that the ostrich approach of shoving ones head in the ground and pretending the pandemic doesn’t exist - guarantees societal collapse. Big surprise there. Doh! That's a life lesson no one has ever encountered before.
All of the aging indicators are imperfect. Epigenetic indicators vary wildly in how well they correlate. Each is useful in different ways. Each is messy. But in the end, they are all telling the same basic story.
Evidence backed opinion isn't opinion. All of what you say requires real-world evidence. i.e. an excess of people dying prematurely from Covid associated causes during an extended post-pandemic period. Otherwise, it's just wild conjecture without any science to back it. What's worse, you're close to indulging in dogma - a skeptic's bête-noire. I'm going to end my contribution here.
Yes actually it is - opinion. Read the language of the authors. They themselves state it as opinion. More than this, as you note - there isn't hard proof yet. The best we have is correlations. We have reason to believe these correlations implicate function and then indicate that the markers are both showing age changes and affecting physiology to cause aging.
More than this you still are not getting it.
This is a problem in science in general. Waiting for confirmed and validated truth can be fatal when the real world impacts occur faster than the science can prove them. When this happens, we must be fleet enough of foot to recognize that and to shift our bases.
This means raising warnings and possibly and probably taking actions before we have anything close to certainty.
We have to assess the potential trajectories of events and impacts and then judge whether we can wait, or we must act.
Let us say you are standing with a bunch of kids in the middle of a crosswalk. You have the right of way and the walk light is on. A truck is hurtling toward you that does not have the right of way - blaring its horn. What do you do?
Stand there like a moron shouting - stop - I have the right of way? Ignore it, knowing you have the right of way? Or suspect that maybe, just maybe, though entirely unproven that the trucks brakes have failed and there is nothing the driver can do to prevent crushing you and your charges into the asphalt, and then both run and pull, exhort, shout to get the kids to flee from impending disaster?
You are effectively arguing out of ignorance to stand fast and to get you and your charges crushed.
We have sufficient indications from what we know of aging, organ damage and various indicators to at the very least warn everyone. This is through multiple lines of reasoning.
Instead of acting, experts everywhere have taken the precautionary act of shielding themselves and their careers from potential harm by staying silent. Worse, many have taken that as a personal direction of not acting even to protect themselves, their families, friends, coworkers and colleagues by taking any action at all.
That is in a word - DUMB.
For those of us who have spent a lifetime protecting people from hazards this is particularly troubling. It is an abrogation of duty to others.
Is the data perfect? Far from it. Is it absolute? Certainly not.
But what prey tell are the consequences from inaction based on the data we have? At the least - enormous individual and collective harm. At the worst - societal collapse.
Gee, do you think maybe that is worth mentioning it to someone? Better yet - shouting it at them?
If the analysis is correct it’s *cell* age which is advanced not your corporeal age. I expect there is a lag and that you will appear older sooner as your cells fail to regenerate as they would if unaffected by viruses.
You are either very poorly informed, misled, or ignorant. It absolutely is a virus - one particular type of a large family of related viruses, with about 10,000 strains now isolated and identified, with specific detailed genetics correlated causally to specific traits and oh so much more. Where ever you are getting your information from is a highly non credible and unreliable source pushing misinformation.
The disease COVID-19 is absolutely caused by the virus - SARS-CoV-2. The shots, especially the mRNA ones work amazingly well with minimal side effects. Some of those are quite rare (though real) risks that occur primarily because the spike protein from the virus is incredibly toxic and damaging. The vaccines use a reduced version of the spike to generate immunity. Normally that is restricted to a small area of muscle tissue in an arm and is not free to circulate as it is with an infection. And the amount is many orders of magnitude less than from an infection.
As of April 11 there are 4,095 officially recognized and named strains (there are many more that did not last long enough or spread far enough to be named, and a dozen or more pending names). 49 of those are named hybrids between two or more strains, with another 960 of those being descendants of hybrids.
My son God bless him has not caught it despite wide travel across the country and as far as Bangladesh and living in the city. He gets vaccinated and wears a mask in public places mostly because he feels great responsibility to never be carrying the virus on the few times a year we see each other. It is a loving act. I work at a hospital and have caught it once. But I read that the food allergic anaphylactic amongst us seem to be immune to COVID. It is being studied. My son was one of the first wave of infants presenting with an anaphylactic reaction to peanut and for him soy as well. I often wonder if what was once a curse is now a blessing for him. Do you know of those studies?
One of the things we can now be fairly confident about is that being immune to strongly mumps provides substantial protection against symptomatic COVID. Being immune to measles does not do that. Precisely why mumps immunity provides protection is unknown.
The MMR vaccine provides good protection against mumps, measles, and rubella. The evidence now though suggests that immunity to mumps provided by the MMR vaccine fades after about 17 years. Measles immunity lasts longer and appears to be life long. So this protection likely does not apply to most people born between 1957 and 2008. Current CDC recommendations do not generally support most people in that gap from getting vaccinated again, whether someone wants to or not. Lack of CDC recommendation equates to denial of authorization. This is primarily a cost (to the government) versus benefit (to society) decision, not a personal cost benefit analysis decision.
In addition, certain relatively uncommon Human Leukocyte Antigens (HLA) seem to also provide substantial protection. Precisely why is also not yet known. Between these, something like 15% of the population seems to not be easily infected or to suffer significant disease (active infection). It is jot known whether this also applies to long COVID, rapid aging (including brain and organ injury), immune damage, or abnormal clotting.
We (societally) do know that people can contract the disease, show no overt symptoms, and develop long COVID. So standard precautions to avoid infection are still advised. i.e. frequent up ro date vaccinations with vaccines tailored to current strains, avoiding crowds, not eating or drinking in public (especially indoors), and scrupulously wearing masks is advised.
But again - cost (to businesses) versus benefit (to society for GDP) was used to decide to end the "emergency" phase. This too was not a personal or individual cost-benefit analysis. And for many of us the analysis of these risks and costs weighs strongly the other way - toward protection.
Worse, that analysis was weighed based on immediate costs and benefits, not on on-going or long term risks and harms. The cessation of active measures leads us off the cliff into societal destruction as the long term impacts of a forever pandemic destroy society.
And that even doesn't begin to get to the right answer, The risk that at any moment the virus hybridizes with one of its more deadly cousins (MERS, NeoCov, PDF-2180, hku4 or hku5, or some other) is huge. Each of these likely results in a new pandemic that is 20-40% lethal.
See, thank you this dude is 57 he is not 46. You can tell just by looking at him and his rectangle torso that he is beyond the 40s. Men truly believe that they age gracefully, and they don’t. We can see it on them just like we can see it on women.
If he was really only 46 why was his sperm aged to 57? Because he’s not 46.
I KNEW he would end up with LC after seeing video of him out mixing it up with huge crowds. We’ve seen so many athletes struck with LC. Him being obsessive about his health, I knew he’d notice it right away.
The hubris of this is what gets me. People in the US die on a daily basis from inability to get needed medications or treatments or… ffs food. I participated in a supper table event last night. 102 people, mostly homeless, all hungry. We ran out of food. There was still a line. A generous person ran to buy pizzas.
And yet we have individuals like this who apparently have decided, “I am the one person essential to the future survival of the human species and therefore every measure must be taken to ensure MY survival.” And then the unspoken part of, “if a few thousand, hundred thousand, I mean, who’s counting really? People die so that I can remain wealthy enough to live forever, that’s just the price humanity has to pay.”
When I studied Tai Chi I came across people who thought that by doing it every day they were going to prolong their lives. I was never one of them. But my ex-husband was although he never said so when we lived together.
Over the years, here are the statistics I collected about those folks: one teacher died from a burst appendix because he kept try to treat it with Chinese herbs instead of going to the hospital; one teacher got leukemia and instead of undergoing chemotherapy, he appeared to go on a macrobiotic diet. After a year of that he decided to go to the hospital, by which time he was having hallucinations. He lived two more days. Not related to my teachers was a friend of mine who practiced Shiatsu. She had a lump in her breast and went on a macrobiotic diet as well. That diet must have killed a large number of people who went on it rather than seeking appropriate medical services. She did not die. Instead, they removed 25 lymph nodes and found that 13 were cancerous. To save her breast, she endured 9 months of chemo and radiation. My former husband was diagnosed with prostate cancer and rather than have the organ removed and undergoing treatment, he also went to a Chinese doctor and took Chinese herbs and had acupuncture for a year with a Vietnamese doctor trained in China. I think he thought the cancer was defeated because he only got one PSA test afterward, he thought he was cured. Of course he wasn’t. The cancer came back and he was dead within two years. Magical thinking does not cure cancer. Nor does spending three or four hours a day on various forms of martial arts and exercise. If you have genes for cancer, you will most likely get it. My former mother-in-law died from endometrial cancer shortly before her son did. Death just really does not care about your potions, pills, or exercise.
I’m not dead because I go to good doctors who have actually saved my life several times. All that other stuff my husband used to do was stuff that bored my ADHD addled brain so I didn’t and don’t do it.
I got two cancers, prostate and multiple meyloma and then I started qigong and tiachi to help stay bipedal and relax. My teacher is Chinese and she uses the modern medical system and tells her student to see their doctors.
Wow this is very interesting. I have a sort of hobby interest in the science of aging and from the little that I know it's hard to say how covid will impact us population wise, but the preliminary scientific results that are out there (as Sam Thomas correctly points out) are not encouraging. It's particularly damning to see how we are failing young people. There were covid grifters like Balloux going on about how kids should get infected over and over with this virus to create population-level immunity and meanwhile it seems that everyone, except a small minority of well informed individuals (who are now outcast as hysterical, or unable to move on) has come round to this view.
I've come to terms with the fact that I probably will become a lot less old than my grandparents (who both became in their 90s) and I've been thinking about this for a while. Obviously age had its challenges for them, but it was nice to see them live good, long fulfilling lives, with only the last few months very difficult for my grandma, and for my grandpa he was fine basically until he got pneumonia in 2013 and died very suddenly after just one day.
and I also wrote a more technical piece on how paleoanthropology shows humans have managed to lengthen their lifespans by caring for older people, long before the advent of modern medicine, 30,000-100,000 years ago:
We should not strive for immortality. Death is not bad. It's good to make way for younger generations and see what they make of things. But it is nice to be able to become old. Natural aging is fine, helping people live longer by taking away things that kill us prematurely, like viruses, air pollution, warfare, car deaths, is I feel a moral duty. It's one we're badly failing.
If you mask with N95’s and limit the number of SARS2AIDS infections you get, you’ll be able watch humanity die. N95 masks are charged and trap particles with static electricity in between layers of mask.
I was unable to get those for a long time while working at a cement mine.
Its fine, I'll just breathe in cement dust spilling out of the roller mills. That company had haphazard ppe supply before, and it just got worse with covid so I guess it wasn't people hoarding masks' faults
The information is out there for everyone to find -- if they don't fall down the rabbit hole of mis-, dis-information and conspiracy theories. It's not a failsafe, but I feel can improve your odds.
He is also vaxxed up. If the spike protein is the issue, it doesn’t matter if it is breathed or injected. Did his LC start after his vaccinations with Moderna starting around April 21 2021 per his Twitter?
Suggesting that it is the spike protein that is the problem and either through injecting a vaccine that clearly DOES NOT stay in the injection site and can enter the blood stream if you don’t aspirate the shot or getting it naturally? Exposure to spike protein is exposure unless you can provide evidence contrary.
As I understand it the mRNA COVID vaccination is not the same as other vaccinations. It injects a code which the body interprets as an instruction to create spiked protein , it doesn’t actually do this but the immune system is thusly primed to attack that spiked protein should it ever appear. This is why there is no petty immune reaction to the jab for most people.
It occurs to me that the use of the word “vaccine” can be easily misinterpreted when applied to newer immunological techniques. It might be better to use “injection”. This would avoid people mistaking the now historical term “vaccination” where altered infections would be injected. Eg cow pox pus being introduced in the original vaccination experiments. (Incidentally this is where we get the word from *vacca* Latin for cow)
Of course introducing manmade materials in the bloodstream is not without risks and only a fool would think otherwise.
I was in the original Moderna stage three study and I never ever got covid. I suffered no ill affects from the vaccine. I've been vaxed 10 times now from both companies and instill have had no ill affects from them. So I think I'll continue and I wear a mask everywhere indoors except home or with people I know and trust.
I am not a physiologist, but a past professional triathlete. I still train at very intense levels but my workouts are shorter in time and distance. My maximal oxygen uptake puts me, an almost 71 year old man in with those in their twenties in average. That's average, no way can I keep up with younger trained athletes. Too, aerobic fitness is just part of the picture. My healing prowess, recovery times and quality of rest have diminished with my age. But I'll take being a geezer in good shape!.
Taking fitness as a proxy for age, there is no way that a 15% reduction in vital capacity can be offset in regards to his aims of a longer lifespan unless he plans for a virtual existence bedridden with mechanical assistance. Some life that will be!
It's hilarious that those who truly believe that Covid was created in a lab are the same ones who refuse to wear a mask or get vaccinated. If I thought the government was trying to poison me with Covid in order to kill me, I'd F'n be the first in line at the mask store.
He was wearing a mask and posted about getting vaccinated in the beginning of 2021. I don't even like this guy but I'm not sure why everything assuming he's some Trumplican anti-vax dude
Your citation for aging caused by COVID is correct.
It is one of at least three mechanisms - epigenetic methylation. And it costs on average about 7 years of biological age per infection. So yes, avoiding this damnable virus is the single greatest life extension thing we all can do.
There is more.
The first observed impacts on aging are the cognitive decline from long COVID and the related organ damage. These are caused by the toxicity of the spike protein. Surgeons have noted repeated that patients who have had COVID look like they have organs that are far older than their chronological ages. Scientific studies suggest that this is the equivalent of about 10 years of biological aging per infection. And they are additive.
So again, the best thing to do to maximize life span is to never get infected. The second best thing to do is to never get infected AGAIN.
But it so much worse. The third and largest impact on accelerated againg by infection woth SARS-CoV-2 comes from truncation of the telomeres which cap our chromosomes. The length of our telomeres is inversely correlated to biological age. Our telomeres are longest as fetuses. With every cell division they shorten. It is a sort of countdown clock to death.
The length of our telomeres affects the function of our genes. It is one of the programmed mechanisms that controls age related changes. And when the tears become too short, during cell division chromosomes tend to cross-link and the end. When this happens our bodies identify the cells as defective and orders them to die. This is the wasting at end of life.
This study is the sentinel study that correlated the length of tears Covid infection.
https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/34200325/
what it suggests or shows, albeit with a small data set, is that there is a direct linear correlation between biological age and infection with SARS-CoV-2 (COVID), and changes in biological age.
However, this correlation does not intercept to zero. it just strongly that the worst impact is to the youngest members of the population. If this correlation is correct which it appears to be it implies that an infant infected and recovered from COVID becomes biologically 36 years old. This aging impact becomes less with increasing biological age.
There is no reason to believe or suspect of this correlation is to chronological age. Rather each infection and recovery increases the biological age, and that new biological age then becomes the basis for correlation with the next infection to the resulting biological age.
What this all means is that after three infections, no matter what age you start at, you are old, very very old. This has huge implications for individuals and more so for the population and society.
as we have had the pandemic ongoing for four years and most people have been infected at least 2 to 5 times, the impact of this aging is already locked into place. We now only await our bodies catching up to the aging impact which has already occurred. And then, to the impact on society at large. As you can imagine those will most probably be enormous.
And it appears that this is irreversible or largely irreversible. The harm has already been done.
However because our leaders and our experts so-called have decided to embark on a campaign of silence in order to get people back to work and shopping to "save the economy" we are continuing to accumulate even more damage which will further destroy society.
There is no solution to this problem, other than never being infected and never being infected again.
The next few years and decade will tell the tale. Do the genetic and epigenetic changes, and the biological damage to organs and brain truly correlate with age? We will soon know the answer to those questions.
I for one have chosen to be one of the survivors. How about you?
Have yet to expeince this, or even so much as the common cold (knock wood), for -at least- the last 15 years. Being somewhat introverted, evidently, has its upside. "Clean living" has never been my thing either, so I hope to never experience it at all, because I'm relatively certain, it would be my -last- "experience".
Also was caregiver for my 92 year old mother til she passed a few months ago, so I made extra sure to avoid any situation in which I -could- get, so as not to bring it home to her, she never got it either. I will continue "social distancing" wherever contact can be avoided, because I don't care for crowds anyway. I broke my rule a few weeks ago though, I went and got a haircut for the first time since covid began, I usually just cut it myself, and even -that- felt "risky" to me. Sure the vaccines keep people from dying, but not from getting it, I've got them all, but I'm still pretty sure it'll end me, so I for one, will remain hyper vigilant.
Words cannot express my disdain for the man, and his cult, who turned a virus -endemic- that, had HE not made the decisions he had, YEARS before it ever started, there is every possibility, would -barely- have been a "pandemic" at all. Ffs, we had "pandemic response teams" -abroad-, some right there IN China, he brought them all home, well before the pandemic, he dissolved the response team on the NSC; An instruction manual was created in 2014, explicitly telling him, restock national stockpiles of PPE, repair, and make more ventillators, etc etc, he never looked at it, personally, I blame ALL OF IT, on him.
It is truly difficult to wrap your mind around how "responsible" one man can be for the harm that ensued, and/or WHY, no one talks about it, tough to fathom, but there it is. So naturally, the dumbest Americans, are just dying to experience round two, and die they probably will, when thry do, I have zero sympathy for them....
"..avoiding this damnable virus is the single greatest life extension thing we all can do."
The good news is virology has been debunked from every conceivable angle and not a single aspect of it stands up to scientific scrutiny. The latest round of control experiments should be front page news (and would be if Big Pharma did not own the media).
https://substack.com/@controlstudies/note/c-89482261
This is in the context of 100 years of real world contagion experiments (smearing healthy volunteers with the snot and lung fluid of sick people etc) which have consistently failed to demonstrate contagion via this route. In other words, according to the science, colds and flus are no more contagious than scurvy - which was once considered highly contagious (and anyone saying otherwise was labelled a crazy 'scurvy denier').
Daniel Roytas has recently compiled the experiments into a book for ease of reference ('Can You Catch A Cold?').
After 100 years of failed contagion experiments, you might be wondering how lockdowns were justified in 2020. The answer is simple. In 2017 the BBC, Cambridge University and LSHTM (all funded by Gates) created a 'computer model' of contagion based on 30,000 smartphone apps and GPS data. They even made a TV show out of it ('Contagion! The BBC4 Pandemic')
The experiment involved no snot or sick people, and no biology whatsoever. It was entirely virtual/ digital / mathematical (ie a load of very impressive made up nonsense).
By their own admission this data set became 'the new gold standard' for pandemic modelling. It formed the basis of lockdown policy three years later, at the start of 2020.
We are currently living in a technological explosion which is unprecedented in human history. Confusing modern technology with science (the scientific method) is extremely dangerous, and is likely to result in injury or death. Certainly a shortened life expectancy.
No doubt more-money-than-sense Bryan Johnson dosed himself up on Trump's magic juice and put an old rag over his airway all day long to protect himself from imaginary sub microscopic demons. That, along with his other eccentric behaviour, would explain why he is looking so rough these days.
More on the 2017 smartphone 'contagion' experiment here:
https://odysee.com/@CoronaStudies:3/SMART-HEIST:7
You think people are going to live about 45 years because of Covid?
Beats me, I think you might be replying to someone else, I said nothing of the sort. I said I never got it, and never want to cause it will probably kill me.
My adult child born in the 80's showed allergies to soy flour and protein as an infant which by age 2 expressed as a peanut allergy with anaphylaxis then the soy allergy once controlled by Benadryl developed into anaphylaxis. But interestingly despite living in a crowded area of Boston, traveling trains and planes and even a relocation to Anchorage for a year in 2020 and then a trip to Bangladesh in 2021 has never contracted COVID. They are vaccinated. I then looked into it and there are studies of people with allergies that cause anaphylaxis to be resistant to COVID. I found the studies published on NIH web site.
Perhaps we should turn our disdain toward the individuals who created the virus in a lab using our very own tax dollars.
The only way to avoid COVID is to be a hermit for the rest of your life (and even then you'll still get infected)
I know this because I've tried it, and have been infected.
However, you will get infected with far lower viral loads, which is good for recovery. I was able to recover from long COVID and sustain that recovery for over a year, because I was isolating from people. At the time of the recovery, I'd had at least 3 covid infections.
Also, it is an American government bioweapon from Fort Detrick. There is a slew of evidence that it didn't come from China.
I have never gotten COVID, however, I have been wearing an N95 mask since Day 1. I live in CA, so I already had a stockpile of masks for when we get fires here.
When I do see people, I ask them not to do anything too crazy like a high exposure event, etc. If they want to do that, just make sure it's 3 days before seeing me. If they don't want to do that, then they don't get to see me and I am 100% fine with not seeing a friend like that.
When we do meet up, I make sure they take a CUE test to catch any early or asymptomatic infections, and I've found most of my friends are too scared to unmask around me and risk accidentally infecting me. We ALWAYS sit outside and I space the seating out so we're not next to each other, so I do continue to socially distance.
I can still all of the things I used to, and I haven't gotten COVID. I may be one of the few in a mask now and may be one of the only ones in an N95 but I could give a fuck.
I add goggles for doctor's appointments, since hospitals and doctor's offices are one of the most likely spots I'd get infected. Again, never been infected.
I"m SEVERELY immunocompromised so when i sick it's Biblical. A cold will cost me 6-8 weeks of my life. The flu (which I caught every year until 2020) would cost me 10-16 weeks of my life.
I spent my entire life sick - constantly. Going from one virus to a secondary infection 100% of the time. Rarely getting a break on illnesses before catching something else. I was on antibiotics every month.
Since March 2020 when I started wearing an N95, I haven't been sick. To be honest, I can't remember the last time I was prescribed antibiotics. Probably January 2020 after catching something at a NYE party.
This has been the healthiest I've been in my entire life. Not a cold. Nothing. I wish doctors had recommended masking to me prior to COVID. It would have changed my life.
So, it is possible to not catch COVID. You just have to make sure you're wearing a fit-tested N95 mask when you're out in public with the infected masses. Fairly simple, actually.
You're already dead if you live like that.
I’m very much alive and well. Like, very well. I’m so sorry for you that you’re life is so small that caring for others and yourself would limit it so much.
Bravo!!
Oh my -- judgmental and ignorant remarks are better left unsaid -- didn't your parents teach you that, Frank?
😂
EDIT: Since posting, CUE HEALTH has gone out of business, so we've switched to Metrix tests (98% accuracy) for the moment and have ordered PureLife (99% accuracy).
100% agree. I got COVID in March 2020, before the news of the pandemic truly broke here in the U.S., but since then, I’ve masked with well-fitted N95s, and I haven’t caught it since. I haven’t even had a cold.
I am so glad this pandemic had somewhat of a silver lining for you. I have asthma since infancy and am now elderly but very healthy and on no meds other than asthma maintenance. I spent most of my childhood years rushing to emergency for asthma attacks; and even missed third grade because of it. Back then there was no maintenance medication, only emergency relief. Around age 12 I received allergy shots and again at age 40. So, I know how it is to be sick as a child. At age 16 my asthma went into remission so to speak and the athlete in me was able to break loose! My brother only 13 months younger than I am died at age 36 from an an asthma flare secondary to a virus that caused infection. He had no medical insurance (1988) having lost his job due to the virus and then the asthma; went to an emergency clinic received a breathing treatment and free inhaler and was dead two days later. Tragedy that could have been avoided if the doctor called 911 instead of sending him home with a free inhaler. His lungs were so infected he reported to doctor that he could feel crackling when he rubbed his chest. No x-ray, nothing. Just sent home and he died.
I apologize for the delayed response. I just saw this in my notifications.
So, I order my 3M Aura masks via 3Ms store on Amazon. They are currently on sale!
I just bought a Pack of 440 3M Aura Masks for $59.
They're currently 91% off, which comes out to just .13 cents per mask.
Here's the info and link:
3M Aura Particulate Respirator 9205+, N95, Pack of 440 Disposable Respirators, Individually Wrapped, 3 Panel Flat Fold Design Allows for Facial Movements, Comfortable, NIOSH Approved
https://a.co/d/h7wJuQb
I have K95s that I use, but these are even better, just bought some. Thank you for sharing!
I am sorry you've had to go through that.
Yes, it requires great care and largely - isolation. That can't be changed so long as the government fails to inform and advise correctly. It won't be forever. With rising illness, disability and death there will come a time when things change dramatically. It won't be soon.
As to the virus coming from Ft. Detrick. That is nothing but conspiratorial nonsense. The virus arose naturally from recombination in bats in southern China / northern Thailand. Which is precisely where it or something very much like it was expected to come from.
Nah, it's from the US. Images of Google searches of pneumonia outbreaks across 2019 and 2018. There were none in 2018. Tons in 2019. Google later removed the hits from 2019.
https://imgur.com/a/CRwan3n
No, it is not natural. It is a bioweapon that was funded and developed by the US government, and seeded in China at the Wuhan military games.
It is definitely linked to Ft. Detrick and Ft. Belvoir.
It is possibly linked to the Wuhan Institute of Virology, which is funded by the US government.
The culpability of China is an open question, the culpability of the US is a known fact.
Liberals are just as clueless as the conservatives. The vaccine can kill. The data is cooked. Masks work. It stays in the body for 2 years. It's a US bioweapon.
No. No. No! A bat bit an anteater that flew to Wuhan before it transferred it to people, then the whole city got sick and you couldn't find parking at the hospitals.
Apologies. The comment went to the wring reply. Thank you fir the added informstion.
You'll forgive me for not taking you seriously, because your article directly contradicts my experience.
I had the best quality of life in my 30 years AFTER being infected by covid at least 3 times, and recovering through spatial isolation, antibiotics, and a few rounds of ivermectin (not the horse kind).
I then sustained this quality of life for over a year, working like a horse in the yard every day. Until I got reinfected again by a meeting I couldn't avoid.
You are not credible.
Everyone I know, self and family included, who had vaccines and followed the public health guidelines never got COVID. None had reactions to the vaccines beyond a sore arm for a day or two, all are healthy, active, and doing well w/ zero side-effects. And none are, or have been, living as hermits. Aku, you’re being a bit too dramatic.
Baloney.
Are you sure Covid didn't screw up your brain.
(Small points. If it had been a bioweapon there would have been a vaccine before it was released. If it was an accidental release, cases would have shown up in Maryland before China. Last,look at the history of influenzas jumping from animal hosts to people. )
Whilst it’s highly unlikely it was a bioweapon and more likely it was zoonotic you can’t simply dismiss the idea by saying there would be a vaccine before it was released. Firstly you don’t know there wasn’t a vaccine and secondly many bioweapons have no vaccine or remedy.
Here's my thinking.
A bioweapon developed by a terrorist group where disruption and death were the purpose?
I agree with you.
One developed by China or the United States? Then I don't see them doing that without an vaccine in development as well.
I'm also suspicious that they would use a corona virus for their project which seems to mutate if the wind shifts at the same time a leaf falls but that's conjecture.
Now could it have been accidental?
As you said, not likely but not completely disproven.
But then given where it starts, that makes it a Chinese accident.
Now remember, Trump has pulled the CDC monitoring teams in 2017. So it's not a joint effort.
And an American accident would not be in an incoming hub. The first cases would start popping up in Maryland, Georgia, somewhere we have our labs.
It's comforting I think to people that this is human error because it means humans can fix it. Zoonotic diseases have been around since we have been around and all we can do is monitor and have precautions in place.
There was some discussion about how C19 got into the US. If I recall correctly , Wuhan is a central office for Chinas global chicken export (an eye proportion of global consumption BTW) and that there is a US office in New York from which delegates flew in and out of regularly.
If I were in the business of creating a bioweapon I wouldn’t be choosing a corona viruses with any ability to mutate - otherwise what good what a vaccine be. Further to that - if you’re creating a bioweapon at huge risk and considerable expense it wouldn’t be such a virus - much more likely a nerve agent with a very short half-life in open air.
In my opinion Capitalism and incessant growth lead to corona virus - digging up unsuitable land and swamps for rapacious building projects and felling ancient woodland with its bat populations, for example, is the mostly likely way C19 got int o humans - and the propensity for some Asian people eating rare animals in China for various medical and status reasons.
The exceptionalism of western thinking was severely dented by the fact the virus didn’t care who it infected in the world. And all the analysis fails to discuss this.
The British government was woefully unprepared and dare I say it , seemingly unconcerned about the virus. The Conservatives made several appealing decisions in the years before and during the epidemic and then threw money at it which was deftly vacuumed up by their cohorts. The hole in public funds left by the “missing money” will kill far more people than the virus did.
My adult child has never contracted it and travels widely as well as lives in a crowded city in an apartment building; traveled to Bangladesh in 2021 and made a long trip to Anchorage to relocate and live there for a year in 2020. I found studies on the NIH web site that link resistance to COVID with a diagnosis of anaphylaxis caused by food proteins. My child was diagnosed with anaphylaxis to soy protein and flour (not oil or lecithin) as well as peanut in the 80's. So, there are people not contracting COVID for one reason or another who are very exposed to people and places where the virus lingers and is spread, including my adult child. It is an open question whether the fool allergy/anaphylaxis protected them but there are studies on this as well as on what makes some of us generally resistant to COVID.
I’m interested in the bioweapon angle can you post/DM a link please. I always felt it was “convenient” that it was reported that the virus was detected in China.
It's a Neurological and Vascular Disease that causes immune system dysfunction. The acute phase of the infection can disable or kill you, but damn if that virus doesn't take up residence in the body and cause some fucking damage.
I have 3 close friends who have been completely disabled by COVID. The inflammation in their brains has left them with what I'd say sounds like early Dementia. I mean "Brain Fog" is a really nice way to sugar coat not being able to speak properly anymore or remember what you were saying CONSTANTLY while talking to people. Big yikes.
My primary care doctor of 12 years got COVID on the frontlines and died (before the vaccine).
And, I have quite a few extended family members that died in 2020 (before the vaccine).
And, quite a few friends have lost Aunts, Uncles, Cousins, and siblings to COVID - all unvaxxed.
Evangelical Christians living in "red" areas of the country who thought Jesus would save them and they didn't need a vaccine. Praying (shockingly) did not save their lives.
They died young too! Leaving behind spouses and young kids. Doing GoFundMe campaigns to help their widows.
I had one friend whose unvaccinated family lost SIX members from one birthday party. Six! Including the woman of the hour whose birthday it was - she died 3 weeks after that party. Whoopsie.
60% of infections are asymptomatic, and you'd never know if you had it if you had not tested for COVID, obviously. So, you can not say you have never gotten COVID.
That's like saying you low cholesterol, but have never once had any bloodwork to test your HDL/LDL. Just bc you never tested your cholesterol doesn't mean you have healthy levels, lol.
If you are going out unmasked, gathering indoors, etc over the past 4 years - you've gotten COVID and it's eating away at some part of your body.
Good luck with that.
yeah, all my family members and friend's family members died from injectables that they DID not get.
Crazy how that happened.
Ok, cool. I'll make sure to get all my health information from a facebook group doctor and substack and not the experts in virology, immunology, and public health. Sounds like a solid plan. I'll see ya there.
In southern Missouri we just didn't contract it at rate like many areas except in crowded St. Louis up north. And black folks usually suffer worse.
And in 2 large area churches that I am familiar with it only took people who were going by way of whichever virus was next. VERY old or frail or compromised people.
My now 86-year-old mother-in-law got in early on and said she felt like she had bronchitis in the normal manner she always does, but did not miss any activities except a week at church to respect other folks.
She was 82. She's fine. No known lasting effect.
The whole extended family got it around that time except my household and 16 of about 20 tested positive and zero even missed a day of work.
Nobody has long Covid, and nobody is suffering any known lingering effects.
How can our experience be so different?
(I finally caught it about 6 months ago and it was an unpleasant summer cold and my wife too, who had a sore throat, but doom pandemic result is just not what we are seeing)
How do you determine if you have Covid given the testing is faulty?
Is the testing faulty?
Are you saying that 60 year olds who have had three infections should be almost all dead as they are biologically ninety years old? This doesn't seem to tally with the mortality figures, in particular excess deaths. It also means I'm biologically 85 - so older than my mother.
I'm not saying that. The data is.
However, there are a few things to bear in mind. These are my imperfect assessments in looking at the data. I am not a medical doctor. This is not and should not be used or though of as professional or medical advice. Specific cases and individuals need specific individual assessment by professionals.
First:
That damage has occurred does not mean you cannot do things to make it better. There are a lot of things to be done for specific issues, to reduce inflammation, to heal damage, to reverse methylation, and to lengthen telomeres.
The best answer of course is to avoid damage where ever and whenever possible, and to do those things anyway to improve health and hopefully extend life expectancy.
Second:
Our knowledge of how aging occurs is far from perfect. We have correlations . We have indications that the changes in methylation and truncation are not simply markers of age, but that they are involved in changes in biochemistry indicative of aging. I.e. that they are bidirectional, they both indicate age and influence biological age. But how true that is is uncertain.
Also, there is a spread in the data. It isn't a perfect or complete correlation. We can suspect that some particular amount of change corresponds to some particular amount if biological aging for a population of people on average. Not all will have the same impact. Some are less. Some are more. There are many factors that go into aging.
And though the correlations tell us a likely story about the whole body, there may be critical organs or systems which dominate and that we haven't figured out yet. That can make a large difference, So far, it seems that the markers do correlate. We won't know until a lot of people reach their ends of life that have been tracked.
Third:
For organ damage the answer is more immediately concerning. That comes from surgeons describing the conditions of real people's organs who have had COVID and later had surgery.
For someone aged 60, a lot of biological aging has already occurred. And though the correlations appear sound for populations as a whole, exactly how that impacts older folks individually is far less certain. Many people age 60 are biologically much older due to insults earlier in life or genetic differences Many are also biologically much younger.
If the data can be trusted, and if it means anything in my specific case, insults I had throughout life have left me 30 years younger than my physical age. The horrible impacts of my earlier life consumed those years. So maybe I get them back now. Individual cases are just that. Is that real. I may never know. Every day is a gift.
Fourth:
For the telomere truncation, the correlation from the data seems to reduce to zero change per infection about age 70. That is likely not true, and just an artifact of the randomness in real world data. But, it might be real. If so, I suspect that it only means that the telomeres have already been so shortened by life that it makes little difference any more.
Then too there is the issue there are many different things overlaying on one another. Which is dominant? And if the methylation and truncation impact age expression, is there a lag time until the body expresses that change? If so, how long is that? I haven't ween any data to clarify those questions, or to provide firm answers.
Unfortunately, the way science works is a bit like driving while only looking in the rear view mirrors. It tells us about the past. It can suggest the future, but it doesn't directly show it to us. When some big change like this pandemic comes along, it is like hitting a hard turn in the road. But because we are relying on the proven past to tell us what to do, there is a serious risk of running off the road or crashing into something.
We need to be looking instead at very imperfect indicators like these studies. They don't give us perfect answers or certainty, just a better set of hints. Using the driving analogy, they are like getting glimpses out if the side windows.
The data isn't showing what you say. The latest studies are instead indicating that epigegenetic factors such as DNA methylation are a better correlate of biological age than telomere length. It's a common error that just because something is easy to measure or understand then it's a more likely or viable explanation. It's the main method by which the alternative medicine industry makes a profit.
"Recent research findings, however, indicate that TL per se can only allow a rough estimate of aging rate and can hardly be regarded as a clinically important risk marker for age-related pathologies and mortality. Evidence is obtained that other indicators such as certain immune parameters, indices of epigenetic age, etc., could be stronger predictors of the health status and the risk of chronic disease." https://www.frontiersin.org/journals/genetics/articles/10.3389/fgene.2020.630186/full
Thank you for the linked opinion. There is a lot of interesting information.
However you have entirely missed the point.
ALL of these indicators point to the same basic conclusion. COVID infections cause dramatic aging impacts. Every infection adds to the impacts of previous infections.
At this point in the pandemic, the average person has been infected multiple times (3 or more). By the least impactful estimate of aging of all of these indicators, this implies an average aging of 21 years or more. That is a dramatic 7 fold increase in the rate of aging by any measure. That makes 20 year olds 40 year olds, and 45 year olds into retirees.
By six years into the pandemic (two years from now), that converts 20 year olds into retirees!
And that is the least rapid aging correlate.
By the estimates reported by surgeons, we are already facing half our population now being biologically old.
Consider what that implies to the burden on our health care systems over the next several years. Consider too what that will do to the ability to work (especially to manual labor) and hence to productivity. That is directly correlated to financial and corporate performance, and societal well being.
It very much appears that the ostrich approach of shoving ones head in the ground and pretending the pandemic doesn’t exist - guarantees societal collapse. Big surprise there. Doh! That's a life lesson no one has ever encountered before.
All of the aging indicators are imperfect. Epigenetic indicators vary wildly in how well they correlate. Each is useful in different ways. Each is messy. But in the end, they are all telling the same basic story.
Evidence backed opinion isn't opinion. All of what you say requires real-world evidence. i.e. an excess of people dying prematurely from Covid associated causes during an extended post-pandemic period. Otherwise, it's just wild conjecture without any science to back it. What's worse, you're close to indulging in dogma - a skeptic's bête-noire. I'm going to end my contribution here.
Yes actually it is - opinion. Read the language of the authors. They themselves state it as opinion. More than this, as you note - there isn't hard proof yet. The best we have is correlations. We have reason to believe these correlations implicate function and then indicate that the markers are both showing age changes and affecting physiology to cause aging.
More than this you still are not getting it.
This is a problem in science in general. Waiting for confirmed and validated truth can be fatal when the real world impacts occur faster than the science can prove them. When this happens, we must be fleet enough of foot to recognize that and to shift our bases.
This means raising warnings and possibly and probably taking actions before we have anything close to certainty.
We have to assess the potential trajectories of events and impacts and then judge whether we can wait, or we must act.
Let us say you are standing with a bunch of kids in the middle of a crosswalk. You have the right of way and the walk light is on. A truck is hurtling toward you that does not have the right of way - blaring its horn. What do you do?
Stand there like a moron shouting - stop - I have the right of way? Ignore it, knowing you have the right of way? Or suspect that maybe, just maybe, though entirely unproven that the trucks brakes have failed and there is nothing the driver can do to prevent crushing you and your charges into the asphalt, and then both run and pull, exhort, shout to get the kids to flee from impending disaster?
You are effectively arguing out of ignorance to stand fast and to get you and your charges crushed.
We have sufficient indications from what we know of aging, organ damage and various indicators to at the very least warn everyone. This is through multiple lines of reasoning.
Instead of acting, experts everywhere have taken the precautionary act of shielding themselves and their careers from potential harm by staying silent. Worse, many have taken that as a personal direction of not acting even to protect themselves, their families, friends, coworkers and colleagues by taking any action at all.
That is in a word - DUMB.
For those of us who have spent a lifetime protecting people from hazards this is particularly troubling. It is an abrogation of duty to others.
Is the data perfect? Far from it. Is it absolute? Certainly not.
But what prey tell are the consequences from inaction based on the data we have? At the least - enormous individual and collective harm. At the worst - societal collapse.
Gee, do you think maybe that is worth mentioning it to someone? Better yet - shouting it at them?
If the analysis is correct it’s *cell* age which is advanced not your corporeal age. I expect there is a lag and that you will appear older sooner as your cells fail to regenerate as they would if unaffected by viruses.
How do I stop receiving notifications from this lunatics channel?
It was never a virus. It was the shots, dingbat
You are either very poorly informed, misled, or ignorant. It absolutely is a virus - one particular type of a large family of related viruses, with about 10,000 strains now isolated and identified, with specific detailed genetics correlated causally to specific traits and oh so much more. Where ever you are getting your information from is a highly non credible and unreliable source pushing misinformation.
The disease COVID-19 is absolutely caused by the virus - SARS-CoV-2. The shots, especially the mRNA ones work amazingly well with minimal side effects. Some of those are quite rare (though real) risks that occur primarily because the spike protein from the virus is incredibly toxic and damaging. The vaccines use a reduced version of the spike to generate immunity. Normally that is restricted to a small area of muscle tissue in an arm and is not free to circulate as it is with an infection. And the amount is many orders of magnitude less than from an infection.
As of April 11 there are 4,095 officially recognized and named strains (there are many more that did not last long enough or spread far enough to be named, and a dozen or more pending names). 49 of those are named hybrids between two or more strains, with another 960 of those being descendants of hybrids.
My son God bless him has not caught it despite wide travel across the country and as far as Bangladesh and living in the city. He gets vaccinated and wears a mask in public places mostly because he feels great responsibility to never be carrying the virus on the few times a year we see each other. It is a loving act. I work at a hospital and have caught it once. But I read that the food allergic anaphylactic amongst us seem to be immune to COVID. It is being studied. My son was one of the first wave of infants presenting with an anaphylactic reaction to peanut and for him soy as well. I often wonder if what was once a curse is now a blessing for him. Do you know of those studies?
One of the things we can now be fairly confident about is that being immune to strongly mumps provides substantial protection against symptomatic COVID. Being immune to measles does not do that. Precisely why mumps immunity provides protection is unknown.
The MMR vaccine provides good protection against mumps, measles, and rubella. The evidence now though suggests that immunity to mumps provided by the MMR vaccine fades after about 17 years. Measles immunity lasts longer and appears to be life long. So this protection likely does not apply to most people born between 1957 and 2008. Current CDC recommendations do not generally support most people in that gap from getting vaccinated again, whether someone wants to or not. Lack of CDC recommendation equates to denial of authorization. This is primarily a cost (to the government) versus benefit (to society) decision, not a personal cost benefit analysis decision.
In addition, certain relatively uncommon Human Leukocyte Antigens (HLA) seem to also provide substantial protection. Precisely why is also not yet known. Between these, something like 15% of the population seems to not be easily infected or to suffer significant disease (active infection). It is jot known whether this also applies to long COVID, rapid aging (including brain and organ injury), immune damage, or abnormal clotting.
We (societally) do know that people can contract the disease, show no overt symptoms, and develop long COVID. So standard precautions to avoid infection are still advised. i.e. frequent up ro date vaccinations with vaccines tailored to current strains, avoiding crowds, not eating or drinking in public (especially indoors), and scrupulously wearing masks is advised.
But again - cost (to businesses) versus benefit (to society for GDP) was used to decide to end the "emergency" phase. This too was not a personal or individual cost-benefit analysis. And for many of us the analysis of these risks and costs weighs strongly the other way - toward protection.
Worse, that analysis was weighed based on immediate costs and benefits, not on on-going or long term risks and harms. The cessation of active measures leads us off the cliff into societal destruction as the long term impacts of a forever pandemic destroy society.
And that even doesn't begin to get to the right answer, The risk that at any moment the virus hybridizes with one of its more deadly cousins (MERS, NeoCov, PDF-2180, hku4 or hku5, or some other) is huge. Each of these likely results in a new pandemic that is 20-40% lethal.
So this person reduced his sperm age from 57 to 42?
What impresses me more is how he reduced his maturity from that expected of an adult to that of the prepubescent.
See, thank you this dude is 57 he is not 46. You can tell just by looking at him and his rectangle torso that he is beyond the 40s. Men truly believe that they age gracefully, and they don’t. We can see it on them just like we can see it on women.
If he was really only 46 why was his sperm aged to 57? Because he’s not 46.
Sounds like an incredibly boring life filled with nothing but ego.
He rides a motorcycle and doesn't take Covid precautions. It's long been clear to me that his longevity plan was lacking in these regards.
I KNEW he would end up with LC after seeing video of him out mixing it up with huge crowds. We’ve seen so many athletes struck with LC. Him being obsessive about his health, I knew he’d notice it right away.
Too bad so sad.
The hubris of this is what gets me. People in the US die on a daily basis from inability to get needed medications or treatments or… ffs food. I participated in a supper table event last night. 102 people, mostly homeless, all hungry. We ran out of food. There was still a line. A generous person ran to buy pizzas.
And yet we have individuals like this who apparently have decided, “I am the one person essential to the future survival of the human species and therefore every measure must be taken to ensure MY survival.” And then the unspoken part of, “if a few thousand, hundred thousand, I mean, who’s counting really? People die so that I can remain wealthy enough to live forever, that’s just the price humanity has to pay.”
When I studied Tai Chi I came across people who thought that by doing it every day they were going to prolong their lives. I was never one of them. But my ex-husband was although he never said so when we lived together.
Over the years, here are the statistics I collected about those folks: one teacher died from a burst appendix because he kept try to treat it with Chinese herbs instead of going to the hospital; one teacher got leukemia and instead of undergoing chemotherapy, he appeared to go on a macrobiotic diet. After a year of that he decided to go to the hospital, by which time he was having hallucinations. He lived two more days. Not related to my teachers was a friend of mine who practiced Shiatsu. She had a lump in her breast and went on a macrobiotic diet as well. That diet must have killed a large number of people who went on it rather than seeking appropriate medical services. She did not die. Instead, they removed 25 lymph nodes and found that 13 were cancerous. To save her breast, she endured 9 months of chemo and radiation. My former husband was diagnosed with prostate cancer and rather than have the organ removed and undergoing treatment, he also went to a Chinese doctor and took Chinese herbs and had acupuncture for a year with a Vietnamese doctor trained in China. I think he thought the cancer was defeated because he only got one PSA test afterward, he thought he was cured. Of course he wasn’t. The cancer came back and he was dead within two years. Magical thinking does not cure cancer. Nor does spending three or four hours a day on various forms of martial arts and exercise. If you have genes for cancer, you will most likely get it. My former mother-in-law died from endometrial cancer shortly before her son did. Death just really does not care about your potions, pills, or exercise.
I’m not dead because I go to good doctors who have actually saved my life several times. All that other stuff my husband used to do was stuff that bored my ADHD addled brain so I didn’t and don’t do it.
I got two cancers, prostate and multiple meyloma and then I started qigong and tiachi to help stay bipedal and relax. My teacher is Chinese and she uses the modern medical system and tells her student to see their doctors.
I agree with your teacher, and that has been my experience as well.
Wow this is very interesting. I have a sort of hobby interest in the science of aging and from the little that I know it's hard to say how covid will impact us population wise, but the preliminary scientific results that are out there (as Sam Thomas correctly points out) are not encouraging. It's particularly damning to see how we are failing young people. There were covid grifters like Balloux going on about how kids should get infected over and over with this virus to create population-level immunity and meanwhile it seems that everyone, except a small minority of well informed individuals (who are now outcast as hysterical, or unable to move on) has come round to this view.
I've come to terms with the fact that I probably will become a lot less old than my grandparents (who both became in their 90s) and I've been thinking about this for a while. Obviously age had its challenges for them, but it was nice to see them live good, long fulfilling lives, with only the last few months very difficult for my grandma, and for my grandpa he was fine basically until he got pneumonia in 2013 and died very suddenly after just one day.
What do we miss out on, individually and as a society? Anyway, I wrote this piece https://helendecruz.substack.com/p/youve-got-to-live-your-life
and I also wrote a more technical piece on how paleoanthropology shows humans have managed to lengthen their lifespans by caring for older people, long before the advent of modern medicine, 30,000-100,000 years ago:
https://helendecruz.substack.com/p/the-good-of-becoming-old-human-life?utm_source=activity_item
We should not strive for immortality. Death is not bad. It's good to make way for younger generations and see what they make of things. But it is nice to be able to become old. Natural aging is fine, helping people live longer by taking away things that kill us prematurely, like viruses, air pollution, warfare, car deaths, is I feel a moral duty. It's one we're badly failing.
If you mask with N95’s and limit the number of SARS2AIDS infections you get, you’ll be able watch humanity die. N95 masks are charged and trap particles with static electricity in between layers of mask.
I was unable to get those for a long time while working at a cement mine.
Its fine, I'll just breathe in cement dust spilling out of the roller mills. That company had haphazard ppe supply before, and it just got worse with covid so I guess it wasn't people hoarding masks' faults
The information is out there for everyone to find -- if they don't fall down the rabbit hole of mis-, dis-information and conspiracy theories. It's not a failsafe, but I feel can improve your odds.
Spot on! Thank you.
The reason he's silent about his long-COVID is because recognizing long-COVID would disrupt billionaire lifestyles.
Recognizing the dangers of COVID would disrupt everything the ruling class stands for.
Thankfully for them, the masses (both left and right) are making it extremely easy for them to continue the status quo
Research his investments and you will soon figure out why he does not speak about COVID that much......
what an absolute tool. motherfucken quest for immortality but no respirator discipline during the collapse of the capitalist world system.
what inadequate materialism does to a mof, goddamn.
This one hits dee. Ppl need to see this. I was training for a 70.3 mile triathlon and almost 5 years later I am not better.
He is also vaxxed up. If the spike protein is the issue, it doesn’t matter if it is breathed or injected. Did his LC start after his vaccinations with Moderna starting around April 21 2021 per his Twitter?
Wrong
What’s wrong?
Suggesting that it is the spike protein that is the problem and either through injecting a vaccine that clearly DOES NOT stay in the injection site and can enter the blood stream if you don’t aspirate the shot or getting it naturally? Exposure to spike protein is exposure unless you can provide evidence contrary.
As I understand it the mRNA COVID vaccination is not the same as other vaccinations. It injects a code which the body interprets as an instruction to create spiked protein , it doesn’t actually do this but the immune system is thusly primed to attack that spiked protein should it ever appear. This is why there is no petty immune reaction to the jab for most people.
It occurs to me that the use of the word “vaccine” can be easily misinterpreted when applied to newer immunological techniques. It might be better to use “injection”. This would avoid people mistaking the now historical term “vaccination” where altered infections would be injected. Eg cow pox pus being introduced in the original vaccination experiments. (Incidentally this is where we get the word from *vacca* Latin for cow)
Of course introducing manmade materials in the bloodstream is not without risks and only a fool would think otherwise.
I was in the original Moderna stage three study and I never ever got covid. I suffered no ill affects from the vaccine. I've been vaxed 10 times now from both companies and instill have had no ill affects from them. So I think I'll continue and I wear a mask everywhere indoors except home or with people I know and trust.
https://www.reddit.com/r/blueprint_/comments/15j6oq0/has_bryan_johnson_taken_covid_vaccine/
Maybe forever COVID then
I am not a physiologist, but a past professional triathlete. I still train at very intense levels but my workouts are shorter in time and distance. My maximal oxygen uptake puts me, an almost 71 year old man in with those in their twenties in average. That's average, no way can I keep up with younger trained athletes. Too, aerobic fitness is just part of the picture. My healing prowess, recovery times and quality of rest have diminished with my age. But I'll take being a geezer in good shape!.
Taking fitness as a proxy for age, there is no way that a 15% reduction in vital capacity can be offset in regards to his aims of a longer lifespan unless he plans for a virtual existence bedridden with mechanical assistance. Some life that will be!
It's hilarious that those who truly believe that Covid was created in a lab are the same ones who refuse to wear a mask or get vaccinated. If I thought the government was trying to poison me with Covid in order to kill me, I'd F'n be the first in line at the mask store.
He was wearing a mask and posted about getting vaccinated in the beginning of 2021. I don't even like this guy but I'm not sure why everything assuming he's some Trumplican anti-vax dude