Katie goes undercover to infiltrate a secretive feline drug ring, Jesse investigates the data on long COVID, and Rebekah Jones makes another surprise appearance
i hate to say it but long covid just feels so “online.” with most diseases i can usually name at least a few people that have it that i know personally, but with long covid there’s nobody. it seems to be exclusively an anecdotal/self-diagnosed disease among white soys on twitter. and 99/100 times said person was already hyper-online, reclusive, quad vaxxed, etc etc. just feels like there’s almost personal stake having long-covid. i guess i also have personal stake in not having it, but isn’t that the same with any disease.
I bought GS from Robin. My cat got FIP in summer 2020. At the time I assumed there was some kind of mark-up despite the Atlantic article, but I had no idea they were making so much. I'm honestly not that bothered by the amount of mark-up per vial/pill, or even that they weren't transparent about it. GS saved my cat, and without FIP warriors, I wouldn't have had access to the specific form factor (small tablets) that I could actually get into my cat.
I'm much more bothered by the fact that some admins were essentially pocketing all that cash while others were doing all the actual work of triaging and helping with dosage etc. And that certain brands were being favored or even having adverse outcomes covered up. We did notice what appeared to be a difference in dosing between two batches at one point.
Also, I don't know if there was some separate drama back in 2020, but the Facebook group was completely shut down briefly and then a new one was created back then. No real explanation was given.
The cat story was riveting. I appreciated hearing about something so perverted by nuance that I couldn’t get outraged by either side. Great work Katie. My husband could overhear and said “I love these guys.”
I think people who say they have long Covid have one of four things that can be difficult to differentiate:
1) Unrelated illness
2) Covid-related psychological distress resulting in psychosomatic illness
3) autoimmune disease triggered by covid
4) lingering direct Covid damage.
I have personally developed a (usually) post-viral autoimmune disorder without remembering anything about the illness, suggesting it was rather mild at the time. (It was glomerial nephritis and I fully recovered.) I think post-viral issues are more common than people realize. It does not mean if you are more tired now than two years ago you have one.
Long COVID is real and people with it deserve treatment. But the Long COVID community has a quack problem. Dana Parish wrote a book about chronic Lyme disease and claims that Lyme disease causes MS (almost everyone with MS is infected with EBV). She's also one of those Zero Covid people. Diana Zicklin Berrent has claimed that Long COVID is like Adrenal Fatigue, which doesn't exist. People with Long Covid need good science so that they have effective treatments. It's also important for research to recognize that Long Covid isn't just one thing. People with the post-viral fatigue syndrome should not be treated with exercise. People who ended up with damage to their lungs and or hearts due to a severe case of COVID will probably benefit from exercise to increase their lung and heart strength. And people who have a lingering cough will probably get better with time. That also means that some people who think they have Long COVID may have something else. Some may have MS and some may have Lupus and they will need appropriate treatment for their actual disease. We don't want people finding out that the Long Covid they've spent 3 years being treated for is actually Lupus and in that time they've lost half of their kidney function. There was an article in a medical journal about two cases of advanced lung cancer that had been misdiagnosed as Long COVID. People are going to die from errors like that.
A good medical journalist would make sure that the patients they're reporting on have tested positive for SARS-COV2 either by PCR or antibodies. They should realize that patients are the experts in their symptoms but that doesn't mean that the patients know the cause of their symptoms. Even doctors often don't know the cause of their symptoms until they've done tests and they can misdiagnose people. I get the impression that Ed Yong has let his compassion for patients overwhelm his journalistic instincts. If you're a medical journalist and some of the activists for a particular condition have a history of advocating for fake diseases, you should report on that. It's also important to report on the range of scientific evidence on that condition, rather than just the science that backs the claims of the patients you've interviewed. He also seems to have fallen for the idea that it's somehow disrespectful to people with Long Covid to drop covid precautions when nearly everyone has some immunity. The good news is that infections with SARS-COV2 are now less likely to result in Long COVID, probably because nearly everyone has immunity, but he seems skeptical of that finding. THat's a bit concerning
I haven't listened yet- I will at work this evening.
I would to, before I listen, state that my twin sister has Long Covid from her 2020 infection. She was infected in March of 2020 and suffered a cardiac arrest in May of 2020 (a defibrillator saved her) and an arterial dissection in her brainstem in July of 2020. She now needs infusions of infliximab to stand and walk. I saw with my own eyes what covid did to her and I have spoken to her doctors, who are highly qualified clinicians and specialists at UPENN in Philadelphia. She had a recent appointment with her neurologist who stated that long covid caused her myelin sheath to be "eaten through." They are concerned about another clot /dissection so they have scheduled another MRI. She has aphasia, which is getting worse, and balance issues, which are getting worse. She takes a slew of medications for her heart and for her brain. I know long covid is not psychogenic. I will probably skip the long covid section here as I have lost friends in real life who laugh about it and call it fake knowing what I went through with my sister. I couldn't bear to add this podcast to something else I used to enjoy and like that views my family's nightmare as just another NPC libtard SJW meme disease.
This cat story has to be one of the best stories told and researched on the show. My only critique is that there was no joke made about CatTurd2. With how silly Jesse and Katie can be, it’s easy to forget that they’re damn good at what they do. And major props to Trace, he’s like the CNA at the BARpod hospital, mucking about in the dirty crevices. Salute to you sir, you deserve some scritches
"Brain fog isn’t like a hangover or depression. It’s a disorder of executive function that makes basic cognitive tasks absurdly hard" and gave an example of a woman who "“runs into a mental wall” when faced with tasks as simple as filling out forms. Her memory, once vivid, feels frayed and fleeting. Former mundanities—buying food, making meals, cleaning up—can be agonizingly difficult."
The woman might very well have long COVID, but Ed Yong's outright dismissal of the idea that brain fog could be like symptoms of depression really got to me because the description of her brainfog felt almost exactly like some of the problems I had because of severe depression. During my worst periods of depression, my executive functioning was sometimes even worse than that. That Yong wasn't willing to actually engage with similarities between brain fog and depression and just dismissed the idea they could be similar or the same bothered me enough that I actually emailed him about it. I never heard back.
I'll just leave my story with Long Covid here, it's now cleared, but I had symptoms for 2 years. Like many people I know with LC, I got infected early on in March 2020. The thing wiped me out, for people who have had Omicron only, Alpha was something else, I was very sick for 2 weeks, then it cleared, but I didn't fully recover until April 2022. I ended up in ER twice with chest pains. My hair fell off in large clumps. I had brain fog for about three months during 2020, I was literally stupid and couldn't read, write, or concentrate. I also had numbness and neuropathies. I was tired all of the time. My lungs hurt. I didn't want to be sick, I had been very healthy and active all of my life, I kept wishing it away, the doctors had no idea what was wrong with me, but I felt like crap all of the time. And then a combination of my third vaccine and third covid infection cured me. My guess? At least in my case Long Covid was caused by persistent viral load somewhere in my system, which kept triggering an auto-immune response. But honestly,I have no idea, but this crap is real, and the weird symptoms were so random that I thought that I was going crazy.
Ed Yong's idea that we should privilege self-diagnosed long covid sufferers' personal testimony over objective medical data seems like a special exception.
For example, does anyone think it's likely that Yong would apply the same standard to people who claim to have suffered injury from covid vaccines?
I would never have said this before last week, hell would have called myself a conspiracy theorist for saying it, but after recent revelations and Europe and the FDA pulling the original vaccines, I’ve had a bit of a change of heart.
I’m not anti-mRNA technology, it’s an amazing breakthrough, and I’m not saying anything against the current vaccines, but there might be another reason some of the vaccinated are feeling these long symptoms, specifically those who keep getting Pfizer boosters.
I’m a 30 year old male, healthy, had COVID alpha pre-vax and it felt like a mild hangover for half a day.
Later I got 2 doses of Pfizer and the 2nd shot crippled me. I mean that literally because at one point I actually collapsed. I didn’t feel like I would die but it was 2 days of absolute hell.
I’m going to actually “follow the science” here as new studies come out, and hell I could be totally wrong, I personally never had “long COVID symptoms”, but at this point it’s just hard to know what the truth is on a lot of things.
I’ve come to the conclusion to not dismiss anything, but instead to wait and see.
I grew up in Michigan, and while it is true that there is no reason for anyone from Michigan to have a confederate flag, it is also true that that never seems to stop anyone...so maybe racist brother is not still in the aryan nation, just another Michigander with grandparents from Kentucky over-romanticizing the good old days of yore...
The impersonation thing just doesn’t seem like that big of a deal to me. Twitter was artificially given way more cultural cache than warranted in large part because of their arbitrary verification policy. It’s a distorted reality where the media could spin any narrative about any event with the veneer of bluecheck legitimacy. It’s a silly website, not a place where serious discourse happens. If this finally forces the media class to acknowledge that, it’s a (probably unintentional) win in my book.
Obviously the villain here is the FDA (as usual).
Oh, my gosh. One of the best episodes. Insane cat ladies, international smuggling, Newt Gingrich’s sister -- it has everything!
i hate to say it but long covid just feels so “online.” with most diseases i can usually name at least a few people that have it that i know personally, but with long covid there’s nobody. it seems to be exclusively an anecdotal/self-diagnosed disease among white soys on twitter. and 99/100 times said person was already hyper-online, reclusive, quad vaxxed, etc etc. just feels like there’s almost personal stake having long-covid. i guess i also have personal stake in not having it, but isn’t that the same with any disease.
I bought GS from Robin. My cat got FIP in summer 2020. At the time I assumed there was some kind of mark-up despite the Atlantic article, but I had no idea they were making so much. I'm honestly not that bothered by the amount of mark-up per vial/pill, or even that they weren't transparent about it. GS saved my cat, and without FIP warriors, I wouldn't have had access to the specific form factor (small tablets) that I could actually get into my cat.
I'm much more bothered by the fact that some admins were essentially pocketing all that cash while others were doing all the actual work of triaging and helping with dosage etc. And that certain brands were being favored or even having adverse outcomes covered up. We did notice what appeared to be a difference in dosing between two batches at one point.
Also, I don't know if there was some separate drama back in 2020, but the Facebook group was completely shut down briefly and then a new one was created back then. No real explanation was given.
The cat story was riveting. I appreciated hearing about something so perverted by nuance that I couldn’t get outraged by either side. Great work Katie. My husband could overhear and said “I love these guys.”
I think people who say they have long Covid have one of four things that can be difficult to differentiate:
1) Unrelated illness
2) Covid-related psychological distress resulting in psychosomatic illness
3) autoimmune disease triggered by covid
4) lingering direct Covid damage.
I have personally developed a (usually) post-viral autoimmune disorder without remembering anything about the illness, suggesting it was rather mild at the time. (It was glomerial nephritis and I fully recovered.) I think post-viral issues are more common than people realize. It does not mean if you are more tired now than two years ago you have one.
Long COVID is real and people with it deserve treatment. But the Long COVID community has a quack problem. Dana Parish wrote a book about chronic Lyme disease and claims that Lyme disease causes MS (almost everyone with MS is infected with EBV). She's also one of those Zero Covid people. Diana Zicklin Berrent has claimed that Long COVID is like Adrenal Fatigue, which doesn't exist. People with Long Covid need good science so that they have effective treatments. It's also important for research to recognize that Long Covid isn't just one thing. People with the post-viral fatigue syndrome should not be treated with exercise. People who ended up with damage to their lungs and or hearts due to a severe case of COVID will probably benefit from exercise to increase their lung and heart strength. And people who have a lingering cough will probably get better with time. That also means that some people who think they have Long COVID may have something else. Some may have MS and some may have Lupus and they will need appropriate treatment for their actual disease. We don't want people finding out that the Long Covid they've spent 3 years being treated for is actually Lupus and in that time they've lost half of their kidney function. There was an article in a medical journal about two cases of advanced lung cancer that had been misdiagnosed as Long COVID. People are going to die from errors like that.
A good medical journalist would make sure that the patients they're reporting on have tested positive for SARS-COV2 either by PCR or antibodies. They should realize that patients are the experts in their symptoms but that doesn't mean that the patients know the cause of their symptoms. Even doctors often don't know the cause of their symptoms until they've done tests and they can misdiagnose people. I get the impression that Ed Yong has let his compassion for patients overwhelm his journalistic instincts. If you're a medical journalist and some of the activists for a particular condition have a history of advocating for fake diseases, you should report on that. It's also important to report on the range of scientific evidence on that condition, rather than just the science that backs the claims of the patients you've interviewed. He also seems to have fallen for the idea that it's somehow disrespectful to people with Long Covid to drop covid precautions when nearly everyone has some immunity. The good news is that infections with SARS-COV2 are now less likely to result in Long COVID, probably because nearly everyone has immunity, but he seems skeptical of that finding. THat's a bit concerning
I have never enjoyed reading a podcast description more! Off to listen.
I haven't listened yet- I will at work this evening.
I would to, before I listen, state that my twin sister has Long Covid from her 2020 infection. She was infected in March of 2020 and suffered a cardiac arrest in May of 2020 (a defibrillator saved her) and an arterial dissection in her brainstem in July of 2020. She now needs infusions of infliximab to stand and walk. I saw with my own eyes what covid did to her and I have spoken to her doctors, who are highly qualified clinicians and specialists at UPENN in Philadelphia. She had a recent appointment with her neurologist who stated that long covid caused her myelin sheath to be "eaten through." They are concerned about another clot /dissection so they have scheduled another MRI. She has aphasia, which is getting worse, and balance issues, which are getting worse. She takes a slew of medications for her heart and for her brain. I know long covid is not psychogenic. I will probably skip the long covid section here as I have lost friends in real life who laugh about it and call it fake knowing what I went through with my sister. I couldn't bear to add this podcast to something else I used to enjoy and like that views my family's nightmare as just another NPC libtard SJW meme disease.
This cat story has to be one of the best stories told and researched on the show. My only critique is that there was no joke made about CatTurd2. With how silly Jesse and Katie can be, it’s easy to forget that they’re damn good at what they do. And major props to Trace, he’s like the CNA at the BARpod hospital, mucking about in the dirty crevices. Salute to you sir, you deserve some scritches
I've been skeptical of Ed Yong's long COVID reporting ever since his article about brain fog and long COVID: https://www.theatlantic.com/health/archive/2022/09/long-covid-brain-fog-symptom-executive-function/671393/
His asserted that:
"Brain fog isn’t like a hangover or depression. It’s a disorder of executive function that makes basic cognitive tasks absurdly hard" and gave an example of a woman who "“runs into a mental wall” when faced with tasks as simple as filling out forms. Her memory, once vivid, feels frayed and fleeting. Former mundanities—buying food, making meals, cleaning up—can be agonizingly difficult."
The woman might very well have long COVID, but Ed Yong's outright dismissal of the idea that brain fog could be like symptoms of depression really got to me because the description of her brainfog felt almost exactly like some of the problems I had because of severe depression. During my worst periods of depression, my executive functioning was sometimes even worse than that. That Yong wasn't willing to actually engage with similarities between brain fog and depression and just dismissed the idea they could be similar or the same bothered me enough that I actually emailed him about it. I never heard back.
I'll just leave my story with Long Covid here, it's now cleared, but I had symptoms for 2 years. Like many people I know with LC, I got infected early on in March 2020. The thing wiped me out, for people who have had Omicron only, Alpha was something else, I was very sick for 2 weeks, then it cleared, but I didn't fully recover until April 2022. I ended up in ER twice with chest pains. My hair fell off in large clumps. I had brain fog for about three months during 2020, I was literally stupid and couldn't read, write, or concentrate. I also had numbness and neuropathies. I was tired all of the time. My lungs hurt. I didn't want to be sick, I had been very healthy and active all of my life, I kept wishing it away, the doctors had no idea what was wrong with me, but I felt like crap all of the time. And then a combination of my third vaccine and third covid infection cured me. My guess? At least in my case Long Covid was caused by persistent viral load somewhere in my system, which kept triggering an auto-immune response. But honestly,I have no idea, but this crap is real, and the weird symptoms were so random that I thought that I was going crazy.
Ed Yong's idea that we should privilege self-diagnosed long covid sufferers' personal testimony over objective medical data seems like a special exception.
For example, does anyone think it's likely that Yong would apply the same standard to people who claim to have suffered injury from covid vaccines?
I would never have said this before last week, hell would have called myself a conspiracy theorist for saying it, but after recent revelations and Europe and the FDA pulling the original vaccines, I’ve had a bit of a change of heart.
I’m not anti-mRNA technology, it’s an amazing breakthrough, and I’m not saying anything against the current vaccines, but there might be another reason some of the vaccinated are feeling these long symptoms, specifically those who keep getting Pfizer boosters.
I’m a 30 year old male, healthy, had COVID alpha pre-vax and it felt like a mild hangover for half a day.
Later I got 2 doses of Pfizer and the 2nd shot crippled me. I mean that literally because at one point I actually collapsed. I didn’t feel like I would die but it was 2 days of absolute hell.
I’m going to actually “follow the science” here as new studies come out, and hell I could be totally wrong, I personally never had “long COVID symptoms”, but at this point it’s just hard to know what the truth is on a lot of things.
I’ve come to the conclusion to not dismiss anything, but instead to wait and see.
I grew up in Michigan, and while it is true that there is no reason for anyone from Michigan to have a confederate flag, it is also true that that never seems to stop anyone...so maybe racist brother is not still in the aryan nation, just another Michigander with grandparents from Kentucky over-romanticizing the good old days of yore...
The impersonation thing just doesn’t seem like that big of a deal to me. Twitter was artificially given way more cultural cache than warranted in large part because of their arbitrary verification policy. It’s a distorted reality where the media could spin any narrative about any event with the veneer of bluecheck legitimacy. It’s a silly website, not a place where serious discourse happens. If this finally forces the media class to acknowledge that, it’s a (probably unintentional) win in my book.