The grim reaper’s hand to play/Travancore, Wikimedia Commons
While Americans continue to feud over face coverings, a huge new meta-analysis is out pointing to what really drives the burden of Covid-19 in the Western world: obesity and so-called comorbidities.
The former, according to the study published in the peer-reviewed BMC journal Systematic Reviews, fuels the overcrowding of hospitals while the latter is responsible for the vast majority of death attributed to the disease caused by the SARS-CoV-2 virus first discovered in China in late 2019.
Survival rates for those suffering with obesity were, thankfully, not that much worse than for those of normal weight, according to the study, unless the obese were also suffering from some of the West’s most common chronic illnesses, or what are now more often referred to as comorbidities.
“The highest observed risk ratios of death were found for cerebrovascular disease, cardiovascular disease, chronic renal disease, and hypertension,” the study reported.
The study itself was massive with a team of researchers led by Nathalie Verónica Fernández Villalobos from the Helmholtz Centre for Infection Research in Germany combing through nearly 7,500 Covid-19 studies to find 190 that warranted a full review for the meta-analysis in order to find 75 that finally passed a risk bias assessment.
The researchers did, however, warn that despite this effort the data they used was often based on hospital records, implying some “bias in a sense that more severely symptomatic patients are more likely included. Although our assessment revealed high to moderate study quality, studies based on hospital records are highly selective regarding the population included.”
The big killers
Hypertension, which most people know as high-blood pressure, was found to raise the risk of death from Covid-19 by 2.6 times. Chronic renal disease, better known in this country as chronic kidney disease, boosted the danger by a factor of two and a half.
Cerebrovascular diseases – primarily strokes, transient ischemic attacks and aneurysms, the fifth leading cause of death in the U.S. before the pandemic, according to Medical News Today – were linked to a 2.7-times greater risk of death from Covid-19.
And cardiovascular disease (CVD) – which rose to the rank of the country’s number one killer in 1930 and has stayed there ever since – proved the most dangerous comorbidity of all. It increased the risk of death from Covid-19 by 3.2 times, according to the new meta-analysis.
Not long after the 1928 discovery of penicillin, which provided doctors a powerful new drug with which to treat pneumonia, Gillinov and Nissen observed that “the heart gave out.
“By 1930, average life expectancy in America had risen to about 60, and heart disease had become the number one cause of death. These statistics reflect an important feature of coronary heart disease (CHD): the incidence of the disease increases strikingly with age. Longer life means more time for arterial plaques to develop and cause problems. The risk of an 85-year-old man having a heart attack is 25 times that of a 45-year-old.
“Longer life does not by itself cause CHD, but the combination of longer life and damaging lifestyles increases the risk of developing coronary heart disease. Contemporary lifestyles have created a minefield of risk factors for CHD. Liberated from the grip of infectious diseases, too many of us fill our extra years of life with smoking, eating, and many excuses not to exercise.”
Easy road to early death
A decade on from their publication of “Heart 411: The Only Guide to Heart Health You’ll Ever Need” and with a new infectious disease having killed an estimated 6.24 million people around the globe, the Gillinov-Nissen warning about the dangers of what has come to be called “the sedentary lifestyle” now sounds prophetic.
Unfortunately, the dangers of said lifestyle have also crept backward through the population with not only older Americans filling their “extra years of life with smoking, eating, and many excuses not to exercise,” but with a lot of younger Americans early on filling their lives with “eating and many excuses not to exercise.”
As to the relationship between declining fitness and increasing comorbidities, the authors of the meta-analysis warned that the “effects of comorbidities on (Covid-19) disease severity increased for several comorbidities with young age….”
The dangers of these comorbidities and their role in the deaths of the 25 percent of Americans under age 65 dead from Covid-19 have been obvious since almost the beginning of the pandemic.
Despite all the media fear-mongering as to how SARS-CoV-2 can kill anyone (which, of course, it can), the new study makes clear the fact the burden of the disease falls most heavily on what the authors of the study classified as “vulnerable populations.”
Some of these are in decline in the U.S., and some aren’t.
Smoking, thanks to government campaigns warning of its dangers and taxes that now make smoking one of the country’s most costly habits, has dramatically declined among all Americans, but eating and lack of exercise have trended in the opposite direction.
The international Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) now ranks the U.S. as the world’s fattest major country. There are fatter nations on the planet, but none with a population topping 5 million people. Ten of the top-11 are predominately small island nations home to fewer than 205,000 people each.
National fitness is harder to track than obesity, but the trend in the U.S. does not look good. A 2016 study of the aerobic fitness of children and youth in 50 countries published in the peer-reviewed British Journal of Sports Medicine found kids in the U.S. ranked 47th.
Overall population health in the U.S. was notably in decline even before the pandemic with average life expectancy in the country peaking in 2014.
By the time that editorial ran, the pandemic had taken a big bite out of life expectancy in the country, and it would take another big bite in 2021 thanks in large part to the fundamentally poor health of many people living in a nation where the focus on “health care” isn’t really about health at all, but about universal insurance to provide medical treatment for an increasingly unhealthy population.
Vax is us
The pandemic has been a case in point. Instead of focusing on getting Americans healthy, something that is protective in a lot of ways beyond SARS-CoV-2, the national emphasis has been on first getting everyone masked and then getting everyone vaccinated, including those at little threat of death from the new virus.
The authors of the meta-analysis subtly question whether such population-wide measures to deal with Covid-19 are the wisest strategy given that most of the danger posed by the SARS-CoV-2 virus focuses on identifiable groups.
In the discussion section at the end of the anaylsis they note they are providing evidence “for the effects of comorbidities on the severity of COVID-19 and effect modification of these effects by age in order to target public health measures towards groups at risk. The detailed analyses on effect modification revealed that effects of comorbidities on disease severity increase for several comorbidities with young age, which has important implications for the planning of vaccine strategies as well as non-pharmacological interventions targeting risk groups.”
Targeted responses to the pandemic were suggested at the start only to be quickly shut down. Those who noted the economic and psychological costs of lockdowns and mandatory masking in the U.S. found themselves vilified by government officials.
Emails released after a Freedom of Information Act request have shown Francis Collins, the director of the National Institute of Health in 2020; Anthony Fauci, the director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Disease in 2020, and others conspiring to torpedo the Great Barrington Declaration, which argued for Covid-19 policies focused on protecting the elderly and vulnerable while otherwise returning to life as normal.
As Vinay Prasad, an associate professor of epidemiology and biostatistics at the University of California San Francisco observed late last year in a commentary for STAT, a website dedicated to reporting on health and medicine, “Americans would have benefited from a broad debate among scientists about the available policy options for controlling the Covid-19 pandemic, and perhaps a bit of compromise. The emails tell us why that isn’t what we got.”
Prasad’s commentary went on to touch on how the politicization of science during the pandemic now threatens to do to science what the politicization of everything did to journalism.
Trust dies when rules are put on what is acceptable and unacceptable for discussion.
“What concerns me about the NIH director’s email and his interview on television is that he appeared unwilling to have this dialogue,” Prasad wrote. “Collins’s day job does not make him the arbiter of scientific truth, the Pope for all scientists. On questions of unprecedented pandemic policy, he is surely entitled to his opinion – as we all are – but his is just one opinion of many.
“When it comes to lockdowns or school closures, the answer to the question of whether the benefits exceed the harms and, if so, under what conditions, is far from certain, and scientists will continue to study this for decades. As a good scientist, Collins should have recognized the massive uncertainty around these policies….
“Jeffrey Flier, the former dean of Harvard Medical School, and I called for dialogue and debate among scientists without demonization in April 2020. I’m disappointed to see a few months later that the NIH director, a man uniquely positioned to foster such a debate, had actively sought to thwart and discredit scientists with alternative ideas to the pandemic response. His ad-hominem comment that the authors were ‘fringe’ was unnecessary and unhelpful. In the weeks that followed, more and more mud would be slung against the authors of the Great Barrington Declaration, as well as against scientists who held alternative policy views, and favored more and stronger restrictions. The vitriol ensured that the country would not have the dialogue it so desperately needed.”
The increasing evidence, of which the new meta-analysis is only a part, would point to the possibility that Prasad was making a very good and important point.
Categories: News
Oops! (The last sentance)
“The WHO said in June 2021 that a crucial component of ending the pandemic was to reach 40% vaccination rates by the end of 2021 and 70% by June 2022, which is coming up in a little over a month.
“The reality is that there is a loss of momentum,” said Dr. Isaac Adewole, a former health minister of Nigeria who is now a consultant for the Africa Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, according to the New York Times.
Some health experts suggest they missed their window of opportunity.
“There was a time people were very desperate to get vaccinated, but the vaccines were not there,” Adewole said. “And then they realized that without the vaccination, they didn’t die.”
https://thelibertydaily.com/pro-vaxx-doctor-and-bureaucrat-makes-embarrassing-admission-about-vaccine-failures/
The other thing they did was war against therapeutics including but not limited to monoclonal antibodies, HCQ, ivermectin, vitamin D, zinc, quercetin.
This is not a big surprise, as Fauci did the identical thing nearly 40 years ago leading the HIV / AIDS fight. He was successful then too. Cheers –
I remember all the cries from Anchorage and Fairbanks to shut down the whole state, when logic said that most of the problems would be in larger groupings of people, like cities, towns and villages. The governor stuck with giving local control to the boroughs and cities and not shutting down the whole state. It was the right call for Alaska, giving its size and lack of population outside of Anchorage and Fairbanks. On the other side of the coin, governors in states like California shut down the whole state because of massive populations like 40 million people spread out all over the state. Florida was an exception, but did not apparently fair any worse than states like California. The main thing was that when Covid-19 first came on the scene, no one knew much about it. So responses were most of all on the conservative side. Your article points out that people who are ill-equipped to fight off viruses like Covid, will not fair well. So what really should be happening is that people need to be more physically active. I am 82 and still pretty healthy because I still do my own yard work and pretty much anything else that comes up. It also is just as important to keep vaccinated and aware of the health challenges facing our modern and much more connected world.
If I chose to identify as young and healthy with zero comorbidities does that count as the same as being those things? I’m relatively young, relatively healthy, but have comorbidities. Should I not get vaccinated because I choose to identify as something I’m not? I guess it could be said that most older people choose to be old by a series of choices they made, otherwise they would not be old. Being healthy for most is a choice since we all know being healthy is better than not and even the simple act of walking has been shown to improve health. Some people are born with comorbidities or are otherwise genetically inherited. Yep, if I had my druthers I’d be young, healthy, and have no comorbidities.
When we, as a seemingly intelligent species, have developed the ability to bolster our immune system during a worldwide pandemic should we do so or just wish away reality? Clearly identifying as something we are not and wishing away reality are not things that intelligent people do.
Don’t forget, Craig, that it was vaccines and not relying on the populace to eat healthier and make lifestyle changes that elininated smallpox worldwide, and polio and measles in the US.
With this coronavirus it’s not just death that’s the problem; even a mild case can lead to permanent organ damage and cognitive dysfunction.
As long as there’s significant vaccine avoidance, the virus will find fresh ground on which to replicate and mutate.
Even if we are in that rare”picture of health” category, and feel we have little to worry about from diseases, to help make our fellow Americans stay as well as possible, we should do our civic duty and get vaccinated, wear masks indoors and do most of our socializing outdoors.
Maxine 🤦♂️
DPR
you dismissed her historical perspective on things that may have been before your time,but certainly not mine nor Craigs, and things that Craigs missives should have considered.
We stepped forward into the unknown, with tools only learned from the past, and trying to take steps forward from the near present.Thats how history works…
Dave you are wrong. . I didn’t dismiss her historical perspective. I was shocked by her in accuracy. The virus mutates in the vacinated and unvaccinated alike. Her analogy to small pox was off base . Mrna and other recent vaccines have nearly no chance of eradicating corona virus. Whereas smallpox was not generally spread airborne and the vaccine was different so it’s useless to compare the two as maxine did . Saying wearing masks is a civic duty is just uniformed. The facts say it’s marginal if at all helpful. Maxine just stated so many falsehoods that are easily determined at this point I didn’t know what to say except an expressive face plant so perhaps she will educate herself. Because she’s apparently ignored or cant quickly perceive accurate facts . Dave you completely misread. I probably have a lot better feeling for history than you relize . You misunderstand my age .
DPR,
Actually your horrendously wrong with regards to small pox.
Slow down a bit and think,how are most viruses transmitted,some are personal contact,the rest?
And no,your grasp of history is challenged by your apparent lack of experience imo.
But life is an ongoing learning center,you have the tools and the means
Dave , cdc says small pox is primarily transmitted by direct contact or prolonged face to face time. Clothing bedding objects on and on . At a certain early stage transmission be by air but thats not the normal or primary transmission method. Whereas corona virus is the opposite. Its transmitted primarily by air per all scientific information to this point at least covid 19 . ( you yourself are one who is “deadly wrong” ( humor those words for me) versus your statement horrendously wrong which you are also .
You state my lack of inexperience but provide no details. My Freind you have no idea what knowledge or expierence i have so stick to the researchable facts . No need for you to interject false information. Just look up the primary method of transmission for small pox versus covid. Then look up corona viruses ability to mutate versus small pox ability. The reason we dont have typical vaccines for covid is because its really hard to make one that works or stops transmission. Its an admitted scientific fact that the vacinated transmit covid at a similar rate to the unvaccinated. ( roughly 30% less but thats not enough to eradicate the disease- period!) whereas small pox vaccines actually create immunity that’s fairly extended. A big kicker is small pox itself isn’t transmitted or harbord by animals. Wheras corona virus and even covid apparently is which makes it nearly impossible to irradicate especially with its rapid mutation rate in all creatures vacinated or not . Some day it may be irradicated but not in near future regardless of how many masks are worn or how many people are vaccinated. Dave you are way off base thinking im uneducated or inexperienced on the subject. Its not material to the discussion anyway as expierence is not always tied to facts . Facts and knowledge or understanding stands on its own. Expierence usually does help but not always. A person can still be horribly incorrect regardless of experience.
Dave and Maxine- if you wanna do your civic responsibility then get extremely fit and promote such . This will reduce the burden on our medical profession and reduce our tax burden. Tax dollars represents Time costs so per data fitness trumps masks and vaccines. Real civic duty is exercise to reduce deaths for most causes across the board and spend your spare time building and maintaining trails so people can use the outdoors. Thats true civic duty . Less time and dollars lost more choices regarding fitness. Pretending masks and vaccines will defeat this disease is fantasy . Forcing others to wear or vacinate is just brain dead facist thinking. Wear and jab to your hearts desire but its un-American to take those choices away from people with mandates . Especially as they factually are not making much if any statistical difference in the long haul especially versus fitness and focus on natural immune and general health from a healthy diet and lifestyle. ( focus on what is currently proven to work) just don’t support the destruction of personal choice.
Even COVID “god” Fauci admits those vaccinated catch and spread COVID.
The people that I personally know who got COVID were fully vaccinated. The ones that died had serious prior health issues such as cancer, heart issues, or COPD.
Everyone is exposed to various viruses and bacteria whether at work, home, or out and about. Eating healthy, exercise, and abstaining from harmful recreational products contribute to one’s ability to overcome many illnesses.