An artist’s rendition of the SARS-CoV-2 virus/Wikimedia Commons

The real threat is the next new virus

Almost everyone reading this – if not everyone – has by now been infected with the SARS-CoV-2 virus.

Most got sick to lesser or greater degrees as they dealt with the subsequent onset of “corononavirus disease 2019″ (Covid-19) or what is increasingly being called simply Covid much as influenza disease 1918 became the flu at some point after it was finally identified as a viral pathogen in 1930.

Probably everyone reading this has also been sickened by the flu at some time, and some, probably many, have been waylaid by that disease more than once.

The same is now proving true for Covid and, vaccine or no vaccine, Covid is clearly destined to become as common in the 21st Century as flu was in the 20th century.

We’re going to have to learn to live with it.

Why? Because the SARS-CoV-2 virus is today everywhere in nature.

If this wasn’t obvious before, a newly published study in Nature underlines how the coronavirus that drove first major pandemic of this century has embedded itself in the world around us.

It was known to have jumped from humans to mink early in the pandemic and later cats, dogs and whitetail deer. And now researchers say they have confirmed detection of the virus in six more species of mammals: “deer mouse, Virginia opossum, raccoon, groundhog, Eastern cottontail, and Eastern red bat.”

The latest study also noted the suspicions of some researchers that the now well-known Omicron variant of Covid may have developed in wildlife before transmitting back to humans.

The flu has followed this track in both directions with the latest variant – HPAI A(H5N1) bird flu – creating havoc in the dairy industry where the Centers for Disease Control (CDC) now reports 174 dairy herds infected.

Bird flu outbreaks have been a persistent problem in the poultry industry. Chicken and turkey farmers were reported to have lost a potential $1 billion last year after slaughtering more than 58 million birds to limit the spread of the disease.

Thankfully, human infections linked to latest bird flu variant have been limited to “cases in U.S. dairy and poultry workers,” according to the CDC, but there is no reason to believe H5 will stay down on the farm, which is why the CDC says it is monitoring the situation.

Fear and mongering

In February of last year, The New York Times ran a bird-flu commentary warning that “An Even Deadlier Pandemic Could Soon Be Here” in which sociologist Zeynep Tufekci, a professor at Columbia University’s Craig Newmark Center for Journalism Ethics and Security, warned that the latest bird flu variant killed 56 percent of the 870 people known to have been infected by it.

The column was reminiscent of the panic that surrounded bird flu in 2006 after the discovery that some samples taken from infected people in Turkey carried mutations that could enable the virus to spread more easily among the human population.

Some Alaskans might remember the craziness that ensued in this state as biologists scurried to Western Alaska to swab the butts of geese, ducks and other birds to see if they were bringing the disease from Asia to North America.

“The 800 Yup’ik Eskimos in this wet and lonely village (of Kipnuk) knew the situation was serious when government scientists began swooping in on bush planes,” the Los Angeles Times reported almost two decades ago.

There were fears at the time that H5NI would make the leap to humans as easily as SARS-CoV-2 did, but that never happened. And despite the worry of Tufecki and The Times this is still considered unlikely.

The Institute for Progress, a non-partisan think tank in the nation’s capital – last year claimed “a roughly 4 percent chance of an H5N1 pandemic as bad as or worse than COVID-19 over the next year.”

What the infection fatality rate in a pandemic-size outbreak might be is unpredictable, but as the Covid-19 pandemic showed, the U.S. is home to a very vulnerable population due to a general lack of fitness.

More than 1.2 million deaths in the country have now been attributed to Covid, according to the Worldometer tracker, but the vast majority of those dead were already compromised by comorbidities, multimorbidities or frailty before they were infected.

“In this context, public-health efforts to improve baseline population health are an integral part of pandemic preparedness,” researchers from the United Kingdom warned in Nature Medicine last year. “In particular, the substantial burden of disease…and the wider public-health implications of the ‘syndemic’ of COVID-19 on top of widespread comorbidity due to common non-communicable disease and socioeconomic inequality merit urgent attention.”

The aforementioned syndemic has nothing to do with sin unless one considers it a sin to ignore one’s physical fitness.

The website News Medical describes a syndemic simply as “two or more illness states interacting poorly with each other and negatively influencing the mutual course of each disease trajectory.”

Editor-in-chief Richard Horton of The Lancet, a highly respected medical journal, only months into the Covid-19 nightmare that had freezer vans full of bodies parked on New York City streets because the morgues were overflowing warned that “COVID-19 is not a pandemic. It is a syndemic.”

“We have viewed the cause of this crisis as an infectious disease,” he wrote. “All of our interventions have focused on cutting lines of viral transmission, thereby controlling the spread of the pathogen.

“The ‘science’ that has guided governments has been driven mostly by epidemic modelers and infectious disease specialists, who understandably frame the present health emergency in centuries-old terms of plague. But what we have learned so far tells us that the story of Covid-19 is not so simple.

“Two categories of disease are interacting within specific population – infection with severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 (SARS-CoV-2) and an array of non-communicable diseases.”

That was in September 2020. Nobody listened.

Magic bullets

Pandemic responses continued to focus on lockdowns and masking that penalized the fit and healthy at little risk in hopes of protecting the unfit and unhealthy.

Swedish epidemiologist Anders Tegnell took a public beating for concluding this was foolishness.

“‘Swedish Fauci’ still won’t budge on no-mask approach despite rising COVID-19 cases,” the New York Post headlined in October of that year. 

In a “working paper” that same month, economists at Stanford University basically accused then-President Donald Trump of killing people by holding political rallies, primarily outdoors, that could be implied to have “increased subsequent confirmed cases of Covid-19 by more than 250 per 100,000 residents.

“Extrapolating this figure to the entire sample, we conclude that these eighteen rallies ultimately resulted in more than 30,000 incremental confirmed cases of Covid-19. Applying county-specific post-event death rates, we conclude that the rallies likely led to more than 700 deaths, not necessarily among attendees.”

The reality that Horton recognized early – that a SARS-Cov-2 infection presented one way in healthy people and another way in the unhealthy – was never officially recognized amid the hysteria surrounding Covid deaths.

By the time President Joe Biden was elected, the public pressure to do something was such that he ordered the military – including Navy Seals and other special-forces units among the fittest people in the country – vaccinated.

Biden declared that “being vaccinated will enable our service members to stay healthy, to better protect their families, and to ensure that our force is ready to operate anywhere in the world.”

He ignored the fact that the fittest members of the military faced little risk of serious illness, let alone death, even without the vaccine. Young age alone was already proving highly protective.

In a review of pre-vaccine Covid deaths, a 2022 peer-reviewed study in The Lancet reported the infection fatality rate (IFR) for those 30 and under as 0.0573 percent or almost a twentieth the IFR for those age 60 and over. 

European researchers who sought to assess the “cost of lost productivity due to premature mortality associated with Covid-19” in the first year of the pandemic, reported being forced to restrict their research to those over age 30 because so few people under that age had died of Covid.

“Inspection of excess mortality by age and gender revealed no notable excess mortality under 30 in any country, therefore, we restricted consideration to age 30 and older,” they wrote in their study published in The European Journal of Health Economics, a peer-reviewed publication. 

Suffice it to say that almost no one under the age of 30 died from Covid unless they had multimorbidities or an already life-threatening comorbidity, and for those over age 30, the death rate was directly linked to the number of comorbidities they accumulated with age with many of those tired directly to lifestyle choices.

Horton’s argument that the Western world needed to put some effort into changing those lifestyles to make its citizens healthier never gained much traction and still hasn’t.

Societal suicide

America’s slothdemic, in particular, remains in full swing with the merits of vaccines, which can help some, and masks still being debated while the need for fitness, which protects not just against the pathogens of today but those of tomorrow, remains overlooked.

Masking still has its true believers, too.

A study appearing in the peer-reviewed BMJ (formerly the British Medical Journal) last  month declared that wearing a surgical mask in “public spaces over 14 days reduces the risk of self-reported symptoms consistent with a respiratory infection” by 3.2 percent “compared with not wearing a surgical face mask.”

The study, however, had problems, among them the inability to discount placebo and nocebo effects in self-reported results.

Those who wear a mask they believe is working might well be inclined to underreport or even dismiss symptoms of respiratory infection due to their belief they are “protected.”

And those who believe in masks but are employed as “controls” not wearing masks might well be inclined to do the opposite because of fears they are sure to be infected.

The authors generally admitted to this problem but argued that “although an outcome based on a (viral) test result would have provided more specific information about infections, our primary outcome assessed symptoms that are important to both individuals and the public in a real-world setting.”

Feelings…nothing but feelings.

They then revealed another confounder that could have badly skewed results: “A higher proportion of participants in the control arm (non-masked) reported attending cultural events and restaurants during the (14-day) trial period.”

These are the kinds of places in which airborne pathogens like SARS-CoV-2 are usually found.

Thus the results of the study are about as good as the results from other self-reported studies, none of which have been shown to produce very good results.

A study of self-reported studies warned that “high rates of bias emerge in survey estimates of normative behaviors,” ie. behaviors influenced by social pressure.

Social pressure, for instance, has been shown to encourage people to over-report the amount of exercise they are getting and underreport their sitting time given that sitting too much has been found unhealthy.

A Norwegian study published in the International Journal of Behavioral Nutrition and Physical Activity last year found serious errors in self-reporting sitting time.

“The mean self-reported sitting time was 408 minutes per day, and the mean device-measured sitting time was 516 minutes per day,” a difference of more than 26 percent,” the study reported.

The earlier study of studies citing high rates of bias was titled “Lies, Damned Lies, and Survey Self-Reports? Identity as a Cause of Measurement Bias,” which probably sums up all that need be said about self-reported studies.

Masks might offer some degree of protection against respiratory infections or they might not. But it is interesting to note, in this context, that the prepandemic rates of respiratory infections in countries where masks were common, like Taiwan, were higher than in countries where they were rare, like Sweden. 

Whatever the case, masks in the U.S. have mainly served as a distraction from the real issue – fitness – arguably because it is easier for authorities to tell people to mask up than to tell them to get off their fat asses and move.

The number of people in the U.S. who recognize “Exercise is Medicine” are few and the number advocating this physiologial reality even fewer. 

Exercise in the U.S. is, unfortunately, treated as “play” with the National Football League, the country’s highest profile sports entity, promoting its “Play 60” “platform to empower youth to get physically active for at least 60 minutes a day and encourage a health lifestyle.”

Something is badly wrong if children need to be encouraged to play. Play is a natural thing among the young of most higher level animals or at least it once was.

Given space and opportunity, most kids still play although there is no doubt electronic entertainment is slowly but steadily altering their behavior. But the big fitness problem is really with adults, anyway, and then tend to think of “play” as something one outgrows

Exercise to them becomes “work,” and as they now live in a world where machines have made nearly everything as easy as possible, this work is easily avoided.

“Exercise is Medicine” is a great slogan, but it’s a hard sell because there is no money to be made and thus no motive for capitalists to promote the idea when the money to be made is in selling medicines or even masks.

There is money to be made in both, which encourages their manufacturers to promote them. There is no money to be made in selling exercise as medicine and thus no incentive for anyone to advertise it.

Government could in the name of public health, but there, too, exists a reluctance to tell people to get up and get moving let alone to begin designing infrastructure to encourage walking or cycling as a means of transportation rather than driving anywhere.

One can make a valid argument that the greatest threat to American health these days isn’t Covid, the flu or the next new pathogen waiting to take root but the motor vehicle, which has for large numbers of people all but eliminated what used to be the daily exercise of getting about.