Post Reply - A new pandemic

For several years, when minimizers downplayed consistent findings of post-COVID immune damage, they stated that were we experiencing large-scale immune dysfunction, we’d expect to see spiking fungal infections, spiking bacterial infections, worsening viral outbreaks, pneumonias and other opportunistic infections. We are now seeing all of these effects internationally, yet minimizers continue to turn a blind eye and the press continues to push “your kid wore masks in 2020” as the explanation.

We are even beginning to see large resurgences of previously-eliminated-in-rich-countries viruses like measles. Lack of vaccination is a culprit; so is normalizing sending sick kids to schools, telling parents kids need to get sick to be healthy, denying people paid sick leave, and kicking kids’ immune systems in the teeth multiple times a year.

Unless we change course urgently- unless we fight back against the normalization of constant illness and the individualization of a critical public good- we are going to see a long, slow, across-the-board decline in health and life expectancy amid increasingly uncontrollable disease outbreaks and overwhelmed hospital systems. I haven’t even gotten into the damage COVID does to blood vessels, kidneys, livers, brains, and hearts, how it can trigger autoimmune diseases and reactivate latent pathogens; all of that information can be found elsewhere on this site. But the reality is that our kids will be continually reinfected with COVID while navigating the return of measles and other vaccine-controlled diseases, while being told there is zero technology that can protect them and zero reason to protect them, while contracting flu and RSV more frequently and with worse severity.

This is not 1824. It is 2024. We have the technology and knowledge to mitigate disease spread. Let’s fight for a future that is safer, better, and healthier than the world we grew up in, rather than sicker, crueler, and technologically regressed. If we don’t face reality and understand what we’re sacrificing right now, the next generation certainly will.