Coronavirus: Thread

[grarpamp]

> corrupt narratives...

Why COVID Is Like AIDS

https://alexberenson.substack.com/p/why-covid-is-like-aids

In 1981, doctors in New York and Los Angeles saw healthy young men
sicken and die within months, their immune systems apparently
destroyed.

The deaths set off a frantic search for the culprit. By 1983
virologists had identified a novel pathogen they would call Human
Immunodeficiency Virus.

Over the next decade, scientists learned much more about HIV, which
early on had a fatality rate close to 100 percent, worse even than
Ebola or smallpox. Ultimately they tamed it - perhaps the greatest
success for scientific and medical research in the late 20th century.

But the political story of AIDS is much trickier. Scientists realized
quickly that gay men and intravenous drug users were at far higher
risk of contracting HIV than the general public. But they feared
people might not support funding for AIDS research - and stigmatize
those groups further - if they explained that reality openly.

So they didn’t.

As Smithsonian Magazine reported in 2013:

    “Federally-funded campaigns sought to address a large number of
people from all backgrounds--male, female, homosexual or heterosexual.
The America Responds to AIDS campaign, created by the CDC, ran from
1987 to 1996 and became a central part of the "everyone is at risk"
message…”

The deception probably increased the public’s willingness to fund
research. But it came with serious side effects. Smithsonian went on
to explain:

    “Some AIDS organizations, especially those providing service to
communities at the highest risk for contracting HIV, saw the campaign
as diverting money and attention away from the communities that needed
it the most.”

It also caused needless fear in people at vanishingly low risk,
especially heterosexual women.

Perhaps most important, it was fundamentally untrue.

That fact should matter to anyone who believes truth - even unpleasant
truth - ought to drive public policy decisions.

Which brings us to COVID.

SARS-COV-2 isn’t even in the same time zone as HIV as a killer. But it
is like HIV in one crucial way. It plays favorites.

After a year, most of us know that the elderly are at much higher risk
from coronavirus (though even well-informed people may not be aware
HOW much higher the risk is).

But what public health authorities have gone out of their way to
obscure is how much obesity - especially severe obesity - drives the
risk of the coronavirus in younger people.

In April, British researchers published a definitive paper on the
subject in The Lancet Diabetes & Endocrinology, a peer-reviewed
journal. The researchers examined the medical records of almost 7
million people in England to look at the link between obesity and
severe outcomes from Covid, including hospitalization and death.

The topline findings show only a moderate link between extra weight
and Covid risk. But when the researchers looked more closely, they
found that’s because in older people, being overweight does NOT drive
excess risk.

So the researchers divided the patients into four age ranges: 20-39,
40-59, 60-79, and over 80. They found that in the two younger groups -
including adults up to age 60 - being obese was associated with nearly
ALL the risk that Covid would lead to intensive care or death. The
findings held even after they adjusted for many different potential
confounding factors, like smoking, non-weight-related illnesses, and
wealth.

The excess risk was extremely high even for people who weren’t
morbidly obese - defined as a body-mass index of 40 or more. A person
between 40 and 60 with a BMI of 35 - someone who is 230 pounds and
5’8” - had about five times the risk of dying of Covid of a person of
normal weight. For younger adults, the excess risk was even higher,
and for morbidly obese people even higher still.

In contrast, people of normal weight under 40 are at essentially no
risk of death from Covid. The researchers found their rate to be under
1 in 10,000 per year. Even in the 40 to 59 age range, normal-weight
adults had an annual risk well under 1 in 1,000.

The researchers did not include those stunning findings in the main
body of the paper, only its appendix. Still, they were clear in their
discussion about the overall results:

    “Our findings from this large population-based cohort emphasise
that excess weight is associated with substantially increased risks of
severe COVID-19 outcomes, and one of the most important modifiable
risk factors identified to date.”

In fact, the findings suggest that for people under 60, weight loss
would be the single best way to reduce the risk of Covid - probably
even more than a vaccine (and with no side effects).

But of course you haven’t heard about this paper.

No one has. The public health establishment has decided that an honest
discussion of who is really at risk from Covid might smack of
victim-blaming - just as it did a generation ago with HIV.

This time, though, we haven’t just frightened a bunch of people at
essentially no risk. Our viral lockdown theater has been far more
destructive, for kids who have lost a year of school and everyone
else. In one final irony, lockdown-related weight gain may have
actually worsened the risks last year.

It’s long past time to tell the truth.