Figmund Sreud
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Hmmn, … Presidents Putin of Russia and Biden of the US are to hold a phone call at 11:30 pm Moscow time today. This phone call has been initiated by Putin.
There must be some kind of unexpected happening, … an urgent one, I suspect.
F.S.
Well, … World Junior Hockey tournament toast mid-way!
The International Ice Hockey Federation has cancelled the remainder of the 2022 World Junior Hockey Championship because of rising cases of COVID-19, according to multiple reports.
F.S.
From RT article in today’s “Rattle”:
In diplomatic meetings next year, Russian officials will urge Washington to halt the bloc’s expansion
To add to that, another RT article describes what will happen, … if war happens:
The last war: How a US-Russia conflict would play out
“… direct military confrontation between the two countries would not help solve a conflict, but instead be likely a world-ending catastrophe.”
https://www.rt.com/russia/544608-last-war-in-human-history/
… probably a close enough projection!
F.S.
Well, … here we have how Ontario, Canada, deals with COVID-19.
https://brightlightnews.com/ontario-loses-1000-icu-beds-during-pandemic/
Incredibly, during the middle of a supposed pandemic, the province of Ontario has managed to lose 1,114 adult ICU beds from May 13, 2020, to Dec. 24, 2021, according to the province’s own data.
… in addition:
Most alarming in this new information is the fact that the Ontario govt increased its $39.6 billion 2020 budget (“$16.3 billion to protect people’s health and $23.3 billion to protect the economy”) in its COVID-19 Action Plan to $51 billion for 2021. Nowhere to be seen are the 500 new “surge” beds that Premier Ford promised Jan. 18 for Toronto, Durham Region, Windsor, Ottawa, and Kingston.
… fwiw,
F.S.Wishful thinking by Kunstler:
This traditionally blank week between Christmas and New Year’s, when almost, nothing gets done, is the opportunity to stop-and-assess the situation. Do you not see what is going on? Will you allow yourself to keep getting hosed by illegitimate authorities? Do you want your personal sovereignty back? Do you want your country back? Will you go along with obvious malevolence just to avoid standing out and risking your status, your livelihood, your special privileges? Do you actually believe in what’s known as your sacred honor? And what relation it has to reality? Do you understand that periodically in history the human race goes crazy and does terrible things that it later regrets? This is one of those times.
Stop and Assess
Anyway, observation from my local/em> perch – Calgary, Alberta – is that stop and assess is not going to happen any time soon. If anything, the madness index amongst hoi polloi is just getting elevated by the minute.
F.S.
Oh, … it’s a White Christmas this time on the island, … a cam view just 25 metres from the house!
http://www.pointholmesrecreation.ca/rampcam/
F.S.
Thinking of all of you on this forum this festive season and wishing you a joyful holidays!
The Best Classic Christmas
… best,
F.S.
Dam just gave in, … La Belle Province – a nickname for Quebec – goes first, other provinces and territories will follow:
“Our health system is already in crisis.”
Bars, gyms, movie theatres, concert venues and spas must close as of 5 p.m. Monday. Restaurants will have to reduce their capacity to 50 per cent and limit their hours from 5 a.m. to 10 p.m. Professional sports will have to be held without audiences.
Schools will close early for the holidays, shutting down as of Monday evening and returning on Jan. 10. Elementary schools will remain open only for vaccination campaigns and the distribution of rapid test kits.
Working from home is now being mandated for all non-essential workers, including civil servants. The provincial government is pausing all ministerial public activities, such as news conferences that are not related to COVID-19.
Hours before the announcement, Quebec reported a record number of cases for the past 24 hours, with 4,571 new cases, three more deaths and 21 more people in hospital.
Hospitalizations, at 397, are already higher than half of the province’s capacity.”
… bold added.
https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/montreal/new-closures-covid-19-quebec-1.6292622
F.S.
Herr Fauci continues to grind down his falsies down ( … froth and all)!
The protection offered from two-dose mRNA vaccines — like those produced by Pfizer/BioNTech and Moderna — is “quite good particularly against severe disease,” Fauci said Sunday.
“But when you get to Omicron, the protection significantly goes down,” he said. “But the good news is when you boost someone, it goes right back up.”
Omicron ‘is going to take over’ this winter, and Fauci says Americans should brace for a ‘tough few weeks to months’
https://www.cnn.com/2021/12/19/health/us-coronavirus-sunday/index.htmlAside: … at ~80 years of age, this phlunkin’ dump truck is pretty active, … I say!
F.S.
• ‘The Moment Of Truth Has Come’ For Russia & NATO – Moscow (RT)
—————————————Hopefully, … hopefully this is just a start of serious negotiations. Following is a good initial write up on this:
“To me that sounds like: ‘Let’s stop moving forces around and lets sit down and talk.’ That is fine with me. Do it.”
Russia Details Security Demands To U.S. And NATO
https://www.moonofalabama.org/2021/12/russia-details-secruity-demands-to-us-and-nato.htmlIt’s all about The International Communityd and about “The International Community”. Yes!
… fwiw,
F.S.
From REFI NITIV this a.m.:
• BioNTech SE & Pfizer Inc: The European Commission said on Sunday it had reached an agreement with BioNTech and Pfizer for an extra 20 million doses of their COVID-19 vaccine to be delivered to EU member states in the first quarter of 2022. These doses come on top of an already scheduled 195 million doses from BioNTech- Pfizer, bringing the total number of deliveries in the first quarter to 215 million, a commission statement said. The commission and member states have also exercised an option to order more than 200 million BioNTech-Pfizer COVID-19 doses adapted for the Omicron variant and expect delivery from the second quarter of 2022.
• Moderna Inc: The company said that a booster dose of its COVID-19 vaccine appeared to be protective against the fast-spreading Omicron variant in laboratory testing and that the current version of the vaccine would continue to be Moderna’s “first line of defense against Omicron.” The vaccine maker said the decision to focus on the current vaccine, mRNA-1273, was driven in part by how quickly the recently discovered variant is spreading. The company still plans to develop a vaccine specifically to protect against Omicron, which it hopes to advance into clinical trials early next year. “What we have available right now is 1273,” Dr. Paul Burton, Moderna’s Chief Medical Officer, said in an interview. “It’s highly effective, and it’s extremely safe. I think it will protect people through the coming holiday period and through these winter months, when we’re going to see the most severe pressure of Omicron.”
• Novavax Inc: The company is expected to start delivering its COVID-19 vaccines to the European Union in the first quarter of 2022, an EU source said, as experts for the region’s drug regulator met to decide whether to approve the shot. The EU Commission had no immediate comment and the U.S. biotech company was not immediately available for comment. The EU source declined to be identified because they were not authorised to speak to the media. If approved, the two-dose vaccine, branded Nuvaxovid, would be the fifth coronavirus shot to be brought on to the EU market and arrives as the Omicron coronavirus variant spreads.
… so you are informed!
F.S.
@WES: … I have concluded here in Canada, all of our political parties, both provincial and federal, have all been bought by Pfizer and company.
——————-You think? Have a listen to about first 9 minutes of T2 interview ( taped on Friday, I believe).
Omicron, Omicron, … blah, blah, blah! Greta-like performance according to my wife!
“Omicron doesn’t care if we’re tired of restrictions,” … “It’s going to keep doing what it does anyway.
“We have a choice, because we’ve seen it so many times. If we act early and carefully to hold back, to starve Omicron, if we over the next two weeks don’t feed it, don’t give it opportunities to spread more than it has to, we’ll have a much better winter and a way better spring.”
Trudeau says he believes that, despite widespread pandemic fatigue, Canadians will do what it takes to control the spread of Omicron because they are now “empowered with knowledge.”
https://ifunny.co/picture/what-a-maroon-what-an-ignoramus-IjNdGENc8
F.S.
Interesting. The Menticide Manual : A Series
… by a German writer and cultural critic.Yes. Here is the starting point:
Foreword
The easiest way to destroy a man in body and soul is to harm him in all ways and forms imaginable and claim it‘ll be good for him. This demonic logic, its inversion is telling him that doing good would actually be bad for him, creeps into our mammal brains through early childhood dreams.
In these particular childhood dreams, which all humans experience versions of, the paralyzed dreamer is the victim of a brutal injustice or a fatalistic accident; say he is being raped in the bushes or is being gradually squashed by a tank or cartwheel while a consolidating voice, maybe his mother or maybe a passer-by, is assuring him that “it’ll soon be over” and that “all will be fine.” This nightmare is the result of childhood trauma: an abusive experience, a great injustice, an incomprehensible horror… yet the world around us seems just fine with it!
All tyrants abuse their underlings‘ childhood traumas and tell them “it is for the best of you” and that “the pain goes away, I promise.” Only one more round of beating, one more war on terror, one more crackdown on dissidents, only one last state of emergency and we are through with it.
As adults we learn to cope. We tell ourselves that what does not kill us makes us stronger or that life is suffering anyway. If that’s what it is, and this experience is universally shared by most human beings, it follows that indeed we may inflict on each other the most horrible things and do not even need to pretend “it’s for your best,” because it goes without saying that it could not have been for anything otherwise.
Most readers will be aware of genocide, the destruction of a genus or group, and of homicide, the killing of a body. We know the many ways a group or a person can be eliminated: slowly through torture and poisoning, quickly through cuts, holes and strangling – murder! What remains a taboo in literature and the news though, is the various ways we are able to kill reason, logic and sanity – menticide!
This concise text will introduce to our distinguished readers the most deadly ways to subvert, to demoralize, to lobotomize and finally to liquidize someone‘s brains… until they are reduced to nothing more than another helpless Schizo Fran or Mona Loser ready for suicide or the local madhouse.
… and here is latest of the series ( with links to all previous segments at the end). Introductory sentence:
Have you ever sucked on plastic? Sure you have. It has no smell. Astroturfing is big corporations or the government replacing organic stuff with synthetics and nature with replicates.
The Menticide Manual – Astroturfing
fwiw,
F.S.Dear Life – Jim Peterik & World Stage
This the only vid of this I could find: https://youtu.be/RDdo01atoxQ
… bit of lyrics:
“DEAR LIFE, AT YOUR PLEASURE
THIS IS MY OPEN LETTER
NEED YOUR HELP IF THIS WORLD IS TO SURVIVE
WE HAVE LOST ALL PERSPECTIVE
ALL OUR DREAMS ARE REJECTED
TRY YOUR BEST TO KEEP OUR HOPES ALIVE
IT’S IN DESPERATION I COME TO YOU
MY HEART IS OPEN WIDE …”F.S.
… er, Rehab: https://youtu.be/KUmZp8pR1uc Amy Winehouse
… and here we have the news for today from “La belle province”,Quebec:
COVID updates, Dec. 16: Quebec cuts capacity limits in stores, bars, restaurants to 50% as of Monday
https://montrealgazette.com/news/local-news/covid-19-updates-montreal-quebec-new-cases-vaccine-vaccination-booster-shot-omicron-lockdown-holiday-party-travel-december-16Of course, there is another hot spot in Canada: Kingston, Ontario. The very worst infected COVID-19 town!
Kingston, Ont., area now has highest rate of COVID-19 cases in Canada
“As of Dec. 16, the health unit was reporting a rolling seven-day average of 471.4 cases per 100,000 residents — far surpassing the next highest, the Chaudière-Appalaches region in Quebec, where that number sits in the mid-200s.”
https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/ottawa/kingston-health-unit-highest-covid-19-case-rate-canada-1.6288819Oh, Canada, … you wilting!
Anyway, … if this shit-show continues, we all will need to go to Rehab!
F.S.
From my in-box this a.m. – two specific notes ( obviously overlapping a bit), …
… first:
TOP NEWS
• Moderna COVID-19 shot more likely to cause heart inflammation than Pfizer’s, study shows
Moderna’s COVID-19 vaccine is up to four times more likely to cause inflammation of the heart muscle, a very rare side effect, than its rival vaccine from Pfizer-BioNTech, according to a Danish study published in the British Medical Journal late on Thursday.… second:
STOCKS TO WATCH
• BioNTech SE, Moderna Inc & Pfizer Inc: Moderna’s COVID-19 vaccine is up to four times more likely to cause inflammation of the heart muscle, a very rare side effect, than its rival vaccine from Pfizer-BioNTech, according to a Danish study published in the British Medical Journal late on Thursday. The study, in which almost 85% of Danes, or 4.9 million individuals, aged 12 and older participated, investigated the link between mRNA-based COVID-19 vaccines and heart inflammation, also known as myocarditis or myopericarditis. Separately, European Union governments have agreed to exercise an option to buy over 180 million doses of a version of the COVID-19 vaccine adapted for the Omicron variant developed by BioNTech and Pfizer, the head of the European Commission said.… suggesting a harm business is good business. Invest wisely!
F.S.
Intriguing!
Only two countries vote against UN resolution condemning Nazism!
F.S.
@ my pedants said know: Those who stand their ground are cool. Kids know that.
_____________________Yes, … but will those who know will actually stand their ground? My son and his pals and palets – 18 to 30 years sample – understand the game very well. We talk about it around the table extensively. They are mostly in full agreement – their talks and opinions would fit quite well on this forum, … yet, yet pretty well all already went and got their jabs! You know, … explanation goers: … cant go to the hockey game without an official QR code on their iPhone, can’t go skiing without one either. Bars require jab status, Tim Horton’s, restaurants, et. al., too. Going across the boarder to the U.S, is restricted to those without QR code, …
… so much for understanding of the situation! Kids, …
Best,
F.S.
Bit of a twist: … interesting article on vaccines suppliers:
Conclusion
1. A forward-looking market will evaluate the vaccine manufacturers based upon available information on Omicron in a changed covid vaccine landscape.
2. Three key issues arise from the arrival of the Omicron variant. The current Wuhan based formulations will most likely be made redundant by an escape variant Omicron. Omicron will most likely become the dominant variant and all information so far indicate that it will be a milder version than Delta.
3. Each of the three key issues has consequences for a changed vaccine environment which carries a high risk of negative disruption to vaccine manufacturers and a significant reboot of the covid vaccine market.
4. The size of the post-Omicron covid vaccine market cannot be established without more certainty as to the consequences of the changed marketing requirements and the characteristics of 2nd generation vaccine candidates. We’ll have to return to this aspect once we have suitable information.
5. Attempts to sell the now redundant Wuhan based vaccines to the public as still their best option could backfire very badly with more vaccine hesitancy and an attitude of, what’s the purpose, when protection is fleeting.
Investors in vaccine stocks should clinically evaluate the risks introduced by the Omicron variant to the revenue and income expectations for each vaccine manufacturer and its implications for the share price of each.
6. Investors in vaccine stocks should clinically evaluate the risks introduced by the Omicron variant to the revenue and income expectations for each vaccine manufacturer and its implications for the share price of each.COVID-19 Vaccines: The Big Omicron Reboot For BioNTech, Moderna And Novavax
… fwiw
F.S.
Panic in Canada! Yes. It all started with Province of Ontario.
Ontario’s official update on COVID-19 projections, Dec. 16, 2021:
Key findings
• Cases are climbing across most public health units. The Omicron variant will shortly become the dominant variant.
• Omicron transmits very quickly. Early evidence suggests it can produce severe disease. Without prompt intervention, ICU occupancy could reach unsustainable levels in early January.
• Although vaccines are less effective against Omicron infection, boosters can substantially increase protection. Even 2 doses likely provide strong protection against severe illness. The risk of severe illness is dramatically higher in the unvaccinated.
• We can help protect the most vulnerable with vaccination (children and boosters). Rapid rollout of booster doses is essential, with strong focus on the most vulnerable (e.g., long-term care, shelters, high- risk communities) and healthcare workers.
• Increasing vaccination is not enough to slow this wave. Circuit breakers with strong additional public health measures (at least 50% fewer contacts) and strong booster campaigns (250,000 per day) could
blunt the Omicron wave. High-quality masks, physical distancing indoors, improved ventilation,
and increased access to rapid testing can help buy time for boosters to take effect and keep schools open.• Although uncertainty persists, waiting for more information will eliminate the opportunity for action.
Above findings are now heralded, hourly – on the hour, every hour – on Canada’s national network – CBC
Rest of Canada reacts, … boosters now recommended after three (3) months after second jab!
As I’m currently shopping for a replacement air filter for my furnace, I see a definite difference the way folks mall around in the mall, … almost overnight, folks reverted back to a behaviour as it was the way back at the advent of the pandemic. Freaky times are back, … returned with vengeance!
F.S.
Bit more off topic stuff for today:
“President Xi expressed his pleasure in meeting President Putin virtually at the year-end, their second virtual meeting in 2021 and their 37th meeting since 2013. President Xi noted that on multiple occasions President Putin has hailed Russia-China relations as a model of coordination between countries in the 21st century, …”
President Xi Jinping Had a Virtual Meeting with Russian President Vladimir Putin
https://www.fmprc.gov.cn/mfa_eng/zxxx_662805/202112/t20211215_10470186.htmlThe 21st century, … them sands are shifting!
F.S.
Here we go, … all double-vaxxed NHL players and staff:
“The Flames’ training facilities are currently closed and all players are isolating and being tested daily. Although they are scheduled to return to action Saturday against the Columbus Blue Jackets, that game will presumably be postponed.”
Calgary Flames COVID-19 outbreak has 17 more confirmed cases
https://calgarysun.com/sports/hockey/nhl/calgary-flames/calgary-flames-covid-19-outbreak-has-17-more-confirmed-cases… on another note:
Effective immediately, indoor gatherings remain capped at 10 adults, but those people can be from as many households as desired. Children and youth 17 and under do not count toward the 10-person limit, …
Alberta makes ‘very modest’ changes to COVID-19 gathering rules ahead of holidays
Alberta makes ‘very modest’ changes to COVID-19 gathering rules ahead of holidays
… what a bloody circus!
F.S.
@ John Day: … after 60+ nuclear experimental explosions on Marshall Islands by the U.S., one would expect no Marshall Islands, … but I digress.
Anyway, … I did view few more vids of attending dignitaries, but my mind kept recalling names like: Jacobo Árbenz, Patrice Lumumba, João Goulart, Kwame Nkrumah, Salvadore Allende, … many more! Mohammed Mosaddegh, …… and couple of vids:
Best,
F.S.
Bit off daily topic: Summit for Democracy just happened. Participants – subset in our word (all autocrats?) intervened. Here are their visions as listed by the organizer of the summit:
https://www.state.gov/official-interventions-the-summit-for-democracy/… fwiw
F.S.
OK, here we go. Following is just a latest – about 10 hours old – snip (example) of how we Canuckstanians get bombarded by MSM – CBC The National News, in this case – about COVID.
It’s relentless, it’s 24/7, … that keeps up for about 21 months since the very beginning!
Oh, … gawd, help us! ( … and I thought Trybuna Ludu*was bad in my childhood!)
F.S.
*) Trybuna Ludu (Polish pronunciation: [trɨˈbuna ˈludu]; People’s Tribune) was one of the largest newspapers in communist Poland, which circulated between 1948 and 1990. It was the official media outlet of the Polish United Workers’ Party (PZPR) and one of its main propaganda outlets along with the televised news program Dziennik.
Glimpse into Russians frustration with the U.S.:
“ There is one-sided negative predictability, in fact. As for any prospects for improvement, everything is completely unpredictable. This is a sad conclusion based on the results of the long journey that we have travelled with the current US administration, with Donald Trump, and with Barack Obama. These problems did not emerge yesterday. They have to do with the US tendency, by and large, to deny Russia the role of a major independent player in international relations while trying to impose its own approaches to a whole range of issues, including how we should live in our own country.
All of the above certainly limits our prospects for straightening out relations – at least at the present stage, I would not risk giving any optimistic forecasts. We can definitely say there is predictability in that we will have to continue to deal with just this kind of America and this kind of American policy. And we are ready for this.”
Deputy Foreign Minister Sergey Ryabkov’s interview with Izvestia, December 13, 2021
https://www.mid.ru/en/foreign_policy/news/-/asset_publisher/cKNonkJE02Bw/content/id/4992391F.S.
2021 Person if the Year
The founder and CEO of SpaceX and Tesla, Elon Musk, has been named Time’s 2021 Person of the Year for being a “clown, genius, edgelord, visionary, industrialist, showman, and cad.”… so you know!
F.S.
https://www.toronto.ca/wp-content/uploads/2021/11/9862-A7305152-1024×1024.jpg
Success!Today, December 12, about 2,000 of Toronto’s youngest community health superheroes received their COVID-19 vaccine at Scotiabank Arena as part of Toronto Kids Vaccine Day! Yes, …
Toronto Public Health and The Hospital for Sick Children’s best vaccinators made Toronto Kids Vaccine Day a success. These doctors and nurses turned out to be absolute experts in speaking with children and caregivers about vaccines as well as provided child-friendly experiences for vaccination. Seriously, … our national media – CBC – proclaimed so!
F.S.
@ Dr. D. : “support, fund and harmonize knowledge on SARS-CoV-2”
That was the key component, focus, and takeaway from the Event-201 wargames. Nothing about the virus, no way to stop it, all about media, messaging, and control.
__________________________________Yes, control first, … than a forced transformation! The Great Reset after the pandemic.
You see, Canada is deeply committed to Devos Crowd through federal governmental leaders. Yes!
T2, Socks, aka Canada’s Prime Minister Justin Trudeau, a non-financial Finance Minister and Deputy Prime Minister of Canada Christina Alexandra Freeland, … and a former Bank of Canada and Bank of England governor, … and also United Nations special envoy for climate action and finance, Mark Joseph Carney, are all members of WEF and are fully committed to “improve the state of the world”!
The World Economic Forum is fronting The Great Reset initiative!
F.S.
Operation Extermination–The Plan to Decimate the Human Immune System with a Lab-Generated Pathogen, by Mike Whitney – The Unz Review
“If someone wished to kill a significant portion of the world’s population over the next few years, the systems being put in place right now would enable it.” Dr. Mike Yeadon, former Pfizer Vice President
F.S.
@ zero sum: I must be the only person listening to CBC covid updates from the different provincial health officials.
The lies just roll off. Their own data is making them liar. The questions, from the media, are fluff.
____________________Surprised? Don’t be. In April 2020, the Government of Canada established “The COVID-19 Immunity Task Force” (CITF). The Task Force’s mandate is “to catalyze, support, fund and harmonize knowledge on SARS-CoV-2 immunity for federal, provincial, and territorial decision-makers in their efforts to protect Canadians and minimize the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic.”
… and so, CBC, CTV, Global are all tuned into one and only one – mandated and official – channel for information, … no exceptions!
F.S.
@ Dr. Day: Hmm, … “it’s not normal for the heart rates of younger and athletic patients to jump from 60 to 120 just from walking across a room or while they’re asleep”? Yes, … this suggests to me of an outlandish possibility that – just perhaps – this virus did specifically evolved ( … or was devised? ) to impede a physical performance of a younger and fit person. Or a large batch of, … of a very specific traits.
F.S.
@ Dr. Day Thank you, Doc. I really appreciate you response.
For some reason, here in Canada, we don’t have sign in into National Geographic to read it. Strange, …
Anyway, … since I have an open access to the article, here it is, a copy of the text:
How COVID-19 harms the heart
Many patients are experiencing heart palpitations, chest pain, and shortness of breath even after recovering from COVID-19. But new studies offer reason for hope.
Danielle Huff was on her treadmill when she first noticed the pain in her chest. She had just recovered from a terrible case of COVID-19 about two or three weeks earlier, during which she’d had just about every symptom imaginable: sore throat, headache, congestion, coughing, loss of smell, body aches, a mild case of pinkeye, and a constant heaviness in her chest like there was a bowling ball weighing it down.
But this feeling in her chest was different—it was a sharper pain that came on suddenly. Huff, an Illinois school administrator in her 30s, has a family history of heart issues, and she worried that it might signal something serious. Although she’d always tried to live a healthy lifestyle—doing yoga or walking every day—she soon found herself too frightened to exercise.
“It got to the point where I just couldn’t,” she says. “I was scared of the chest pain because I didn’t know what it was.” Ultimately, her doctor referred her to a cardiologist who specializes in treating patients who have recovered from COVID-19 but still experience cardiac symptoms.
From the earliest months of the pandemic, scientists have suspected that COVID-19 is not just a disease of the lungs, but also a disease of the heart and blood vessels. “We realized very, very early that clotting was playing a major role,” says Jeffrey Berger, director of New York University Langone’s Center for the Prevention of Cardiovascular Disease. Even in March 2020, physicians were seeing unexpectedly high rates of blood clots in their patients, leading to a rise in heart attacks and strokes. Autopsies also revealed masses of tiny blood clots in places where doctors don’t normally see them, such as the liver and the kidneys.
(Coronavirus in the U.S.: Where cases are growing and declining.)
Now it has become clear that COVID-19’s cardiovascular damage doesn’t resolve as soon as a patient recovers from the initial infection. For some patients, MRI scans show signs of inflammation months after clearing the virus. Others continue to have elevated levels of troponin, a chemical that’s released into the blood whenever there’s damage to the heart muscle.
Oddly, Huff took a battery of heart-related tests and the results came back normal. Still, she found herself so short of breath she had to step out of a yoga class and couldn’t walk across her school building without needing to sit down. And about a month after she recovered from COVID-19, she began feeling random heart palpitations.
Adding to the mystery, some people who had only mild or even asymptomatic cases of COVID-19 also report long-lasting symptoms such as heart palpitations, chest pain, shortness of breath, and extreme fatigue. Scientists are still baffled about what’s causing them.
“To me there’s no question these individuals are suffering real symptoms,” says James de Lemos, a cardiologist at the University of Texas Southwestern Medical Center and a co-chair of the American Heart Association’s COVID-19 CVD registry steering committee. “The question is, is there some injury to the heart that’s leading to symptoms that we’re not seeing?”
There is reason for hope. Researchers have made strides toward understanding how to prevent COVID-19 from attacking the heart and blood vessels. Meanwhile, physicians are learning more every day about how to treat long COVID symptoms—and rigorous investigations are underway to help shed light on why they occur.
HOW COVID-19 ATTACKS THE CARDIOVASCULAR SYSTEM
Physicians quickly learned in early 2020 that the use of blood thinners, which help keep blood from clotting, improved the chances of survival for moderately ill COVID-19 patients. But Berger says it also became clear that there was more to the deadly blood clotting than what they could treat with these anticoagulant therapies alone.
“One in four patients were still dying or requiring organ support,” he says.
In the last five to 10 years, scientists have begun to understand that platelets play a role in promoting unwanted clotting and inflammation in other diseases such as HIV, psoriasis, lupus, and rheumatoid arthritis. These tiny round blood cells serve one major purpose: to stop bleeding by binding to a damaged blood vessel and forming a clot. With that in mind, Berger and a team of researchers set out to investigate what role the platelets might play in COVID-19.
“We found it was nothing like we would have expected,” Berger says. “It was like somebody changed the genetic architecture of these platelets.”
In a study published in Science Advances, the researchers showed that the virus can enter megakaryocytes, the bone marrow cells that make platelets. The infected cell then alters the genetic material in the platelets so that they become more active and give off protein signals that make the lining of the blood vessels sticky and inflamed. This makes the vessels prone to developing clots that can spread throughout the body.
Scientists also learned that the virus weakens connections in the tissue that lines blood vessels, making them leaky instead of sealing them up, as you might expect when clots are present.
“It’s like a double-edged sword,” says Ben Maoz, a biomedical engineer at Tel Aviv University and lead author of a recent study that identified the SARS-CoV-2 proteins that cause the most damage to the blood vessel lining. Somehow, he says, COVID-19 affects the blood vessels “in a dual and opposite way.”
Leaky vessels allow blood and other chemicals in the body to spill into places they’re not supposed to go—including the air sacs of the lungs and the tissues of other organs. That can have a cascade of downstream effects, from the flooded lungs seen in many severe COVID-19 cases to complications of the liver, kidneys, and, of course, the heart.
“Things we’re supposed to be protected from are suddenly coming in,” Maoz says. He likens the harm this causes to a garbage bag with holes in it: Those holes will allow some waste to seep back into your home. Some of the subsequent damage, like the smell and the foul liquid, will be noticeable right away. But others—like, say, a resulting rat infestation—may not be evident for months. The extent of that harm will depend on how bad the leak was and how long it lasted.
POST-COVID SYMPTOMS
But it’s not clear exactly how this blood vessel damage is connected to the lingering cardiovascular symptoms in patients who have recovered from COVID-19. Maoz points out that the virus causes harm in many complex ways that are difficult to disentangle. Yet physicians have continued to see signs of damaged heart tissue such as myocarditis, inflammation of the heart muscle, or high levels of troponin months after hospitalization from COVID-19.
Berger says it’s not unusual for a virus that causes such severe inflammation to have residual consequences post-recovery—particularly among patients who had moderate or severe disease and needed to be hospitalized. Worryingly, some patients who had asymptomatic, mild, or moderate disease—including children—also have similar evidence of heart damage. (The real risk of heart inflammation to kids is from COVID-19—not the vaccine.)
Yet mounting evidence suggests that myocarditis due to COVID-19 is more rare than initially believed, de Lemos says. In September a Centers for Disease Control and Prevention study showed that the risk of myocarditis is nearly 16 times higher in patients with COVID-19 than those without. However, the study concluded that the condition is uncommon for both populations—and the risk of myocarditis from COVID-19 is just 0.146 percent. De Lemos says the condition also does heal within months.
“Most of those hearts look fairly normal when reevaluated during follow-up,” he says.
Then there are patients like Huff. Amanda Verma, a cardiologist who treated Huff at the Washington University School of Medicine’s post-COVID clinic in St. Louis, says that some patients come in with chest pain but their stress tests are normal. Others complain of palpitations, yet when equipped with heart rate monitors, their heart rhythms appear normal. Still, Verma says those tests aren’t telling the whole story.
“If you dig a little deeper, you’ll notice that the heart rate pattern isn’t quite normal,” she says. Although it’s expected for a person’s heart rate to rise while walking, it’s not normal for the heart rates of younger and athletic patients to jump from 60 to 120 just from walking across a room or while they’re asleep—which is what was happening to Huff.
This abnormal increase suggests COVID-19 triggered dysfunction in the autonomic nervous system, the pathways of nerve cells that automatically control vital functions such as breathing and the heartbeat, Verma says. It’s part of the evolutionary “fight or flight” response that allows your body to function without having to be consciously instructed. For COVID-19 long-haulers, that system appears to be out of whack.
“People often tell me they’re exhausted by the end of the day—and, yeah, who wouldn’t be if your heart rate was up that high all day?” Verma says. “It’s like you’ve been running all day.”
Scientists have yet to understand how COVID-19 might be causing this type of dysfunction. Some hypotheses suggest it could be a result of the body’s excessive inflammatory response to the virus, or perhaps it could even be related to sex hormones, since women are more likely than men to become COVID-19 long-haulers. Either way, the inability to name the syndrome makes it challenging to get insurance companies to cover treatments—and is maddening for patients who feel their symptoms are not being taken seriously.
“It’s unbelievably frustrating for patients who suffer from this because they don’t get answers,” de Lemos says. “To some extent validating that this is real is the first step. This is real illness, and we just don’t understand it yet.”
REASONS FOR HOPE
Researchers are making progress on finding treatments that could reduce the severity of COVID-19—and ultimately improve cardiovascular outcomes. Berger and his team are studying drugs that target the platelets to prevent them from activating and causing clotting.
Meanwhile, Maoz and his team have identified the five virus proteins that cause the most harm to the blood vessel lining. They are testing a model that will allow researchers to identity the proteins that inflict damage on other parts of the body. This molecular understanding will help to develop drugs that can block the specific proteins from attacking the blood vessels and causing critical illness.
“It’s amazing to see how fast we’ve been able to adapt and answer fundamental questions,” Berger says. “The speed of science has dramatically improved.”
However, he acknowledges that none of these potential drugs that would prevent the platelets from clotting or block the virus proteins from attacking the blood vessels will help people who are already suffering from long COVID. To do that, scientists ultimately need to figure out what’s behind their strange constellation of symptoms.
Earlier this year, the National Institutes of Health launched a collaborative research initiative that will support large-scale studies of long COVID-19 in children and adults. And Verma says that physicians who specialize in long COVID-19 are starting to find ways to treat it, from prescribing anti-inflammatories for chest pain to beta blockers for reducing a patient’s blood pressure when their heart rate is out of control. Even exercise—when carefully monitored and structured so that it doesn’t exacerbate fatigue—can help.
There’s also anecdotal evidence that long COVID can resolve over time—even if that may take a year to 18 months. Verma says she’s been able to take some of her patients off their medication, and many of those who haven’t recovered completely do eventually feel better after treatment
“The big question though is, is this going to impact their health in 10 or 15 years down the road?” she says. “Did it do something we just can’t see?”
For Huff, things have gotten better. After taking medications for her high blood pressure and elevated heart rate, the palpitations and shortness of breath have dissipated. Intriguingly enough, so did the frequent migraines that she’s had since she was 13. She’s still too afraid of the chest pain to go back to exercising, but she’s hopeful for the answers that ongoing research and open communication between doctors and their patients may yield as they learn together about the long-term implications of COVID-19.
“There’s a lot to learn, and I can understand the frustration with not knowing what’s going on,” she says. “But I’m at a point of acceptance that I’m just not going to have all the answers right now.”Again, … very much appreciate your input to this forum. Thank you!
Best,
F.S.
_How COVID-19 harms the heart
Many patients are experiencing heart palpitations, chest pain, and shortness of breath even after recovering from COVID-19. But new studies offer reason for hope.Read in National Geographic:https://apple.news/A1z1O2Pr3Q9m_Zl1d0OFsbA
Commentary from Dr. Day would be greatly appreciated on above, …
Best,
F.S.
… Pepe Escobar speculates on content of Putin – Biden video discussions of yesterday:
What Putin really told Biden
Russian and US leaders dropped their respective rhetorical gauntlets but nobody really expects Russia to invade Ukraineby Pepe Escobar December 8, 2021
F.S.
… here is a chart from above, in case link happens to be behind a paywall (my was not first time, but first time only! – I’m not a subscriber to ft.com)
F.S.
Trading Covid dips: … variant-triggered dips! [… dipsticks pandemic!]
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https://www.ft.com/content/deaa2633-d3b0-42eb-b87d-a457aaed297fTraders have taken advantage of stock market dips in the past week to scoop up US shares, even as questions persist about the new Omicron coronavirus variant and the future direction of monetary policy.
Investors poured $10bn into equity funds holding US stocks in the week to Wednesday, building on a 10-week inflow streak, according to data provider EPFR.
Investors buy the dip in US stocks as Omicron drives market volatility
https://www.ft.com/content/deaa2633-d3b0-42eb-b87d-a457aaed297fF.S.
