While Omicron’s subvariants find new ways to evade vaccines and destabilize immune systems, another pandemic has overwhelmed officials who are supposed to be in charge of public health.
Let’s call it a plague of willful incompetence or an outbreak of epidemiological stupidity. Or maybe José Saramago’s novel has come to life and targeted public officials with a scourge of blindness.
In any case, COVID, a novel virus that can wreak havoc with any organ in the body, continues to evolve at a furious pace.
In response officials have largely abandoned any coherent response, including masking, testing, tracing and even basic data collection.
Yes, the people have been abandoned.
So don’t expect “normal” to return to your hospital, your airport, your nation, your community or your life anytime soon.
Although many public health officials still dismiss COVID infections as inevitable and even beneficial, a growing body of science shows this fashionable dogma is dangerously wrongheaded, if not an outright form of malpractice.
Reinfections, and 2022 is surely the year of reinfections, just increase the damage from COVID, which can be profound: immune dysregulation, blood clots, nerve cell death, inflammation, lung damage, kidney failure and brain damage.
New science shows that Omicron and its variants are getting better at evading immune defences induced by vaccines or by natural infection. BA5, for example, is more transmissible than any previous variant.
As a consequence it is now possible to be reinfected with one of Omicron’s variants every two to three weeks.
The data also shows that each reinfection confers no immunity. A summer infection, for example, will not protect you against a fall infection. But each and every infection will damage your immune system regardless of how mild the symptoms.
Let’s start with a startling U.S. Veterans Affairs study involving five million people.
It looked at the health outcomes after a first, second and third infection in both the vaccinated and unvaccinated. A second infection, for instance, doubled the risk for death, blood clots and lung damage. It also increased the risk of hospitalization by three times. Every COVID infection increased the risk for bad outcomes in a graded fashion.
The unvaccinated fared worse than the vaccinated. “Reducing overall burden of death and disease due to SARS-CoV-2 will require strategies for reinfection prevention,” noted the study.
There is more bad news. Past infection by older variants dampen rather than strengthen immune protection even among those with three vaccinations. “That previous SARS-CoV-2 infection history can imprint such a profound, negative impact on subsequent protective immunity is an unexpected consequence of COVID-19,” noted the researchers in Science.
The high global prevalence of Omicron subvariant infections and reinfections “likely reflects considerable subversion of immune recognition” in the population, the study concluded.
|
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Andrew Nikiforuk has been writing about the oil and gas industry for nearly 20 years and cares deeply about accuracy, government accountability, and cumulative impacts. He has won seven National Magazine Awards for his journalism since 1989 and top honours for investigative writing from the Association of Canadian Journalists.
Andrew has also published several books. The dramatic, Alberta-based Saboteurs: Wiebo Ludwig’s War Against Big Oil, won the Governor General's Award for Non-Fiction in 2002. Pandemonium, which examines the impact of global trade on disease exchanges, received widespread national acclaim. The Tar Sands: Dirty Oil and the Future of the Continent, which considers the world’s largest energy project, was a national bestseller and won the 2009 Rachel Carson Environment Book Award and was listed as a finalist for the Grantham Prize for Excellence In Reporting on the Environment. Andrew's latest book, Empire of the Beetle, a startling look at pine beetles and the world’s most powerful landscape changer, was nominated for the Governor General’s award for Non-Fiction in 2011.
|
![[groups_small]](groups_small.gif)