Post viral syndrome data

Well, war, welcome to this talk on Saturday, March 16. Now I want to look at today's

data

that shows that long covid is actually no different from any other

post

-

viral

syndrome

. It's basically another

post

-

viral

syndrome

. It is not a unique phenomenon. I'm not saying that people who claim to suffer from long Co aren't genuinely suffering, they may be, but so are people suffering from any other post-viral syndrome. A syndrome that is simply a collection of symptoms is actually quite interesting, but it is also interesting. What this press release, which is about a paper coming out next month, doesn't say, it doesn't talk about other possible causes of Spike protein pathology, but we'll get to that in a minute, let's actually look at this paper. um quite interesting and it looks like we probably need to remove the term long covid now as this is published on uh simex and it will be published as an official document or as a presentation not until next month as we see here so it's kind of like a preview and because it's a preview, it doesn't really give us all the

data

that we would like, but it certainly gives us some interesting data to go on and also adds some things that we'll do. we will talk about data from Queens land Queens land in Australia, they say this long covid is indistinguishable from other post-viral syndromes and other respiratory viruses are used a year after infection, so it is not something unique to the covid virus, is another post-viral syndrome that we know about and which ones are actually quite common, of course, we recently learned from Dr.

Grimes and Professor Anderson that vitamin D is depleted during infections, so part of this could be because people have very low levels of vitamin D if they have used a whole vitamin D to fight the infection they may have very low levels, so it is a variable that is worth considering, but it is not the goal of this video, so I do not I'll stop at that for the moment, but for a long time Co is indistinguishable, quite strong language from other respiratory conditions correct comparison to influenza and other respiratory viruses Australia Queens land now this is collected during the Omicron wave no evidence no evidence of worse postv viral symptoms or functional impairment one year after infection, in other words, there is no evidence that patients feel worse or may do less one year after infection, say Co, with influenza or other respiratory viruses or viruses , for a long time covid may have seemed like a different and serious disease due to the large number of covid-19 cases, this is very possible there many people contracted covid in queensland suddenly and it could seem like a new syndrome because many people were presenting whereas with influenza there was partial immunity of course, but the other thing to keep in mind is that Queensland has a very high vaccination rate, as many of our countries do, but in Queensland it is around 90%.

Could this be part of the problem? It is not analyzed in the document. Now they took data from 5,112 symptomatic adult individuals, so they took people who had symptoms. these long covid stroke postviral syndromes things like brain fog fatigue cough shortness of breath changes in smell and taste dizziness Fast or irregular heartbeat and generally not feeling as well now did pcrs now the preliminary chain reactions of pcrs were carried out between May 29 and June 20-25, 2022 now, of course, PCR is done for both influenza and Co. They are quite similar tests, so PCR confirmed the covid-19 infection. There were 2,399 people with negative PCR. for covid 2,713 people, so many people were suffering from post-viral infections who had not had positive covid influenza 995, so this gives us a group of 2,399 with a diagnosis of covid and 9995 with a diagnosis of influenza.

Now those numbers sound a little different. but of course statisticians take this into account and those numbers are enough to give us pretty good quality data, so I'm very happy with that now that the results were collected a year later, so keep in mind that it was 2022, the pcrs. the diagnosis was made it was made how the patient felt a year later it was done in May and June 2023 now this is quite high of people who were diagnosed with a positive diagnosis and still report symptoms 16% now as a post-viral syndrome for people still reporting symptoms a year later, 16% is surprisingly high to me, surprisingly high to me.

There could be another cause, but that is not mentioned in the document, but 16% is high. If you're used to dealing with this, let me know if you think 16% is high. It seems very, very high to me, for example, for a post-influenza condition, so 16% are still reporting symptoms. 834 of the 5,112 now still report moderate to severe functional impairment, so it interferes with activities of daily living, actually 3.6% and again I would have thought. that's pretty high sounds high to me those who still report symptoms after a year between postco and post flu those who still report symptoms simply say there is no difference between those who report postco symptoms a year later after flu One year later no they give the numbers It's frustrating but they don't give the numbers but they say there's no difference so we can tell you there's no significant difference between that so there's no difference they're both the same it's another post-viral syndrome no a unique pathology.

And in a sense I think this is good, it's hard to say it's good news because we're talking about diseases, but it's good to know that we're not talking about a new, separate phenomenon, this is another post-viral syndrome, according to this data. now, those with functional limitations of the moderators a year later were given the numbers of non-co adults 3% uh adults positive for covid 4.1% adults positive for influenza 3.4% now it's okay, the covid one looks a little bit worse 4.1% um, but there's really no significant difference between these in the overall numbers now this is from uh bmj Public Health uh comparison at 12 weeks post infection this is a set this is the same author but this is another study from the british medical journal or some of the same authors I think symptoms continue after covid at 12 weeks um 21% continued symptoms after flu at 12 weeks 23% so again a slightly fewer people are complaining of symptoms after covid 12 weeks later, but again the numbers are not statistically different, they are the same, so we are getting the same postv viral effects 12 weeks after covid as 12 weeks after flu. um, one year after covid, rather than one year after the flu and one year after covid or the flu, both in terms of the patient not feeling well and functional deficits.

Anyway, no difference between those groups, moderate to severe functional impairment after covid was 4.1, moderate to severe functional impairment after 4.4, no difference in that time period after 12 weeks in that other study, the obvious question did not address the presence of antibodies against the Spike protein now that you have a covid infection, is the immune system going to eradicate, eliminate, eliminate the SARS Corona 2 virus or get rid of it completely. Now some people with compromised immunity might take quite a few months to do that, so we can get mutations and it may continue for quite a while, but the vast majority of people will clear it completely and even people with suppressed immune systems will completely clear it at some point. moment, so the virus will be completely eradicated, which means that the amount of Spike protein will begin to decrease. go down, but if for some reason the body still produces Spike protein continuously, as we know happened in some post-viral post-vaccine syndromes, sorry, not in post-viral post-vaccine syndromes, then because the virus is still producing the antibody against the La viral Spike protein would still be high so what we have to do is test for the presence of the antibody against the Spike protein, if it is present then the Spike protein is probably still there and we could be dealing with a post-vaccination syndrome if the person is still you feel unwell but there are no antibodies against the spike protein, which means that the spike protein has already been eliminated, so we are probably dealing with a post-viral syndrome, this really needs to be done, so post-vaccine syndromes can continue.

Spike Protein Antibody Um, post-viral syndromes a year later I wouldn't expect to see antibodies to the Spike protein in any appreciable quantities, but that wasn't mentioned in the article, but I think it's important because as Queensland is about 90% vaccinated in adults, it's a shame they did it. I don't take that into account, but here we go, the obvious question was not addressed, Dr John Gerard Queensland, chief medical officer, and I agree with this. These findings underscore the importance of comparing post-co 19 outcomes with those of other respiratory infections and of conducting more research on viral syndromes, in fact, and I have certainly seen patients who are doing well, post-viral syndromes can be life-threatening, they can damage all kinds of organs around the body, post-viral myocarditis when I worked in coronary care was the most common indication for heart transplant I think it probably still is, in fact, so these are common viral infections, viral infections are common , but the amount of knowledge about them is not that great, so that is a well-made point, we need more studies on this, plus we think it's time. stop using terms like long covid because it's just another post viral syndrome now.

I'm just saying here, um, no, no, we have to have complete empathy and sympathy, whatever the correct term is for people with uh. Long covid or post viral syndrome SARS Corona virus 2 um, it doesn't mean it's something insignificant, they can be very sick, but people can also be sick after the flu, it doesn't seem to be a different syndrome. The new syndrome is the point this is raising. They wrongly imply that there is something unique. This is the doctor speaking, Dr. John Gerard. They wrongly imply that there is something unique and exceptional about the long-term symptoms associated with the virus.

This terminology can cause unnecessary others. It may cause unnecessary fear and there are some other references in there if you want to check them out for yourself, so here we go. That's actually quite reassuring to me, but we really need to know more about the differential diagnosis between long covid post long viral. Post-Covid Viral Syndrome and Post-Vaccine Syndrome and testing for the continued presence of the spike protein antibody is an obvious path forward, so obviously we would expect the obvious path forward to be taken or not, but we'll leave it at that. There, that is a separate debate.

So overall I think it's fair. Pretty good news about influenza and covid and other respiratory viruses. Very similar postviral syndromes. There will be more on this. I suspect we'll probably get more data when the article comes out in April and hopefully we'll have it. More data comparing post-vaccination to post-vaccination viral syndromes too thanks for watching