Stop psychologizing Long Covid, Who died from Covid, The Fauci inquisition, Misusing RCTs, and more

Welcome to the latest issue of the Covid-Is-Not-Over Newsletter!

It’s nice to be back from the summer posting break. Not sure exactly what the publication schedule will be for the next few weeks, but I might not exactly be back to a weekly schedule until after.Labour Day. We’ll see. I have quite a store of links that I’ve gathered since the hiatus started, so filling up the issues won’t be a problem.

What were the summer themes in the Covid world?

Revisionist history and retconning 2020 was everywhere, particularly with the Fauci Showtrials. I might end up doing something specifically on those retcon showtrials at some point.

As usual, there’s a bad study to debunk, this time on air purifiers, of all things. There’s a good response to that study highlighted this week, with two links to Substack posts by Dr. Nicola Jane Boyd.

We did have a few great WTFkery of the Summer Award laureates, with this one on German Workers Can’t Take a Single Sick Day Without a Doctors Note Now also a fine nominee for the Hall of Fame. WTFkery of the Summer Award, Narcissist Edition goes to The Secret Reason Bosses Want Everyone Back in the Office, Every Day of the Week. WTF, indeed.

I really appreciate the CIDRAP daily email and highlight their work here quite often. However, this one is pretty disappointing and merits a WTFkery of the Week Award, How the Mighty Have Fallen Edition: COVID is still here. Is the pandemic? There’s been a soft pandemic denialist strain to their editorial content for a while, as much as their research reporting seems to point in the opposite direction.

AI WTFkery can’t be ignored, with Black prisoners are assigned harsher living conditions in Ontario jails—thanks to AI being a particularly appalling example.

In the No Shib, Sherlock category we have The Eaton wildfire evacuation shelter near LA saw outbreaks of norovirus, COVID, and flu, report reveals.

And finally, I’ll note that the latest edition of the Pandemic Accountability Index’s What COVID-19 Does to the Body has been added to the list of Top Articles.

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• What COVID-19 Does to the Body (11th Edition, August 2026) / Pandemic Accountability Index

• What Do We Know About Long COVID? A Compilation of Medical Research (125+ Studies) / Pandemic Accountability Index

• ANSWERED: Is COVID-19 Harmful to Children? A Compilation of Peer-Reviewed Medical Research / Pandemic Accountability Index

• ANSWERED: Does COVID-19 Impact the Immune System? A Compilation of Medical Research (45+ Studies) / Pandemic Accountability Index

• ANSWERED: Does COVID-19 Harm the Brain? / Pandemic Accountability Index

• WHN joins in the chorus: Medical masks are not PPE / World Health Network

• Yes, We Continue Wearing Masks—Here’s Why: Common Questions Answered / World Health Network

• Seven Things to Know About Long COVID by Marisa Swanson / World Health Network

• Long COVID in Context: Prevalence, Search Interest, and Funding / World Health Network

• Spectrum of COVID-19: From Asymptomatic Organ Damage to Long COVID Syndrome by Andrew Ewing, Špela Šalamon, et al. / World Health Network

• Simple things you can do to avoid COVID by Lucky Tran / Aranet

• Immunity Debt: The Conspiracy Theory Elevated to Popular Pseudoscience That Is Making Children Sick / LIL_Science

• You Have To Live Your Life & more Responses to Common COVID Minimizing Phrases

• Covid-19: Will It Mutate To Nothingness? by Rawat Deonandan

• The Science of How COVID Spreads by Abby / One Life Lived Well

• How respiratory viruses transmit: Why some viruses spread easily and others don’t, and what it means for prevention by Gage Moreno

There is currently no paid subscription option for this newsletter and I do not have any plans to switch to that model. However, Substack does have an option where subscribers can pledge to subscribe “just in case” and a few of you have done so. I very much appreciated the vote of confidence in what I’m doing here. If you want to send a little “Thank You” I have a Ko-fi tip jar set up. It. My plan is to spend whatever is donated by supporting artists on Bandcamp.

By me patio beer!

The COVID-19 pandemic triggered a historic and devastating rupture in the conduct of science and public health. When the virus first emerged, the capitalist ruling class faced a stark choice: mobilizing the vast resources of global society to eliminate the pathogen and save millions of lives or protect the financial markets and corporate profits. Across the world, and most aggressively in the United States, capitalist governments chose the latter. The policies set forth in those early months of the global outbreak did not merely result in a temporary public health failure. They laid the cornerstone for the complete teardown and politicization of the entire scientific community.

To justify the abandonment of life-saving public health measures, the Trump administration weaponized anti-science propaganda, peddling the homicidal strategy of “herd immunity” and demanded a rapid return to work to keep the wheels of profit turning. The Biden administration then codified this approach into a permanent policy of “forever COVID,” dismantling pandemic surveillance, dropping isolation guidelines, and systematically normalizing mass death and debilitation.

This deliberate subordination of human survival to economic demands fundamentally transformed public health institutions. Agencies once tasked with disease prevention were hollowed out and converted into instruments of political enforcement. Decades of scientific advancement were discarded to accommodate a social order willing to accept millions of preventable deaths as the mere cost of doing business.

The six years of the COVID-19 pandemic in the United States were not a natural disaster that befell an unprepared society. The pandemic was a preventable catastrophe whose severity was determined in advance by deliberate policy choices. The empirical data converges on a single, documented chain of causation. Decades of labor market degradation produced profound income insecurity, which forced working class families into poor housing and inadequate nutrition.

This economic precarity guaranteed frontline occupational exposure. Combined with inadequate healthcare access, this exposure led inevitably to COVID-19 infection. Lacking employer-provided sick leave, infected workers were forced to continue working, resulting in severe disease, Long COVID and earlier death. Each link in this deadly chain can be quantified. Essential workers experienced proportionate mortality ratios 19 to 59 percent above the occupational average. At the community level, every $10 per capita increase in local health spending reduced peak COVID-19 deaths by 1.2 per 100,000 residents. Yet the United States, which spends a staggering $14,570 per person on healthcare annually, allocates less than 3 percent of those funds to public health and prevention, resulting in the lowest life expectancy among peer nations.

Within this political economy of mass death, the concept of the “essential worker” requires demystification. During the spring of 2020, capitalist politicians and the corporate media celebrated “essential workers” with performative gratitude. Yet this designation functioned purely as ideological cover for a policy of organized, lethal exposure. In practice, the term “essential” simply meant that a worker’s labor was necessary for the uninterrupted functioning of the capitalist economy, and therefore, their life was entirely expendable.

Senate Republicans staged a McCarthyite witch-hunt against Anthony Fauci Wednesday, an inquisition against science convened for the declared purpose of provoking him into committing perjury. In response to an unending torrent of lies and slander, Fauci answered not a single question, invoking his Fifth Amendment right more than 100 times.

Fauci, who directed the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID) for 38 years, appeared under subpoena from Republican committee chairman Rand Paul, who has pledged repeatedly to see Fauci imprisoned. Days earlier, Paul published more than 1,100 pages of Fauci’s private diaries, together with a 465-page collection of records reaching back to 2001, which were provided by Health and Human Services (HHS) Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. in a blatant violation of Fauci’s right to privacy.

Paul opened by telling Fauci that the pandemic lockdowns “could never have been inflicted without you aiding and abetting the crime.” When Fauci’s attorney David Schertler attempted to speak, Paul ordered Capitol Police to remove him, to applause from the fascist-filled gallery. For over two hours the committee’s Republicans put questions to a witness they knew would not answer, on gain-of-function research and the Wuhan Lab Lie, on what one senator called “experimental gene therapy,” and other far-right conspiracy theories. Paul closed by scheduling a committee vote for August 5 on a resolution certifying Fauci’s contempt of Congress.

RCTs have to be used where outcomes are not directly measurable, like vaccine or drug trials, and where the intervention is predetermined and constant (eg a patient receives a vaccine, and that vaccine stays with the patient throughout the study). Where RCTs fail for measures like filtration is that even if all the technical questions are adequately addressed, because we are looking at treatment of a physical space, rather than an individual, unless the study participants stay within their respective control/intervention locations for the entirety of the study period, the results become largely meaningless. For example, in the JAMA study, we have no idea if residents left the care homes, staff could have become sick at home, and there was no way of understanding what the impact of the HEPA filters was on pathogen concentrations where they were used.

The alternative approach, and much better option, is to simply measure how effective the intervention has been. In the case of HEPA filters, this would involve measuring the pathogen load with and without HEPA filters running.

Where we are testing the public health efficacy of devices, we measure outcomes, we don’t use RCTs. We don’t conduct RCTs on the benefits of refrigerating food. Instead we’ve measured pathogen levels before and after refrigeration and developed food safety standards from there.

The extent of the RCT dogma is also illustrated by the response to RCTs into hand washing. We know good hand hygiene is an essential part of infection control, but as I previously said here multiple RCTs into hand hygiene have failed to produce consistent results proving its efficacy. In fact, one comprehensive, large 2020 RCT study (66 care home units, 640,486 resident days) actually showed more hand washing increases some infections! . The response within the medical community is to either glide over these inconvenient results or to conclude that the RCT designs were not good enough. However, when an RCT finds HEPA filters are ineffective at reducing infections, the RCT construct in this context is deemed to be ‘robust’ and the results reliable. These contradictions demonstrate the levels of prejudice within public health, both in favour of RCTs to assess clean air technologies and against clean air measures in general.

Between us, we bring two perspectives to persistent illness: personal experience of long COVID, and clinical and research experience in chronic illness rehabilitation.

Both have taught us the same thing: when symptoms are real, disabling and difficult to explain, patients need more than reassurance that tests are normal. They need to be believed, assessed carefully and offered ways to make sense of what is happening in their bodies.

Most of these writers previously disclosed their skeptical views on Long Covid before publishing long-form stories on the illness. Why are news outlets outsourcing articles about one of the most important health stories of the decade to ax-grinders? If the media wanted to inform the public about Long Covid, there are many qualified writers who share information and findings, in journals like Nature and outlets like the Sick Times.

National corporate media have created a controversy—”is Long Covid a real medical disease?”—which never existed in any serious form among the experts who research Covid, instead of investigating the actual nuanced debates in that field, like whether viral persistence drives symptoms. These media have given credibility to writers eager to entertain the supposed controversy, while marginalizing writers who start from the premise, widely shared among actual researchers, that Long Covid is a medical disease.

“Are you sure it’s not the menopause?”

I don’t know if my friend noticed my eyes glaze over as she stared at me across the lunch table, one eyebrow raised in a quizzical fashion. It was a question I was bored of hearing — and one that, if landing on a difficult day of symptoms, made it hard for me to keep my irritation in check.

I contracted COVID-19 in October 2022. I tested positive for two weeks, but my symptoms ran the full gamut until March 2023: a constant headache, aching joints, racing heart, cognitive dysfunction, and extreme fatigue. “Like someone had flicked your off switch,” a colleague remarked, after seeing me go into a leaden slumber within seconds of sitting.

In this episode of Still Here, co-hosts Miles Griffis and Betsy Ladyzhets talk to Cousins about developing severe Long COVID at the start of the pandemic, her years-long attempt to return to elite training, and the relapse that ultimately forced her retirement in 2022. She is one of many professional athletes grappling with infection associated chronic conditions, including NHL player Jonathan Toews, tennis player Emily Radacanu, and many more. Cousins reflects on how her athletic background reshaped her understanding of rest, toughness, and listening to her body, and speaks candidly about pushing back on harmful “brain retraining” programs.

What do you do when your medical providers don’t know about Long COVID and internet personalities promise you they have the cure?

In this episode, Miles Griffis and Betsy Ladyzhets talk to Long COVID physician, patient and advocate Zeest Khan about her Long COVID journey, how she looks at new research and off-label treatments as a physician, and how to spot misinformation and pseudoscience online.

More than a year after COVID-19 symptom onset, both previously hospitalized and nonhospitalized women who had long COVID reported four neurologic symptoms more often than their male peers, Northwestern University researchers write. …

An average of 16 months after COVID symptoms began, women in both groups reported four neurologic symptoms more often than men (PNP, 79.6% vs 64.9%; NNP, 76.1% vs 64.6%). Both female PNPs and NNPs more often cited numbness/tingling, dizziness, headache, and pain than men, but only female NNPs reported brain fog, muscle pain, and impaired sense of taste and smell more often than male NNPs.

A new study suggests that Black patients with acute COVID-19 infection are less likely to be diagnosed as having long COVID than White patients, despite no significant difference in long-COVID symptom burden between the two groups. …

They found that, when at least one long-COVID symptom was present among patients who visited a healthcare provider at least bimonthly, Black patients were less likely to be diagnosed as having long COVID than were White patients.

Long COVID affected roughly 3% to 5% of healthcare workers at three Spanish hospitals from 2020 to 2023, with prevalence increasing with age and in some occupational groups, according to a new study published in BMC Public Health. …

Long-COVID prevalence was estimated at 4.9% and 5.0% at two of the hospitals and 3.0% at the third. These estimates are lower than those observed in previous studies, which have ranged from 15% to more than 70% among healthcare workers. A Swiss study earlier this year assessing data through 2024 placed the rate at up to 60%.

Working-age adults living with long COVID feel less satisfied with life, experience less happiness, and have less hope, according to a study published this week in BMC Public Health. The paper highlights the association between having long COVID and poorer wellbeing.

“The findings underscore that the burden of long COVID extends beyond clinical health outcomes to encompass how individuals evaluate and experience their lives,” wrote the authors, from Syracuse University in New York.

“Long COVID symptoms were significantly associated with lower levels of subjective wellbeing in a dose-dependent manner.”

People who work night shifts may face a significantly higher risk of developing long COVID, according to a study published last week in the Scandinavian Journal of Work, Environment & Health. That risk may rise even further among night shift workers who also have chronic insomnia.

More than one in four UK health care workers have been affected by long COVID, with symptoms lasting beyond three months, according to an NHS research program involving a UCL team.

“There is a clear and urgent need for improved workplace adjustments, tailored support for the workforce, and increased learning and understanding of the impact of long COVID for the wider health and care system. We simply cannot afford for history to repeat itself.”

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Warren Haynes. Raven Black Night.