We’re publishing a guest post today by John Collis, a recently retired nurse practitioner and a regular reader of the Daily Sceptic. He thinks that people presenting with Covid symptoms may be infected with more than one virus, not just SARS-CoV-2. Could the herpes family of viruses – such as mononucleosis/glandular fever – also be playing a part?
Over the course of the last two years, as different symptoms were being reported for Covid, long Covid and vaccine reactions, there seemed to be a pattern emerging that rang a few bells with me. To put this into context, for the past 15 years I was a nurse until I retired earlier this year. During that time I worked on a neurology ward and in the Emergency Department. I encountered patients who developed neurological and clotting problems a few weeks after having a viral infection, typically a stomach bug.
The reports of vaccine trial participants developing neurological problems made me think of an autoimmune response initially, but I thought nothing more about it until the symptoms of long Covid were being described, particularly fatigue. Initially, I shrugged this off as a normal post-viral reaction, until I recollected the long term effects of infective mononucleosis/glandular fever.
I knew that some members of the Herpes family of viruses never actually leave the body but lie dormant. The classic example is the virus that causes chicken pox; under certain circumstances a person who has had chicken pox may develop the painful condition shingles.
After researching the herpes family of viruses I discovered that each one of them adopts a dormant state in different types of cells in the body. For example the virus responsible for cold sores (Herpes simplex) and that responsible for chicken pox (Varicella Zoster) reside in neurons. There are others that reside in the B-cells and T-cells of the immune system. These viruses are pretty much ubiquitous across the adult population, around 90% for all but one member where the prevalence is around 15%. Fifty per cent of five year-old children already have the virus responsible for glandular fever, Epstein-Barr virus (EBV), although its designation is the somewhat uninspiring HHV-4.
Besides the well known diseases associated with these viruses, I discovered that they can cause respiratory complications such as pneumonia, one even producing “ground glass” images on CT or X-ray; cardiac problems including myocarditis; neurological problems such as Guillain-Barré syndrome, and, in the case of EBV, Multiple Sclerosis; clotting disorders and endocrine disorders.
Cytomegalovirus (CMV or HHV-5) is able to cross the placenta and causes congenital problems including deafness and other neurological issues.
As mentioned earlier, these viruses lie in a dormant or latent state in the body and can be reactivated into an infective or lytic state if suitable conditions exist. One of the prime reactivating triggers is stress, which has been noted in astronauts returning from space and in patients who have been in ITU for more than five days. The exact mechanism remains uncertain, but there is a suggestion that some of the substances forming part of the immune response can actually trigger the latent to lytic state transformation. There is a suggestion that EBV may reactivate randomly in the mouth and throat. It has also been found that EBV causes ACE2 receptors to develop across certain cells when it is in the active lytic phase. ACE2 receptors are used by SARS-CoV-2 to access and infect cells.
The possibility that these viruses were playing a part in the whole SARS-CoV-2/Covid narrative, including the vaccines, provided me with an impetus to discover whether there was any published literature over the last 20 months. I discovered reports of skin rashes associated with two other herpes family viruses both in Covid patients and in post vaccination patients; similarly, reports of Herpes Zoster increasing during high infection rates. Mortality and morbidity increase in patients who have both Covid and reactivated herpes viruses. There are reports of neurological symptoms after a SARS-CoV-2 infection, along with eye and foot problems all associated with herpes family viruses. One report has myopericarditis caused by sudden HHV-6 infection leading to a potentially fatal shock condition in a Covid patient.
What conclusions may be drawn from this brief overview?
a) Covid may not be a disease state created by a single virus but in some people may involve the reactivation of one or more herpes family viruses.
b) Long Covid may be associated with the reactivation of one or more herpes family viruses.
c) Vaccination reactions may be associated with reactivation of herpes viruses.
Clearly, although 90% of adults have latent herpes viruses of different sorts, not everyone develops significant symptoms of Covid, long Covid or reactions to vaccination. Likewise, not everyone who develops Covid, long Covid or vaccine reactions necessarily have reactivated herpes viruses; however, I would suggest that may be because, in general, no-one is looking.
What is the way forward?
Personally, I would suggest that all patients present with symptoms of Covid, long Covid and reactions to vaccination are tested for the presence of herpes family viruses. If such activity is present then there may be a case for suitable antivirals against herpes to be administered. Any teenage child present with non-arrest cardiac problems should be tested for herpes viruses, whether they have had the vaccine or not.
For those who wish to look further down this particular rabbit hole, the following website may be interesting: list of herpesvirus infection studies.
Stop Press: Longtime contributor to the Daily Sceptic Dr. Freddie Attenborough did his PhD on the subject of whether SARS-CoV-1 was caused by a singular causative agent or multiple, interacting agents? You can read papers he wrote on the subject here and here.
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Truth is stranger than fiction because fiction is obliged to stick to possibilities whereas truth isn’t”——Mark Twain. —-Perhaps silly Liberal Progressives need to cut out all the fiction and check out some TRUTH
In the 20th century the Marxists murdered at least 100 million people. In Russia 18 million people passed through the Marxist slave-camps. Yet dimly flickering fragments of humanity like Sally Rooney still think there’s something wonderful about Marxism. Weird.
Pol Pot
Mao
The Kim dynasty
“dimly flickering fragments of humanity like Sally Rooney”
Now that is poetry.
Thank you.
Interesting, isn’t it?
It’s OK to be a communist.
For me anybody who declares his/her support for communism effectively says “yes, I think Lenin’s idea of the red terror was a great one, the forced labour camps and the summary executions were a fantastic way of keeping the population under control and there is a lot to be said for mass famine and starvation”.
“The Bolsheviks started out with the determination to remedy the abuses of Tsarist Russia. Under the Tsars, about 17 death sentences were carried out each year. The communist revolutionaries thought that outrageous. They screamed bloody murder: The death penalty should be abolished. However the contract contained a small footnote: In the beginning, there still would be executions it it was necessary to install communism itself as a system. In the first months after the Russian Revolution of 1917, there were 540 executions per year; after a few years, this increased to 12,000 per year; and between 1937 and 1938 more than 600,000 executions were carried per year.
Even more astounding than the numbers of victims was the arbitrary way in which people were sentenced to death. Each city and region was given weekly and monthly quotas that stipulated how many ‘traitors’ had to be arrested. If, at the end of such a period, the local mandate holders observed that the target number had not yet been reached, they took to the streets and arrested people at random:”
Extract from The Psychology of Totalitarianism by Mattias Desmet.
Never heard of Sally Rooney. I don’t read any contemporary fiction. Still working my way through my parents’ book collection – that will keep me going for the rest of my days. Default assumption is that anything contemporary will be bollocks. There are hundreds or thousands of great works of literature I haven’t read. I feel no need to buy or read the “latest thing”.
Couldn’t agree more, although there is a contemporary work here and there that’s worth reading; it’s just that finding such rarities is so time consuming – while finding great works of art that were produced in the ‘past’ – a country Rooney doesn’t care to visit – is easy. So much great art to absorb, so little time. Rooney and her ilk just don’t matter.
Not long ago, the prospect of nuclear annihilation was the favoured excuse for non-fecundity, so the prospect of an imaginary climate apocalypse seems a remarkably feeble pretext. It wasn’t always thus – my sisters were both born in the darkest days of WWII, when a Nazi victory was a real possibility. (I’m a post-war boomer – boo, hiss(II)).
Tucker’s very enjoyable review of Rooney reminds me of the Beachcomber character who wrote “A marvellous book – I look forward to reading it!”.
I don’t quite get why somebody who starts off with ‘ I’ve never read any of her novels and I don’t intend to start now,’ has been given the task of her character assassination? That is just pure bias for its own sake. A massive drop in journalist standards by the Daily Sceptic here I’m afraid. I don’t agree with Hitler or Mao but at least I made an effort to read their writing before criticising.
I was disconcerted by his opening line too, but actually I got Tucker’s point pretty quickly, his dismissal of Rooney’s work without even reading it becoming perfectly acceptable to me: contemporary writing is sooo predictable – why waste one’s time with it? That’s not to say that nothing produced today is readable – but Rooney has been so repitively clear from the start about her views – she’s so much a purveyor of millennial angst and nothing else, and sooo happy to publicize it – that the assumption that this is just more of the same is probably justified. And “probably” is good enough for me, given how much good stuff there is out there. After all, Rooney herself is a fan of not reading things (see the ‘pre-1921’ reference in Tucker’s article). In the case of many writers, contemporary and otherwise, I’d agree with you; but you can smell the assembly-line predictably of Rooney’s views from a mile off – and, in the same vein, a big body-swerve of the kind that grown-ups give on principle to the effete 20/30/40-something tattooed, purple-haired, pierced brigade is a sign of maturity to me. I just know what they’re going to say.
It was hilarious. I loved it.
So did I!
What a miserable sounding vacuous, ignorant old woman – even though she’s 30 something
Never mind the politics, feel the grammar. I might be influenced by my early education in parsing and analysis of sentences, but a writer who can say “Me, my family and friends, we……” fails the 11+.
This was brilliant . Thank you. I too viewed Sally Rooney through the lens of looking at who read her. It’s the sort you overhear in Hackney. The poseur childless. I guessed her ‘characters’ enjoy the navel gazing of privileged post-university students aiming well-rehearsed barbs at the privileged. Novels have to write stinging dialogue because it’ snot as if the characters haven’t been able to think about what they are going to say.
Rooney produces derivative dystopian self indulgent and dim output. The unutterably stupid protest against Baillie Gifford sponsored literary festivals is a spectacular own goal. A fund manager which invests more than any others in a post carbon world. A poorly considered narcissistic own goal which harms literature and allows her to feel good about herself while revealing intense ignorance..
Her books are dreadful according to my daughter who is 24. Well she only bothered with Normal People. My son is in publishing and he his opinion was lower.