The Impact of COVID-19 on Scientific Thought: Long COVID, Vaccination Side Effects, and Tracking Apps

I wrote so many times that the covid would contribute relevant research for years that now I feel terrible if I steal your results from you. I know that no one wants to even hear about the pandemic, let alone the knowledge that derives from it, but I believe that my obligation -and perhaps yours as well, idle reader- is to pay even a shred of attention to the effects that the SARS-CoV-2 is taking on scientific thought. Remember that the great strength of science is that it inflicts a bloody, sharp and permanent criticism on itself. That’s what allows you to rule out errors,…

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I wrote so many times that the covid would contribute relevant research for years that now I feel terrible if I steal your results from you. I know that no one wants to even hear about the pandemic, let alone the knowledge that derives from it, but I believe that my obligation -and perhaps yours as well, idle reader- is to pay even a shred of attention to the effects that the SARS-CoV-2 is taking on scientific thought. Remember that the great strength of science is that it inflicts a bloody, sharp and permanent criticism on itself. That is what allows you to rule out errors, correct theories and put received knowledge in serious trouble.

A growing number of doctors and scientists, for example, are becoming convinced that there are rare cases of long covid, an enduring neurological condition, which are associated with vaccination, and they start calling them long vax. Symptoms appear days or weeks after vaccination and include fatigue, headache and cardiovascular disorders, sometimes the sensation of receiving an electrical shock, sometimes the famous “brain fog” that many patients have described.

A question of journalistic ethics. Ascribing an adverse effect to vaccination would have been a risk in 2021 or 2022, because vaccines have saved many millions of lives in half the world. But it’s time to turn the page. I insist that they are rare cases, much more infrequent than cases of long covid that causes mere infection with the virus, but the observations warrant a more systematic study. In the medium term there will be many patients who benefit from it. Fear of toxic anti-vaccine networks is a lousy adviser. Against the lie is not fought with silence, but with arguments.

Another issue that has just been clarified is the usefulness of mobile applications for tracking. The widespread perception is that we gave them a lot of pomp and circumstance and then they were of no use. But reality does not agree. During 2020, the first year of the pandemic, some 50 countries deployed these systems. If a covid positive person was close to a healthy person for more than 15 minutes, the healthy person received a notification. As long as they’d both downloaded the app, of course. British scientists now estimate that this tool saved thousands of lives in his country. No current anti-pandemic plan, not even that of the WHO, makes the slightest mention of these applications. It’s a mistake.

Speaking of the WHO, its new chief scientist, the British doctor Jeremy Farrar, recently landed after 10 years at the Wellcome Trust, one of the largest biomedical foundations in the world, assures that will remain focused on covid so that global health does not recede in the wrong direction. Farrar wants to be closer to countries, with the stated intention of providing them with the science they need to make their own decisions. If he alone achieved that, a monument would have to be made for him. If science informed policy decisions on key issues—health, education, climate change—governments would pay less attention to the toxic waste in circulation. I fear, however, that we are a long way from that world.

2023-07-06 03:00:00
#virus #science #lesson