THE problem with internet searches is that they sometimes provide incomplete information. For example, when Chris Baker of Smith Publicity Inc asked ChatGPT or Google to find publications with an interest in long covid and was provided with the result that TCW Defending Freedom, edited by Kathy Gyngell, had published regularly on the topic, he clearly was not provided with the information that we have long considered long covid, much like its purported progenitor covid-19, to be a scam.
As a result of his efforts, poor Chris emailed Kathy with an email subject headed ‘Long COVID Is Quietly Becoming a National Disability Crisis’ which was an advert for Dr Tyler B Evans’s new book, Pandemics, Poverty, and Politics: Decoding the Social and Political Drivers of Pandemics from Plague to COVID-19. Dr Evans was the former Chief Medical Officer for New York’s covid emergency response and is now CEO of Wellness Equity Alliance.
Dr Evans has his own website dedicated to himself which, from the most cursory of inspections, informs you that he is one helluva guy. He is a multilingual physician, academic, humanitarian, father and author. He holds multiple licences to practise medicine in the United States, gained a diploma from the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine and there is hardly a humanitarian cause with which he has not been involved. Palestinian Human Rights Monitoring Group, Médecins Sans Frontières . . . he’s been there and done that.
His claim to be an academic is somewhat thin, however, with only one book, one chapter and ten peer-reviewed publications. As such he would be unlikely to be appointed as a junior lecturer in a UK medical school. This is not an ad hominem attack on Dr Evans, but he must be judged by his own claims.
Dr Evans’s record of work for those less privileged than average is spotless and it is copious. I have no doubt he does stalwart work. Were I to end up in some far-flung war zone with minimal access to food and medical care, there is nothing I would wish to see more than the beaming and well-groomed countenance of Dr Tyler B Evans appearing through the rubble and smoke.
Nevertheless, having a sparkling CV, a string of qualifications and wide international experience does not prevent Dr Evans from jumping on the long covid bandwagon. This mode of transport takes you rapidly to the Shangri-La of the moral high ground, new streams of funding and an open door to most mainstream publishing houses.
In Dr Evans’s own words: ‘Long Covid is increasingly becoming a more common chronic disease that communities across the country need to deal with. Those with the least agency and access to healthcare are the most at risk.’ This is the first time I have seen the middle classes described as having ‘the least agency and access to healthcare’.
According to Dr Evans, a ‘disability crisis’ is being created while ‘the federal government is dismantling the research and support infrastructure’. In the absence of facts, hyperbole is the usual substitute. By ‘facts’ I am referring to such things as a clear link to infection with covid, a definitive diagnosis and objective pathological markers.
We have exposed regularly in these pages that some people (50 per cent in one study of young people) reporting long covid symptoms had never reported having covid. The diagnosis of long covid ranges from fewer than ten to more than 100 possible symptoms and many are so vague as to be indistinguishable from a range of other possible diagnoses. There is no clear pathology associated with long covid.
‘Closing the Office for Long COVID-19 Research and declaring the pandemic “over” does not make the condition disappear,’ reckons Dr Evans. Indeed, but the fault lies not in declaring the pandemic over but in the fact that a pandemic was declared in the first place. Common sense at the time and the evidence emerging shows that the threat from covid was grossly exaggerated and that the actions taken on the back of the initial declaration of a pandemic (primarily lockdowns, lack of access to healthcare and covid vaccines) were a major cause of death.
Meantime, in other long covid news, Global Health NOW listed an article relating to Latino farmworkers in Washington who are suffering long covid symptoms six years after having covid. I have no doubt people in this group, who work with the blueberry crop which is a major feature of the north-west of the United States, are suffering from something. But the assumption it is long covid seems premature.
The article makes no reference to the possibility of confounding factors or alternative explanations for a set of symptoms in a particular group of workers. For example, are toxic fertilisers and insecticides used on the blueberry crop?
What is striking in all of this is not the presence of symptoms, but the absence of rigour. The real danger is not that long covid is being ignored, but that it is being believed too readily. Once a label takes hold, particularly one backed by institutions, funding and media amplification, it becomes remarkably resistant to scrutiny. In that sense, the long arm of long covid may yet prove to be its most enduring symptom.
