A new study finds that the global impact of the COVID-19 pandemic over the past four years coincides with a new surge of many other infectious diseases well beyond their pre-pandemic levels. The study was reported by Airfinity, a UK-based data and analytics company specializing in monitoring and forecasting disease and public health trends globally.
The implication of this finding is that the systematic dismantling of public health measures by capitalist governments around the world, allowing SARS-CoV-2, the virus that causes COVID-19, unfettered access to the world’s population , created the conditions for even greater damage to the world’s population. Human health.
Airfinity has already tracked the dire impact of China’s COVID zero lifting in late 2022, which resulted in hundreds of millions of people being infected and more than a million deaths. Last week, the company published a new analysis on its webpage showing that “the world is seeing a resurgence of at least 13 infectious diseases, with cases higher than before the pandemic in many regions.” More than 40 countries or territories have reported at least one resurgence of infectious disease, 10 times or more compared to their pre-pandemic baseline.
As shown in the figure above in the upper left corner, these include cholera, dengue fever, invasive group A streptococcal disease, which can cause “strep throat”, but with ramifications serious and fatal, tuberculosis, polio and influenza. Other increasing diseases that have significant consequences for children and immunocompromised people include measles, respiratory syncytial virus, chickenpox, and whooping cough.
The increase in these diseases beyond their pre-pandemic levels, in some cases by several orders of magnitude, is deeply troubling. In this process, Long COVID appears to play a central role. It can affect almost every organ system in the human body and acts as a mass disabling event, with more than 200 symptoms meticulously documented by the National Academy of Sciences.
In the United States alone, nearly one in five people have suffered from Long COVID, which represents 50 million people. The prevalence of this chronic disease stands at almost 7 percent, or approximately 17.6 million people.
Phillip Alvelda, CEO and president of Brainworks Foundry and former program director at the Pentagon’s Office of Biological Technologies, who was instrumental in the development of mRNA vaccine technology, described the impact of long exposure to COVID on immune resistance to other diseases in a recent two-year study. -interview part published by the Institute for New Economic Thought. He emphatically declared:
Even a mild or asymptomatic infection can harm the immune system. This can leave you vulnerable to new illnesses that may not have bothered you before, but now, with your immune system weakened, these new illnesses can take hold and attack you. Additionally, conditions that may have been latent or contained in your body by your immune system could resurface now that it is weakened, such as shingles, HIV, or a resurgence of herpes. We’re seeing resurgences of all of these things in the general population. We are also seeing a resurgence of measles, whooping cough and polio – all the diseases we thought we were rid of.
The long-term impacts are considerable and most likely lifelong. Even two years later, heart attack risks double and stroke risks triple, not to mention the myriad neurological and metabolic problems that contribute to overall health decline. This only raises the specter that repeated infections cause cumulative damage, further weakening the entire human organism. Currently, on average, every American has experienced three episodes of COVID-19, a figure that is expected to more than double by next year at current rates.
Worse, the impact of these infections on children who are repeatedly exposed to COVID-19 and other respiratory pathogens in crowded, poorly ventilated schools remains a largely understudied area. This is a direct consequence of the ruling class’ campaign to reopen “the economy”, i.e. capitalist profit, by reopening schools so that parents of school-age children can be forced to ‘to go to work.
Communities have been inundated with the perpetuation of the lie that children are immune to COVID-19. Current figures showing widespread academic decline are falsely attributed to lockdowns, which helped save lives early in the pandemic, and not to the impact of the health consequences of the disease itself on children’s ability to learn .
The children’s problem was highlighted in a recent Australian report titled ‘Too many children with Long COVID are suffering in silence’. David Putrino of Putrino Labs, a rehabilitation innovation organization for the Mount Sinai Health System in New York, which has been at the forefront in the study and treatment of this disease, said: “The world of these children becomes very small, very quickly. »
He added:
We see children missing school and being unable to participate in sports. We see social isolation. Long COVID is much more complicated and brutal for young people. Adults tend to be better able to manage the medical and political intricacies of their illness. I don’t like the concept of comparative suffering, but I know that children have a harder time accepting it because people seem to understand it less.
All of this also means that Long COVID kills, a point that the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) and federal public health officials have downplayed. As Alvelda noted, Long COVID kills “immediately 1.5% of people who get it.”
However, discussions of COVID-19 and its consequences have largely disappeared from mainstream media. Public health dashboards have been removed. Instead, anti-science policies are enacted that assure the public that they can safely return to work even if infected with a contagious pathogen. This simply means that the policy of mass death has become “officially” normalized.
The only significant exception to corporate silence has been the large Bloomberg News report produced in collaboration with Airfinity, which documented the resurgence of 13 communicable diseases. Some of the facts found in this report are surprising:
- Flu cases in the United States have jumped 40 percent compared to pre-pandemic years.
- Cases of pertussis, or whooping cough, increased 45-fold in China in the first four months of 2024 compared to the previous year.
- In Australia, cases of respiratory syncytial virus, RSV, have almost doubled compared to a year ago.
- Argentina and Brazil are facing the worst dengue epidemics on record.
- In Japan, we are witnessing an unexplained resurgence of Streptococcus A.
- Measles is reappearing in Britain, parts of continental Europe and 20 states in the United States.
- Globally, 7.5 million people experienced new cases of tuberculosis in 2022, the worst total since the World Health Organization began global surveillance in the mid-1990s.
As the table suggests, there are many causes, differing from region to region, but almost all are linked to the COVID-19 pandemic and all are exacerbated by the global crisis of capitalism.
Even as the FDA debates which strain COVID-19 vaccines will target next, principled experts in the field warn that this attempt at catch-up will do little to alleviate public health concerns raised by Long COVID “for always “. SARS-CoV-2’s ability to constantly adapt and change, pushing through the latest vaccines, has the effect of breeding complacency even though it is the only treatment capable of reducing the risk of Long COVID.
The only effective means to combat COVID-19 and these re-emerging pathogens, whether common or rare, are proven basic public health policies: testing, monitoring and isolation; masking with N95 masks; purify indoor air. Health systems and public health infrastructure need resources to function as intended. And with the threat posed by the highly pathogenic avian virus, there are immediate concerns for which the world is less prepared than ever.
It is capitalism as a social disease that mocks science. The current surge in infections across the world is a symptom of this sick social condition.