HHS Just Admitted They Screwed Up Massively

A New Long COVID Website is a Quiet Admission of Failure

The end result of gambling with other people’s health.

In what should be the leading headline in mainstream media, the Department of Health and Human Services has published a new website dedicated to Long COVID. This is a remarkable development, after years of disinformation and a blanket slashing of all federal research funding for COVID-19 related topics, and the closing of the Office of Long COVID. In what should come with a series of formal apologies for years of misleading the public by those who are now the leaders of our federal public health agencies, there is silence. It’s as if we are all expected to quietly forget what we were told with our own eyes and ears.

To which I can only say: Nah.

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Faceplanting Into a Shameful Legacy

Champagne for me, chronic illness for thee. Such a great deal!

Let us flash back to fall 2020 and the publication of a useless online petition known as the Great Barrington Declaration, written by Martin Kulldorff and Jay Bhattacharya. Clinking champagne glasses on behalf of wealthy billionaires, they promised “herd immunity” within “3-6 months” by demanding hundreds of millions of unvaccinated Americans embrace a new SARS virus they knew nothing about. This was a radically new proposal unprecedented in the history of pandemics and public health, completely unsupported by evidence.

Now there are a lot of sharp, well-read scholars who subscribe to the Pandemic Accountability Index, and I’m grateful for your support. I have to ask, because memory seems to fail me, but what section of the Great Barrington Declaration told the public to expect that a significant percentage of these unvaccinated millions embracing a new SARS virus would go on to develop serious health complications, including disability & chronic illness that can end their careers, their dreams, and even force them into homelessness? This was a risk that was understood looking at research from the original SARS-CoV-1 outbreak, published a full decade prior.

How morally depraved do you have to be to demand your fellow citizen roll the dice on this sort of life-upending risk?

Before becoming FDA Commissioner, Marty Makary ran around conservative media like the Wall Street Journal and FOX News like a chicken with his head cut off, screeching that Long COVID was no big deal or even loudly declaring “There is no Long COVID, there is only ‘Long Anxiety.’” The Department of Health and Human Services just admitted that he was completely wrong. His lackey Vinay Prasad (who is leaving the FDA again in April) also shared sentiments that those suffering from Long COVID are simply “lying fake disease grifters,” and that it was “invented” by journalist Ed Yong.

Leadership of our federal public health agencies said this is fake news.

As wildly inappropriate and rife with disinformation the HHS’ website is, even going so far as to label Long COVID as merely an “invisible illness” after many afflicted have developed serious physical changes, the HHS’ website is a staggering admission that their leadership was completely full of it. Either they were too incompetent to realize that a SARS virus contained serious potential for long-term harm, or they simply never cared, relishing in all the money and attention. Most likely, it was some combination of the two.

The liberal public health influencers who spent years downplaying Long COVID when Biden was President, suggesting such ridiculous myths like that it would magically go away after enough waves of reinfection through the population, and went on to endorse RFK Jr’s picks to lead these essential agencies as “reasonable” and “surprisingly strong,” have some serious egg on their faces.

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The Greatest Offense of All

Let’s move on to this HHS “Long COVID” website itself. The listed prevalence of “5%-7%” is a significant undercount, aided by years of disinformation and political meddling. This isn’t unusual - we know that COVID-19 deaths were undercounted by 15-30% and even going so far back to 1892, Hamburg was intentionally underreporting cholera deaths as the city’s Chief Medical Officer claimed, “there’s no way to prevent cholera outbreaks.” No, seriously!

We currently don’t have a treatment or cure for Long COVID, and the ongoing demolition of the National Institutes of Health means that America likely won’t be discovering one in the future. Podcast Jay admits as much, falsely equating Long COVID with “vaccine injury,” a far rarer condition exploited by disinformation artists:

What Bhattacharya is really doing here is legitimizing a myth peddled by the worst of the worst depraved Twitter trolls that he follows on his personal account, “DrJBhattacharya:” That “Long COVID” is actually just “vaccine injury;” that COVID-19 is not responsible for the disabling of millions - in line with the CDC’s quack-ridden Advisory Committee for Immunization Practices. Frankly, there’s likely a significant number of people who have been misled into blaming Long COVID on the vaccine thanks to social media disinformation. HHS leaders should be setting an example. Instead, they feed off the sadistic depravity of all their favorite trolls and even encourage it.

Worse yet, with no treatment or cure, this HHS website pledges to provide a “Clinician Locator” who will likely share a great deal of overlap with the same scam artist quacks who raked in the big bucks peddling random nonsense to treat COVID-19. In other words, the leadership of the Department of Health and Human Services are serving up the Americans they hurt with their disinformation on a silver platter to a bunch of crackpot vultures. A federal handout to the lowest of the low.

This is a horrific chapter in the long history of American medicine’s failures to treat and manage post-viral chronic illness. While Long COVID emerged in 2020 under Trump, the vast majority became disabled under the Biden Administration’s mismanagement of the SARS-CoV-2 pandemic. Abandoning these millions of newly disabled Americans to scam artists, quacks, and wellness grifters handpicked by Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. & co. is utterly indefensible.

If you want to be the leader, you have to take responsibility - not run away from it.

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