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Tsunamis hiding in plain sight: spreading depression in clinical neurology
Friday March 13^th, 2026 at 4:07 PM

Nature Reviews Neurology

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sarcozona

28 minutes ago

Epiphyte City

‘It’s surreal’: US sanctions lock International Criminal Court judge out of daily life – The Irish Times
Friday March 13^th, 2026 at 12:49 AM

This summer Kimberly Prost, a Canadian judge at the International Criminal Court (ICC), arrived at her home in The Hague and, as was her habit, called out “Alexa”.

There was silence. The voice-activated assistant did not respond. “Alexa was dead. She wouldn’t talk to me,” Prost recalled in an interview with The Irish Times.

Prost had been added to the United States’ sanctions list, because in 2020 she ruled to authorise an investigation into possible atrocities in Afghanistan, including by US troops. Amazon, obliged to implement the sanctions as a US company, had cancelled her account.

It was just the start of what Prost describes as a “pervasive, negative effect” of the sanctions across all aspects of her life, which has shut her out from much of the international banking system.

The effects of being sanctioned are wide-ranging.

“You immediately lose your credit cards – it doesn’t matter where they were issued or by what bank,” Prost said. Bank transfers can be challenging: a sum of money she tried to send a young couple as a wedding gift has been lost in the system for weeks.

“Online shopping becomes excruciatingly difficult, if not impossible. But there’s other things, everyday things, like ordering an Uber or ordering tickets for something, or booking a hotel.”

“If you have assets in the United States, then they’re frozen,” Prost said. “If you have family or family who works there, visits there, there’s a real danger. One of my colleagues, her daughter’s visa was revoked.”

Sanctioned court staff are from countries including Senegal, Benin, Peru, Fiji and Uganda. Sending money to their home countries has become difficult.

“I can’t buy US dollars, but also I can’t buy some other kinds of currencies, because the transaction would go through the US system,” Prost said. “So for some of my colleagues who are sending money, perhaps to South America or Africa, they have that problem.”

Prost stresses that these relatively minor issues compared with the matters she hears about in cases before the court.

“These are small annoyances, but when they all come together at once in your life, it’s paralysing,” Prost said.

“The purpose is clear. They have said, basically, we’re imposing these sanctions because of decisions you’ve taken in your role as a judge. So effectively, they are interfering directly with the independence of a judge,” Prost said.

“I can’t think of any other way to describe it but an attack on the independence of the judiciary and the International Criminal Court’s independence as an institution, which is why I’m so interested in the public hearing this.”

Prost was added to the sanctions list in August because five years ago she was one of the judges who ruled to authorise an investigation into alleged war crimes by the Taliban, Afghan forces, US forces and the CIA in Afghanistan since 2003.

The US has sanctioned six ICC judges this year, along with the court’s chief prosecutor and two deputy prosecutors.

Israeli prime minister Binyamin Netanyahu. Photograph: Abir Sultan/EPA

The reasons given by the state department relate either to their roles in the Afghanistan investigation or their involvement in the court’s issuing of arrest warrants for Israeli prime minister Binyamin Netanyahu and former defence minister Yoav Gallant in November 2024 for the war crime of starvation as a method of warfare in Gaza, and for crimes against humanity.

[ ICC judges wanted Netanyahu arrested. Now they’re being targeted by TrumpOpens in new window ]

The US and Israel reject the jurisdiction of the court. Neither country is among the 125 signatories of the Rome Statute, which established the ICC in 1998. However, the treaty sets out that nationals of non-member states can be tried for crimes that take place on the territory of states that are signatories.

Afghanistan signed it in 2003 and the state of Palestine in 2014. The court therefore asserts its jurisdiction to prosecute the crimes of genocide, crimes against humanity, war crimes and crimes of aggression that have taken place in Gaza, East Jerusalem or the West Bank, no matter the nationality of the alleged perpetrators.

In an executive order announcing the first round of ICC sanctions this year, US president Donald Trump said the court represented an “unusual and extraordinary threat to the national security and foreign policy of the United States” for its investigations into nationals of the US and Israel. The state department accused the court of conducting “lawfare” and infringing on US sovereignty.

Along with the ICC staff, the US also sanctioned three Palestinian NGOs for engaging with the court in its efforts to “ investigate, arrest, detain or prosecute Israeli nationals”. The court is preparing for the possibility that the ICC itself might be sanctioned as an entity any day.

Originally from Winnepeg, Prost was a public prosecutor in Canada and became specialised in the prosecution of genocide, war crimes and crimes against humanity. She served as a judge on the United Nations’ International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia, which led to the conviction of multiple people for carrying out a genocide in Srebrenica.

[ ‘I’m remembering Srebrenica while Srebrenica is happening in Gaza’Opens in new window ]

For five years, she was the ombudsperson for the UN Security Council’s al-Qaeda sanctions, something Prost calls “an odd background twist that makes this very ironic”.

“Basically, my job was to speak to people who wanted to come off the list,” Prost said. “So I know sanctions very well.”

There is a psychological impact on ICC staff, who have spent their lives working within the criminal justice system, when they suddenly find themselves on a sanctions list alongside people implicated in human rights violations, terrorism or organised crime.

Kimberly Prost. Photograph: ICC

“It’s a bit surrealistic,” Prost said. “Now you’re on that same list. So yeah, it’s a bit shocking.”

Prost was part of the Canadian delegation when the Rome Statute was first agreed in 1998. It was the culmination of a century of efforts to establish an international court to try individuals for the worst crimes in the world, a permanent version of the one-off courts established to try the Nazis in Nuremberg and the perpetrators of the Rwandan genocide.

[ When Nazism went on trial: the Irish journalist in the room at NurembergOpens in new window ]

At that time, the negotiating countries had their differences, Prost recalled, but were united in their overall aim.

“[They believed] there should be a system designed to bring accountability for the gravest crimes: crimes against humanity, war crimes, genocide,” she remembered. “There should be an end to impunity. And that’s what infused the entire negotiation.”

Something that sticks with her from her time as a judge is the testimony she heard that led to the conviction of the former head of the Islamic police force that governed Timbuktu in northern Mali when the historic city was overrun by a jihadist takeover in 2012.

Al-Hassan ag Abdoul Aziz was convicted of war crimes and crimes against humanity for overseeing torture, public amputations and floggings.

“I was sitting in a courtroom having witnesses come from Timbuktu, who’d never been outside of Timbuktu, to testify,” she remembered.

“The power of that testimony, and hearing those victims ... standing up and expressing their rights and expressing over and over again: we want justice.”

Court staff are familiar with challenges to their work. Russia retaliated to the court’s issuing of arrest warrants for president Vladimir Putin and military leaders for atrocities in Ukraine by issuing arrest warrants for ICC staff.

Former ICC chief prosecutor Fatou Bensouda. Photograph: Toussaint Kluiters/AFP/Getty Images

Former prosecutor Fatou Bensouda has said she was subject to threats and intimidation after she opened an initial inquiry into atrocities in Afghanistan and by Israeli forces.

However, the US sanctions are unprecedented. Prost has not ruled out litigation in the US, as she believes the legal basis to the sanctions is questionable, though this would be hugely expensive.

She hopes that speaking openly about the effect will galvanise supporters of the court to defend it and limit the effect of the sanctions. Some of the implementation of the measures outside the US is discretionary. The judge believes it is very important that there is no perception that powerful developed countries are exempt from accountability.

“That would damage the court, if we’re unable to do cases equally wherever justice demands,” Prost said. “This is about a basic need, the imperative of justice for all of us.”

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sarcozona

15 hours ago

Epiphyte City

The Curious Case of the Disappearing Data
Thursday March 12^th, 2026 at 5:08 PM

Last night I tried to access a dataset I’ve used many times before.

Over the past year it has suddenly been getting harder and harder to find. At first it quietly disappeared from the CDC and NIH directories. Search the site directly? Nothing. It was like maybe someone didn’t want us looking at the data? Wonder why that would be???

Fine.

Scientists are stubborn little gremlins. Hide something and we immediately want to know why. So I wrote a bit of code to pull the datasets directly.

And access them I did.

Then I compared the numbers with copies of the data I saved earlier in the pandemic.

They didn’t appear MATCH. But mostly a lot was erased. Gone. Poof

That should not happen.

These datasets are historical mortality metadata. Imagine giant spreadsheets full of numbers that only weirdos like me get excited about. But those numbers represent recorded history. Once illness and mortality data is logged, it doesn’t magically change.

You cannot retroactively “update” who died in 2021 or change a billing code for someone with a catastrophic stroke.

At least not unless someone is actively altering or manipulating the data.

So when historical data suddenly shifts, there are really only two explanations.

Either the laws of physics broke overnight.

Or someone doesn’t want those numbers being looked at.

Which raises two extremely obvious questions.

Who is now controlling the data?

And why the hell are they doing it?

These datasets track mortality and disease trends in the United States. Epidemiologists use them to answer the most basic questions in public health.

Are more people dying than expected?

If so, why?

Once we see patterns, researchers investigate the causes and try to fix the problem. That’s literally the job description.

Find the problem.

Study the cause.

Help people.

Instead, when I tried to access the database again last night, the page refused to load.

Now it displays a message.

“CDC’s website is being modified to comply with President Trump’s Executive Order.”

Why the hell would a sitting president write an executive order to prevent the data from being accessed? The only answer I can come up with? There are things in there they don’t want people to see. Why? Because it shows how BADLY the US and world fumbled Covid and are directly responsible for millions of unnecessary deaths and now rapidly increasing diseases related to repeated COVID infections.

That’s it.

Just a locked fucking door where the data used to be.

And based on the comparisons I ran, the problem isn’t just that the data is hidden.

Some of the most critical pieces appear to have been permanently erased.

Which should scare the absolute shit out of everyone.

Because that data doesn’t belong to politicians.

It belongs to the public.

It’s the closest thing we have to a black box recorder for the health of the country.

For most people this message probably looks like routine government maintenance.

For researchers it feels more like someone just ripped the batteries out of the smoke alarm while the building is actively on fire.

Public health data is the early warning system for society. It tells scientists when something in the population is changing.

When those systems suddenly start disappearing while disease patterns are shifting in ways we have never seen before, scientists notice.

And we start asking questions.

Loud ones.

If you have ever tried to shut me up, you already know that is the fastest way to guarantee I start yelling louder. I am a scientific chaos gremlin who detests cover ups and blatant lying to the public.

COVID was never just a respiratory virus

Early in the pandemic I started writing about what I was seeing in the numbers.

By mid-January 2020 the data strongly suggested the virus was airborne. By the third week of January it was obvious people were transmitting it before symptoms appeared. Based on particle size it behaved far more like measles than the flu, meaning this wasn’t step back six feet and wear a paper mask- this was full sealed NIOSH approved respirator time. Which I recognized and immediately started doing. So far (knock on wood) no COVID- even though I was in the thick of it.

None of that was particularly popular to say.

I was mocked for it.

By scientists. The hospital I worked for. Colleagues I formally had respected. Pretty much everyone that had a voice and didn’t want to look at the truth. But numbers don’t lie, they are the ones lying and obfuscating the truth

Fun times.

By March 2020 something even stranger was appearing in the data.

Patients were not just experiencing lung infections.

Doctors were reporting strokes in young people. Severe clotting disorders. Heart inflammation. Kidney damage. Neurological issues. New autoimmune diseases popping up out of nowhere.

It looked chaotic.

So I did what scientists are supposed to do when something weird appears in the data.

I asked other experts if they were seeing the same thing.

Back when Twitter was still useful, I reached out to researchers across multiple fields.

“Hey… are you seeing this shit too?”

The responses came back quickly.

“OMG YES! I keep being dismissed.”

Ummm so if you sideline the experts in favor of politicians what does that say?

I honestly felt slightly better that those people who were on the top of the field were also being ignored and gaslit. Hey if we were going down, we were going to do it together and while fighting.

A small network of researchers started comparing notes almost immediately. Epidemiologists, physicians, immunologists, public health experts.

Thousands of independent observations later the picture was becoming painfully clear.

COVID was not just killing people through respiratory failure.

It was damaging the body everywhere.

We raised alarms. We shared data. We proposed simple mitigation strategies that could have reduced the damage before vaccines even existed.

And we were ignored when all we wanted was to provide clear simple messaging to help people understand the risk as well as how to prevent the spread. It wasn’t about creating fear. It was giving people actionable information to help keep themselves and their families safe(r). To give folks some control over an overwhelmingly scary situation.

Covid and the cardiovascular risk

Eventually the larger international datasets caught up.

And they confirmed what many of us already had figured out months prior.

Researchers demonstrated that SARS-CoV-2 infects endothelial cells. These are the cells that line blood vessels throughout the body (Varga et al., 2020).

If you want a simple analogy, think of your circulatory system like the plumbing in your house.

Blood vessels are the pipes.

Endothelial cells are the smooth lining inside those pipes that keeps everything flowing properly.

COVID damages that lining.

When the inside of a pipe becomes inflamed and rough, things start sticking to it. Clots form. Flow becomes turbulent.

Now imagine that happening in the pipes supplying your brain, heart, lungs, kidneys, and every other organ.

That is why COVID behaves less like a respiratory infection and more like a disease of the vascular and immune systems.

Subsequent research has continued to show persistent endothelial damage and vascular inflammation long after infection resolves (Aljadah et al., 2024; Stoichita et al., 2026).

The cardiovascular risks following COVID infection are now well documented.

One of the largest studies examining long-term outcomes analyzed health records from the U.S. Veterans Affairs system. Researchers compared more than 150,000 COVID survivors with millions of uninfected individuals.

They found significantly increased risks of stroke, heart attack, arrhythmias, myocarditis, heart failure, and blood clots for at least a year after infection (Xie, Xu & Al-Aly, 2022).

Overall survivors experienced about a 40 percent increase in major cardiovascular events.

Even people whose infections were mild enough that they were never hospitalized showed elevated risk.

Which means this is not just a severe-case problem.

It is an “everyone who got Covid” problem.

Which would normally be exactly the kind of thing researchers would want to track carefully.

Using national health datasets.

You know.

The ones that are now missing.

Each infection adds more damage.

And while scientists are scrambling to understand how bad that damage is across the population, the datasets used to track those trends have been quietly disappearing over the past year.

Now they are simply locked.

Which raises a question that should make anyone uncomfortable.

Why remove the instruments measuring a problem while the problem appears to be getting worse?

What happens when the immune system’s brakes fail

COVID interferes with how the immune system regulates itself.

The immune system has built-in brakes that shut down inflammation once a threat is neutralized.

Without those brakes the immune system can get stuck in a chronic inflammatory state.

Imagine driving a car with the accelerator pressed down and no functioning brakes.

Eventually something catastrophic happens.

Researchers have documented persistent immune dysfunction after infection, including T-cell exhaustion (Chen-Camaño et al., 2025).

T-cells are critical immune cells that coordinate responses against infections and cancer.

When they become exhausted they stop functioning properly. They produce fewer immune signals and lose the ability to identify abnormal cells. Once these cells are exhausted or even erased, you don’t get them back the same. The older you are? Sorry, but they just don’t return.

Numerous studies now show those immune cell populations remain suppressed 20 months or more after infection (Jiang et al., 2025).

This is why we kept getting so sick as a population after each wave of COVID. It’s not because of lock downs. It’s because Covid took a baseball bat to a critical part of our immune system and destroyed it.

This matters beyond those pesky invasive step infections that were suddenly killing kids, or the weird invasive fungal infections, etc etc etc because those were just the canary in the coal mine governments chose to ignore

That portion of your immune system spends every day hunting for cancer.

Let that sink in please. Covid essentially damaged or destroyed the part of our body that fights cancer. The more you get it the worse the damage is to these cells.

Cells make mistakes constantly while dividing. Normally the immune system finds those mistakes and destroys the abnormal cells before they turn into tumors.

If that surveillance weakens, those errors slip through.

The cancer question

Cardiovascular disease is only part of the story.

Researchers are also watching trends in early-onset cancers, meaning cancers appearing in people under 50.

Colorectal cancer gets the most attention because its rise among younger adults has been particularly dramatic (Siegel et al., 2023).

But colorectal cancer is only one piece of a broader pattern.

A 2024 analysis in The Lancet Oncology found early-onset cancers increasing across fourteen different cancer types worldwide, including breast, pancreatic, kidney, and liver cancers (Sung et al., 2024).

Some hospital systems have reported colorectal cancer diagnoses in people under 50 rising by twenty to thirty percent in just a few years (Patel et al., 2024).

Cancer trends normally move slowly.

When diagnoses jump this quickly, epidemiologists start asking questions.

The body’s ability to suppress abnormal cells weakened.

Both processes are heavily influenced by inflammation and immune function.

Which brings us right back to COVID.

Something changed. It started to change right when Covid hit the scene. I do not believe in a “coincidence”, especially one that is now backed by a tsunami of scientifically vetted evidence.

And right back to the disappearing datasets used to track these trends. It is not science it is a cover up.

The US healthcare problem

Now add another layer of insanity.

The United States already operates the most expensive healthcare system on earth.

And one of the least accessible.

We spend more money than any other country in the world and still manage to produce worse outcomes.

Because the system is built around profit.

When people get sick in that system, they are not just patients.

They are billing codes.

Now imagine hiding national health data while simultaneously making healthcare even harder to access.

Which is exactly what the so-called “Big Beautiful Bill” did by cutting federal healthcare spending and Medicaid access for millions of Americans.

Less preventative care.

Fewer screenings.

Fewer diagnoses.

And fewer medical records entering the datasets that scientists rely on.

It is almost a perfect system for making a public health disaster statistically disappear. The US government is essentially telling US citizens to suck it up and please just quietly go die somewhere. We are too busy building ballrooms to fund basic medical care.

If you cannot measure the problem, you can always pretend it isn’t there.

The number that should have triggered alarm bells

A major analysis of U.S. mortality data found that between 2020 and 2022 more than 300,000 excess deaths occurred among Americans aged 18 to 49 beyond what historical patterns would predict (Faust et al., 2023).

Excess mortality simply means more people died than statistically should have.

Three hundred thousand extra deaths in younger adults should have triggered the largest public health investigation in history.

Instead the datasets used to investigate those deaths are being altered, erased, or locked away.

Which raises a very simple question.

If hundreds of thousands of people have died above expected levels, and researchers cannot access the data used to analyze those deaths, how exactly are we supposed to determine what caused them?

Without data, the investigation cannot happen.

And without the investigation, the answers never appear.

Turning off the dashboard lights

Public health surveillance exists so we can detect problems early.

Imagine airline engineers noticing a pattern of engine failures.

Now imagine someone decides the solution is to remove the instruments that measure engine temperature.

Planes would keep crashing.

You would just stop recording why.

Deleting the evidence does not change the biology.

Inflammation still damages blood vessels.

Immune dysfunction still accumulates.

Cancers still grow.

Reality keeps generating new data whether governments acknowledge it or not.

Eventually the numbers return.

They always do.

And when they do, people are going to ask a very uncomfortable question.

Why did the data start disappearing right when we needed it most?

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sarcozona

23 hours ago

Epiphyte City

Babies with COVID-19 develop more serious disease than those with RSV, US data reveal
Thursday March 12^th, 2026 at 5:07 PM

Children under two years of age hospitalized for COVID-19 are more likely to die or become seriously ill than babies with respiratory syncytial virus (RSV), according to a study published this week in Open Forum Infectious Diseases.

Babies can become sick and die from both respiratory viruses, even if they were healthy before becoming infected, according to the study, which was led by researchers from the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

2.9% death rate for COVID, 0.4% for RSV

In the study, 39% of babies admitted to an intensive care unit (ICU) because of COVID-19 needed to be put on a ventilator to breathe, compared with 16% of babies with RSV. Children hospitalized for COVID-19 also stayed in the hospital longer than those with RSV in the study, which included 33 hospitals in 28 states and was conducted from November 2023 to March 2024.

In addition, babies hospitalized for COVID-19 were more likely than babies with RSV to receive vasoactive infusions—drugs given intravenously to manage blood pressure, heart rate, and cardiac output by widening or constricting blood vessels. They were also more likely to need extracorporeal membrane oxygenation, a temporary mechanical breathing and heart support used when standard treatments for those problems have already been tried.

In the study, 2.9% of children with COVID-19 died, along with 0.4% of those with RSV. The 1,406 babies in the study arrived at the hospital with acute respiratory failure, a medical emergency in which the lungs cannot provide enough oxygen or remove carbon dioxide. All were hospitalized in the ICU for at least 24 hours. More than 89% of the babies had RSV, 7.5% had COVID-19, and 3.4% were infected with both viruses.

Children hospitalized for RSV or both viruses were younger than those hospitalized with COVID-19. Twenty percent of babies with RSV had an underlying medical condition, compared with 44% of those with COVID-19.

Medical societies recommend vaccination

Although RSV immunizations were approved in 2023, they were not yet widely available during the study. Only 5.5% of babies age six to 23 months were vaccinated against COVID-19 in the study.

Research shows that vaccinations for both RSV and COVID-19 are safe and effective. The American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists recommends women receive a COVID-19 vaccine at any time during pregnancy and an RSV vaccine between the 32nd and 36th week of pregnancy. Both vaccines can protect newborns too young to be vaccinated.

For babies whose mothers weren’t vaccinated against RSV, the American Academy of Pediatrics recommends newborns under 8 months receive an injection of lab-grown antibodies. The pediatric group also recommends babies age six to 23 months be vaccinated against COVID-19.

This week's top reads

Up to 56,000 people died from COVID-19 or RSV last year

RSV was associated with 190,000 to 350,000 hospitalizations from July 1, 2024, to June 30, 2025, as well as 10,000 to 23,000 deaths, according to new CDC data.

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sarcozona

23 hours ago

Epiphyte City

The COVID-19 pandemic at 6 years: Mass death, debilitation and media silence
Thursday March 12^th, 2026 at 5:06 PM

World Socialist Web Site (en)

Six years ago this week, on March 11, 2020, the World Health Organization (WHO) officially declared the global outbreak of COVID-19 a pandemic. In the six years since, the pandemic has killed over 30 million people worldwide, left more than 400 million suffering from Long COVID and inflicted incalculable damage on the social fabric of every country on Earth. It is one of the most catastrophic events in modern history—and it is not over.

World Health Organization Director-General Dr Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus (center) declaring the coronavirus pandemic a Public Health emergency of International Concern in March 2020. [Photo: Fabrice Coffrini]

Yet not a single major bourgeois publication has so much as acknowledged this anniversary. The pandemic has been deliberately erased from public consciousness by the political establishment, even as the virus continues to spread, disable and kill on a mass scale. In May 2023, under pressure from the Biden administration, the WHO prematurely ended the Public Health Emergency of International Concern, offering political cover for capitalist governments globally to scrap remaining public health measures. Today, the COVID-19 pandemic remains a serious and deadly ongoing threat whose cumulative toll grows with each passing week.

The ongoing toll: Excess deaths and new studies on Long COVID

According to the latest report from the Pandemic Mitigation Collaborative (PMC) for March 9, 2026, the United States is currently experiencing a sustained wave of viral transmission. The PMC estimates that there are approximately 565,000 new daily infections across the country. This elevated level of transmission means that roughly 1 in 87 Americans—or 1.2 percent of the population—is actively infectious on any given day.

SARS-CoV-2 Daily infections March 9, 2026 [Photo by PMC, courtesy of Dr. Mike Hoerger]

Crucially, what is most alarming is not the peaks but the floor—the period between surges. The wastewater-derived data reveals that between-wave baseline transmission has remained persistently elevated since the Omicron surge of early 2022, never returning to pre-2022 lows. This rising floor of endemic infection is arguably more significant than the dramatic wave peaks: it represents the continuous, unrelenting generation of new infections, Long COVID cases and excess deaths, even in the quietest periods of viral circulation, which objectively defines the term “forever COVID.”

The scale of this unchecked spread guarantees a continuous mass generation of post-viral disability. The PMC estimates that 54 million total infections have occurred in the US in the first three months of 2026 alone. And with this transmission comes a massive burden of Long COVID, with estimates that between 205,000 and 820,000 new Long COVID cases are generated every single week from new infections. The PMC model indicates that between 1,200 and 1,900 excess deaths result from these new weekly infections.

Indeed, using actuarial data, they estimated that for 2025 there were between 109,000 and 175,000 excess deaths, up to 73 percent higher than direct COVID-19 deaths. As their figures demonstrate, these excess deaths are on par with the number of people who died of lung cancer (125,000 deaths) in the US, eclipsing deaths from colon, pancreatic, breast and prostate cancer combined.

PMC estimates of excess deaths in 2025 [Photo by PMC, courtesy of Dr. Mike Hoerger]

Their data closely corroborates a recent cross-sectional study published in JAMA Internal Medicine by CDC scientists, which estimated 1.1 million hospitalizations and 101,300 COVID-19 deaths in the US during the 2022–2023 period. For the following period from 2023–2024, they documented nearly 880,000 hospitalizations and 100,800 deaths. The JAMA study highlighted that older adults bear the brunt of this crisis, with those aged 65 and older accounting for 81.2 percent of all COVID-19 deaths in the latest surveillance period while representing less than 20 percent of the US population.

As the report highlights, these preliminary estimates of COVID-19 deaths are higher than the 89,098 and 59,616 COVID-19 deaths reported by the Division of Vital Statistics Mortality Multiple Cause data file in 2022–2023 and 2023–2024, respectively.

The stark discrepancy is mentioned by the authors, but they fail to provide real answers beyond a perfunctory statement that these may be attributable to the decline in documenting COVID on death certificates or the use of preliminary estimates from the National Center for Health Statistics that undercount the real figures. Notably, they highlight the dramatic decline in vaccination coverage in this period, a byproduct of a bipartisan effort that promoted the erroneous benefits of COVID infection and so-called “natural” or “hybrid” immunity. Their analysis, however, lacks a coherent explanation for this discrepancy.

Dr. Mike Hoerger, in response to a query by this reporter on the aforementioned CDC study about the COVID death toll for 2025, wrote, “Two years flat suggests more of the same until a rigorous publication says otherwise. They have some ‘preliminary’ estimates on their website but do not provide enough detail to be useful, and I would suggest they are prone to minimizing to the extent testing continues to decline even in healthcare settings.”

The bipartisan dismantling of public health

These ongoing massive casualties caused by COVID-19 were not inevitable, but the direct consequence of politically motivated decisions to dismantle all public health protection while the virus continued to rage. The Biden administration systematically dissolved the US pandemic response by allowing the national emergency declarations to expire, triggering the unwinding of Medicaid coverage for millions of vulnerable people and privatizing the distribution of life-saving vaccines and treatments. By deliberately codifying a “forever COVID” policy to prioritize corporate profit and economic normalcy over human needs, the political establishment effectively guaranteed the continued, massive death toll documented in recent studies.

Having established this homicidal “forever COVID” baseline—and having utilized the WHO’s premature declaration ending the global health emergency as political cover—the Biden administration did not merely fail to prevent what followed; it made it structurally inevitable. The attacks on public health carried out under the Biden administration paved the way for the elevation of anti-vaccine quack Robert F. Kennedy Jr. to the position of Health Secretary, where he has overseen the steady dismantling of the Department of Health and Human Services and all of its sub-agencies.

Contrary to the anti-vaccine hysteria whipped up by the far-right, there is a growing body of evidence proving that vaccines were highly protective against death and cardiovascular complications associated with COVID-19 infections. A mid-2024 cohort study published in Nature Communications, which analyzed the health records of nearly 46 million adults in England, provides overwhelming evidence of the cardiovascular safety of COVID-19 vaccines. The researchers found that the incidence of common cardiovascular emergencies, such as acute myocardial infarctions (heart attacks) and ischemic strokes, was significantly lower following vaccination compared to periods before or without vaccination.

Specifically, arterial thromboses were up to 10 percent lower 13 to 24 weeks after a first dose and dropped even further—up to 27 percent lower after an AstraZeneca second dose and 20 percent lower after a Pfizer second dose. Similar declines were observed for common venous thrombotic events, such as pulmonary embolisms and deep vein thrombosis. The researchers concluded that the substantial benefits of first, second and booster doses in preventing common and severe cardiovascular events far outweigh the risks of very rare complications associated with vaccines such as myocarditis, which is more prevalent in those who become infected with SARS-CoV-2.

This comprehensive data refutes anti-vaccine misinformation by demonstrating that COVID-19 vaccines actively reduce the broader cardiovascular risks associated with the virus, offering strong evidence of the need to expand vaccination programs under conditions in which vaccine science is under relentless attack.

The cumulative toll of mass reinfection and immune system damage

The damage inflicted by mass reinfection is equally grave and particularly alarming among populations long dismissed as immune to serious COVID harm. A recent pre-print study available in The American Journal of the Medical Sciences highlights the severe, debilitating impact COVID-19 has had among active-duty military personnel—some of the youngest and fittest sections of the population. Analyzing the electronic health records of over 650,000 service members diagnosed with COVID, researchers found that 42.8 percent—or 278,278 individuals—developed Long COVID. The sheer scale of chronic illness in a population subject to strict age and physical readiness requirements completely shatters the official narrative that the virus poses little threat to the young and healthy.

The researchers tracked a vast array of persistent symptoms disrupting the lives and physical fitness of service members. Pulmonary issues were the most prevalent, affecting 22.4 percent of those with Long COVID, followed closely by neurological problems (14.6 percent) and chronic fatigue (13.5 percent). Notably, while cognitive symptoms such as “brain fog” and memory impairment were reported by a smaller segment of the sample (3.7 percent), these proved to be the most persistent and long-lasting, raising profound concerns about the potential for enduring cognitive damage. The study also found that preexisting conditions, such as obesity, anxiety, depression and nicotine use, significantly heightened the risk of developing these devastating post-viral complications.

Furthermore, a study by researchers at Shandong University and the University of Toronto, published in the February 2026 issue of the International Journal of Infectious Diseases, revealed that mass SARS-CoV-2 infection causes persistent and chronic immune compromise—with key lymphocyte subsets like CD8+ T cells remaining significantly below baseline up to 20 months post-infection—a condition particularly severe in patients with cardiovascular disease. Analyzing data from over 40,000 patients, researchers found that long after the acute phase of the virus had passed, key immune populations (including CD4+ T cells, CD8+ T cells and natural killer (NK) cells) failed to recover. This chronic immune dysfunction leads to prolonged T-cell exhaustion, leaving individuals highly susceptible to opportunistic pathogens, the reactivation of latent viruses like Epstein-Barr and the onset of Long COVID. This is yet another study confirming the advance warnings made by the most far-sighted scientists as early as 2020, including immunologist Dr. Anthony Leonardi in extensive interviews with the WSWS.

For patients with preexisting cardiovascular disease, this immune collapse was even more profound and highly dangerous. The authors warned that this severe loss of T-cell-mediated immune control fuels chronic vascular inflammation, which can destabilize atherosclerotic plaques and drastically increase the risk of acute thromboembolic events like heart attacks and strokes. These findings provide a concrete immunological mechanism for the long-term cardiac morbidity triggered by the virus, further exposing the criminality of the political establishment’s “forever COVID” policy that subjects the population to endless, damaging reinfections.

The catastrophic implications of Kennedy’s tenure at HHS were recently highlighted in a scathing editorial by The Lancet. Titled “Robert F. Kennedy Jr: 1 year of failure,” the editorial board warned that the destruction Kennedy has wrought in one year might take generations to repair, and that there is little hope for US health and science while he remains at the helm.

Secretary of Health and Human Services Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., speaks in the Oval Office of the White House in Washington, as President Donald Trump, left, and Mehmet Oz, administrator for the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services, look on. [AP Photo/Alex Brandon]

The editorial cataloged a relentless assault on evidence-based medicine, including the summary dismissal of agency experts, revisions of guidelines to contradict established science, reductions in cutting-edge scientific research and the promotion of junk science and fringe beliefs. Furthermore, the journal noted that critical federal datasets used to track disease have vanished, leaving the population blind and unprepared for both the ongoing pandemic and emerging threats. This destruction did not arise in a vacuum—it was made possible by the prior bipartisan dismantling of the pandemic response infrastructure that left it hollowed out and vulnerable to precisely this kind of assault.

As the ongoing weekly reports by the PMC demonstrate, the COVID-19 pandemic continues to exact a devastating physiological and social toll, standing as a massive indictment of the entire capitalist political establishment.

Ultimately, the social issues raised by this ongoing collapse of public health have assumed a distinctly political and class character. Kennedy’s ability to act as a disruptive force—promoting anti-science quackery and systematically exposing the population to preventable diseases—is only possible because the ruling class has subordinated human life to corporate profit. The bipartisan acceptance of mass infection demonstrates that the capitalist system is fundamentally incompatible with the basic requirements of human health and well-being.

The normalization of mass death from COVID-19 is of a piece with the broader social barbarism overseen by the same ruling elites. The capitalist governments that have condemned millions to death through “forever COVID” are the same that have enabled and armed the genocide in Gaza and now the criminal US-Israeli war against Iran. The Trump administration’s fascistic assault on public health—accelerated by Kennedy’s demolition of the remaining public health infrastructure—is part of a broader program of social reaction that includes the destruction of all climate change mitigation policies, which in turn fosters the conditions for future pandemics through habitat destruction, zoonotic spillover and the weakening of global health systems. The world is now less prepared for the next pandemic than it was in 2020.

The World Socialist Web Site stands alone in providing continuous, scientifically grounded coverage of the COVID-19 pandemic from the standpoint of the international working class. Since January 2020, the WSWS has published over 5,000 articles on the pandemic—the only publication outside of scientific journals to have covered the science and politics of COVID with this depth and consistency.

One year ago, the WSWS marked the five-year anniversary of the pandemic with a comprehensive series analyzing the origins of the social catastrophe and the unique record of the WSWS in opposing it. The Global Workers’ Inquest into the COVID-19 Pandemic, launched in November 2021, continues to document the testimonies of workers, scientists and public health experts from around the world.

As we have stressed from the very beginning, the defense of science, the restoration of public health infrastructure and the end of the pandemic require the independent political mobilization of the international working class to fight for a socialist reorganization of society.

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sarcozona

23 hours ago

Epiphyte City

Screw Covid, I'm going to Sturgis.
Thursday March 12^th, 2026 at 5:05 PM

https://transcendloneliness.substack.com/

Troy Tassier is a professor of economics at Fordham University and the author of The Rich Flee and the Poor Take the Bus: How Our Unequal Society Fails Us during Outbreaks.

A metamorphosis occurs each August in Sturgis, SD. The small 7,000 person town is invaded (peacefully) by a steady stream of Harleys, Indians, and Triumphs among countless other motorcycle brands. The rumbles of their engines bubbling at each intersection can be heard throughout the town. It’s the Sturgis motorcycle rally and Sturgis has grown to a population of around half a million people – It now contains the same population as Kansas City, MO and Raleigh, NC.

In the year 2020 public health authorities warned them not to allow it. Kristi Noem, Governor of South Dakota at the time, ignored them. The mayor threw up his hands and told the NY Times, “do you want me to build a wall around Sturgis or a wall around South Dakota, because that is the only way we could have stopped it.”

He was right, just like every other year, they rolled in. Concerts and crowded bars. Hardly a mask in sight. They even sold t-shirts mocking the pandemic. My kids bought me one off of e-bay as a father’s day joke the next year. “Screw Covid, I’m going to Sturgis.”

What happened next was predictable. Covid spread. It wasn’t like Las Vegas. What happens in Vegas stays in Vegas. What happens in Sturgis doesn’t stay there, it spreads everywhere.

In my book I summarized research estimates from the Center for Health Economics & Policy Studies at San Diego State University. They put the number of cases connected to Sturgis in the range of 115,000-260,000, or 10 to 20 percent of all cases in the US at the time. This was just one month after the rally occurred and it was still spreading. Yesterday a new research study was published that makes the wave of infection that spread out of Sturgis more visible.

In the left column of the graph above you can see the frontline of the Covid wave expanding outward from Sturgis. In the figure below you see the same wave in the top row but it also indicates the intensity of the caseload, with darker colors having more cases.

Sturgis was the epitome of the “you do you, I’ll do me” individual choice mindset at the height of the Covid pandemic. Many people simply wouldn’t accept that their choice had effects on other people. And those people weren’t just their partners and kids or their grandchildren and grandparents. It was also the kids on the school bus and the teachers in the schools. The people you worked with and the people they served. It was the doctors and nurses and other staff at the hospital. It was the barista at Starbucks and the maid at the hotel. The cashiers at CVS and the local grocery. It was all the people connected to them and onward and onward. Individual choices cascaded outward like ripples from a stone tossed in a pond. When you’re sitting in the middle of it, you can’t see the damage spread outward and spiral out of control. Nonetheless, it was there. And now we can see it.

Troy Tassier is a professor of economics at Fordham University and the author of The Rich Flee and the Poor Take the Bus: How Our Unequal Society Fails Us during Outbreaks.

If you would like to see a dynamic visualization of the paper results you can view two short 30 second movies here:

https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pcbi.1013983.s007

https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pcbi.1013983.s009

I have found the videos to play most reliably if you copy the address into a web browser and play it from there. In addition, there are other videos and figures of a second wave tracked by the researchers. I encourage you to look at them too. They are available in the “Supporting Information” section of the paper which is available here:

https://journals.plos.org/ploscompbiol/article?id=10.1371/journal.pcbi.1013983#sec014

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sarcozona

23 hours ago

Epiphyte City

Tsunamis hiding in plain sight: spreading depression in clinical neurology Friday March 13th, 2026 at 4:07 PM

‘It’s surreal’: US sanctions lock International Criminal Court judge out of daily life – The Irish Times Friday March 13th, 2026 at 12:49 AM

The Curious Case of the Disappearing Data Thursday March 12th, 2026 at 5:08 PM

Babies with COVID-19 develop more serious disease than those with RSV, US data reveal Thursday March 12th, 2026 at 5:07 PM

2.9% death rate for COVID, 0.4% for RSV

Medical societies recommend vaccination

This week's top reads

Up to 56,000 people died from COVID-19 or RSV last year

Our underwriters

Unrestricted financial support provided by

The COVID-19 pandemic at 6 years: Mass death, debilitation and media silence Thursday March 12th, 2026 at 5:06 PM

The ongoing toll: Excess deaths and new studies on Long COVID

The bipartisan dismantling of public health

The cumulative toll of mass reinfection and immune system damage

Screw Covid, I'm going to Sturgis. Thursday March 12th, 2026 at 5:05 PM

Tsunamis hiding in plain sight: spreading depression in clinical neurology
Friday March 13^th, 2026 at 4:07 PM

‘It’s surreal’: US sanctions lock International Criminal Court judge out of daily life – The Irish Times
Friday March 13^th, 2026 at 12:49 AM

The Curious Case of the Disappearing Data
Thursday March 12^th, 2026 at 5:08 PM

Babies with COVID-19 develop more serious disease than those with RSV, US data reveal
Thursday March 12^th, 2026 at 5:07 PM

The COVID-19 pandemic at 6 years: Mass death, debilitation and media silence
Thursday March 12^th, 2026 at 5:06 PM

Screw Covid, I'm going to Sturgis.
Thursday March 12^th, 2026 at 5:05 PM