(Kenyan-British road cyclist Chris Froome retired early due to heart damage some have linked to Covid and some link to Covid vaccines.)
Fight! Fight! Fight!
Many Americans think Covid-19 is causing record numbers of young and previously healthy people to have strokes, blood clots and heart attacks, while others blame this “mysterious uptick” on the Covid vaccines. Who’s right?
So, which is it? Virus or vaccine?
In reality, it’s both.
The science of cardiovascular damage in the wake of a Covid-19 infection is clear. Most people have measurable cardiovascular damage due to a SARS2 infection, and the severity of it exists along a staggeringly broad spectrum. The variation is due to genetics, lifestyle, pre-existing oxidative stress and damage to the endothelium, etc.
Clear too is the science of cardiovascular damage caused by the covid vaccine, in certain people. Big pharma and the politicians they fund don’t like this inconvenient truth, and they’ve worked hard to hide it. But the evidence is so overwhelming the storied publication Science even admitted it this week. It is not a fringe view to believe some people have measurable cardiovascular damage due to the SARS2 vaccines.
The problem appears to lie in some people’s immune response to the spike protein itself, which is present in both the virus and the vaccine. We need to be honest about that.
The problem appears to lie in some people’s immune response to the spike protein itself, which is present in both the virus and the vaccine.
So Why All The Fighting?
“Both” is a hard concept for Americans. Our culture prefers simple binary answers: good-or-bad, right-or-wrong. According the psychologist William Doverspike, PhD, the roots of America’s cultural obsession with black-and-white thinking might lie in Christianity itself.
Most Americans self-identify as Christian or have Christian ancestry. One doesn’t have to be Christian or religious to absorb the cornerstone cultural good versus evil mindset. One has only to live in a society where these values are promoted. The two-party political system, corporate news media and entertainment industry exploit this belief, because fear is a fine and profitable motivator.
In psychology, Doverspike argues, there’s a maladaptive coping mechanism called “splitting.” People who “split” can only see other people as either all good, or all bad. Doverspike and others say the entire United States culture is steeped in dysfunctional splitting.
The back-and-forth bickering about whether it is the virus-only or vaccine-only causing heart damage in young, healthy people is just the newest manifestation of this collective dysfunction.
What Can We Do?
I have to hand it to Yale cardiologist and researcher, Harlan Krumholz. He recently acknowledged that he might have been wrong in saying the Covid vaccines were absolutely safe for everyone. He and his colleague, Yale immunologist Akiko Iwasaki, have established a new initiative called the LISTEN Study, the purpose of which is “to understand Long Covid, post-vaccine adverse events and the corresponding immune responses.”
So, that’s what we can do.
We can listen.
All of us, to each other.