I’m going to leave this post as a sticky and update it with links to essays and interviews on the COVID-19 pandemic I heartily recommend reading. Order represents the order I came across them, most recent at the top.
On insulin resistance
As a recent post indicated, I have been doing a lot of reading around health these last few years. I have primarily concentrated on literature pertaining to metabolic health and literature pertaining to the microbiome. This is all in addition to practising a healthy diet and lifestyle.
The more I read, the more I became interested in learning about my own health markers beneath the visible or easily discoverable. This is mainly due to knowing I have a sweet tooth, knowing that when I do gain weight it is largely around my abdomen, and learning about the phenomenon of TOFI: thin on the outside, fat on the inside.
As the health tests you can get on the NHS are sorely limited, I recently went private to get some more thorough tests through Medichecks. In particular, I was very interested in learning about my HDL:Triglycerides ratio as a more meaningful cholesterol test, and, of course, the biggie for me was insulin resistance. The latter is because I have learnt that many people are insulin resistant and therefore on their way to diabetes, even though their fasting blood glucose levels look fine.
The results surprised me a little and so I thought I would share them to show why it is so important to pay attention to your diet and get more thorough blood tests done than the NHS offers. But first, some basic stats:
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On modellers and the elderly
Professor Carl Heneghan is one of those people who have an amazing knack for cutting right through to the crux of a matter and explaining things simply, calmly, and clearly; and it is for these reasons, that I really, really recommend listening to this recent interview with him on why he spoke out against lockdown.
There are two things he said that I wanted to comment on further: the first is the atrocious abandonment of the elderly; and secondly, the failure of a numbers-only approach to understanding complex social phenomena.
On COVID numbers
I was very lucky to get COVID very, very early on in the pandemic. I say lucky because before catching it, like everyone else, I was subject to high levels of fear about the virus, as it was so unknown and I have quite a bad history with the flu turning into pneumonia. So I was always grateful that I had gotten it early on so that I could step free from the fear of what might happen and know the truth: for healthy people like me, COVID is no worse than medium flu.
So with my fear dissipated, I was able to think more clearly about what was unfurling and I came to the following conclusions:
- Lockdowns were a bad idea: we need(ed) to properly protect the clinically at risk (old people, immunocompromised people, etc.), and let everyone else catch the virus and move on. (What I now know to be called “focussed protection“, but I had not heard of it at the time. Incidentally, I think the main failure of this proposal was the use of the technical term “herd immunity”. Most people had never heard of it, did not know it was technical language, and so balked at what sounded like treating us like cattle.)
- I noticed the U-turns of Chris Whitty and the WHO who went from saying masks were of no real use in prevention or transmission, to supporting mandates for them when the political tide turned in their favour. So it was clear that the advice being given out by the so-called experts was politically motivated.
- Case numbers were irrelevant since we had no baseline: we did not test widely for other viruses to know what the prevalence of non-symptomatic viruses are in the population. I knew enough to know our bodies are an ecology of human cells plus a wide range of bacteria, viruses, and fungi, so what did it matter if we tested positive for a virus that had no impact on the person being tested? (I mention this in passing here.)
- The lack of discussion around risk stratification was also a red flag to me. The fact that people seemed convinced that there was equal level of risk across all the population when all of the data from PHE/UKHSA showed that to be an egregious lie. (Even worse, all those people who had gotten mild COVID, but were still acting like they would die if they got it again.)
- The denials of natural immunity and of risk in the mass vaccination drives (not to mention the foul coercion of them). When the truth is that, as Dr Steve James said, for some of us (i.e. healthy people who have already had COVID), there are no rewards in the vaccine, only risk.
- I was highly suspicious of the fact that death numbers were “deaths within 28 days of testing positive” rather than deaths from. Instinctively I knew that if the “deaths from” number looked anything like the “deaths within 28 days” number, then they’d just give the former, but they didn’t. That raised my suspicions about inflationary tactics.
- Lastly, and following on from six, I personally know of two people whose (elderly) parents died of causes not at all related to COVID but since they tested positive, were recorded as a COVID death.
But number six, sweet number six, how thee made my brow furrow. I did not believe that we would ever know the truth about from COVID deaths for at least the next twenty years. But then on December 1st, I came across an FOI request on whatdotheyknow.com which made my jaw drop: Birmingham Community Healthcare Foundation had actually answered the question. Between 1st February 2020 and 3rd April 2021, there had been 79 deaths with COVID, and 2 from.
On metabolic health
Many things in life baffle me. Things like: why do people participate in a global capitalist system doing shit jobs they hate for a system which does not benefit them? Why do so many people wear such ugly shoes? Why are there no truly revolutionary people living in the UK? Why do so many women look like drag queens nowadays? Why does no-one care about (data) privacy? All baffling stuff.
However, the Truly Baffling Thing which has occupied my thoughts most frequently over the last two years is: why, in the midst of a global pandemic which is disproportionately affecting the metabolically unhealthy, are people not making an effort to get healthy? Genuinely and truly baffling. It’s almost like people want to be ill and/or at risk.
On continuity
A few years ago (well before COVID), I met a woman in the waiting room of the vets. She had been a community nurse during the time of the AIDS epidemic and she talked about the profound discrimination and stigmatisation that HIV+ people experienced at the beginning of the epidemic, even by other healthcare workers. I don’t remember all the details, but I remember realising that the stigmatisation and discrimination against HIV+ people, and those who cared for them, was way worse than I had realised. For a good while after meeting her, I would come back to her comments and wonder who I would have been at that time. Would I have been her or would I have been the majority who behaved so despicably and callously towards others out of a fear for their own personal safety?
I’m pretty certain now that I would have been her, and not her colleagues or society more generally. I’m pretty certain of that because I have not lost my values to COVID-fear, unlike almost every other person I can think of.
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