Thread by @YouAreLobbyLud

1/ WHAT HIV/AIDS SHOULD HAVE TAUGHT US ABOUT COVID

The initial [seroconversion] illness with HIV is generally non-existent or a relatively mild flu-like illness. To begin with, it wasn't recognised at all and was only identified many years later in retrospect.

2/ Now imagine that the COVID pandemic was instead the HIV pandemic, but occurring for the first time today, which this time we did recognise immediately as a flu-like illness from which a full recovery was invariably made.

3/ What we would not appreciate, however, is that the first symptoms of immunodeficiency do not appear on average until FIVE YEARS after that initial mild illness and the full horror of the AIDS illness until EIGHT YEARS after.

4/ AIDS was and is a terrible scourge, but the initial illness looks completely benign: "like a mild flu".

Now compare to COVID, which we have not even had for THREE YEARS. It produces an often severe initial illness with multiple organ effects and a high rate of death.

5/ Then, we know that it causes a prolonged, often severe, syndrome - "Long Covid" - in a significant percentage of people and that it has major effects on the immune system, sometimes even in people in whom the initial illness was very mild.

6/ Further, we are seeing frequent repeat infections with COVID, something which does not happen with HIV, and we know that these repeat infections can be very severe, resulting in death or "Long Covid", even when the previous infection(s) did not.

7/ The long latency period after the initial mild illness with HIV before immunodeficiency and invariable death, combined with increasing knowledge about long-term viral effects in the 40 years since, "should" prime us to be very, very cautious with a novel infection like COVID.

8/ Those facts "should" prime extreme caution to any rational observer, because they demonstrate the nature of the "unknown unknowns" we are dealing with and the plausibility that long-term effects of this virus could be significant.

9/ In fact, we already know they are significant, but what we don't know (though many of us are guessing) is just how bad they could be for everyone who has been infected, especially those infected multiple times.

10/ However, instead of wisely using hard-earned experience from HIV and other sources to inform our decisions about the future in this scenario of extreme complexity, we have decided to wing it, to "look on the bright side", to be "glass half full" people, to hope that…

11/ …everything will turn out OK and also to berate and vilify those who counsel that the uncertainty of this situation behoves caution.

12/ We (meaning our experts, decision makers and politicians) are exhibiting such stupidity and blithe disregard for reasoning that we pretty much deserve any and everything that may be coming to us.

13/ My biggest fear in all this is that those experts, decision makers and politicians have dug themselves into a hole so deep that there is no conceivable way for them to back out or change course, while also saving face, no matter how bad the situation may become.

14/ Their only option for personal survival - meaning ego, professional and psychological survival - seems to me to be to keep doubling down, to keep gaslighting, to keep denying reality, until the train finally hits the buffers.

15/ And one final point: even if, by some miracle, everything turns out OK, the disease mysteriously vanishes, Long Covid magically disappears and immune suppression isn't a thing, then the right thing to do from the start will STILL have been to act with caution in the face of…

16/ …a novel viral illness with clear multi-systemic effects.

If we keep facing existential threats in this thoroughly reckless manner, then there is only one potential outcome for our species and our planet and it isn't good. This, truly, is our existential trial.