Because of the energy drinks. 
It could not have been a more cliche moment. The conversation topic kicked off with the nurse commenting on my bestie’s vape. And how it was so much more dangerous than smoking, with a detailed description of popcorn lung (if you need a reminder) and that people were being put on respirators and still being unable to catch their breath before dying.
She then followed this up with an incredibly passionate, heart wrenching account about the state of things in medicine and how they’re seeing more and more young folks coming in with maladies typically reserved for the elderly… you could have copied and pasted her warning with that of a CC influencer; heart attacks, strokes, etc 19 year olds coming in with things for people in their 50s, yada, yada. All the hits… right up until she concluded on how it’s the fault of energy drinks.
Meanwhile, I’m just sitting there in my n95.
Fast forward later in the night, to the end of this poorly written scene, with the nurse giving me a fistbump and telling me she ‘hopes I feel better’ as we said our goodbyes.
And no, i did not get into it. It was my besties bday and it was not a scenario in which me getting into a debate was going to end well.
So, yeah. I’m just sharing this to remind y’all that there are people are out there in the medical field noticing something is wrong. And that you’re doing the right thing by masking… and/or not drinking energy drinks, I guess. Lol🤷
Honestly, the energy drinks and the vaping on top of the COVID probably aren’t helping.
Of course they don’t, but you don’t blame someone’s exceptional aim for when they unalive themselves with a firearm.
This is not tiktok. You can use real words.
Like, noted YouTube superstar and gamer extraordinaire Pete Dorr had what is likely a COVID heart attack last year. He’s unvaccinated and also I don’t think he’s literally ever exercised in his entire life up to that point. The kind of people who aren’t getting vaccinated and definitely aren’t masking are also not living healthy lives.
The vaccine isn’t stopping long Covid, comrade. Vaccinated or not, your odds of stroke or heart attack after a Covid infection are about doubled for 6-8 months. And that was what they came up with after infection 1. Average vaxxer folks are approaching double digits, with your real over achievers already up there making posts on tiktok about how they can’t remember their friends’ names anymore.
Is long COVID and heart attacks related? I thought the vaccines helped mitigate the worst of COVID which included the heart attacks but not necessarily long COVID. What’s the effectiveness being measured in regards to the vaccines? Just deaths? Whybisnit able to taper deaths but not any else?
It’s just semantics, really. Long Covid is Covid. The vaccines basically just prevent the initial infection from killing you, but most of the bad shit remains with like maybe a 10% drop in occurence.
After a single Covid infection you’re still looking at an elevated risk of:
Idk the mechanics of why the vax keeps you out of the immediate hospital/grave, but keep in mind it did not take very long (Aug 2022) before the number of vaccinated deaths outnumbered non-vaxxed and in my (and many other’s) opinion the people who died (are dying) from vaxx and relax were victims of social murder/eugenics.
Do you have a handy scientific source on the elevated risks you mentioned? I’m always referencing that COVID causes long term damage to people but I would like to have a scientific source about it that I can send to people instead of just saying “trust me”
I’m out and about for the afternoon, but I think this will give you everything you need. 🤞
https://hexbear.net/post/4850045?scrollToComments=false
Thank you for the writeup. I wasn’t disagreeing with you, literally Just Asking Questions. I haven’t been keeping up with COVID stuff since I can’t do anything except self-quarantine, mask, and vaccinate at this point. Everyone I know has already heard all my arguments about it and remained unchanged so yeah.
No worries, I just get a bit ranty.
Long covid is not covid. Long covid is an umbrella for several diseases, but the most common ones are autoimmune diseases that are triggered after the initial inflammation which we call covid. The severity of your acute covid says very little about the possibility to develop long covid which could be the reason why the chance to develop long covid only slightly decreases after vaccination.
However, the chances for heart and vascular issues decrease more significantly after vaccination: https://www.medpagetoday.com/infectiousdisease/covid19vaccine/121756
I see you post a lot about COVID so I’m curious where you get your information when you apparently are disinformed on some important details.
Over the years I’ve approached viral propagation from different disciplines, from marketing to malware. So if you see me ranting about mass immune dysregulation or wastewater interpretations, as I have been since 2020, that’s my own knowledge. Otherwise, I’m typically paraphrasing or quoting a number of epidemiologists or wastewater experts I try to check in regularly with on x and bluesky. (Though I’ve been taking a few months off, so if I’m a bit behind, it is what it is.) And yes, Long Covid is Covid is one of those paraphrases, possibly even a direct quote. Viral persistence being a key driver of (edit: many of) the, over 200, sequelae associated with Long Covid (especially the autoimmune response) is pretty much considered locked in at this point and honestly (edit: even for those that aren’t) I’d still consider you to be arguing semantics.
Mechanistic Insights Into Long Covid: Viral Persistence, Immune Dysregulation, and Multi-Organ Dysfunction
This is currently the most recent large scale literature research on long covid, that combines the main hypotheses and their empirical evidence: https://www.nature.com/articles/s43856-025-01300-z
It describes viral persistence as one of several hypotheses, it’s reductive and harmful to say that viral persistence is the main cause for long covid when there is no scientific backing for that claim. There are other factors at play that are not necessarily caused by viral persistence, and viral persistence alone does not cause the symptoms, since viral persistence has also been identified in people who do not have long covid. On top of that, viral persistence is not the same as an acute covid infection. It’s a phenomenon that happens after the acute infection and manifests differently than acute covid. Vaccines can impact the symptoms of acute infection and of post infectious illness differently, and it’s reductive and harmful to group them all together and say that vaccines do not mitigate many of the risks of a covid infection when they do.
For you this might be an argument about ‘semantics’, but for people who suffer from long covid and medical experts who work with people on long covid it defines whether the research is useful or not, and whether there is any progress on treatment.
For decades, ME patients and non grifting scientists have begged for research that does not group all post viral infection or all chronic fatigue patients together because it has been shown again and again that there are different mechanisms at play for these symptoms, which makes any large scale research that does not differentiate between these groups completely useless. Research that groups all forms of long covid together are similarly useless.
Any researchers who claims that they can explain the cause for long covid and back it up with science is lying, because the science says that we don’t know the significance of the different mechanisms at play, and that this significance probably differs greatly because there is more than one distinct illness that falls under the long covid umbrella.
Sorry, comrade, but you’re not convincing me. As far as semantics, I may have worded that poorly and I’ve made a small edit: I’m not saying that all long covid is the result of viral persistence but if someone leaves a faucet running and the flooding it causes leads to collapse of a nearby structure, I’m still going to point at the running faucet. I would even argue that by trying to distance long covid from covid you’re propagating the rhetoric used to sociologically end the pandemic. Social support for those with Long Covid, funding for research, that shit is all undermined by covid denialists. Look at the antimask legislation, look at how they’re getting away with dismantling all future pandemic responses. By trying to separate covid from long covid, it assists that movement, imo. It’s putting up a ‘Pardon our Dust’ barrier around the running faucet while collecting signatures to rebuild the collapsed structure in the same flooding location.
AFAIK the severity of Covid is a symptom of how much your endothelial tissues are affected, and these are all throughout the body.