The above title appears to be the bottom line. I've yet to see a corporate media headline state things quite this baldly, but I attribute that to a corporate tendency to try to bury leads that don't fit prevailing narratives. We're supposed to be recovering, both individually and societally, from the ravages of Covid. Well, guess again.
The paper is titled, "SARS-CoV-2 is associated with changes in brain structure in UK biobank." The lead author is Gwenaelle Douaud, and it was published March 7 in Nature, the gold standard of academic publications. I recommend that everyone search out this paper and read it. I can also recommend the YouTube podcasts of Dr. Been and Dr. John Campbell as useful tools to walk you through the paper.
Essentially, even mild cases of Covid-19 cause brain shrinkage. The findings, summarized in the abstract, are beyond ominous. To quote, "the significant longitudinal effects include greater reduction in grey matter thickness and tissue-contrast in the orbitofrontal cortex and parahippocampal gyrus, greater changes in markers of tissue damage in regions functionally-connected to the primary olfactory cortex, and greater reduction in global brain size." In other words, Covid shrinks your brain. As such, the effect of having contracted even mild Covid-19 is having brain volume reductions similar to those caused by aging and dementia. The reversibility and permanence of these effects are currently unknown.
This brain shrinkage was shown to have measurable cognitive effects. Think about that for a moment. Contracting Covid knocks your intelligence down some significant number of points. It debilitates you. It has the same impact as aging your brain. And we don't know if any of it is reversible. These are devastating findings. We need immediate replication studies, worldwide.
Coverage
When Dr. Fauci finally admitted early this year that Omicron was likely to find everyone, it turned out to be an admittance that Covid was going to age our brains and retard almost all of us.
I realize that we are in the midst of a Russian invasion of Ukraine and Will Smith slapping Chris Rock, but how does Covid- super-aging our brains not make headline news cycles? Searching CNN and MSNBC yields nothing for "Covid causes brain damage," "Covid shrinks brain," or "Covid causes structural brain changes." Newspapers, at least, paid more attention. The New York Times and USA Today reported on the findings but have not done follow-ups or featured the subject in an ongoing manner.
How is this not a front-and-center everyday topic of headline news? Our brains have been shrunk by a virus in a significant manner, and we do not know if the damage is permanent. It's as if we'd been mentally aged against our will, and the subject is being ignored.
American institutions are not acknowledging, much less discussing, this very frightening problem. If we thought they had protected us from the worst of the virus, we appear to have been very wrong.
Bob Dietz
April 4, 2022
