Diabetes is complex and a simplistic jump to "Covid directly causes Diabetes" is very likely incorrect.
From the article itself:
Diabetes risk factors may have been exacerbated during the COVID-19 pandemic including limited physical activity, increased sedentary behaviors, sleep disturbances, and increased intake of processed foods.
and note that diabetes has increased in very specific groups, not generally at the same rate across everybody that caught Covid.
For a comprehensive picture of multifactor incidence of diabetes see, say, this Australian health release:
You should edit your comment to specify that you are referring to Type 2 diabetes. As stated in the article, infection by coronavirus and many other viruses can trigger Type 1 diabetes through autoimmune reactions. (Which I think most people would interpret as "directly causes" for all practical purposes.)
Nothing in this paper is anywhere close to establishing causality, it's an interesting observation that merits further study.
We should also note that the authors offer alternative possibilities in the discussion such as increased/early diagnosis.
Interestingly, the 10-19 T1D IRR declines below prepandemic levels in Q4 2021 which would be supportive of this hypothesis for this age group however more follow-up is needed to see how the trend evolves.
My point is that we do know viruses "directly cause" Type 1 diabetes -- which still has lots of interesting research questions -- but they are quite different from questions about the effect of lockdowns on Type 2 diabetes. Lockdowns being the obvious middle step we are all wondering about that connects the virus to the disease "indirectly".
> My point is that we do know viruses "directly cause" Type 1 diabetes
If you mean virus are capable of directly causing T1D in theory and animal models, sure. As to whether this actually happens to humans in real life is as clear as mud.
There is also similarly weak evidence that says viruses have either no or a protective role in the pathogenesis of T1D.
Sure. But the point is that as far as casual factors go, the research questions for T1 vs T2 diabetes are going to be fairly different. I personally think it is important to be clear what we are talking about, and that the article itself is written poorly in this regard.
For type 2 I can see the risk factors of limited physical activity, but type 1? Type 1 is generally something attacking the pancreas. I've been a long time T1 diabetic, and was diagnosed after I had a long term persistent lung infection.
>Type 1 diabetes occurs when your immune system, the body’s system for fighting infection, attacks and destroys the insulin-producing beta cells of the pancreas. Scientists think type 1 diabetes is caused by genes and environmental factors, such as viruses, that might trigger the disease.
While covid may not have caused this T1 discrepency, it does need investigated.
Conversely the rate of increase in Type 1 was much smaller then Type 2.
> Relative to 2016 to 2019, in 2020 to 2021, the incidence of new-onset type 1 diabetes was 17% higher (incidence rate ratio [IRR], 1.17). The incidence was higher among patients aged 10 to 19 years (IRR,1.17), boys (IRR, 1.18), and Hispanic patients (1.21).
> Rates of type 2 diabetes were 62% higher (IRR, 1.62) in 2020 to 2021 than in 2016 to 2019. The incidence of type 2 diabetes rose from 14.8 to 24.7 per 100,000 person-years over that time.
I assume the parent comment was only referring to Type 2 diabetes and made a sibling comment to that affect. However, while we're on the topic, I suppose one can ask why some people have the autoimmune reaction that triggers T1D. Presumably there are genetic, lifestyle, or environmental factors that lead to it, just like celiac or Hashimoto's, etc.
I have a friend (fit, healthy male of 28) who suddenly lost a whole lot of weight and then was diagnosed with type 1 diabetes, not too long after having COVID - may have been a coincidence, but it is suspicious...
To be sort of nitpicky: the underlying study [0] does not argue a direct causal connection. This is one of many current observational studies reporting on population level trends and measuring associated incidence ratios/risk ratios/hazard ratios.
That said, dismissing the COVID correlation entirely out of hand also feels wrong here; in part because there are meta analysis in the literature [1] that show risk ratios very comparable to increases here.
To compare from the quote in the article:
> Rates of type 2 diabetes were 62% higher (IRR, 1.62) in 2020 to 2021 than in 2016 to 2019. The incidence of type 2 diabetes rose from 14.8 to 24.7 per 100,000 person-years over that time.
To this in Ssentongo et al:
> Of the 8 studies that characterized the risk of incident diabetes among survivors of COVID-19, the pooled point estimates was 1.66 (95% CI 1.38; 2.00, Fig. 2), implying a 66% higher risk of diabetes.
covid-19 is a complex disease that is correlated to problems with almost every major system in the body (See any of the cites implied by my handle), to suggest it's not a factor at all is very likely incorrect.
> To be sort of nitpicky: the underlying study [0] does not argue ...
To be sort of nitpicky at the time I made that comment there were only four (IIRC) other comments here all of which were making direct causal connections.
It was less the article I was addressing and more those commenters that felt the need to jump straight into "COVID ate my homework" stories.
I can see that both yourself and I appear to agree that covid-19 is a complex disease with a great many correlations and it certainly factors into to at least some kind of indirect connection.
Of interest, perhaps, is this quote from the link I provided above:
After adjusting for differences in the age structure of the population, the proportion of people living with type 2 diabetes almost doubled between 2000 and 2013, and has remained relatively stable in the last decade.
There was no covid in the post 2000 decade, something in that time period caused type-2 diabetes to double (rise by 100%) all the same.
I hope you and I both share a similar degree of wariness towards the conclusions of meta-analysis reviews.
COVID directly gave me pre-diabetic symptoms that gradually improved over about 12-18 months. It was really a binary healthy, not healthy switch after the most intense day of sickness.
I’m curious. How do you know it was COVID? I too was diagnosed pre-diabetic post-COVID. No longer the case now. However, I’m not sure how I could ever make the direct attribution to COVID?
Sociodemographic factors, average body mass index, fasting and random glucose levels, and hemoglobin A1c concentrations didn't change from 2016 to 2021.
> Home cooking for most people uses tons of sauces/cheeses/creams/butter/chocolate/breads/etc loaded with sugar and sat fats.
A restaurant chef once told me, 'not as much as we do'. I was in a city that required chain restaurants to put sodium quantities (and maybe other data) on the menues. The numbers were eye-watering.
Former restaurant chef. Indeed, that’s my experience. Especially butter. I’ve never seen so much butter go into a dish. Another that flies under the radar: ingredient quality. Example that comes to mind: the cooking oil for sauce/fry/etc is garbage.
I don't think anyone defends sugar as good for you, but there is a lot of research showing that dietary saturated fats can actually be good for you. Especially if the concern is diabetes, ketogenic diets can be extremely beneficial as the body is burning primarily fat rather than glucose and glycogen.
> Despite comparable weight gain after 49 days, this double-blind trial showed that overeating energy from PUFAs prevented deposition of liver fat and visceral and total fat compared with SFAs. Excess energy from SFAs caused an increase of liver fat compared with PUFAs. Further, the inhibitory effect of PUFAs on ectopic fat was accompanied by an augmented increase in lean tissue and less total body fat deposition compared with SFAs. Thus, the type of fat in the diet seems to be a novel and important determinant of liver fat accumulation, fat distribution, and body composition during moderate weight gain. We also observed fatty acid–dependent differences in adipose tissue gene expression. The significant decrease in pancreatic fat in both groups during weight gain was an unexpected finding that needs confirmation due to the low amounts of pancreatic fat in this lean population.
The crank diet influencers who were previously into saturated fats being good sometimes now think sugar is good because of the influence of a dead crank diet influencer named Ray Peat.
I don't know who Ray Peatis but there are cranks on both sides of any issue. To point to one example that you may have seen and use that to discredit all others isn't doing anyone any good.
I ate keto for a couple years and still generally fall closer to that bucket, though I'm not dealing with any health issues and started eating some breads and carbs again. All the researchers, dieticians, and excercise/fitness coaches I learned from are all still agreed that sugar is bad for you as far as I'm aware. I haven't heard any of them pivot towards saying there are benefits from any meaningful intake of sugars.
In general, it is: I know the ingredients, I know what’s in there, I know there is no old oils is used, I know no MSG is used, or soy or other non healthy ingredients, I know the source of the meat, I know my salad is fresh and wasn’t one of those refrigerated bagged ones, Among others. And that’s compared to restaurants we are not even discussing fast food industry.. not to mention how over-priced plus the 25%tip.
On the other hand you had more free time, because there was no commute. My fitness went UP due to homeoofice and lockdowns. I also started to eat healthier, simply because I had more and easier control over what I eat.
That would really depend on where somebody was located.
All across Canada, for example, the government-imposed and "public health"-imposed restrictions were remarkably harmful to the health of the general public.
It varied somewhat by region, but pretty much all fitness facilities, including gyms, were shut down for extended (many months, if not longer) periods of time. Some never reopened. Losing access to facilities like those was a big problem in a country where harsh winters can seriously limit outdoor activities for several months each year.
There were also curfews and other restrictions that prevented or severely limited people from doing exercise and other physical activity outside.
The lockdowns and restrictions also destroyed or seriously harmed many businesses, which resulted in significant stress for the employees, owners, suppliers, and others affected. They suffered financial harm, job losses, business losses, and so on.
The forced masking and forced shots caused significant stress for those who were lucky enough to not lose their jobs or businesses.
Hospitals, medical clinics, and doctors cancelled or significantly delayed huge numbers of procedures and screenings.
Those are just a few examples. It went well beyond those. I didn't touch on the harm from the education-related restrictions, for instance.
Between 2020 and 2023 in Canada, blatantly idiotic "public health" policies caused far more people far more physical and mental harm than any virus did.
Covid was definitely a healthier time for me - I didn't consume a drop of alcohol for almost a year and my mother (who I was staying with) leaned into cooking so I ended up not eating a single repeated meal for almost 6 months.
Did lots of walks and outdoor workouts, got a tonne of sunlight and vitamin D
On the other hand, just within my own friend group my experiences were quite polar and many of my friends tripled their alcohol intake or ate even more unhealthy take-out food or would start baking cakes and cookies everyday...
Covid and a layoff probably saved my life - quit a serious alcohol habit but ended up very sedentary until I got laid off and basically ended up rehabbing myself by helping my parents out with some construction work. Then had a slow year but now I'm back to the gym and finding out that I'm not as decrepit as I thought and headed towards being in the best shape of my life.
Thanks, that's a lot of reading to get through but it's interesting that we see such changes in activity and diet versus the OP article's finding that major health statistics haven't noticeably moved.
Did they say that? Are you referring to this section or did I miss something, I mostly skimmed the JAMA article:
> In our study, baseline clinical characteristics of patients with incident type 1 diabetes and type 2 diabetes were not different during nonpandemic and pandemic years. This is consistent with other studies showing similarity in age, HbA1c, and body mass index among patients with incident diabetes before and during the pandemic.
If this is the section you mean that's not discordant, what they're saying is that people with diabetes have similar characteristics during non pandemic and pandemic years. It doesn't comment on whether more people in general have increased BMI therefore placing them at risk for T2DM.
> Among youth with type 2 diabetes ... Sociodemographics and, additionally, mean body mass index, fasting and random glucose, and HbA1c levels were not different from 2016 to 2021.
They're talking about these values in the diabetic population, not youth in general. They are simply saying there are more diabetics, but they have similar characteristics as pre-pandemic diabetics. This is expected.
The study shows incidences on the scale of 15-25 cases per 100,000. The relative incidence ratio may have increased significantly but the absolute increase was small enough that the handful of people with higher A1C wouldn't have budged the average.
I mean.. we locked children in their homes for 12-24 months. Quite literally, my kids could not: attend school, take swim lessons, do gymnastics, play soccer for 24 months without severe restrictions. Further, other parents were concerned to the point the sniffles or a covid exposure would limit our ability to get together for 3-14 days. Finally, you had parents also stuck home trying to raise kids in this environment and often would end up eating out / getting pre-packaged meals because there simply wasn't time.
Luckily, we had a yard, so I could at least get my kids outside and we'd play. Eventually, I ended up just moving because 18-20 months into this thing Illinois was still having a mask mandate for 2yr olds plus. I think it was finally lifted from schools after 24 months - https://www.chicagotribune.com/coronavirus/ct-illinois-mask-...
I should add, many places still required it, it just wasn't mandated. They still were shutting down the classrooms every for a couple weeks at a time if 1 covid case was identified. This ended up meaning 25%+ of the time my kids were home.
My general point, if you feed kids a bad diet & remove their ability to exercise yeah -- type 2 diabetes.
My kids were not locked in our home. They were outside literally every day. And I live in a city apartment and we had lockdowns. They socialization did suffer and they missed some sports practice, but they did had enough of healthy physical movement.
Sure, glad you did that. Like I said, we were outside in the yard and very active.
I can easily imagine plenty of peers & neighbors not letting their kids out to play. That’s how it was where I lived. I’m sure play dates were canceled. I’m sure parents staying at home didn’t get their kids as much exercise as gym class. I’m also confident many parents just gave their kids tablets to entertain them.
You mention yourself missed sports practice. At a massive scale many children in the margins do get more overweight and that correlates with increased type 2 diabetes.
I do not know anyone who would not have kids going outside. Literally anyone. Yes some socialization was cancelled. Some people kept socializing with one or two friend families. Literally no one I know about kept kids inside 24/7 the way you suggested.
In general, parents who do put less effort into children were also the ones took lockdowns least seriously - meaning their kids were about as usual minus school.
Imagine you're in NYC, school is closed, gyms are closed, swimming is closed, beaches are closed. You have to work and your kids are home. How do you get them activity? You send your 4 year old down the hall to run around? what exactly?
That's an extreme example, but even in the suburbs I saw a dramatic reduction in available activities & children participating in activities.
Even a 25% reduction in activity for marginal kids (i.e. on the kid of getting type 2 diabetes) would probably push a significant portion over the edge and become diabetics.
We just went to a park or walk. That sort of stuff. Not everything needs to be an organized activity. Maybe the suburbs are in even worst position then city, since you are completely limited to own backyard with nowhere to go if it is nor paid and organized.
I don't think you appreciate just how oppressive and outright stupid the restrictions were in some areas.
> We just went to a park or walk.
At one point, such venues were closed across an entire Canadian province with a population of about 14,000,000 people at the time. To give a sense of scale, that population would make Ontario the 5th-most-populous US state, if it were one.
"Ontario closes all playgrounds, sports facilities and off-leash dog parks"
Good comment. We must never forget the egregious violations of civil rights incurred for seemingly no good reason at all. I remember being kicked off the beach in Chicago, when I was just hanging out _alone_. What does that have to do with public health?
It saddens me to hear so many young people are having such serious health disadvantages. I wish I could do something for them other than post. I think the actual culprit is stress.
I was a stress eater up until late July when I started with strict OMAD/keto. I lost 8kg and reduced waist circumference by 11cm.
> I wish I could do something for them other than post.
You can start by making pariahs out of parents of obese children. They are child abusers, full stop. Do not enable them with your friendship or business, just as you would for anyone you know is beating their kids.
>Rates of type 2 diabetes were 62% higher (IRR, 1.62) in 2020 to 2021 than in 2016 to 2019. The incidence of type 2 diabetes rose from 14.8 to 24.7 per 100,000 person-years over that time.
That is a huge jump. Is it possible there was more widespread testing of at risk populations? If they are simultaneously reporting no notable changes in average BMI, my knee jerk thought is populations cannot change that quickly.
Really the changes in type 1 of 18% should be far more alarming...
> Type 1 diabetes rates climbed from 18.5 per 100,000 person-years in 2016 to 2019 to 22.4 per 100,000 person-years from 2020 to 2021.
T1D is an immune system reaction, commonly caused by viral infection or other autoimmune disorder. If the correlation holds in T1D, then there is highly likely some correlation with the even larger increase in T2D, though lack of exercise will be a comorbidity here.
You can be a Type 2 diabetic for a fairly long time before you get a clinical diagnosis though. I wonder if the increased focused on health and seeing the doctor simply hit the throttle on a bunch of people getting the diagnosis sooner rather then later?
Yeah basically surveillance bias, it's mentioned as a possibility in the discussion.
T2D feels like it could be a combination of both, there was certainly an increase in metabolic risk factors as well.
The authors also mention acute stress response may have contributed to increased detection of previously undiagnosed diabetes.
The continuing trend will be interesting to see. For example T1D in the 0-9 group reaches a 5 year low in Q4 2021. I think it's too early to conclude much, we'll better understand the ramifications of the pandemic and virus in another 2-5 years.
> Within KPSC, while there were no initiatives for increased diabetes screening among at-risk patients, the shift to increased virtual care allowed for better electronic monitoring of patients’ health status, which may account for some additional patients with diabetes detected during the pandemic years.
> Acute stress of SARS-CoV-2 infection has been shown to increase blood glucose levels, and individuals with previously undiagnosed diabetes may receive a diagnosis when presenting to hospitals for infection-related care.
The rise of society and culture-driven anxiety (this is not related to covid the disease) resulting in seeking food comfort and accompanying type 2 diabetes might also explain this
I know a few people that have had their anxiety shoot up recently. We are more isolated than ever
Let’s fix this. There’s funding already allocated to improve ventilation in schools. Since the coronavirus is endemic we’re going to be dealing with these increased risks for decades. Why can’t we get this done? Let’s actually save the children for once.
I didn’t have COVID even once. Or maybe I did and didn’t notice it. Most of the people I know are in the same boat. My 69 year old morbidly obese father tested positive for COVID but only had sniffles. My 95 year old grandmother had COVID and didn’t really have symptoms.
Since 2022 I don’t use any kind of protection ever and don’t follow up on vaccination. I am somewhat convinced COVID was a tempest in a teapot and the world would have been better off if we never heard about it. Even as it deployed itself into communities.
So, no. No more special measures, please. We’re back to normal and thank goodness for that.
P.S. Better ventilation in schools is great, of course. Just, let’s not make it about COVID. Let’s leave COVID confined to the dumpster heap of history and maybe learn some lessons from the whole episode. Like, fear is never to be trusted.
It's such a strange experience since the pandemic encountering folks like you and some sibling commenters, who, because a few people in their immediate social group, "seem fine", dismiss the outcomes of millions who died, or struggle with Long COVID, or all the accumulating science documenting the post-acute conditions this virus causes. Other viruses cause post-acute complications too, so it's not even new, but for this virus people really need to put it in the box of 'what me worry?' for some reason. Three years ago I would've expected different from the educated and generally cynical/skeptical HN crowd, but no longer I guess.
The virus is endemic and, though we weren't supposed to say this before, will continue to circulate and act much like the common cold. Ventilation in schools would be extraordinarily expensive, would only impact that 8 hour period of each kid's day, and with the state of average school buildings in the US we would never seal them up well enough for a positive pressure system to reliably keep them ventilated.
Unfortunately we can't just throw money at every problem to fix it. There could be more effective avenues if we want to spend that minry though, revisiting the food our kids eat might be more effective at keeping our kids healthy for example.
> would only impact that 8 hour period of each kid's day
That 8 hour period of each kid's day where they're surrounded by dozens of other potential disease vectors. The period before they go home and infect their parents, and potentially kill their grandparents. It's expensive but let's be frank, we're okay with thousands of people dying annually because we don't want to spend the money to do anything about it.
Especially when they found that only five minutes of exposure to someone else's exhalation was sufficient to transmit covid-19 with that South Korean restaurant case.
> The 8 hours of each kid's day where they're surrounded by dozens of other potential disease vectors.
Would ventilation really stop this though? Kids will still ride on school busses, play during recess, share classroom supplies, eat in the same cafeteria, etc. Ventilation isn't magic, I don't think there are any ventilation systems that could swap out the air so quickly that kids wouldn't be exposing each other. I also haven't seen any studies in which they retrofitted an average school building and tested transmissability, though I'd be very interested if anyone has a source to such a study.
> The period before they go home and infdct their parents, and potentially kill their grandparents.
This isn't how infection works. If a kid is exposed at school they won't go home and immediately infect others. I also feel for any child made to think that if they step out of line at all they would kill their grandparents.
> It's expensive but let's be frank, we're okay with thousands of people dying annually because we don't want to spend the money to do anything about it.
This gets to the question of what gives the most impact for our buck. If saving lives if the question we would first need to decide if all lives are equal and whether there are other causes of death that can be more easily or cheaply mitigated.
If the goal is to save on the scale of thousands of lives, investing in helping our people eat better would almost certainly make a bigger impact, I'm sure there are many other examples that would be more efficient than retrofitting all school buildings with ventilation systems effective enough to show a change in Covid deaths.
Not quite sure what you mean, humans have lives with plenty of viruses that circulate regularly and people don't choose to get infected.
The term pandemic is also pretty specifically defined as the time period where an infection is spreading rapidly through a population. Once it has spread everywhere you can't accurately keep calling it a pandemic, the period of rapid spread is over.
How about do something to help it now instead of claiming it's endemic which it definitely is not. Clean air great. Doing something now to stop the damn spread, better.
I am literally advocating for preventing, or at least reducing, spread in schools in this very comment, and as a parent, have skin in the game. Endemic doesn't mean harmless.
Huh, I used the extra time I had during Covid to educate myself on health, nutrition, exercise.
I lost 15 kg, reached my target BMI and have been replacing fat with muscle since.
I am the healthiest I've ever been in my adult life thanks to Covid.
That’s fantastic. Yeah, what is it with all these people who didn’t use their time being boarded up inside their apartments and houses for months at a time for the first and hopefully last time in their lives, to better themselves. Wusses.
I recommend the book "the glucose revolution" by jessie inchauspe. It is a pretty good book to understand blood sugar, and can go a long way to help you prevent diabetes, manage your energy, cravings and weight.
Benjamin Bikman „Why We Get Sick“ is what I can recommend. His book is spot on regarding insulin resistance, discussing consequences and effective prevention strategies.
This isn't surprising. Physical activity primes GLUT-4 in muscles to take in glucose from the blood stream. No physical activity = chronically higher blood glucose.
There is a lot of research linking diabetes to inflammation.
Inflammation is frequently caused by infection. It can also be caused by changes in body chemistry and those changes then tend to foster more infection
Additionally, lack of muscle mass is known to worsen insulin resistance.
Fixing this as an individual is not that hard. Stop eating processed foods, eat whole foods. And if you're severely insulin resistant, consider a temporary low carb diet.
On a societal level, screw these giant processed food companies.
Due to the sorry state of journalism, social media, and people's capacity for critical/ethical thinking, I expect the internet to very soon be flooded with "covid vaccines proven to cause diabetes in children".
We can talk about how more than 98% of the entire population of Australia happily took two to three COVID vaccinations over the course of the past two years or so and there's been no significant increase in morbidity and mortality statistics compared to before.
We can talk about how Australia has some internationally acclaimed epidemiologists who have been trawling the statistics here for the past 40 years, publishing ground breaking work on folate for infants, SIDS, disease studies, etc. and yet have (at least according to your premise) utterly failed to identify any better health outcomes for the unvaccinated Vs the vaccinated in four decades of data on flu outcomes.
Exactly what kind of numbers are you expecting to see in an island population of 22+ million over four decades?
Well, Injecting stuff into one's bloodstream and vaccination are two different things. Normally, vaccine is injected in a muscle, a tissue, not in a blood vessel.
And yes, flu virus (and other viruses) can (surprise!) replicate itself! And not the vaccine!
Viruses themselves are a common cause of autoimmune reactions that cause T1D. Attempting to automatically blame a vaccine for a virus that commonly affected youth with little to no sign of infection probably isn't a very scientific method of determining cause.
Article notes that coronaviruses binding to ACE2 receptors in the pancreas could cause this. Binding to ACE2 receptors is done by the spike protein, the same spike protein the vaccines created mass amounts of.
It seems to me that it is irrelevant how many spike proteins the vaccines causes your body to make considering that most of humanity has had a real covid infection by this point.
The question would be if vaccine followed by covid infection produced more or less spike proteins (and overall health impact) than no vaccine followed by covid infection.
If you assume that hospitalization and death is correlated to overall quantity of damaging spike proteins then the default assumption would have to be that vaccines are highly beneficial.
> The question would be if vaccine followed by covid infection produced more or less spike proteins (and overall health impact) than no vaccine followed by covid infection.
It would be worth studying to see if there's any meaningful different in new diabetic case with regards to natural infection compared to vaccine only. We can assume everyone has been infected, but it can easily be verified by testing for the presence of an immune response to the non-spike proteins.
mRNA vaccines don't create circulating spike protein. The specific mechanism of action of mRNA vaccines is to create a spike protein inside a cell (muscle cell - it's an intramuscular injection) which then gets presented by the MHC-proteins on the surface of the cell.
This is a similar mechanism which viral-vector vaccines use as well.
This is quite unlike regular protein-bolus vaccines which do in fact just inject a bunch of antigen into your body.
Of course in all cases, intramuscular injections don't really enter the bloodstream anyway: the immune system picks up the injected material and it is transported by the lymphatic system to be presented to the various immunological systems.
Contrast to general viral infection where a self-replicating virus with machinery specifically intended to ensure it is packaged and secreted from infected as a viable infectious agent will basically run rampant until an immune response mounts...at which pointy our blood actually will be full of pieces of spike protein from your immune system shredding virus particles (which is why PCR tests can detect infection for weeks after you've cleared it).
What is somewhat disturbing about that, is that if spike mRNA (from the vaccine OR the virus) enters the nucleus, there are other studies showing it can be reverse transcribed possibly via LINE-1:
I just saw in an article, that while uncommon, mRNA vaccines can actually lead to circulating spike protein. From the article [1]:
Most notably, the plasma of patients with postvaccine myocarditis had “markedly elevated levels” of free spike antigen (33.9 ± 22.4 pg/mL), with the protein circulating in the body unbound by antibodies. “Although postvaccine myocarditis clinically occurs more commonly in males, [this] was seen equally in both affected females and males,” the investigators point out.
From the original study though, patients without myocarditis were found to have no such levels.
> A notable finding was that markedly elevated levels of full-length spike protein (33.9±22.4 pg/mL), unbound by antibodies, were detected in the plasma of individuals with postvaccine myocarditis, whereas no free spike was detected in asymptomatic vaccinated control subjects (unpaired t test; P<0.0001).
So what we have is a potential explanatory mechanism (namely, probably some biochemistry which means for whatever reason these people seem to release the protein rather then keep it cell bound - although correlation is not causation, the whole effect could work the other round).
Surely the disease causing a child to become diabetic is "meaningfully threatened" though?
I'm not sure why some people act like anything less than death is no big deal. Severe organ damage, whether lungs or pancreas or anything is a well documented, non-controversial risk of covid infection.
The more we learn, the more dangerous covid looks to be for kids. Diabetes is one of those risks we now know more about.
There are too many negations in your comment for me to understand its meaning.
"I do think anyone can agree that pushing the vaccine..." "Is terrorism?" Or did you mean the opposite of that?
i'm not sure whether i should be more confused at your implication that three negations of what i said would be what i meant, or that "i don't think anyone can disagree" is a difficult thing to parse
can't disagree with that, it was the specificity of the contention that threw me off
> The opposite of terrorism, I guess, is being helpful and kind?
at the very least it was done in a way in which noone could be expected to complain, could anyone disagree?
ALSO: i tried to post this response much earlier, but I became rate limited and alas could not
full disclosure, my original intention was to promote a healthy discussion which would then be flagged off the page, an aim that i feel was entirely fulfilled, and if you felt any emotional/intellectual discomfort, perhaps i should apologize, since you don't seem like a jerk
It's because your original sentence is incoherent and internally contradictory. You think nobody can disagree that "pushing the vaccine" for "demographics too young" was..."the opposite of terrorism"? What?
I can't disagree with the statement because I can't even work out what it means, so in that sense you're correct.
Vaccines don't cause circulating S protein at any levels that could cause damage to organs.
We can measure some S in the blood after vaccination, but it is at levels of picograms per milliliter. Spike is confined within the cells that the vaccine enters and isn't sprayed around the circulatory system by the vaccine. What is displayed on the surface of those cells is the T-cell epitopes after the protein has been chopped up by proteases and those relatively short sequences are displayed on MHC for the immune system. The spike that leaks out is probably only due to those cells being lysed in the lymph nodes.
That is many orders of magnitude less of an exposure than someone who is infected and has literally billions of virus particles floating around expressing spike on their surface.
The vaccine won't cause any effects via circulating spike, that is just bullshit that was being spread early in the vaccine rollout. The reactions to the vaccine are going to be autoimmune-mediated.
You should really start by asking the parent comment where they got their information or any papers showing the biological effect of spike on ACE2 receptors after vaccination.
What are your thoughts on https://doi.org/10.1161/CIRCULATIONAHA.122.061025 (AFAICT, correlation between post-vaccine myocarditis and detectable free spike, possibly due to individual differences in some adolescents causing slower(?) spike clearance)? Credible?
I've suffered viral pericarditis before due to a cold, so I'm very aware of how the immune system can cause autoimmune inflammatory conditions (onset of my symptoms were weeks after my cold symptoms had completely cleared--the virus wasn't still around banging on my pericardium).
You don't need circulating spike to explain vaccine caused myocarditis. The vaccine produces an immune response. The initial immune response are low affinity antibodies. Those antibodies can sometimes target host cells accidentally. As somatic hypermutation happens in the months following the exposure to the antigen the high affinity antibodies that form (and which are boosted by a 2nd exposure to the antigen) are less likely to accidentally target host cells. This is presumably why I had a complete recovery after around 2 months and all I needed was an NSAID to tamp down the inflammation.
The obvious objection to that article is that correlation is not causation. It needs to be replicated, and there needs to be more than just speculation about a mechanism. There already exists a very well-known mechanism (autoimmunity) for the alternative explanation.
Well, everything in science is correlation. Causation is a construct...
I am taking your comment to mean that you think it's not a credible paper? That's the main thing I wanted to know, it seems like you believe the paper implies something very unlikely and so authors have an agenda?
You're overlooking the cases where the vaccine enters the bloodstream and itself is circulating, or gets transcribed and yields permanent spike production. Especially if combined with immune tolerance this can cause the observed effects where vaccines are directly triggering t1 diabetes (see my comments on another thread for study links showing this, including one from moderna itself).
The obvious followup question to this line of questioning is whether your proposed mechanism is robust enough to cause a 62% year over year increase. I don’t doubt that the spike protein could damage islet cells, frankly I’m not nearly expert enough to evaluate that claim. Assuming it did, I find it pretty unlikely that it causes this much of an effect. Most medicines intentionally designed to cause specific outcomes would be lucky to have an effect this strong.
Agreed. However the virus is relatively new as are the vaccines. We are still in the process of getting longitudinal information. The introduction of the spike protein does coincide with the dramatic rise of diabetes. You are correct this may not be the reason however it is still quite plausible that this is a largest contributing factor.
If you read the article there was also a nearly 20% increase in T1D. T1D is primarily caused by viral or autoimmune system actions. The T2 increase of 60% is likely because of comorbidities increasing the over all rate. Lower insulin output+less exercise.
I've been struggling with acute pancreatitis ever since I got the vaccine.. I do not drink alcohol and I'm not over weight and have a great diet, so it was boggling to my doctor's at first why I had pancreatitis
>Hmm so the corona virus itself can damage the pancreas .. and possibly induce diabetes .
Long time T1D here... ugh, this is bad news on top of all the issues that the world in general is experiencing around type 2 diabetes. Add to this that covid isn't going away and we're apt to experience a few more major strains that affect the population at large expect to see the diabetes crisis get far worse.
Will end up being another long term health care crisis unless we can find some way to protect against the behavior. Diabetic care is expensive, in the US directly, but even in universal healthcare countries, it is a very material, time, and effort requiring illness that needs continuous treatment and monitoring. Especially in the case of T1 where insulin and constant blood sugar monitoring is needed.
> What's the one thing that 200 million people did in the USA, particularly children, that had an unknown potential for adverse health effects and that occured at just the same time and that was new and different? It had to be something different... something new, because this has never happened before.... especially among children. Just think about it. Yes, the vaccine.
Yes, of course, because nothing else different and new was circulating through the population at the time.
Do people like you all just start with a quasi-religious belief that Covid itself must be harmless? I understand being concerned about the possibility of vaccine side effects, but the constant insistence that a novel respiratory virus is safe strain credulity.
It sounds like you made up your mind that the vaccine could not possibly be at fault. Nothing to see here, right? You will not even consider the possibility? Not even a 1% probability? Note I said nothing about religion, so not sure why you bring that up here when speaking of the probabilities of potential cause, but I believe your stand requires significant faith.
I do not consider covid to be harmless. Many died, including my own family members. We are talking about diabetes among children. Children were hardly impacted by covid. But many did take the vaccine. Food for thought.
> It sounds like you made up your mind that the vaccine could not possibly be at fault.
No, I specifically indicated that I was sympathetic to concerns that a rushed vaccine might have unexpected side effects; I simply did not agree with your belief that the vaccine was the only major change during the time period we're discussing.
> Nothing to see here, right? You will not even consider the possibility? Not even a 1% probability?
This is nothing but an emotionally-driven continuation of the previous claim. Of course I'm willing to consider that the vaccine has serious side effects -- show me the data, and show me it in full context (meaning we also consider the vaccine's impact on the effects of Covid infection).
> Note I said nothing about religion, so not sure why you bring that up here when speaking of the probabilities of potential cause, but I believe your stand requires significant faith.
"Quasi-religious" because the assumption that Covid couldn't have caused this outcome is invented from whole cloth.
> I do not consider covid to be harmless. Many died, including my own family members. We are talking about diabetes among children. Children were hardly impacted by covid. But many did take the vaccine. Food for thought.
So at last we've reached the standard conspiracy theorist endpoint: "I'm just asking questions!" And instead of providing an ounce of data to support your argument, you've -- predictably -- provided a pound of wild accusations and obfuscation.
If one were subject to normalcy bias you'd want to believe that the virus was harmless. That everything bad that happened was the vaccines fault. And you'd believe that in spite of all evidence to contrary.
Biggest take away from me from the pandemic was how powerful normalcy bias is.
Point taken, and I do not dismiss the potential. It would be prudent to consider all the new things and not dismiss either without careful review. Most kids suffered very few ills as a result of having covid compared to adults. Diabetes among children is a very rare thing, not even a blip on the radar for children (until now). Also, if we want to say that covid caused an increase of type 2 diabetes among children (no doctor is saying this by the way... neither is the WHO)... what is that evidence? I mean, is there a historical precedence that demonstrates that having one illness to trigger an entirely different illness? For example, do survivors of cancer tend to get diabetes... or did the survivors of the black plaque experience a sudden increase of diabetes... etc... I do not believe that to be the case. I'm not discounting it... I do not believe their to be such a treasure trove of past cases that can be pointed to as models to consider. But, worth a look. My concern is more of the unwillingness I see in so many people to consider the potential of all the options on the table. No one seems to really want to talk about, the other option. All medicines cause issues over time. Take a tylenol every day for 2 weeks and see what happens to you (please, don't do it). How much more something entirely new and experimental.
From the article itself:
and note that diabetes has increased in very specific groups, not generally at the same rate across everybody that caught Covid.For a comprehensive picture of multifactor incidence of diabetes see, say, this Australian health release:
https://www.aihw.gov.au/reports/diabetes/diabetes/contents/t...
lots of graphs showing incidence against age, sex, socioeconimcs, etc.