Long COVID Status Update 2025 Dec 22 Symptoms Summary * Severe since 2022: Brain fog, PEM, PENE. During 2022 I was bedridden for 6 months. I could barely walk down a flight of stairs, felt unsteady and unbalanced. Could not read or copy a 7 digit phone number. Brain was severely malfunctioning to the point where I struggled to form sentences. Driving was dangerous. * Some improvement 2024: Feel chronically ill. Thinking is difficult. Brain fog in and out. Physical exertion is punished. For example assembling this IKEA furniture took me ~2 days of effort followed by 3 days of PEM crash. * POTS: Maybe moderate? I am not terrible most of the time but briefly exerting at odd angles like to pick up kids makes me dizzy. Full on tilt table test makes me feel VERY BAD for 2-3 days. * MCAS? Not sure. Many of my symptoms get worse if I stop my antihistamine medications. Hydroxyzine seemed to be the most effective but I had to stop it recently due to drug interactions. Currently on the much weaker loratadine. * Chronic prostatitis. Started at the same time as LC back in 2022. Crippling pain. Inflammatory something caused tissue to obstruct leading to BPH. * Complex autoimmune changes 2022-2023: CCP IgG positive suggests RA. I received some symptom mitigation from hydroxychloroquine. By 2025 CCP IgG disappeared but I became ANA positive instead. Treatments that didn't work - LDN, long duration Paxlovid, Adderall, Metformin (drug interaction) - rapamycin - sort of works but causes problems over time. This again feels like a clue mitigating downstream problems not the upstream cause. - splenic nerve stimulation - This was an interesting failure! It caused a WONDERFUL FEELING OF TOTAL RELAXATION as the brain-on-fire went away entirely. For 18 hours I felt great. That was followed by symptoms coming back ... then slowly I felt sicker and sicker. It is known to reduce cytokines. I think it causes temporary immune compromise allowing for viral activation. Two weeks later I was symptomatic and tested positive for COVID on a home antigen test. That was an interesting and spectacular failure. I intend to try it again in combination with the combination treatments described below. Treatments - November 2023: hydrogen inhalation mitigates my brain-on-fire symptoms every time. Hypothesis: cancels out reactive oxygen in all cells in your body, temporarily mitigates problems with damaged mitochondria. This is definitely a downstream mitigation but not addressing the upstream cause. Unfortunately the effects wear off after only a few minutes. It isn't a solution, more of a clue, but it is at least something I can use to cope during a heavy PEM crash. I should write a thread exclusively on the topic of hydrogen inhalation for LC/ME. - December 2024 azithromycin caused significant symptom improvement for 1 month. Temporary improvement to brain fog and PEM, and temporary near remission of prostate pain. The effect stopped working so I discontinued. I have to wonder if long-term antibiotics might have been the cause of autoimmune biomarkers changing over time. - July 17th 2025: 1st Pemgarda. See my other thread. x.com/wtogami/status/1946097… - October 3rd: brain fog was very bad. Two days after Novavax brain fog improved a lot and stayed that way for two weeks. Unfortunately it feels like brain fog might be a separate thing from cognitive dysfunction. Exertion still caused neuro crash and inability to think. - October 22nd: Started val/cel combo. Val alone seemed to improve my PEM baseline 30%. Cel seems to be reducing inflammation a minor amount. Honestly not sure what cel is doing but sticking to it because of the Pridgen Protocol. GP is concerned about the long-term GI risks of that high cel dose. I didn't randomly decide to try val/cel. My labs this year on multiple occasions have read high EBV IgM which suggests dormant viral reactivation. Valacyclovir is not targeted at EBV. My guess is multiple other dormant Herpes-family viruses are reactivated at the same time. ID doctor wanted me initially to try valganciclovir which is targeted against CMV. I decided to try valacyclovir first because of excellent safety profile (no black box warning). Whatever val is doing seems to be suppressing a major portion of a persistent infection. I still feel constantly ill. Ability to think has improved by 30% on a sustained basis which is a lot better than past years. That might be due an improved my PEM baseline. I'm not sure. I tried to play catch up with years of defferred maintenance, overdid it and caused a neuro crash for a few days. December 4th: azithromycin again mitigated both neuro and prostate symptoms. - Very Soon: 2nd Pemgarda The Pridgen Protocol trial suggested better results for those who took combination Paxlovid during a portion of the long duration val/cel. In my case I'm combining long duration val/cel with Pemgarda and Paxlovid. x.com/wtogami/status/1946097… My previous Pemgarda didn't yield lasting improvement. I had some serious problems like heavy drug interactions with the combination antiviral. This time I eliminated all meds that conflict with Paxlovid. I'm refusing the pre-medications that interfere with my ability to feel what effect if any Pemgarda is doing to me. - Biomarker Monitoring I'm periodically getting freezing blood/serum/plasma vials before each big treatment. If a big change happens after a treatment then analyzing before and after vials may help to figure out what changed. Future Stuff I want to try 1) Microdosing GLP-1. No reason not to try this. I previously could not try because it had a dangerous interaction with those same meds that I can't take with Paxlovid. But after elimination I can try both this or the milder Metformin again. 2) I'm interested in antiretrovirals where some people had success like with Maraviroc. 3) I am intrigued by the anecdotes coming from the Anktiva LC trial. I have now begun monitoring biomarkers to help determine if I am a good candidate for these immune modulating treatments.

Dysfunctional antigen presentation may be a key upstream driver of ongoing immune activation in Long Covid with POTS. "Monocyte Oxidative Stress Underlies Persistent Immune Activation in Long-COVID Postural Orthostatic Tachycardia Syndrome" medrxiv.org/content/10.64898…

Does the US have any solution that would enable clinical trials for things that cannot be protected by patent thus nobody can profit?

One of the things you see all the time in long covid is how patients go to the doctors, the doctors order CBC, CRP, etc, and say there is nothing wrong with the patient. Patient complains but is mostly dismissed because the labs don't show anything. Despite going into psychosis six weeks after my infection, most doctors didn't think there was anything wrong with me. When I came out of the hospital, I had incredible brain fog, almost like I was drunk. It was so bad I sold my car as I couldn't imagine driving it again. Walking seemed weird to me, hand eye coordination was shot, and I felt like I was eating food like a kid, like it was hard to keep my fork straight. Most of the day I had almost some vertigo/disassociation going on with my brain, and even using Excel was hard for me during that period. I would tell doctors all of that, and they would just tell me it was a result of the psychosis, even though I felt absolutely horrific. My lab results at the time looked like this, mostly normal. Cholesterol was a bit high, but other than that, no real red flags. As such, it must be in my head, or so I was told. dropbox.com/scl/fi/tqfi38qxn…

Republicans are in charge because we promised: to Make America Healthy Again. to start No New Wars, to put people above corporations, to put America above foreign countries, to release the Epstein files, to not spy on citizens, to eliminate fraud, what the hell happened?!

My plan for the antivirals was to hit about 80-90 days and then wind down, which I’m starting to approach. In truth, the jury is still out on whether it worked or not. My labs show something has happened involving IgM and IgG but I’m still not confident with how to interpret it all yet. One of the issues is my RNA seq data is lagged by six weeks. So I haven’t even seen day 42 yet. But that should hopefully come soon. That said, I felt like it would be remiss not to try one anti viral I have avoided over a year - Molnupiravir. Molnupiravir has a bit of a rocky history. It works in a completely different way than most antivirals. GS441524 targets RdRp which makes it so it can’t copy itself. Paxlovid targets Mpro, which means it can’t sub-assemble its sgRNA proteins. The problem with each is that Covid has a proofreading mechanism, nsp14, one that can correct mistakes that are introduced by antivirals. So it’s possible it’s actively working to fix the issue with RdRp and Mpro. Molnupiravir works by lethal mutagenesis. It literally froms a bastardized versions of A and U bases which can then get erroneously incorporated into the virus’ RNA during a copy. These look like regular bases from the nsp14 perspective so it’s unlikely to be able to fix them. After one copy you might get five errors introduced. Now maybe it’s partially disabled or less fit. Next copy five more errors are introduced, and now it’s starting to produce little Seth Brundle mutants that can’t fold proteins or make nsps etc. the errors are random and likely fatal after a few generations. The virus basically dies by error catastrophe. Sounds great, but there are several problems. The first is by definition you are making covid19 clones, and you don’t know if they’ll be defective ones or super ones. In general random errors produce less fit copies, but it’s not impossible the errors can accumulate in a beneficial way. Unlikely though I think. In terms of someone like myself though I’ve been wondering if this might be a good thing. My body has been fighting something for 28 months it can’t seem to get rid. I have no signs of any serious auto immune issues, but what I have is antibody, cytokine, and lymphocyte data that continues to show an active viral antivirus campaign against Covid itself. So the question becomes, how can I break this 28 month stalemate? One way I can imagine if I take one super evolved covid19 clone that’s inside me, likely due to 28 months of specific Duane like immune pressure, and bust it up. So instead of one super clone, maybe I now get 10-20 partially genetically degraded versions instead. Will my immune system have a new shot at them? Let’s see. The other problem is there a non zero chance this can happen with regular cells too. Which is why the medication typically is only taken five days. But in theory if Molnupiravir incorporates into human RNA it’ll eventually break down naturally as long as the DNA hasn’t been changed. Regardless, having seen lots of people who tried it for acute infections with seemingly no ill effects I figured it would be the last antiviral in my test before I start de- stacking meds and give my body a chance to clear itself out from all these meds, which I’m spending about $50-$60 on per day. The fact I haven’t seen clearance yet might not be unexpected In that Madrid study that tested multiple antivirals in immune compromised people, the antiviral courses were ten days but many didn’t officially clear the virus (test negative) for several weeks later all the way out to 100 days before going negative. So it’s possible to stop replication and then spend weeks or months clearing up all the covid viral debris, many of which are still immunogenic. On Monday and Tuesday I’ll do a massive cytokine test, lymphocytes, antibodies, RNA seq #5, and some of the other tests I did at the beginning to bookend some of the results. After that I’ll probably pop the clutch and see what happens.

6 months ago Grok was performing a lot better than Gemini. Gemini was hallucinating hard on both IT and medical topics. Now I'm finding Gemini is frequently finding key relevant details I'm seeking more often than Grok. The hallucinations seem to be better now days too.

once again, more bullshittery that makes me have to question everything 🤦🥺 Texas lab CEO admits falsifying wastewater test results that concealed E. coli and other pollutant levels for years share.google/szPZwgvIpmEKEt5…

In the last month Ukraine has genuinely started winning the war against Russia…

A scientist spent 30 years studying an organ every textbook said was irrelevant. In 2026, two papers in Nature proved she had been right all along. The papers were not written by her. Her name is Noel Rose Mackay. She is a thymic biologist who has studied the thymus since the 1990s, at a time when the field was considered a professional dead end. The thymus is a small immune organ behind the breastbone. By the 1980s, medical consensus had settled: the thymus trains immune cells in childhood, shrinks at puberty, and stops functioning meaningfully in adults. Researching adult thymic function was considered a waste of time and grant funding. Mackay and a small number of colleagues disagreed. They published research throughout the 1990s and 2000s arguing the thymus remained active in adults and that its ongoing T cell production mattered for immune health. The papers were published in smaller journals, cited rarely, and largely ignored by mainstream medicine. For 30 years, clinical practice did not change. Radiologists reading millions of CT scans did not measure thymic health. Oncologists designing immunotherapy did not account for it. No clinical guideline mentioned it. In March 2026, researchers at Mass General Brigham used artificial intelligence to analyse CT scans from over 25,000 adults. The AI found exactly what Mackay had argued for three decades. Adults with healthier thymuses lived longer. 50% lower risk of death from any cause. 63% lower risk of cardiovascular death. 36% lower risk of lung cancer. In cancer patients receiving immunotherapy, stronger thymic health predicted a 37% lower risk of cancer progression and a 44% lower risk of death. Two papers. Published simultaneously in Nature. Covered by Harvard Medical School, Mass General Brigham, and dozens of international outlets. The researchers who wrote them work in artificial intelligence and cancer imaging. They were not thymic biologists. They were not looking for the thymus. The AI found it for them. The science that spent 30 years being ignored was correct. It took a machine looking at 25,000 scans without any prior assumptions to confirm what a small group of scientists had been saying for three decades. Sometimes the reason a field is underfunded is not that the question is unimportant. It is that the answer is inconvenient.

The idea vaccines cause autism was invented by Andrew Wakefield in 1998 and was so thoroughly debunked he lost his license for gross malpractice And here we are 27 years later RFK Jr dredging up the same nonsense Such a tiresome waste of time

MedCram reviewed Ivermectin for Covid in April of 2020 showing that Ivermectin prevented replication of SARS-CoV2 in vitro. But made it clear that this was only in a test tube! youtube.com/watch?v=nHzBLfuN… We later reviewed (2 years later) data in humans showing it didn't work. youtube.com/watch?v=nHzBLfuN… Since then numerous trials have confirmed this with different doses: Key U.S. trials: 1) ACTIV-6, ivermectin 400 µg/kg daily x 3 days — JAMA 2022 U.S. decentralized, double-blind, randomized placebo-controlled trial at 93 U.S. sites. Ivermectin did not significantly improve time to recovery, and hospitalization/death was essentially identical: 1.2% vs 1.2%. 2) ACTIV-6, higher-dose ivermectin up to 600 µg/kg daily x 6 days — JAMA 2023 Also U.S., double-blind, randomized, placebo-controlled. Median recovery was 11 days with ivermectin vs 12 days with placebo, but the posterior probability of reducing symptoms by more than 1 day was <0.1%, and urgent care/ED/hospitalization/death was 5.5% vs 5.8%. Authors concluded it did not support ivermectin use. 3) COVID-OUT — NEJM 2022 U.S. phase 3 randomized, double-blind, placebo-controlled factorial trial of metformin, ivermectin, and fluvoxamine. For ivermectin, the adjusted odds ratio for the primary composite outcome was 1.05, and for hospitalization/death was 0.73 with a very wide CI crossing 1; the trial concluded none of the three drugs prevented hypoxemia, ED visit, hospitalization, or death. The closest “positive” ivermectin signal in a rigorous recent community trial is not U.S. and not placebo-controlled: the UK PRINCIPLE trial was open-label and found a small symptom-duration signal, but the authors still said the findings did not support ivermectin use for COVID-19.

Privacy Badger appears to be less affected by Chrome soon crippling ad blockers.

I will never forget when we began hearing Covid causes more T cell death & loss of naive T cells than HIV. Then The Establishment came for AJ & the people who were saying this, & everyone was silenced until a billionaire began saying it last year.

Denying that SARS-CoV-2 infection leads to a broad range of sequelae across organs is pseudoscience. We need a case definition for Long Covid which accounts for such a broad range of sequelae. Denying this need is harmful for advocacy and patients alike. People must do better

Here is another great piece I'd like to amplify. "when the community pushes back, understand what it is pushing back against, because the article blurs the line on purpose, and the blur is where the argument lives. The community does not reject CBT. I have taught CBT. What it rejects is CBT and graded exercise sold as a cure, premised on the idea that the illness persists because the patient holds a false belief about being sick, and that correcting the belief and pushing through the symptoms will restore function. That is a different claim, and it is not rejected out of stubbornness. It is rejected because of what happens when it is followed." darthfoo.substack.com/p/the-…

RT @TaylorLorenz: Still insane that WIRED published a 7k word story championing MAHA pseudoscience grifters, and the main discredited metho…

We have discovered that Alan Levinovitz's new book has already sold to publishers And it's about psychogenic illness. No wonder he thinks Long Covid is 60-80% psychogenic & why he won't reconsider his framing. He is invested That a major publisher @HenryHolt is running this raises serious concerns