tip of the hat to http://all-hat-no-cattle.blogspot.com/

Thanks to the ineptitude or rather the desire by the previous president and a group of Republican governors (including Reynolds) our nation was bequeathed a massive pandemic. With the pandemic came massive misinformation and a large core group of true believers who seem to be willing to die or be maimed for life to prove their political interpretation of the Covid pandemic is true.

In that vein many have remained unvaccinated. Many of those have gotten infected and died. But as before vaccinations were available, many have been infected and survived. Unfortunately those that survived have often been left with hangover problems known as Long Covid.

In a release Thursday researchers at the UAMS (U of Arkansas Medical School is my guess) have identified a possible cause for long-lasting symptoms for COVID-19 patients. From the thv11 website we get this report:    

According to the findings, there is an antibody that appears weeks after the initial infection and “attacks and disrupts a key regulator of the immune system.”

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“Everything that we’ve found is consistent with this antibody as the instigator of long COVID, so it’s an exciting development that merits further study,” said John Arthur, M.D., Ph.D., professor and chief of the Division of Nephrology at the UAMS College of Medicine, Department of Internal Medicine.

In a press release, UAMS said the antibody causes problems for the immune system by attacking an enzyme the body’s response to COVID-19. The “attacking antibody” interferes with the enzyme’s work.

Researchers found that 81% of blood samples taken from patients with a history of COVID-19 in Arkansas and Oklahoma had the antibody that attacked the enzyme. They tested for the antibody in 67 patients who were infected with the virus and 13 with no history of infection.

“If we show that the whole hypothesis is right, that this interference of ACE2 really does cause long COVID, then it opens up many potential treatments,” Arthur said. “If our next steps confirm that this antibody is the cause of long COVID symptoms, there are medications that should work to treat them. If we get to that phase of research, the next step would be to test these drugs and hopefully relieve people of the symptoms they’re having.”

This is an amazing discovery in the short but horrendous history of Covid-19. While many groups have done all they can to aid the spreading of the virus, science continues to make amazing discoveries in fighting the pandemic. 

One of my greatest fears has been that children who are too young to be vaxxed will get Covid in unmasked schools and then suffer lifelong debilitating effects from it. While this is not a cure yet, it looks like a big step in finding that cure.

If only we could stop the disinformation and get the whole country unified in attacking the virus we could make great strides in defeating it. 

As Lincoln noted a century and a half ago “a house divided against itself cannot stand.”