CDC hides replies referencing the Senate HELP Committee's Long COVID Hearing

The public health body is purposely suppressing information about the severity and frequency of Long COVID, as well as information about high-quality masks.

Pantéa Javidan’s twitter bio isn’t that of a bot, troll, or anti-vax conspiracy theorist. “Faculty & Research Fellow @StanfordHumRts,” it reads, “Center for Human Rights & International Justice; @Stanford, Human Rights in Trauma Mental Health Lab.” Dr. Javidan holds both a JD and PhD, as her handle notes.

On February 1, the CDC tweeted, “Your next COVID-19 infection could be your worst, so don't gamble with your health. Vaccination reduces risks and severity and keeps you protected. Stay up to date with COVID-19 vaccines: https://bit.ly/3u3wsHF #COVID19.” On the one hand, it was a welcome departure from some of their previous minimizing, if perhaps a confusing one for folks who’ve been repeatedly assured that COVID infections will “get milder.” (There is no scientific principle whereby viruses must become milder; this claim is a poorly applied misinterpretation of the fact that highly deadly viruses in rural, contained populations often burn themselves out before reaching urban centers, e.g. Ebola. Many viruses maintain severity across decades or centuries, including malaria, Bubonic plague, and HIV. On an individual level, Dengue fever becomes more severe on reinfection).

What happened next was less reassuring for advocates. Many COVID-informed doctors, researchers, patients, and allies began urging the CDC to go further; to relay information about Long COVID, and to encourage, not just vaccination, but stronger mitigation tools like high-quality masks and air filtration.

The CDC, paid for by our tax dollars and ostensibly charged with relaying public health information, began hiding the replies.

Hiding Dr. Javidan’s reply was particularly indefensible; it stated, “Notice how the Long Covid expert protects against Long Covid. ‘How do we prevent long covid? The best way is to prevent covid in the first place.’” Attached was an image of Dr. Ziyad Al-Aly, a prominent Long COVID researcher, testifying before the Senate HELP Committee in a tan KN-95 mask and extolling the importance of prevention.

“Several people alerted me that the CDC had hidden my comment,” Dr. Javidan told me, speaking on the experience. “This was alarming, considering the factual, helpful, and civil nature of the comment.”

Dr Javidan goes on to note that, “Interestingly, once I shared what had happened in a Tweet, it had the opposite of the intended effect. My comment was shared, liked, and viewed hundreds of thousands of times, outranking the CDC’s original post.” Her original post currently has over 45 thousand views, and the follow-up tweet she shared has over 291 thousand.

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, charged with controlling and preventing diseases, is attempting to hide information about controlling and preventing COVID. Worth noting that Dr. Javidan’s tweet does not even specifically say anything about masking; rather, it points out that a foremost Long COVID expert believes prevention is important and depicts him wearing a mask. This is, apparently, contrary to the messaging the CDC wants us to see.

Of course, the hidden replies also include plenty of anti-vax conspiracy theorists and angry minimizers demanding that the word “COVID” be banned from the public lexicon. But interspersed between these replies are links to legitimate scientific studies and encouragements to mitigate transmission.

Another hidden reply from Celeste Kinney, NCC, MS, links a peer-reviewed study published in Nature in 2022: Long COVID risk falls only slightly after vaccination, huge study shows. This information is apparently inconvenient to the CDC; perhaps because they have zero plan to deal with Long COVID, zero plan to mitigate, and their default stance toward the reality that many people suffer disabling, long-term illness after COVID infection is denial and active concealment.

A hidden reply from twitter user @Robyn_TRuth, whose bio identifies her as a patient and healthcare advocate, shared the below graphic, stating (correctly) that COVID can “leave your blood vessels inflamed, blood filled with microclots, multiple organs infected at once and your immune system turning against you. Don't gamble with your health. Wear a respirator. Avoid infections. Avoid long-COVID.”

The helpful graphic encourages layered mitigation measures to slow and halt the spread of COVID-19; it also includes critical information about spread that has been little-seen in CDC graphics. “COVID-19 is airborne and moves like smoke,” the graphic reads, “COVID-19 may remain contagious for hours in a room. COVID-19 transmission can happen before symptoms begin.”

As advocates began to note that their replies had been hidden, new replies asked the CDC why it had hidden information about masking, layered protections, the limitations of the vaccines and the long-term harms of COVID. These replies were hidden as well.

This behavior on the part of the country’s foremost public health body exemplifies just how politicized its messaging has become. The Biden Administration, bent on running for re-election with the false claim of “ending the pandemic” under its belt, simply cannot abide or promote discussion of the dangers of repeated COVID infections, nor any mention of mitigation measures that might remind the public that COVID isn’t over.

Falsely promoting the idea that vaccines alone can protect you from poor outcomes of COVID is also contributing to vaccine hesitancy and anti-vax conspiracy. As I noted in this piece a year ago, not discussing the heart-damaging effects of COVID is supercharging anti-vax narratives that vaccines damage your heart. As the outcomes of unmitigated COVID spread become obvious around us- high sudden deaths among young people, large waves of previously controlled viruses, constant, recurrent and more severe illness among kids in schools- the lack of information from the top leaves a vacuum where conspiracies can thrive.

Vaccines are one useful tool- of many- that can help reduce spread and reduce your risk of hospitalization and death. Their efficacy also fades rapidly, the virus mutates around protection quickly, and vaccines alone cannot fully prevent Long COVID. If the Biden administration actually wanted to promote vaccination, the knowledge that vaccine efficacy fades over the course of months and viral mutation helps the virus evade vaccines would help people understand the importance of boosters. Even the word “booster” is minimizing; the new COVID vaccines are formulated for the XBB variants and thus much more genetically similar to the currently dominant JN.1 variant than the original shots. They are not meant to merely supplement our original vaccines, but to provide new protection against a genetically distinct virus, like the annual flu shot does.

How many Americans understand that “variant” functionally means “vaccine resistant”? The variants that become predominant are those that are best able to evade previous immunity.

The failure of the vaccine-only approach has painted politicians into a corner. This administration- and other world governments- can’t begin taking necessary steps toward mitigation without admitting they were disastrously wrong about their pursuit of a herd immunity strategy. So the long-term, society-level effects of constant reinfections continue to compound. Teacher shortages. School cancellations. Record student absences. Record sick days for workers. Staffing crises. Extreme healthcare worker shortages and overwhelmed ERs. Hospital collapse and untenable hospital-acquired infections. Birth defects. Widespread memory and neurological problems. Heart attacks in young people. RSV, Strep A, TB, Candida Auris and now measles outbreaks. Skyrocketing disability numbers and long-term sick leave.

This ship must be turned, or all of the above impacts of endless reinfection will continue to worsen. This is because COVID infection does not confer long-term immunity, carries a high-risk of long-term disability and illness with each infection, and impacts the brain, heart, blood vessels and immune system. Giving it to people again, and again, and again, and hoping these crises lift rather than intensify, will not change our course.

The first step must be honesty with the public about Long COVID; from there, we can begin to work seriously on solutions. As long as the public remains in the dark, believing that COVID is “mild,” “over,” “a cold,” they will believe mitigation- including vaccines- is totally unnecessary. Communicating COVID’s severity is critical to controlling its spread.

Right now, the CDC shows interest in neither.