Open (More or Less) Post on Covid 54

[ecosophia]

As we move further into the second year of these open posts, it's pretty clear that the official narrative is cracking as the toll of deaths and injuries from the Covid vaccines rises steadily and the vaccines themselves demonstrate their total uselesness at preventing Covid infection or transmission. It's still important to keep watch over the mis-, mal- and nonfeasance of our self-proclaimed health gruppenfuehrers, and the disastrous results of the Covid mania, but I think it's also time to begin thinking about what might be possible as the existing medical industry reels under the impact of its own self-inflicted injuries. 

So it's time for another open post. The rules are the same as before: 

1. If you plan on parroting the party line of the medical industry and its paid shills, please go away. This is a place for people to talk openly, honestly, and freely about their concerns that the party line in question is dangerously flawed and that actions being pushed by the medical industry et al. are causing injury and death. It is not a place for you to dismiss those concerns. Anyone who wants to hear the official story and the arguments in favor of it can find those on hundreds of thousands of websites.

2. If you plan on insisting that the current situation is the result of a deliberate plot by some villainous group of people or other, please go away. There are tens of thousands of websites currently rehashing various conspiracy theories about the Covid-19 outbreak and the vaccines. This is not one of them. What we're exploring is the likelihood that what's going on is the product of the same arrogance, incompetence, and corruption that the medical industry and its tame politicians have displayed so abundantly in recent decades. That possibility deserves a space of its own for discussion, and that's what we're doing here. 
 
3. If you plan on using rent-a-troll derailing or disruption tactics, please go away. I'm quite familiar with the standard tactics used by troll farms to disrupt online forums, and am ready, willing, and able -- and in fact quite eager -- to ban people permanently for engaging in them here. Oh, and I also lurk on other Covid-19 vaccine skeptic blogs, so I'm likely to notice when the same posts are showing up on more than one venue. 

4. If you don't believe in treating people with common courtesy, please go away. I have, and enforce, a strict courtesy policy on my blogs and online forums, and this is no exception. The sort of schoolyard bullying that takes place on so many other internet forums will get you deleted and banned here. No, I don't care if you disagree with that: my journal, my rules. 

With that said, the floor is open for discussion.  

Comments

Re: Yep yep yep, it sucks

[methylethyl]

Exactly.

Nobody has as much control over that stuff as they think, and we don't actually know that much about heritability for most things. Yeah, there are some gimmes: you probably want to think hard about having kids if you're an addict, a binge-drinker, have had gastric bypass surgery, or you are definitely a carrier for some horrifying genetic disorder like Huntingdon's or cystic fibrosis or Tay-Sachs or something.

But apart from that? Yeah. You *can't* know all the risks, and all worthwhile things in life involve some amount of risk. My husband and I are both "on the spectrum" but still decently functional adult human beings, and we opted to have kids. Of our three, one is about as much on the spectrum as we are, and that's fine. We have experience with that, after all ;) The other two shocked us by being completely normal! Looking back, we'd been told the spectrum thing was heavily genetic, and my FIL being also quite aspie, plus a couple of nerdy engineer grandfathers in the mix... we took it for granted that it was 100% familial and all our kids would be that way. But actually, our aspie kid was also the most difficult pregnancy, where I was the most ill and had the most bad things happen-- I lost ten pounds in the first trimester because the nausea was so awful, and had a severe intestinal ailment around 6mo which again caused me to drop ten pounds-- had a dreadfully hard time gaining weight at all, and was actually underweight after he was born. Maybe all our kids carry that *potential* for being on the spectrum, but it takes a craptastic pregnancy with some malnutrition to push it over the edge? Who knows. The thing is, there's only so much you can control, and the biggest problems are often things you can't predict or don't know about.

Life = risk.

Re: Yep yep yep, it sucks

[deathcap]

What on earth are you doing inside of my family structure!

Me: diagnosed ADHD as a kid, figured out later on that ASD type 1/Aspergers fit way more. Am a fully functional adult whose biggest issue seems to be being tone deaf (in social situations, not literally, as I have nearly perfect pitch). Wife: persistent anxiety disorder and mild OCD tendencies. We also have three kids, and you know what? The first one is 8, and honestly reminds me a LOT of how I was as a kid...very kinetic, VERY cerebral and intellectual, VERY literal, high energy and stuck in his imagination a lot. His pregnancy was filled with heavy vomiting and he was colicky as can be. Kid #2 is 4, has a noticeable language delay and as far as I can tell some sensory issues, being closer to "classic" high-functioning autism (he does NOT like headphones, won't cooperate with the hearing tests, and gets mad when I put him in shirts that aren't cotton, undies that aren't briefs, etc, but has an absurdly high vocabulary that he doesn't use properly (yet) and will go through an entire coloring book in one sitting). His pregnancy was marked by a premature c-section driven by a a huge 11cm ovarian cyst (which I got a picture of cause it was fascinating). Our third one? As far as I can tell, he's pretty neurotypical. Didn't have much in the way of colick. Pregnancy didn't really have any issues. Wife felt more or less okay the whole time.

Whether or not there's a link there, I don't know, but your experience with your pregnancies matches up well with ours...

Re: Yep yep yep, it sucks

[methylethyl]

Hah! I feel bad for your wife (we did the horrible colic thing with kid1, too! Wouldn't wish it on my worst enemy!), but it's nice to know we're not the only ones ;) Kid1 was late enough walking and talking that the pediatrician threatened us with a developmental assessment. Once he started, of course, he was unstoppable and went from first word to complete sentences in a few weeks. These days... eh. He's about as socially clueless as we are, and we do a lot of coaching to try and spare him the suffering we went through on that account. We sometimes have to remind him about not making repetitive noises in public, and he gets agitated when we make plans, and then have to change them. He'll be fine. Still, it was a bit of a shock to us when the younger ones turned out so normal! At the time, the popular theory was that it was *all* about genetics. Piffle, I say.

The colic thing, though... It happened with all our kids, just the eldest was the worst. By the third one, I figured out that if I eliminated dairy from my own diet, the colic went away! (and yeah, I still get a little miffed that *nobody told me about this* the first time around-- though I suppose it could be idiosyncratic with different moms/kids. Still, I'd have tried *anything*)

Re: Yep yep yep, it sucks

[(Anonymous)]

>Maybe all our kids carry that *potential* for being on the spectrum, but it takes a craptastic pregnancy with some malnutrition to push it over the edge?

That theory got a lot of discussion in Gillberg and Gillberg's *The Biology of the Autistic Syndromes* back before the whole "CDC discovers more heavy metals than recommended in childhood vax schedule" thing ~2000. They had a bunch of pedigrees where the index case (often with lower-functioning autism) had an "environmental insult" and other family members had Asperger's or were "just Aspergerish." Since that was then, the insults included things like rubella in pregnancy. (Remember the old theory that the problem with MMR and autism was actually the exposure to rubella? That's been memory-holed after the Andrew Wakefield thing.)

Re: Yep yep yep, it sucks

[methylethyl]

Huh. I think I stopped reading the research once it went all "genetics is gonna solve autism! Let's find the autism genes!" Almost nobody was doing any further work on the things I was interested in: what happens when spectrummy people become adults, or on the neuro/sensory processing weirdnesses that very nearly define the condition. The research was single-mindedly *obsessed* with finding-the-genes and controlling autistic kids' behaviors, and completely ignoring all the stuff we were finding out on adults-with-autism chatgroups, just by comparing notes with each other (migraines, anyone?). To this day, the only researcher I've ever seen address this is Olga Bogdashina. I guess there wasn't any grant money in it.

But gosh, the "just Aspergish" genre of family-tree research does ring a bell, doesn't it? My kids' four great-grandfathers: a trolley driver, a chemical engineer, a submarine navigator, and a biophysicist who made significant contributions to his field. Plus a lot of delightfully weird relatives. Maybe it just means that if that's *your* family of bright eccentrics, you should probably be extra-super-careful about pregnancy nutrition and maybe delay or avoid some of the shots? I dunno. As above, you can't avoid all risks, and maybe we stress out pregnant ladies enough as it is!