Gerd Nollmann

[Reality Check Marker @RealCheckMarker]

@1goodtern Nobody is reporting #LongCOVID
How little of a rat's ass does your political leadership give about you or your health if your nation can't be bothered to count how many of its citizens are disabled by SARS?

[Zdenek Vrozina @ZdenekVrozina]

What ties all the Polybio presentations together is a strong emphasis on the persistence of SARS2 - often in a replication-competent form.
This persistence is primarily located in tissues, especially in the gastrointestinal tract (ileum, lamina propria, sigmoid colon).

Nicolas Huot
Found replication-competent SARS2 in the ileum of primates, localized near lymphoid structures.
Marcus Buggert
Detected persistent viral RNA in the gut along with increased interferon signaling.
Tim Henrich
Showed persistence in the lamina propria and associated changes in immune cells.
Eduardo Reategui
Presented the BARA platform (using extracellular vesicles) with very strong detection accuracy.
Van Brocklin
PET scanning to identify areas of T cell activation across patient’s whole bodies

These studies strongly suggest functional parallels with HIV -
Viral reservoirs in immune cells and GALT
Chronic T-cell activation and exhaustion
Long term immune dysregulation driven by persistent viral antigens.

PolyBio is approaching Long COVID as a chronic infectious disease with a viral reservoir, rather than merely a post-viral syndrome.
The transfer of knowledge and experience from HIV research is one of the strongest accelerators of progress in this field!

[Dr. Sean Mullen @drseanmullen]

Tennis taught me emotional regulation at the deepest level.

The ball does not care about your frustration, excuses, momentum swings, ego, or story.

You reset between points or you lose.

Honestly, that’s most of life.

[tern @1goodtern]

If you were 85 in the 80s, you went through the thick of the Spanish Flu.

[Reality Check Marker @RealCheckMarker]

@outbreakupdates This is the one they sent home, suggesting she was suffering from hypochondria . . .
https://t.co/9K3DUoSfV6

[James Throt MBBS, MD, PhD, FRCPath @JamesThrot]

That ship has already sailed, pardon the pun.

One passenger died upon arrival at a hospital in Johannesburg, having FLOWN there from the island of St Helena where she disembarked the cruise ship.

The Hantavirus ‘cat’ is already out of the bag.

[Reality Check Marker @RealCheckMarker]

@DonEford @DrEricDing @JoelTHpostHack There's two possible "cures";
- embryonic stem cells (still being developed),
- don't get infected.
#WearN95 if your insurance coverage doesn't include expensive exploratory research participant treatment.

[Reality Check Marker @RealCheckMarker]

@DonEford @DrEricDing @JoelTHpostHack Yes. Once senescence shuts down cellular function, there's no possibility of any drug treatment, because there's no nutrient absorption. This is why treatment for cancer or HIV are targeted toxic cocktails that induce apoptosis (death). Early detection/intervention is the key.

[Jim Bianco @biancoresearch]

I am not a military analyst. I'm a financial analyst focused on macroeconomic risk.

That different lens might explain why I see something most military strategists and investors are missing.
---
The New Rules of Warfare—And Why We Can't Opt Out

For nearly a century, warfare belonged to whoever controlled the biggest defense budget. Aircraft carriers. Stealth bombers. Multibillion-dollar weapons systems.

That model is changing in ways many aren't appreciating.

Ukraine and Iran are showing the West what 21st-century conflict actually looks like: decentralized, highly iterative, fast-changing, unmanned, and cheap. Neither the US nor Russia—beginning in 2022—appears prepared.

We might now have no choice but to show we can fight and win such a war.

The Ukraine Approach

Faced with a small defense budget, a much smaller population, and a vastly outnumbered army, Ukraine had to get creative. They couldn't match Russia's industrial capacity or spending. So they abandoned that playbook entirely.

They developed an entirely new way to fight, highly decentralized, iterative, and most importantly, cheap.
They also created Brave1—a completely new way to conduct war.

Frontline commanders log into an iPad and bypass central command entirely. They spend digital points to purchase equipment directly from hundreds of (Ukrainian) manufacturers. When they encounter a new threat, they message the manufacturer directly and work with the engineers to find a solution, even if that means they visit to the front. The result is hardware or software upgrades that once took months now take days.

Here's the crucial part: hundreds of manufacturers compete fiercely for these dollars by offering the best possible product as fast as possible. This isn't centralized procurement. It's a market. Competition drives innovation at scale. Weapons evolve as the enemy evolves in real time.

Units are also awarded points for confirmed kills, uploaded from drone video—a powerfully eloquent way to grade effectiveness.

But the real innovation might be how they decentralized manufacturing itself. Instead of building weapons in massive, centralized factories that make perfect targets for Russian bombing, Ukraine distributed production across hundreds of small manufacturers—workshops, machine shops, garages, and yes, kitchens. Each produces components or complete systems. This approach serves two purposes: speed and survival.

You can bomb a tank factory. You destroy production for months. You cannot bomb ten thousand kitchens. If one workshop gets hit, ninety-nine others keep producing. The network regenerates faster than Russia can destroy it. This is why the manufacturing process includes actual kitchens—it's not a metaphor. It's a strategy.

The Metric That Defines a New Era

The result is staggering: at least 70% of battlefield casualties now come from drones. This is the first time in over a century that the primary cause of combat death is neither a bullet nor an artillery shell. Since World War I, industrial warfare meant industrial killing. Ukraine has broken that equation entirely.

As a result, Russia is now controlling less territory than at any point since 2022 and going backward. In March, Ukraine made gains while Russia recorded no gains for the first time in two and a half years, and Drone-led offensives recaptured 470 square kilometers while paralyzing 40% of Russian oil exports.

Ukraine has lowered the "cost per kill" to less than $1,000 per casualty—a 99.98% reduction from the millions of dollars that were common in the post-9/11 wars. This isn't an incremental improvement. This is a complete inversion of modern military economics.
Yet the Western defense establishment is not learning from this.

Rheinmetall CEO Armin Papperger mocked Ukraine's entire approach. In The Atlantic, he called Ukrainian manufacturers "housewives with 3D printers," dismissing their work as "playing with Legos." They are not studying this revolution. They are mocking it.

And the "housewives with 3D printers" are beating the Russian army!

Ukraine Is Now in the Middle East

The US Military and Gulf states face an eerily similar problem. Iran's Shahed drones threaten shipping in the Strait of Hormuz—a chokepoint that funnels 21% of global oil. They cannot fend off Iran by firing a $4 million Patriot missiles at $20,000 drones.

They need what Ukraine has discovered: a decentralized, rapidly adaptive defense network that doesn't require centralized industrial capacity.

That's why Ukraine just signed historic 10-year defense deals with Saudi Arabia, Qatar, and the UAE.

Over 220 Ukrainian specialists are now on the front lines of the Persian Gulf—exporting not just weapons, but a completely new doctrine of how to fight.

The precedent is set. The model works. Everyone is watching.

Mosaic

On April 1st, Trump threatened to bomb Iran "back to the stone ages" if they don't reopen the Strait within weeks.

It's the classic 20th-century playbook: overwhelming offense force, massive bombardment, industrial-scale destruction.

The problem? That playbook doesn't work against distributed, cheap, rapid-iteration systems—especially when your enemy is organized under a mosaic structure.

Iran's "Mosaic Defense" doctrine is a decentralized command system where authority and capability are distributed across multiple geographic and organizational nodes.

Each region operates semi-autonomously with overlapping chains of command and pre-planned contingencies. It's designed so that when you destroy the center, the edges keep fighting. You cannot decapitate a system with no head. You cannot out-bomb your way to victory when your enemy is not centralized; this was the solution for 20th-century industrial warfare.

Defense Wins Championships

21st-century asymmetrical threats require defensive shields, not aggressive offenses. Ukraine has built exactly that: rapid-iteration defenses, decentralized manufacturing, commanders empowered to buy solutions in real time and rewarded for success.

That same defensive model may hold the key to opening the Strait of Hormuz. Not through massive offense, but through the ability to adapt and defend quickly.

Why We're Stuck

Whether you viewed this as a war of choice or not, it has now become a war to keep global trade open. And that makes it inescapable.

This is precisely why the US cannot declare victory and walk away from the Strait of Hormuz— or TACO.

Every adversary on the planet will interpret American withdrawal as confirmation that cheap asymmetric systems work against powerful centralized platforms.

And these adversaries might have sent us a message last month. In mid-March 2026, an unauthorized drone swarm penetrated Barksdale Air Force Base in Louisiana, home to the U.S. Air Force's Global Strike Command.

The fact that this happened not overseas but in the United States, and that these tests occurred just weeks ago, underscores how close this threat is now.

They didn't attack. They announced their presence. Every adversary watching learned that cheap drone networks can reach into the US.

The Global Supply Chain Risk

If the US abandons the Gulf while Iran holds the Strait contested, markets will price this as validation that cheap systems can hold global trade hostage. The current market disruptions will become permanent.

Supply chains will have to pivot from "just-in-time" efficiency back to "just-in-case" redundancy. Inflation returns as safety costs money. Trade routes diversify away from vulnerable chokepoints. The global friction tax becomes permanent.

The Unavoidable Truth

Once you prove that cheap, asymmetric systems can hold global trade hostage, that knowledge spreads globally and irreversibly. Every adversary learns the same lesson: you don't need a $2 trillion Navy—you need $20 million in drones and the will to use them.

Withdrawing while the Strait remains contested would permanently validate this model. Supply chains shift to "just-in-case" redundancy. Insurance costs rise. The friction tax becomes structural—baked into every global transaction for decades.

The cost of staying is measured in months. The cost of leaving is measured in decades of economic drag.

We cannot leave unfinished business.

[James Throt MBBS, MD, PhD, FRCPath @JamesThrot]

It’s worth knowing that COVID has been associated with T-cell exhaustion, lymphopenia, impaired interferon responses & persistent immune dysregulation.

When host immune regulation is altered, susceptibility/vulnerability to other infections, like meningitis, can increase.

[James Throt MBBS, MD, PhD, FRCPath @JamesThrot]

Spreading a brain damaging virus on repeat for >6 years won’t be helping

And since nobody has an appetite for avoiding brain damage, there’s no end in sight

Pretending your 8th COVID infection is just another cold won’t protect you either

Actions & inactions have consequences

[Zdenek Vrozina @ZdenekVrozina]

And unfortunately, the observation that long COVID may develop these features much more rapidly - and possibly across a large fraction of the population if LC is viewed as a spectrum - is increasingly shifting from hypothesis to empirical observation.

[Zdenek Vrozina @ZdenekVrozina]

Reviews of long COVID in Cell and work by Yin describe something similar. Not simply high inflammation, but a mis-coordinated response in which antibodies are present while cellular control and regulation appear poorly synchronized. In that sense, the architecture of the dysfunction looks strikingly HIV-like, even if the underlying pathogen is different.

[James Throt MBBS, MD, PhD, FRCPath @JamesThrot]

Since then, people have lost themselves.

They became so fixated on cosplaying 2019, that they took leave of their senses.

Selfishness, egocentricity, compliance, and consumerism have taken over.

Left & right have morphed into one, regurgitating the same anti-pandemic rhetoric.

[James Throt MBBS, MD, PhD, FRCPath @JamesThrot]

The question isn't whether people are evil or immoral. Even if it seems that way.

It is whether we are ignoring cumulative neurological insult while pretending the erosion of restraint, empathy & foresight is purely cultural & political.

That assumption may age very badly.

END

[James Throt MBBS, MD, PhD, FRCPath @JamesThrot]

People don’t “pretend” everything is fine.

They adapt to dysfunction. This becomes the new “normal”.

The human mind will tolerate astonishing levels of decline if it happens slowly & collectively.

There is not going to be a “reckoning”. Just a slow, gradual, painful collapse.

[Daniel Brittain Dugger @dbdugger]

They're going to the MEmory care unit with a blob brain or the MorguE with the bowels of an AIDS patient. It's already happening.

[Dr. Sean Mullen @drseanmullen]

Everyone has an opinion on cognitive decline.

Almost no one is willing to use their brain to evaluate the actual evidence:

• Longitudinal, multi-year studies showing measurable cognitive performance decline across age groups
• Neuroimaging data showing reduced activity in key brain regions—in both children and adults
• Bench science demonstrating direct viral effects on neurons and neural support cells
• Neonatal data documenting neurological malformations and developmental disruption
• School-based intervention data showing fewer absences and better cognitive outcomes when air purifiers are used

These findings aren’t fringe. They’re published in the most rigorous journals on Earth.

What’s missing isn’t data.
It’s synthesis.

If you can’t hold these facts in your mind at the same time and recognize the pattern, that’s not a difference of opinion—it’s cognitive failure.

And no, this is not because we “closed the world” for a few months.
It’s not because people used screens for a year.

That explanation collapses instantly when confronted with the evidence.

Reality doesn’t care whether it’s comforting.

Sincerely,
Sean Mullen, PhD
Cognitive Scientist

[James Throt MBBS, MD, PhD, FRCPath @JamesThrot]

Since 2020, we’ve introduced a population-level stressor that disproportionately affects frontal function; repeated SARS-CoV-2 infection.

Leading to neuroinflammation, sleep disruption, cognitive fatigue & executive dysfunction.

None of this requires dramatic illness to matter.

[James Throt MBBS, MD, PhD, FRCPath @JamesThrot]

It is crucial to state that the frontal lobes don’t make someone “good”, per se.

They act as brakes, especially on people already drawn to coercive authority.

Hence the frontal lobes don’t make someone good, but they do stop them being dangerous.