I appreciated this when it came out but I also read the NY Times report in January of 2019 which identified the Indies Short-tailed Cricket as the culprit.
I thought we had reports from different locations that predated the cricket report which indicated against the idea of mass hysteria? In other words, I read somewhere that we had multiple reports from sources far enough apart and close enough in time and predating the crickets which suggests that it is highly unlikely for any sort of copy-cat type of effect. ?
You should reach out to Mark Lenzi, a longtime diplomat and NGO leader who claims that he and his families suffered from one of the incidents that have come to be called Havana Syndrome. When I was working on former Soviet Georgia, he had a reputation as a reliable, straightforward, sober person, and I think he'd make a good interview.
I highly recommend this podcast about Havana Syndrome. It's with an expert on functional illness and at one point she mentions that during the pandemic she would sometimes experience symptoms of Covid, which she knew were psychological in nature. This is something that happens to people when we're under stress.
When I worked in Afghanistan it was common for schoolgirls to collapse from what were believed to be poison gas attacks by the Taliban. These happened often enough that the government ended up arresting some people and torturing them into confessing. But nobody ever found any physical evidence for poison gas.
If the Afghans had read this New Yorker article from 1978, they'd have realized what was actually happening:
The field of medicine has tended to view psychogenic illness as a thing that affects women, especially teenage girls. As a result, there's less chance that unexplained symptoms in men, particularly men in tough professions would be considered psychogenic.
Agreed: psychosomatic explanations should always be on the table, even when macho men get sick. But when there's doubt about whether an organic cause exists, patients skewing young and/or female should be considered a red flag.
The difficulty with this is that women are much more inclined to seek medical care, so if there's a condition typified by vague, non-specific symptoms then the population seeking care is going to skew that way, psychogenic or not.
I think Havana Syndrome and Fentanyl exposure are interesting outliers that kind of prove the point - the putative explanations for them are an external threat, and there are male dominated hierarchical organizations providing a permission structure for reporting.
Extreme reactions to imagined Fentanyl exposure among cops is an extremely good example of this happening amongst exactly the group we're culturally inclined to believe wouldn't be susceptible to hysteria (a word not generally used for this any more precisely because it's tied up with those cultural assumptions.)
The depressing thing about that is that because law enforcement has such a manly reputation, it's considered insulting and inappropriate to suggest that these reactions to suspected Fentanyl are psychogenic and so the media end up fanning hysteria over Fentanyl exposure.
Same thing with the foreign service personnel. Previously headaches were nothing to focus on. Now they’ve been told someone is trying to kill them and sudden their headaches are a problem. The symptoms are real and they are accurately reporting them. But the perception of threat makes the report acceptable in a way it would not previously have been.
Well, young women in the UK are convinced that men in clubs are injecting them with date-rape drugs: a method of administration which I don't think has ever been documented, although the drugs themselves exist. I don't know how many of those women are successful professionals, though.
I know I'll be canceled for saying this but it would be good to get a gender breakdown of the Havana Syndrome patients and compare it to the gender breakdown of the Foreign Service in general. For comparison, here's another disease that might not be real:
I think that an issue here is that nobody wants to admit the possibility that their illness was psychogenic because it would mean they were "crazy" or that their very real suffering was somehow fake or invalid. It's not! Just because the primary cause of your symptoms was your own brain doesn't make it under your control, nor does it invalidate your experience.
I came down with a viral infection (never confirmed to be covid) in mid-March 2020 right when pandemic fears were at their peak. I'd say that I didn't really feel 100% physically again until August 2020 or so, and even now my exercise capacity seems limited (confounded by the fact that I've been much less active). It certainly didn't FEEL psychogenic, but I have to admit that I was extremely stressed and anxious the whole time--about my illness, about the uncertainty of how bad the pandemic would be, about my job, and about never seeing my friends anymore. Obviously if there's something physically wrong that's concerning in the long term it would be good to know (and doctors have been unable to find any issues), but I'm not super bothered by the prospect of it having been psychogenic--bodies and brains can be stupid sometime, it wouldn't be my fault.
So Havana, Lyme disease, long covid--it seems like sometimes the assertions that these are psychogenic are phrased in such a way that provokes defensiveness in the sufferers. I think in order to make progress in finding the real causes, psychogenic or not, it would be very helpful to destigmatize the psychogenic hypothesis so that people don't feel crazy or stupid if they did suffer from something that was "all in their head."
"So Havana, Lyme disease, long covid--it seems like sometimes the assertions that these are psychogenic are phrased in such a way that provokes defensiveness in the sufferers. I think in order to make progress in finding the real causes, psychogenic or not, it would be very helpful to destigmatize the psychogenic hypothesis so that people don't feel crazy or stupid if they did suffer from something that was "all in their head."
Well, it's because a doctor is done with you if an illness is psychogenic, and the recommended remedy will be cognitive therapy with a psychologist or psychiatrist involved.
This article conflates two questions: (1) is there an identifiable syndrome, ie are foreign federal officials experiencing certain symptoms at higher rates than the general population and (2) if so what is its cause. Shure points out that the individual symptoms are common, but she but doesn’t really argue, much less prove, that there is no syndrome to be explained. As a result, she’s ultimately left arguing that among the unknown causes of this syndrome, one speculative possibility (mass sociogenic illness) is probably true while all other speculative possibilities are probably false. I’m not convinced. To be clear, I have no idea what’s causing this and have always been skeptical that it’s the Russians. But I’d need a lot more evidence to move from general skepticism of conspiracy theories to a specific belief that the cause is more likely mass sociogenic illness than something else . Once it’s conceded that there’s a syndrome with an unknown cause, the answer is that the cause is unknown.
Seems like an overly strong thesis. I agree that Havana Syndrome very much could be a mass psychogenic illness, but I would also put 'directed microwave weapon' at like a nonzero possibility. As the excellent comment by Neva Durand below me notes, there's a long history of doctors calling chronic illnesses psychosomatic- the peptic ulcer is a pretty wild example!
Shure here marshals a bunch of disconnected facts for the overly strong thesis that it
"is very likely" a psychogenic illness, ignorant of the irony that she's basically doing the same thing as the microwave weapon crowd. There's like the same level of evidence either way! Maximum irony points. Or, it could be a non-weapon but totally real cause such as a new type of illness or bug. (Perhaps it affects other, regular people in other countries who receive less media & medical attention than State Department officials).
We should continue to cautiously study Havana Syndrome, and not make overly strong, evidence-weak assertions either way- whether a new weapon or mass hysteria. This piece doesn't help. I suspect this kind of thinking is popular among the Greenwald/Taibbi 'everything bad about Russia is a hoax' crowd
If a GP diagnosed a random citizen who came in complaining of headaches and fatigue with ‘Havana syndrome’ their peers would mock them. Maybe they would go for chronic fatigue or one of a host of other vaporous syndromes that represent this constellation of symptoms. The ‘Havana syndrome’ assumes that there is something special about foreign service personnel that have these complaints. And the only evidence supporting that was the crickets. Now all that’s left is the prejudice that our foreign service people are too tough minded to be suffering from one of these extant syndromes. But maybe everyone with unexplained migraines has suffered a directed energy assault? Who knows? By your reasoning it is exactly as likely as anything else…
What is the 'evidence' that it's a mass hysteria? That's something that can really only be diagnosed years after the fact. Why would that be our default if we don't otherwise know?
Like- it's OK to be agnostic on issues man. It's OK to say 'there's really not enough evidence to say, let's gather data & be cautious for a bit'. We don't always have to have A Take on everything as it's happening. I'm simply pointing out the author has as much evidence for her thesis as the microwave weapon folks do
Fair enough. Psychogenic illness is a garbage can. We wouldn’t ever ‘know’ that’s what it was in a very satisfactory way. But I would say the parsimonious explanation for an increase in reports of certain symptoms in Havana and then throughout the foreign service is that the internal reports to be on the lookout for those symptoms as part of an attack itself caused the increase in reports. Not ray guns. But as I said elsewhere just show me something remotely resembling a ray gun and I would change my mind.
You have to try to be a good Bayesian here — once you lose the cricket noise, there’s no meaningful evidence of any kind pointing in any direction.
So what’s your prior — I don’t think, in the absence of any evidence, we ought to put equal weight on “stress-induced symptoms” and “novel energy weapons”.
Psychosomatic illnesses are a thing. Ray-guns are not. Those are my priors. I am happy to entertain evidence saying otherwise, or offering an alternative explanation, but I haven't seen anything. Lost Future suggests the possibility that it's a disease (certainly reasonable a priori), but that doesn't seem to fit the pattern either.
I agree, there's no meaningful evidence of any kind pointing in any direction- so writing an opinion piece with statements like "The “Syndrome” is a mass sociogenic illness" is overly strong. Reducing the two possible options to 'mass hysteria' or 'a new weapon' is a false choice, as I mentioned there could be some other (non-weapon) explanation such as a previously unknown disease or syndrome. It could be affecting other, ordinary Cubans who don't receive the same level of media attention as US diplomats & spies
Shure does a good job of laying out the weakness of the raygun theory but much less to demonstrate that this is a functional illness. The discounting of the former increases the likelihood of the latter regardless of priors
To push back on those saying all chronic illness is psychosomatic (chronic Lyme, long COVID, etc) - there's a long history in the medical profession of claiming that anything they don't understand must be due to mental defects of their patients. One example (that won a Nobel prize) is the peptic ulcer, thought for 50+ years to be due to lifestyle choices, or even bad mothers. Then it turned out it was actually caused by a bacterium.
Doctors would rather tell a patient "you're crazy" than "we don't know what's wrong and we don't know how to help you". It's entirely biologically plausible that a viral or bacterial infection causes long term symptoms - we know, for example, that flu infection increases stroke and heart disease risk (possibly also true of COVID).
What upsets me about the ‘Havana syndrome’ is it assumes the conclusion. These symptoms are consistent with lots of extant known unknowns. Why is it it’s own thing? Well first bc of the crickets. Now bc our foreign service personnel are assumed to be too good to be suffering from the same mysterious syndromes that normal people get. Instead they have ‘Havana syndrome’ and the most likely explanation is a ray gun…
I would say it’s the Havana syndrome defenders who are implicitly saying other ailments of unknown cause civilians get are made up. Why else do they need a special syndrome for themselves that has no particularly novel symptoms?
Of course it’s very possible there’s some info to support it that they just don’t want to share. But it’s sort of ‘classified intel fetish or mysterious syndrome; pick one’ IMO.
The flip side to this is that if you take the patient's suffering seriously, and you actually believe the best evidence available is that the symptoms are psychosomatic, and the only way their suffering will be alleviated is for them to accept that, what do you do?
It’s possible that many of these conditions have real, discernible causes, but it’s also true that the mind can magnify their intensity well beyond their “objective” presentation. I had some muscle fatigue for a little while, but I was so anxious about everything at the time that I essentially willed myself into a case “chronic fatigue syndrome.” A healthier mind would likely have allowed the symptoms to pass without issue.
This is very disappointing to read on a blog I hold on such high regard. The facts in this article and the debate about the cause of the illnesses were current in about 2018 or 2019, but there have been dozens and dozens of attacks in multiple countries since then. The people in the same positions are always the ones targeted no matter where in the world this happens. The debate about this has been over for some time and Blinken’s focus on this is a recognition that US official are being deliberately targeted.
Are you saying there’s now direct evidence of the weapon, technology, source, or state sponsor? Because seeing additional attacks involving people in the same kinds of positions only *increases* the relative likelihood of the sociogenic hypothesis: large geographic spread is much more easily explained by social transmission than an ever-widening conspiracy of weirdly nonstrategic deployment of a physically implausible superweapon for which is there is no direct evidence. And if you agreed with Shure’s facts up to 2018-2019, then you need much stronger evidence to overturn the prior formed by Shure’s conclusions. If such evidence had appeared since 2019, then why didn’t you summarize it in your reply here? That is, if the debate is over, why not let us know why it ended?
More of this, please. I appreciate this type of well-reasoned and well-researched post.
Not sure why everyone is conflating this with Lyme or Long COVID (both of which are diseases with an actual cause and exhibit symptoms similar to ME/CFS). The better analogy is to the lab leak hypothesis! Lots of media noise around shady evidence with nothing concrete to refute the overwhelming likelihood of natural origin.
The problem with an indistinct term like “long COVID” is that it conflates a series of materially different problems. When I use that term, I’m specifically referring to conditions of no obvious origin beyond the sufferer’s prior COVID diagnosis. I don’t include actual lung damage in that category, which I would consider a clear and obvious cause of functional impairment. By contrast, there’s no clear and obvious cause of “brain fog” or memory issues.
Perhaps, but much of the coverage I’ve read about long COVID focuses on people who had mild cases of COVID itself. Hard to draw a neat line between that sort of illness and severe, irreparable lung damage.
I appreciated this when it came out but I also read the NY Times report in January of 2019 which identified the Indies Short-tailed Cricket as the culprit.
https://www.nytimes.com/2019/01/04/science/sonic-attack-cuba-crickets.html
I thought we had reports from different locations that predated the cricket report which indicated against the idea of mass hysteria? In other words, I read somewhere that we had multiple reports from sources far enough apart and close enough in time and predating the crickets which suggests that it is highly unlikely for any sort of copy-cat type of effect. ?
You should reach out to Mark Lenzi, a longtime diplomat and NGO leader who claims that he and his families suffered from one of the incidents that have come to be called Havana Syndrome. When I was working on former Soviet Georgia, he had a reputation as a reliable, straightforward, sober person, and I think he'd make a good interview.
Fascinating piece!
I highly recommend this podcast about Havana Syndrome. It's with an expert on functional illness and at one point she mentions that during the pandemic she would sometimes experience symptoms of Covid, which she knew were psychological in nature. This is something that happens to people when we're under stress.
https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/45-havana-syndrome-a-disease-of-body-or-mind/id1545378409?i=1000540133170
Love this post! Moar Natalie!
Yup yup yup.
When I worked in Afghanistan it was common for schoolgirls to collapse from what were believed to be poison gas attacks by the Taliban. These happened often enough that the government ended up arresting some people and torturing them into confessing. But nobody ever found any physical evidence for poison gas.
If the Afghans had read this New Yorker article from 1978, they'd have realized what was actually happening:
https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/1978/08/21/sandy
The field of medicine has tended to view psychogenic illness as a thing that affects women, especially teenage girls. As a result, there's less chance that unexplained symptoms in men, particularly men in tough professions would be considered psychogenic.
Agreed: psychosomatic explanations should always be on the table, even when macho men get sick. But when there's doubt about whether an organic cause exists, patients skewing young and/or female should be considered a red flag.
The difficulty with this is that women are much more inclined to seek medical care, so if there's a condition typified by vague, non-specific symptoms then the population seeking care is going to skew that way, psychogenic or not.
I think Havana Syndrome and Fentanyl exposure are interesting outliers that kind of prove the point - the putative explanations for them are an external threat, and there are male dominated hierarchical organizations providing a permission structure for reporting.
Extreme reactions to imagined Fentanyl exposure among cops is an extremely good example of this happening amongst exactly the group we're culturally inclined to believe wouldn't be susceptible to hysteria (a word not generally used for this any more precisely because it's tied up with those cultural assumptions.)
The depressing thing about that is that because law enforcement has such a manly reputation, it's considered insulting and inappropriate to suggest that these reactions to suspected Fentanyl are psychogenic and so the media end up fanning hysteria over Fentanyl exposure.
Same thing with the foreign service personnel. Previously headaches were nothing to focus on. Now they’ve been told someone is trying to kill them and sudden their headaches are a problem. The symptoms are real and they are accurately reporting them. But the perception of threat makes the report acceptable in a way it would not previously have been.
You are describing mass psychogenic illness.
Well, young women in the UK are convinced that men in clubs are injecting them with date-rape drugs: a method of administration which I don't think has ever been documented, although the drugs themselves exist. I don't know how many of those women are successful professionals, though.
I know I'll be canceled for saying this but it would be good to get a gender breakdown of the Havana Syndrome patients and compare it to the gender breakdown of the Foreign Service in general. For comparison, here's another disease that might not be real:
https://www.theguardian.com/society/2021/jun/13/why-are-women-more-prone-to-long-covid
Russia using this secret weapon in Beijing is the most implausible thing to me. Why would they risk China getting the tech?
I think that an issue here is that nobody wants to admit the possibility that their illness was psychogenic because it would mean they were "crazy" or that their very real suffering was somehow fake or invalid. It's not! Just because the primary cause of your symptoms was your own brain doesn't make it under your control, nor does it invalidate your experience.
I came down with a viral infection (never confirmed to be covid) in mid-March 2020 right when pandemic fears were at their peak. I'd say that I didn't really feel 100% physically again until August 2020 or so, and even now my exercise capacity seems limited (confounded by the fact that I've been much less active). It certainly didn't FEEL psychogenic, but I have to admit that I was extremely stressed and anxious the whole time--about my illness, about the uncertainty of how bad the pandemic would be, about my job, and about never seeing my friends anymore. Obviously if there's something physically wrong that's concerning in the long term it would be good to know (and doctors have been unable to find any issues), but I'm not super bothered by the prospect of it having been psychogenic--bodies and brains can be stupid sometime, it wouldn't be my fault.
So Havana, Lyme disease, long covid--it seems like sometimes the assertions that these are psychogenic are phrased in such a way that provokes defensiveness in the sufferers. I think in order to make progress in finding the real causes, psychogenic or not, it would be very helpful to destigmatize the psychogenic hypothesis so that people don't feel crazy or stupid if they did suffer from something that was "all in their head."
"So Havana, Lyme disease, long covid--it seems like sometimes the assertions that these are psychogenic are phrased in such a way that provokes defensiveness in the sufferers. I think in order to make progress in finding the real causes, psychogenic or not, it would be very helpful to destigmatize the psychogenic hypothesis so that people don't feel crazy or stupid if they did suffer from something that was "all in their head."
Well, it's because a doctor is done with you if an illness is psychogenic, and the recommended remedy will be cognitive therapy with a psychologist or psychiatrist involved.
This article conflates two questions: (1) is there an identifiable syndrome, ie are foreign federal officials experiencing certain symptoms at higher rates than the general population and (2) if so what is its cause. Shure points out that the individual symptoms are common, but she but doesn’t really argue, much less prove, that there is no syndrome to be explained. As a result, she’s ultimately left arguing that among the unknown causes of this syndrome, one speculative possibility (mass sociogenic illness) is probably true while all other speculative possibilities are probably false. I’m not convinced. To be clear, I have no idea what’s causing this and have always been skeptical that it’s the Russians. But I’d need a lot more evidence to move from general skepticism of conspiracy theories to a specific belief that the cause is more likely mass sociogenic illness than something else . Once it’s conceded that there’s a syndrome with an unknown cause, the answer is that the cause is unknown.
So you present this information to the conspiracy theorists and what do you get? Crickets.
Seems like an overly strong thesis. I agree that Havana Syndrome very much could be a mass psychogenic illness, but I would also put 'directed microwave weapon' at like a nonzero possibility. As the excellent comment by Neva Durand below me notes, there's a long history of doctors calling chronic illnesses psychosomatic- the peptic ulcer is a pretty wild example!
Shure here marshals a bunch of disconnected facts for the overly strong thesis that it
"is very likely" a psychogenic illness, ignorant of the irony that she's basically doing the same thing as the microwave weapon crowd. There's like the same level of evidence either way! Maximum irony points. Or, it could be a non-weapon but totally real cause such as a new type of illness or bug. (Perhaps it affects other, regular people in other countries who receive less media & medical attention than State Department officials).
We should continue to cautiously study Havana Syndrome, and not make overly strong, evidence-weak assertions either way- whether a new weapon or mass hysteria. This piece doesn't help. I suspect this kind of thinking is popular among the Greenwald/Taibbi 'everything bad about Russia is a hoax' crowd
If a GP diagnosed a random citizen who came in complaining of headaches and fatigue with ‘Havana syndrome’ their peers would mock them. Maybe they would go for chronic fatigue or one of a host of other vaporous syndromes that represent this constellation of symptoms. The ‘Havana syndrome’ assumes that there is something special about foreign service personnel that have these complaints. And the only evidence supporting that was the crickets. Now all that’s left is the prejudice that our foreign service people are too tough minded to be suffering from one of these extant syndromes. But maybe everyone with unexplained migraines has suffered a directed energy assault? Who knows? By your reasoning it is exactly as likely as anything else…
What is the 'evidence' that it's a mass hysteria? That's something that can really only be diagnosed years after the fact. Why would that be our default if we don't otherwise know?
Like- it's OK to be agnostic on issues man. It's OK to say 'there's really not enough evidence to say, let's gather data & be cautious for a bit'. We don't always have to have A Take on everything as it's happening. I'm simply pointing out the author has as much evidence for her thesis as the microwave weapon folks do
Fair enough. Psychogenic illness is a garbage can. We wouldn’t ever ‘know’ that’s what it was in a very satisfactory way. But I would say the parsimonious explanation for an increase in reports of certain symptoms in Havana and then throughout the foreign service is that the internal reports to be on the lookout for those symptoms as part of an attack itself caused the increase in reports. Not ray guns. But as I said elsewhere just show me something remotely resembling a ray gun and I would change my mind.
You have to try to be a good Bayesian here — once you lose the cricket noise, there’s no meaningful evidence of any kind pointing in any direction.
So what’s your prior — I don’t think, in the absence of any evidence, we ought to put equal weight on “stress-induced symptoms” and “novel energy weapons”.
Having strong priors about this is bad Bayesianism. Some explanations may be more likely than others but all of them should be very low confidence.
Psychosomatic illnesses are a thing. Ray-guns are not. Those are my priors. I am happy to entertain evidence saying otherwise, or offering an alternative explanation, but I haven't seen anything. Lost Future suggests the possibility that it's a disease (certainly reasonable a priori), but that doesn't seem to fit the pattern either.
I agree, there's no meaningful evidence of any kind pointing in any direction- so writing an opinion piece with statements like "The “Syndrome” is a mass sociogenic illness" is overly strong. Reducing the two possible options to 'mass hysteria' or 'a new weapon' is a false choice, as I mentioned there could be some other (non-weapon) explanation such as a previously unknown disease or syndrome. It could be affecting other, ordinary Cubans who don't receive the same level of media attention as US diplomats & spies
Shure does a good job of laying out the weakness of the raygun theory but much less to demonstrate that this is a functional illness. The discounting of the former increases the likelihood of the latter regardless of priors
To push back on those saying all chronic illness is psychosomatic (chronic Lyme, long COVID, etc) - there's a long history in the medical profession of claiming that anything they don't understand must be due to mental defects of their patients. One example (that won a Nobel prize) is the peptic ulcer, thought for 50+ years to be due to lifestyle choices, or even bad mothers. Then it turned out it was actually caused by a bacterium.
https://www.news-medical.net/health/Peptic-Ulcer-History.aspx
Doctors would rather tell a patient "you're crazy" than "we don't know what's wrong and we don't know how to help you". It's entirely biologically plausible that a viral or bacterial infection causes long term symptoms - we know, for example, that flu infection increases stroke and heart disease risk (possibly also true of COVID).
What upsets me about the ‘Havana syndrome’ is it assumes the conclusion. These symptoms are consistent with lots of extant known unknowns. Why is it it’s own thing? Well first bc of the crickets. Now bc our foreign service personnel are assumed to be too good to be suffering from the same mysterious syndromes that normal people get. Instead they have ‘Havana syndrome’ and the most likely explanation is a ray gun…
I would say it’s the Havana syndrome defenders who are implicitly saying other ailments of unknown cause civilians get are made up. Why else do they need a special syndrome for themselves that has no particularly novel symptoms?
Of course it’s very possible there’s some info to support it that they just don’t want to share. But it’s sort of ‘classified intel fetish or mysterious syndrome; pick one’ IMO.
The flip side to this is that if you take the patient's suffering seriously, and you actually believe the best evidence available is that the symptoms are psychosomatic, and the only way their suffering will be alleviated is for them to accept that, what do you do?
I don't think anyone has said that all chronic illness is psychosomatic.
Are you saying that all no sufferers of chronic illness are psychosomatic?
It’s possible that many of these conditions have real, discernible causes, but it’s also true that the mind can magnify their intensity well beyond their “objective” presentation. I had some muscle fatigue for a little while, but I was so anxious about everything at the time that I essentially willed myself into a case “chronic fatigue syndrome.” A healthier mind would likely have allowed the symptoms to pass without issue.
This is very disappointing to read on a blog I hold on such high regard. The facts in this article and the debate about the cause of the illnesses were current in about 2018 or 2019, but there have been dozens and dozens of attacks in multiple countries since then. The people in the same positions are always the ones targeted no matter where in the world this happens. The debate about this has been over for some time and Blinken’s focus on this is a recognition that US official are being deliberately targeted.
Are you saying there’s now direct evidence of the weapon, technology, source, or state sponsor? Because seeing additional attacks involving people in the same kinds of positions only *increases* the relative likelihood of the sociogenic hypothesis: large geographic spread is much more easily explained by social transmission than an ever-widening conspiracy of weirdly nonstrategic deployment of a physically implausible superweapon for which is there is no direct evidence. And if you agreed with Shure’s facts up to 2018-2019, then you need much stronger evidence to overturn the prior formed by Shure’s conclusions. If such evidence had appeared since 2019, then why didn’t you summarize it in your reply here? That is, if the debate is over, why not let us know why it ended?
Love this piece!
More of this, please. I appreciate this type of well-reasoned and well-researched post.
Not sure why everyone is conflating this with Lyme or Long COVID (both of which are diseases with an actual cause and exhibit symptoms similar to ME/CFS). The better analogy is to the lab leak hypothesis! Lots of media noise around shady evidence with nothing concrete to refute the overwhelming likelihood of natural origin.
Former sufferer of ME/CFS here: it’s a psychogenic condition.
The problem with an indistinct term like “long COVID” is that it conflates a series of materially different problems. When I use that term, I’m specifically referring to conditions of no obvious origin beyond the sufferer’s prior COVID diagnosis. I don’t include actual lung damage in that category, which I would consider a clear and obvious cause of functional impairment. By contrast, there’s no clear and obvious cause of “brain fog” or memory issues.
Perhaps, but much of the coverage I’ve read about long COVID focuses on people who had mild cases of COVID itself. Hard to draw a neat line between that sort of illness and severe, irreparable lung damage.