Day 450: Long COVID Fatigue

At Quillette, a brave and soon-to-be-cancelled writer compares "long COVID" to predecessors like chronic fatigue syndrome, and, surprisingly, transgenderism in "The Search to Explain Our Anxiety and Depression: Will ‘Long COVID’ Become the Next Gender Ideology?"

It’s important, as always, to emphasize that gender dysphoria has long been recognized as a real condition that afflicts a small portion of the population. What I’m describing here is an act of extrapolation, not of pure invention, whereby the existence of a legitimate diagnosis is co-opted by larger and larger portions of society. The same kind of trend has been going on in regard to homosexuality (which, to state the obvious, is also a very real phenomenon): To be gay (or bisexual) once had a fairly specific meaning in regard to one’s sexual tastes and behaviour. But teenagers now are encouraged to sort themselves into an ever-expanding typology of (often gauzily described) queer sub-variants—from allosexual (meaning non-asexual) to skoliosexual (“a sexual orientation that describes those who are sexually attracted to people with non-cisgender gender identities, such as people who are non-binary, genderqueer, or trans”). As in the latter case, these sexual identities sometimes mesh in complicated ways with gender identity—even though, as Angus Fox has described in his ongoing When Sons Become Daughters series for Quillette, many self-identified trans youth retreat to gender ideology precisely as a means of escaping (or at least delaying) the sexual changes and impulses associated with post-pubescent development.

One could even extend this pattern to the question of race. Every reasonable person will acknowledge that racism is a real phenomenon, and that the distinction between white and non-white can have concrete (and sometimes tragic) consequences for people who are victims of bigotry in Western societies. But out of this fact has sprung fanciful lexicons and hierarchies that purport to rank and encode fine racial distinctions, often (some might say, especially) in the case of privileged individuals who can’t explain how racism has affected their lives except by reference to abstract (and unfalsifiable) theories that cast the problem as an invisible, systemic malignancy generated by white people.

Another interesting point of comparison is the subclass of medical ailments known as “contested illnesses”—conditions such as chronic fatigue syndrome (CFS), multiple chemical sensitivities, and chronic Lyme disease, which don’t seem to exist except as a sort of crowdsourced belief system among individuals who claim to be afflicted. While none of these movements have attained anything close to the political and academic prominence of gender theory, their most politically engaged proponents echo the now-familiar idea that their problems can be traced to an outwardly undetectable condition whose denial generates its own separate form of suffering.

In the case of COVID-19, much attention has been focused on conspiracy theorists and lay quacks who claim the disease is a fraud. But there is also a pseudo-scientific movement that seeks to present its adherents as sufferers of a condition they call “Long COVID.”

As McMaster University psychiatrist Jeremy Devine recently wrote in The Wall Street Journal, some COVID-19 patients really do experience long-term effects that linger after the infection has left their body. But he adds that “such symptoms can also be psychologically generated or caused by a physical illness unrelated to the prior infection.” Moreover, he notes that a survey produced by Body Politic Covid-19 Support Group, a prominent driver of the Long COVID idea, indicates that “many of the survey respondents who attributed their symptoms to the aftermath of a COVID-19 infection likely never had the virus in the first place. Of those who self-identified as having persistent symptoms attributed to COVID and responded to the first survey, not even a quarter had tested positive for the virus. Nearly half (47.8%) never had testing and 27.5% tested negative for COVID-19. Body Politic publicized the results of a larger, second survey in December 2020. Of the 3,762 respondents, a mere 600, or 15.9%, had tested positive for the virus at any time.”

Echoing the idea of “self-identification” as the gold standard of gender identity, the Long COVID survey authors brushed aside these facts, arguing that “future research must consider the experience of all people with COVID-19 symptoms, regardless of testing status.” In this way, Long COVID also sounds a lot like chronic fatigue syndrome. In 2016, Devine himself, then a medical student, reported on a chronic-Lyme-disease group whose members, in many cases, “never had a Lyme infection in the first place. Those who explained away a negative Canadian test result often did so with a positive one from for-profit U.S. labs—so-called ‘Lyme specialty laboratories’—that offer testing with very high false positive rates.”

Massachusetts cases were up about a sixth of a percentage point today.