Don’t Worry About the “Twindemic”
And Why It’s So Important We Understand What Really Happened to The Flu
Last April, in my Covid Narrative Season Two Preview, I predicted that this October, the media would be all abuzz about a “Twin-Demic”. That being, the threat of an ongoing Covid Pandemic combined with a harsh Seasonal Flu epidemic.
There have indeed been some articles cautioning that flu could be back, making for a very dangerous winter. The thinking goes that with no flu season last year, we could be in for a harsher than normal season this year. Since so few were infected with the flu last year, we potentially have an “immunity debt” that needs to be “paid”, which could mean a more active flu season than is normal with far more people than usual becoming infected. This combined with the threat of yet another winter wave of Covid could once again threaten hospital capacity which is often stretched during even regular flu seasons.
But instead of focusing on driving up fear for the impending “Twindemic”, our Media and Public Health Betters have the solution… Much of the media coverage on flu these days focuses not on how bad the winter may be, but instead on the actions we can take to stop it. As the media sees it, last year’s absence of flu is completely explained by human action. There’s no better example of this than a recent story in the Atlantic:
We accidentally solved the flu? Really? That’s news to me…
The entire article is worth a read, if not just to understand how delusional and hubristic our Public Health Betters are in their belief that their actions can shape nature and bend respiratory viruses to their will. They credit the masking, distancing, and other Non-Pharmacological Interventions (NPI’s) with completely wiping out flu throughout the US.
As I covered before in February, the disappearance of flu cannot be explained by NPI usage.
To understand just how absurd it would be to think that our actions could have actually had this effect, we need to understand the magnitude of what we are talking about. Here’s a look at the WHO Global Influenza Surveillance and Response System report on worldwide flu cases over the last 3 flu seasons:
We missed an entire flu season! Completely! And basically over the Entire World!
How about in the US?
All at once, over the entire US, the flu called it quits just as Covid was beginning to spread. If we zoom in on the beginning of 2020, we also see that the flu dropped out starting in week 11 and 12, which was prior to states beginning stay at home orders and well before universal masking was ever recommended.
Also, recall that the nation was not uniform in our response to Covid. Florida reopened completely in September of 2020 with no mask mandate and no business closures or restrictions. If the absence of Flu can be explained by these actions, you’d expect the lack of such actions to lead to the flu spreading once again. So how did Florida do during the 20/21 flu season?
Zilch, Nada, Zero!
And lest we forget, the world’s favorite (and strangely forgotten by our media) pandemic control group Sweden had no flu either.
Amazing, isn’t it! I guess we locked down so hard in LA, NYC, and London that the flu decided to abandon Florida and Sweden out of spite?!?...
Let’s look at one more example to drive the point home. Brazil has had a rough go with Covid over the last two years, and they’ve had no national mandates and their President even actively encouraged the public to defy local isolation orders.
You’d think if flu could survive anywhere during the pandemic, it would be under conditions like this. Do you really think isolation and social distancing is possible in the favelas of Rio?
Once again, as soon as Covid came on the scene, even in Brazil flu stood no chance.
If you’d like to see a full rundown of the Flu’s absence last year, as well as updates on where we stand currently, I recommend viewing the “Friday Flu” threads from Phil Kerpen.
Now how could it be that the Flu would just vanish? Clearly chalking this up to NPI usage alone is a hypothesis that doesn’t comport with reality. Correlation doesn’t imply causation as you might say. A better explanation might be interactions between viruses. In February I alluded to research during the Swine Flu pandemic of ‘09 showing that Rhinovirus could reduce Swine Flu infections. More recent research shows the same is true with Covid.
A study published in March in the Journal of Infectious Diseases showed an amazing result. Using human bronchial epithelial cell cultures in a lab, researchers introduced both Rhinovirus and SARS-CoV-2 virus to study virus-to-virus interactions. Regardless of whether the Rhinovirus was introduced before, after, or simultaneously with SARS2, the replication of SARS2 was immediately suppressed. Based on mathematical models this effect would be expected to have population wide effects.
And that’s exactly what we’ve seen over the last year. Based on testing data from Biofire, SARS2 and Rhinovirus have been in a delicate “dance” since March 2020.
We don’t have direct data on interactions between Flu and SARS2, but it seems likely that a similar effect may be at work. Viral interference and suppression may also be responsible for the out of season RSV wave seen this summer, even though this is normally a winter ailment.
This effect, where a new pandemic virus suppresses and replaces the previously dominant epidemic viruses has been absolved for decades. The famed British epidemiologist Robert Edger Hope-Simpson called this the “Vanishing Trick” which he first observed during epidemic flu waves in the 1940’s. As he described it:
“Strains that have been causing all the type A influenza in the world for perhaps a dozen years will vanish and next season be replaced everywhere by a novel strain. In the case of minor antigenic changes the predecessor may have been prevalent for only one or two seasons over a large part of the earth’s surface before it disappears and is replaced by a new minor variant.
The vanishing trick still remains to be explained.”
The reality is there is just so much we still don’t know about how respiratory viruses interact or even how and why they ebb and flow. Ask any epidemiologist why the flu begins to spread every Autumn, peaks in the late Winter and is gone by Spring. The best explanation we have is that people spend more time inside during the winter. Really?? I find that explanation lacking. Clearly there is much more going on that we still have yet to figure out.
So as October arrives and the latest Flu season officially begins, what should we expect? Based on the current levels of flu cases we are seeing, I would not expect the flu to reemerge anytime soon. Between clinical and public health labs, with over 43,000 flu tests being reported in the last week, just 55 came back positive! A positivity rate of just 0.13%...
Normally by this time of year both the number of positive tests and the positivity rate would be over an order of magnitude higher. It would appear that Covid and Flu cannot coexist as epidemic viruses. As long as Covid waves continue to dominate it’s unlikely there will be any flu to speak of. Whenever the flu finally does begin to spread widely again, it will likely be a sign that Covid is finally waning into the background for good.
This appears to be the case in India. That country was struck with a massive wave of the Covid “Delta” variant in the Spring, but now Covid levels are very low and the Flu may finally be returning. We can only hope that later this season or possibly next year the same is true in the US.
So this brings me back to that Atlantic piece. An honest reading of the data reveals that NPI’s have had nothing to do with stopping the Flu. Yet the writers in the Atlantic, and the Public Health Betters they interviewed, can’t admit this. Instead they have taken the complete opposite lesson away from our experience over this last year and a half. If you read nothing else from that article, you must read the following paragraph because it alludes to what may be coming in the years ahead:
“At least we didn’t face the dreaded “twindemic.” But our triumph over the flu also poses a dilemma, as much ethical as epidemiological. We’ve demonstrated conclusively that saving nearly everyone who dies of the flu is within our power. To do nothing now—to return to the roughly 30,000-deaths-a-year status quo without even trying to save some of those lives—would seem irresponsible. So what do we do? Which measures do we maintain and which do we let go?”
If these people actually believe this then we are doomed!
The next time there actually is a wave of epidemic Flu, be it later this year, or in the years to come, you can bet that in the Blue areas of this country most dominated by the cult of Covid prevention measures, these same measures (which had no effect at stopping Covid) will once again be put in place.
In some ways I can understand how these Public Health people think. If you truly believed you could save 30,000 to 70,000 lives a year, how could you live with yourself if you didn’t take every action possible to try? The problem is these people appear blind to the actual data. What possible mechanism would allow all the measures we employed over the last year to be completely ineffective against Covid and yet 100 percent effective against Flu? And how can our Public Health establishment ignore the counterfactuals of Florida, Sweden, Brazil, et al?
We never used to expect simple distancing restrictions to have this magnitude of effect. Moreover, the fact that masks were ineffective against Flu used to be established science! Now admitting that masks don’t work is verboten…
This is why it’s so important that we understand and admit to the true reasons for why the flu went away this last year.
If we don’t, then in the years to come, based on the belief that we can now stop the Flu by simply wearing a mask or closing schools and restaurants, these actions will be mandated again. Does anyone want to bet that San Francisco and Los Angeles will issue mask mandates the next time there is a flu season? Will children ever be able to breathe freely during the winter in these cities again? How long until the Flu shot becomes mandatory?
We must demand that our leaders admit to the obvious facts: We aren’t the ones in charge. We simply don’t have the power to bend respiratory viruses to our will. Thinking otherwise is the Illusion of Control. And it’s important that this fact becomes clear, because if it doesn’t, and if we continue down this path where our leaders feel they have the power to shape nature and feel they will be judged based on the outcomes of flu seasons, we will continue to live in a society marred by restrictions and mandates for years to come. That’s not the world I want to live in.
Anyway 0 and 2…