*Now* Can We Talk About the Geopolitical Ramifications of Brain Fog?
President Biden has Covid again. He also has brain fog. Could there be a connection?
In the Fall of 2020, I read Honigsbaum and Krishnan's brief history of the so-called “Russian flu” of the 1890s. Reconstructions of viral family trees suggest the seasonal coronavirus OC43, which nowadays causes common colds, crossed from cattle into people in the 1890s. In other words, it seems plausible that the Russian flu was actually a coronavirus pandemic.
Back when I first read Honigsbaum’s essay, I found it unsettling. Watching history repeat itself in 2024 has shifted me from unsettled to scared1. A major element of my fear is that almost nobody is willing to acknowledge the grim geopolitical consequences of the 1890s coronavirus pandemic, let alone notice the similarities to the present day.
In brief summary, the unsettling history is that the 1890s pandemic left a number of political leaders across Europe with a condition that looked an awful lot lik long Covid. A common element of long Covid is a condition euphemistically referred to as “brain fog.” A more accurate term for the condition is brain damage. Fog clears. Damage often doesn’t.
In the wake of the 1890s pandemic, the existence of a few highly respected but suddenly badly incapacitated leaders attempting to serve out their terms was culturally disruptive2. Furthermore, the occurrence of long Covid-like effects in the general population was so widespread that it was likely the primary cause of the infamous fin de siècle malaise. It’s generally thought that the malaise helped set the stage for World War I. Honigsbaum’s prophecy is that the geopolitics of the current coronavirus pandemic might unfold in much the same way as the 1890s pandemic.
I'm a fan of Louis Pasteur's famous quote, “chance favors the prepared mind.” We would be better off if there were some public awareness of the plausible possibility that a few world leaders may have already begun to play out Honigsbaum's prophecy. Is it possible that Covid damaged 74 year-old Benjamin Netanyahu’s prefrontal cortex in a way that’s causing persistently impaired executive function? Because he certainly seems to be making some dangerously impulsive decisions these days. Or who knows! Maybe it’s the lockdowns3! Smartphones! Our minds should be prepared for all the plausible possibilities we can brainstorm.
And it’s not just world leaders we should be open to wondering about. My husband and I play a little game where we see if we can predict our county's bi-weekly wastewater data based on the observed frequency of space cadet driving behaviors on area roads. Stuff like slowly drifting through stop signs and red lights or meandering from lane to lane, as though wondering: "Where am I going... is this my turn?" The bad driving/wastewater correlations have generally seemed pretty good in our direct personal observations - and they also at least roughly line up with official accident statistics. I wear a yellow reflector vest on my walk to work during peak wastewater season.
Anyway, you can see where I’m going with all this. We should be prepared for the possibility that President Biden’s current Covid infection a fulfillment of the Honigsbaum prophecy. If so, then invoking the 25th Amendment could reduce the prophetic risk that Biden’s malaise will help further set the stage for a World War.
Song of the day: “Run Boy Run” by Woodkid.
OK, one more song of the day - I can’t resist: “Ball of Confusion” by The Temptations. Note that it’s a source of some of the lyrics in a previous song of the day, “Eye for an Eye” by UNKLE (content warning: the Eye for an Eye video is a cartoon but it has biologically disturbing images).
Update: The direct deposit track at PNAS, where elite academy members get to pick their own friends as peer reviewers, has to end. Or at least such publications need to have a public comments section. A recent direct deposit entitled, “COVID-19 lockdown effects on adolescent brain structure suggest accelerated maturation that is more pronounced in females than in males” reads like a fevered conspiracy theory. Proper peer review would have forced the authors to acknowledge the commonly known fact that Covid causes brain damage - as well as the commonly known fact that long Covid disproportionately affects females. Pretending to know that the cause of the observed brain damage among adolescents must have been the lockdowns - when it obviously could have been the virus itself - is delusional.