In the case of what has been called long COVID, two opposing camps are lost in a confusion of name with description.

The idea that SarsCoV-2 would have peculiar long-term effects upon health was immediately popular in some circles for appalling reasons, and thus viewed in other circles with strong inclination to disbelief.

Eventually, a cluster of persistent symptoms came to be widely associated with SarsCoV-2. Some of these symptoms are clearly present in some people, and not psychosomatic. But a very reasonable question is that of whether these symptoms are actually caused by SarsCoV-2, or have some other cause or causes. For some months now, the evidence has strongly indicated that, no, these are, variously, not effects of SarsCoV-2, or are common to respiratory or viral illness more generally. As a description, long COVID has been falsified, but it has lingered as a name.

I continue to encounter recent articles in prestigious, allegedly scientific journals that simply treat as given that these symptoms are caused by SarsCoV-2. An established name is treated as if it were a description. Now some institutions are beginning to insist reasonably that the name long COVID be abandoned, as inapt. But I'm encountering journalists and pundits who thence infer and claim that long COVID does not exists.

That inference doesn't follow if by long COVID is meant a cluster of symptoms, which symptoms are exactly what have been investigated under the name. Only if long COVID is taken to be defined as these symptoms resulting from SarsCoV-2 could we say that nothing fits the concept corresponding to the name.

I doubt that any Briton defined the French disease as especially French. In any case, telling a typical Briton that what he called the French disease did not exist would be tantamount to telling him that syphilis did not exist. What he should instead have been told was that syphilis were not particularly French, and ought to be called something else.

Likewise, the declarations should not be that long COVID does not exist.

The mainstream narrative about SARS-CoV-2 has itself mutated many times, but it seems headed towards a crisis from which it will not recognizably survive. I believe that, as progressives try to get out from under their own responsibility for that narrative and for the homicidal and otherwise inhumane effects of the policies developed and defended by it, they will ascribe principal blame to what they will call Big Pharma, and they will insist that the lesson to be drawn is that the power of the state must be extended — to control more thoroughly the development and allocation of medical treatment, to prevent commercial interests (in general) from influencing supposedly scientific research by selective funding, and to prevent commercial interests from influencing state policy.

Some large pharmaceutical firms have played a decidedly unhealthy rôle in the response of important institutions to SARS-CoV-2. At this stage, I would be less surprised to discover that some of the persons at these firms have been guilty of crimes against humanity than that they were simply bunglers. But, when someone says Big Pharma (with or without capitalization), I don't know that he or she refers to just these firms. Nor, for that matter, am I sure that only large firms have been a cause of the problem, though I am quite sure that not all firms are responsible.

Some people had or have been primed to blame what they call Big Pharma from very early into the pandemic, if not indeed from the outset. Until recently, most of the political left wrote and spoke of Big Pharma as an enemy, demanding such things as quicker expiration of drug patents, monopsonistic bargaining by the state to drive-down drug prices, or overt price ceilings. The first time that I encountered the expression Big Pharma was in AD 2000, when Albert Arnold (Al) Gore jr used it as he made attacks on the pharmaceutical industry a key feature of his Presidential campaign. And people not on the political left had been increasingly worried about the pharmaceutical industry as they saw social perverts such as William Henry (Bill) Gates III develop an interest and involvement in pharmaceuticals as part of a broader vision to remake mankind.

But I think that it is far more reasonable to see the firms, large and small, pharmaceutical or otherwise, that have behaved problematically or downright evilly concerning SARS-CoV-2 not as masterminds but as amongst the many mercenaries and whores.

In any case, the changes that I predict that progressives will demand would in practice mean that medicine would be further socialized and made bureaucratic, that the selective funding of the state would be almost the sole determinant of prevalent, ostensibly scientific conclusions, and that those in the non-commercial commanding heights of society would have still greater control over the political process. Each of these changes would deepen the the fundamental problems that we observe connected to the present mainstream narrative and to state policy concerning SARS-CoV-2. The left should not be tolerated in some further attempt to suppress dissent and deviation.

Alphabet has removed this video from YouTube:

Those who support locking-down in response to SARS-CoV-2 are like weird locusts. Instead of eating the crops; these locusts prevent growth and harvest. That is to say that they prevent economic activity, which is an implicit consumption of an especially perverse sort. In any case, they leave despair and literal starvation in their wake.