This weekly roundup thread is intended for all culture war posts. 'Culture war' is vaguely defined, but it basically means controversial issues that fall along set tribal lines. Arguments over culture war issues generate a lot of heat and little light, and few deeply entrenched people ever change their minds. This thread is for voicing opinions and analyzing the state of the discussion while trying to optimize for light over heat.
Optimistically, we think that engaging with people you disagree with is worth your time, and so is being nice! Pessimistically, there are many dynamics that can lead discussions on Culture War topics to become unproductive. There's a human tendency to divide along tribal lines, praising your ingroup and vilifying your outgroup - and if you think you find it easy to criticize your ingroup, then it may be that your outgroup is not who you think it is. Extremists with opposing positions can feed off each other, highlighting each other's worst points to justify their own angry rhetoric, which becomes in turn a new example of bad behavior for the other side to highlight.
We would like to avoid these negative dynamics. Accordingly, we ask that you do not use this thread for waging the Culture War. Examples of waging the Culture War:
-
Shaming.
-
Attempting to 'build consensus' or enforce ideological conformity.
-
Making sweeping generalizations to vilify a group you dislike.
-
Recruiting for a cause.
-
Posting links that could be summarized as 'Boo outgroup!' Basically, if your content is 'Can you believe what Those People did this week?' then you should either refrain from posting, or do some very patient work to contextualize and/or steel-man the relevant viewpoint.
In general, you should argue to understand, not to win. This thread is not territory to be claimed by one group or another; indeed, the aim is to have many different viewpoints represented here. Thus, we also ask that you follow some guidelines:
-
Speak plainly. Avoid sarcasm and mockery. When disagreeing with someone, state your objections explicitly.
-
Be as precise and charitable as you can. Don't paraphrase unflatteringly.
-
Don't imply that someone said something they did not say, even if you think it follows from what they said.
-
Write like everyone is reading and you want them to be included in the discussion.
On an ad hoc basis, the mods will try to compile a list of the best posts/comments from the previous week, posted in Quality Contribution threads and archived at /r/TheThread. You may nominate a comment for this list by clicking on 'report' at the bottom of the post and typing 'Actually a quality contribution' as the report reason.

Jump in the discussion.
No email address required.
Notes -
Cursory search doesn't reveal a study that studies exactly what you want to find, that is, percentage of uptake by extrapulmonary organs/percentage of cases with uptake in such organs.
There is reasonable evidence, however, for extrapulmonary infection-related changes during COVID for patients that look suspiciously like direct infection, though, which leads to multi-organ failure in some cases (e.g. 36% of autopsied patients in this study, and multi-organ viral infection found in autopsies. This proves less - it might not be directly caused by cells infected with the virus, especially since some are just - but some of it likely is. Qualitatively, we see extrapulmonary infection via the stated mechanism - virus gets into bloodstream, ACE2 is everywhere, etc.
To quote a paper focused on hepatic COVID manifestations as an example:
Liver enzyme dysfunction is fairly nonspecific, but change in albumin and bilirubin levels indicate an impact on enzymatic activity and synthetic function of the liver. (There's also a few more interesting things in the paper, but probably out of scope here.)
You could likely find similar things for quite a few organ systems. Not perfect, mind you, and many drawing data mostly from autopsies (which would select for severe cases), but it gives you a picture of how widespread the infection goes; the GI survey, for example, finds 41% patients having fecal shedding of virus (though the study also selected for people with GI symptoms).
This is not even comparing like-to-like, given that we would be comparing estimated uptake on the one hand and metabolic dysregulation on the other, when I don't think there's been any evidence or studies on multi-organ dysregulation and/or failurepost mRNA vaccine. Purely speculating here, I would expect that COVID invasion of extrapulmonary organs that nevertheless don't result in significant dysregulation and/or organ damage in mild cases to be quite a bit higher than levels of active multi-organ disease.
It's also not including indirect effects from COVID that are nevertheless dangerous, like RAAS system dysregulation from ACE2 downregulation post infection, or cytokine storm, or clotting, or whatever weird shit it does to the vasculature. (IIRC quite a lot of the severe illness comes down to COVID impacts on the vascular system, which predictably has impacts everywhere even if it doesn't preferentially infect organ X or Y.)
More options
Context Copy link