A former Trump administration medical adviser has long claimed that Covid is similar to HIV.
Dr. Deborah Birx, who served as White House coordinator from 2020 to 2021, claimed that Covid, like HIV, “silently destroyed” some people’s immune systems even when they were asymptomatic, leaving them susceptible to health problems months and years later.
But the comments drew criticism from academics online, who accused her of downplaying the seriousness of HIV and overestimating the damage of the long Covid-19 virus, which is widely believed to be wildly exaggerated.
In an interview with News Nation Wednesday, Dr. Birx that “the reason the comparison with HIV is important” is because both are asymptomatic, adding: “There is a lot of destruction that mild and moderate Covid can cause that is unseen, just like HIV. destroyed our immune system.
“And if you get diagnosed today, you can live a very normal life, and people not only survive, but thrive. We need to get to the point where people with long Covid-19… can not just survive, but thrive.”
Dr. Deborah Birx (pictured right), who served as White House Coordinator under President Trump from 2020-2021, told News Nation: ‘The reason the comparison to HIV is important is because HIV was also asymptomatic’
Dr. Jay Bhattacharya, a medical professor at Stanford, called her comparison “bad science” and called her “irresponsible.”
He wrote on Twitter: ‘This is bad science communication that risks sending the public into panic over bad science.
‘Covid is not HIV and the scientific evidence does not support that conclusion. It is very wrong to say that long Covid is comparable to (the long-term consequences of) HIV.”
‘It’s irresponsible. Scientifically incorrect and prone to panic in the mouth of the former White House Covid advisor,” Dr Bhattacharya added.
Unless a person is treated very soon after infection, inactive HIV can hide in cells and multiply once treatment stops.
HIV is grouped under the genus Lentivirus, while Covid belongs to the genus betacoronavirus.
If left untreated, HIV can lead to AIDS, and without medication people typically survive for about three years.
Since the epidemic began in 1981, an estimated 36.3 million people have died from AIDS-related diseases.
About 1.2 million Americans have HIV, and although there is currently no cure, medications reduce the amount of virus in the body by preventing the virus from replicating. This means that it cannot be transmitted to others and cannot cause harm to the body.
Symptoms include fever and muscle aches, headache, sore throat, night sweats and diarrhea, but some can last ten years or more without symptoms.
Long Covid is defined as the continuation or development of new symptoms three months after the initial Covid infection, where symptoms persist for at least two months without other explanations.
Symptoms include chronic pain, brain fog, shortness of breath, chest pain, and intense fatigue.
Long Covid is thought to be caused by bits of the Covid virus remaining in the body and causing problems for years after infection.
Researchers from the UCSF and Gladstone Institutes in San Francisco recently found new evidence to support this theory.
Long Covid is thought to affect between nine and twenty million Americans, but it is notoriously difficult to diagnose and scientists increasingly believe the estimates are inflated.
Dr. Birx told News Nation: ‘We’re learning now about mitochondria and viral impact and brain fog, and the changes in our neurons and the cells that feed the neurons that allow us to actually think and move, and we’re learning that because of what Covid has had for so long done.’
She said: ‘The reason the comparison with HIV is important is because HIV was also asymptomatic. You couldn’t see the virus through the symptoms because people were infected for seven, eight or nine years before developing symptoms.
‘But HIV has been quietly destroying our immune systems… We are now learning about the mitochondria and the viral impact and brain fog, and the changes in our neurons and the cells that feed the neurons that allow us to actually think and move, and we’re learning that again because of the long time that Covid has taken.”
Researchers at UCSF studied 43 people who had Covid in 2020 and examined the differences between the 16 who fully recovered and the remaining 27 who had persistent symptoms.
They looked at the role of T cells, which coordinate the body’s immune response.
Nadia Roan, professor of urology at UCSF and lead author of the study, said: ‘A striking finding we made was that while this T cell coordination was observed in those who successfully recovered from a long Covid-19 period, as expected from normal, healthy individuals, this was lost in people with long Covid.”
The researchers analyzed blood samples and found that instead of the antibodies working properly with the T cells, there was a disruption.
“The antibody response was not coordinated with the T cell response,” Roan said.
In participants with persistent symptoms, immune cells showed signs of chronic inflammation and unusually high movement of T cells in tissues.
It is believed this is due to bits of Covid that never left the body.
Killer T cells, which are responsible for clearing out Covid-infected cells, were consistently held back by the virus and became worn out.
Dr. Roan said the phenomenon of T cell exhaustion is also known in studies of HIV.