Last year, when it came out that Aaron Rodgers had lied about his vaccination status, people from several different corners said that he must have had “Covid brain.” Not being a big fan of Rodgers, I followed the story from the Joe Rogan angle, as I (and others) had identified the radio host as being one of the main drivers of Covid misinformation. Earlier this year, in the smack heard ‘cross the world, Will Smith became one of the latest celebrities accused by fans as having Covid brain. What else could bolt him out of his seat so as to deliver pain to Chris Rock’s face?
I try not to use the phrase “Covid brain,” though that’s really what I’ve been seeking for many months now, over a year. I didn’t know that that was the endpoint of my search when I began. It was kind of a convergence. I had been looking to approach the various facets of the budding Trump movement as it really started taking off in 2020 (hockey-stick action, in terms of rabidity). And when I say movement, I mean cult high-intensity group.
The inflection point came around the beginning of that year, really coalescing just as Covid took the reins over everyone’s attention. Just then, too, Trump was stirring up dissension in the militia movement. As a resident of Michigan, to see Trump’s call to arms against the governor horrified and alarmed me. When Dr. Scott Atlas, radiologist turned Covid adviser, got in on the Twitter act some months later, I thought, “They think this is a game.”
Still, Trump discouraged his followers from taking Covid seriously, to the point where Republican governors across the country, but especially in the South, took time to grandstand about their disbelief about the seriousness of Covid. (Govenor Tate Reeves of Mississippi, for example, said that he and his devoted constituents weren’t afraid of Covid because Christians didn’t fear death.) It was a real turning point in the militarization of Trump’s base of support.
Now, we see the results of tilting at such windmills: the death rate in counties that went for Trump are estimated to have suffered a rate of excess deaths that is more than double that of Biden-voting areas. According to the analysis, “vaccination contributes to explaining differences in excess deaths by political party affiliation, even after controlling for location and age differences.”1
That’s unconscionable.
Trump, however, never paid any political price for the wreckage he left in the wake of his handling of the pandemic. Meanwhile, his most devoted followers, the ones who dream of a sea of white faces in a one-race ethnostate, consider themselves Pureblood, surely a reference, unconscious or otherwise, to the Nazi ideal of racial cleanliness. (I mean, it’s in the name. You’d think the True Believers would feel a sense of irony, yes? Even deadpan humor should register here. At a minimum.)
If I had to wager, I’d put the Covid denialism as the mortar holding together Trump’s firewall. It’s the most far-reaching and certainly the most consequential in terms of people’s real everyday lingering risks of living under a Trump presidency (talk about a legacy). In fact, there are so many avenues for that particular conspiracy theory to take that it can appeal to at least two different types of authoritarians.2 (The great advantage to conspiracy theories is that they’re a wide umbrella, where many can fall into the cast shadow.)
How many of them have Covid brain? I think that is the great question of our time.
It happened to be authoritarianism that got me interested in the intersection of Covid and MAGA. Back in February, I noted the findings of neuropsychologists that damage to the prefrontal cortex, the promontory front of the brain, makes someone more disposed to authoritarian beliefs or attitudes. As Covid also caused dysexecutive syndrome, that could be an avenue to fascist ideology, the most ultra of fringe right extremism. That was terrible to contemplate, I thought at the time.
Back then, the most we knew about how Covid propagated was that while there were at least four different routes of invasion, the direct neuroinvasion method through the nose was considered the most controversial. It was disputed partly because it was no longer in vogue to ascribe contagion to aerosolization, partly because the spike protein was rarely found in brain tissue or even CSF (cerebrospinal fluid). The idea became passe, even taboo.
But, if anything, 2022 put the kibosh on these doubts and outstripped the naysayers. At least three separate teams reported neuroinvasion through the olfactory system—that is, in terms of direct brain infection, through the nose. I reported on a press release about this research in October, where scientists mainly out of UC Davis stated, “We not only demonstrated that the virus infects the brain, but also that it directly infects neurons and can be transported along nerve pathways to sites beyond the initial olfactory regions.”3
In November, working hard on an aspect of Covid brain fog—regarding a pathway that deals with tryptophan (an amino acid associated with Thanksgiving turkey)—I came across information so hot that I jammed my own presses so that I could do my small part to let people know that Covid has been linked to Alzheimer’s-like damage.4 Turns out, several other scientific teams had reported on something similar throughout the pandemic, but the paper I read had just been published this November. All the more reason to mask up for the holiday! I pitched.
The thing about the Alzheimer’s-esque damage is that it deals with anatomical damage, physiological destruction. This goes beyond the tryptophan-induced brain fog, which I will explain presently. No, in that case it is the entorhinal cortex that is implicated here, an antechamber that connects the olfactory area to the hippocampus, most known for its role in memory formation, among other functions.
From the nose, to the entorhinal cortex, down the perforant path, wreaking havoc as it goes, the virus has been shown to cause physical destruction. Tears. Rips in the fabric. Collections of aggregates that, when stained, resemble beads. Shrinkage. Thinning of cortex—that means reduction in real estate, the gray matter. Notwithstanding, there was also profound damage to the white matter, in the lower subcortical regions. The nucleocapsid (N) protein that encapsulates the virus has been found all over the autopsied brain.5 The entorhinal cortex is the crossroad where the virus can choose many routes.
➪ READ MORE: COVID can cause Alzheimer’s-like damage
Above and beyond that, in a parallel process, is something that’s going on more with the wetware, the neurotransmitters and their receptors. One of the most recognized neurotransmitters has tryptophan as its precursor. Tryptophan is blamed for the blanket of sedation that creeps over one who has taken in too much turkey. Really, it’s indulging in so much food in a secure and relaxed setting that encourages the body to go into what’s known as rest-and-digest mode.
One of twenty essential amino acids, tryptophan can be converted into serotonin, the brain chemical known for creation of feelings of happiness and contentment. (Other useful substances like melatonin and niacin also derive from tryptophan.) Alternatively, it can be diverted into another pathway known as the kynurenine pathway. In several situations, such as sickness, this latter pathway is preferred.
Kynurenine sounds like ‘canine’, and that’s because scientists first found it as a byproduct in dog urine. It wasn’t until later that it was found in the human system as well. In fact, it’s been detected in the urine of Covid patients.6-8 The biomarker has been found to be elevated both acutely and in Long Covid.
What happens is this. The cerebral cortex, the outer covering of the brain, is studded with receptors for different neurotransmitters, peptides, enzymes, all sorts of substances. Each receptor is uniquely configured, ultimately serving as a lock. When the body is infected with Covid, it switches to the kynurenine fork of the tryptophan pathway, and when that happens, not only is serotonin diminished—meaning that depression might well be in the offing—but kynurenine goes on to affect other receptors downstream, giving those substances the chance to play havoc.
One such substance is called kynurenic acid, which I will call KYNA for ease. Think of it as kynurenine’s chemical descendent.
Now, the brain uses electrical impulses in addition to these chemical messengers to communicate, and two main drivers of this activity are what are called the AMPA receptor and the NMDA receptor.
As these receptors are activated, the neuron becomes more likely to propagate its signal down its axon to its connected neuron. (The typical neuron has many dendrites, but there is but one axon, and firing is an all-or-nothing prospect.)
AMPA receptors, when activated, act rapidly: the neuron will fire—that is, depolarize and hyperpolarize before coming back to resting potential (around -60 mV)—on the order of brief milliseconds. The NMDA receptor, on the other hand, sustains its firing in a plateau of sorts. These increments to fire can sum and thus make the neuron that much more likely to send its message.
KYNA inhibits the NMDA receptor.9 In fact, KYNA is one of the few endogenous substances made by the human body that antagonize such receptors.10 (Many exogenous antagonists exist, such as ketamine and that family of drugs.) Moreover, KYNA antagonizes what’s known as the α7 nicotinic receptor (nAChR for short).10
These antagonisms—of NMDARs and α7nAChRs—cause psychiatric symptoms. Ketamine brings about dissociation, withdrawal and catatonia, as can be observed outwardly; whereas α7nAChRs interact with acetylcholine (ACh), a neurotransmitter essential for waking consciousness.
α7nAChRs interact also with noradrenaline (NA, also known as norepinephrine), a weaker cousin of adrenaline (aka epinephrine). This, too, goes back to energy, motivation, and wakefulness. Intercepting these receptors will have significant and noticeable effects.
As it turns out, a lot of cholinergic connections are found in the subcortical areas of the brain, beneath that dome of cerebral cortex.11 They help determine the sleep/wake cycle. When a person gets sick, one of the most common behaviors is to descend into sleep. This is so that the body can more efficiently direct resources to holding the line against whatever intruder requires attention.
So why would the body produce this substance that has the potential to go wrong? It does this so as to combat its own movement, which is to produce neuroinflammation to counter the enemy. KYNA is a second-level defense that attempts to mop up the pyretic (that is, fever-inducing) actions of other mechanisms of the immune system. But it introduces problems of its own.
NMDA blockade can cause psychotic symptoms, thought processes and behaviors.11,12 Indeed, this is such a basic model of psychosis that ketamine is used in scientific studies to simulate the effects. (Now, obviously, concentration of dose is important as is length of exposure, which explains the existence of therapeutic doses of ketamine.) The problem of course with the NMDA antagonist KYNA, as far as (Long) Covid is concerned, is chronic exposure.
Two things to consider. First, severe Covid has been associated with an 11% higher risk of schizophrenia where there was no prior association in the person’s background. “While the viral infection may not increase the risk for schizophrenia, COVID-19 hospitalization was associated with an 11% increase in the risk of schizophrenia,” researchers concluded, adding that schizophrenia “should be assessed as one of the possible post-COVID-19 sequelae.”13
Second, Covid has now been linked with markers of a wide variety of neurodegenerative disorders (amyloid beta, tau protein, α-synuclein, and more).14
In fact, one of my very first working hypotheses about Covid appears to have official support in the scientific community: the last citation, published just this month, proposed that Covid may act like a prion.
Other prions include Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease, Kuru, and what’s colloquially known as mad-cow disease. Prions are bad news in every way. Those who suffer from kuru, for example (a side effect of cannibalism!), die within a year.
It’s a swift process, because in prion disease the brain becomes swiss cheese. Literally, the brain spongifies as insoluble proteins inexorably reverse the tide of development, destroying tissue. (In Alzheimer’s disease, the course of disease engulfs the newest parts of the brain back toward the most ancient.) The brain loses surface area, or sometimes entire structures burn out. Along the way, prions convert other regular proteins to their indestructible shape, and so blaze the path of destruction as they recruit ever more.
➪ READ MORE: Normal-appearing white (matter)
As I say, this has been a working idea of mine for some time, one I’ve been reluctant to platform here for lack of definitive proof. (The diary referenced just above, for example, was written as an allegory.)
Since the beginning of this year, however, and especially as more research became public, I have been gathering more and more strands of information, more data that appeared to supply planks to this idea. The two main points I just highlighted—Covid functioning as a prion, severe Covid increasing the risk of schizophrenia—really put the floorboards underneath. This idea is no longer a mere sneaking suspicion. Instead, it’s looking likelier and likelier that this is a real probability.
That is, considering the wide swath of Covid country running through the middle of American conservatism, it’s likely that the worst of Covid resides in that population. Those who self-identify as MAGA as well as those under Republican gubernatorial governance are most probably those who have contracted the virus more than once. Since before the pandemic, a solid and unmoving 15-20% of people said that they intended to never get vaccinated.15,16 Those people are just as vulnerable to the disease as ever, especially as information comes out that implicates repeat infection.17
So, what could be going on in the brains of these MAGA folks? I mean to tackle that in far more depth in an upcoming diary. Suffice it to say, these people are, in their own way, sleepwalking through life.
If my model is correct, these people are rather (not entirely) insensate to the actual world around them and so are responding more to internal stimuli than their actual surroundings. This state would be what was once called an oneiric state, a half-awake/half-asleep state where one might be aware of hallucinogenic, hypnogogic or hypnopompic imagery (the latter two seen before falling asleep or just after waking, respectively).18
A person may or may not have insight into the nature of their disconnection. (Indeed, few people who are sleeping realize that they slumber!) However, it is an altered state of awareness or consciousness that a keen observer might detect given the signs. Also, the nature of this consciousness disturbance (it’s not sedation, really) might in some cases be transient, so the person may have true windows of clarity where they can see with some perspective the strange state in which they find themselves.
I think that Covid is an environmental hazard on par with lead. This airborne environmental hazard is spread contagiously—socially—and affects nearly every organ system in the body. The concentration of the disease in certain pockets and demographics means that this phenomenon should be somewhat localized by region, but especially by political affiliation, just by dint of the polarization kicked off by Trump, perhaps entirely inadvertently, way back nearly three years ago.
The thesis I now have brewing could go a great distance, too, in explaining the bonkers behavior we have seen over that time. This would be not just of large-scale high-casualty events like mass shootings, but also assaulting flight attendants, as well as this weird astroturfed anti-Semitism that is taking root rapidly.
I am not making apologies for the racism and bigotry of these people, nor am I equating mental illness to anti-Semitism (an idea that supposedly could explain Kanye’s breakdown but doesn’t). I merely mean to interpret the data in light of the evidence. We’ve had at this point many years of extra, and we do ourselves a disservice to discount the phenomenon—Covid—that explains so much about what we see happening to the people around us.
References
1 “Excess Death Rates for Republicans and Democrats During the COVID-19 Pandemic.” Jacob Wallace et al., NBER Working Paper No. 30512, September 2022.
2 “Different Conspiracy Theories Have Different Psychological and Social Determinants: Comparison of Three Theories About the Origins of the COVID-19 Virus in a Representative Sample of the UK Population.” Todd Hartman et al., Frontiers in Political Science, June 2021.
3 “COVID-19 Virus Infects Neurons, Induces Inflammation in the Brains of Rhesus Macaques.” Logan Savidge, UCDavis.edu, October 13, 2022.
4 “SARS-CoV-2 invades cognitive centers of the brain and induces Alzheimer’s-like neuropathology.” Wei-Bin Shen et al., bioRxiv, September 2022.
5 “Mapping of SARS-CoV-2 Brain Invasion and Histopathology in COVID-19 Disease.” Geidy Serrano et al., medRxiv, February 2021.
6 “COVID-19 infection alters kynurenine and fatty acid metabolism, correlating with IL-6 levels and renal status.” Tiffany Thomas et al., JCI Insight, July 2020.
7 “Urine metabolomics links dysregulation of the tryptophan-kynurenine pathway to inflammation and severity of COVID-19.” Joseph Dewulf et al., Scientific Reports, June 2022.
8 “Gut microbiota dysbiosis is associated with altered tryptophan metabolism and dysregulated inflammatory response in severe COVID-19.” Morgan Essex et al., bioRxiv, December 2022.
9 “Kynurenic Acid in Schizophrenia: A Systematic Review and Meta-analysis.” Eric Plitman et al., Schizophrenia Bulletin, February 2017.
10 “Endogenous antagonists of N-methyl-D-aspartate receptor in schizophrenia.” Pascal Jorratt et al., Alzheimer’s & Dementia, May 2021.
11 “Dysregulation of kynurenine metabolism is related to proinflammatory cytokines, attention, and prefrontal cortex volume in schizophrenia.” Jochen Kindler et al., Molecular Psychiatry, April 2019 (date of online publication).
12 “Dysfunction of the kynurenine pathway in psychotic disorders.” Magdalena Kegel, Karolinksa Institutet Department of Physiology and Pharmacology, doctoral thesis, 2014.
13 “Severe COVID-19 increases the risk of schizophrenia.” Ancha Baranova et al., Psychiatry Research, November 2022.
14 “Investigating neurological symptoms of infectious diseases like COVID-19 leading to a deeper understanding of neurodegenerative disorders such as Parkinson's disease.” Jing Zhang, Frontiers in Neurology, December 2022.
15 “The Mind of a Conspiracy Theorist.” Jennifer Latson, Psychology Today, November 3, 2020. (An “Associated Press poll found that 20 percent of Americans said they would refuse the vaccine[.]”)
16 “Religious Identities and the Race Against the Virus: Successes and Opportunities for Engaging Faith Communities on COVID-19 Vaccination.” PRRI | IFYC, November 28, 2021.
17 “COVID-19 vaccines reduce the risk of SARS-CoV-2 reinfection and hospitalization: Meta-analysis.” Maria Elena Flacco et al., Frontiers in Medicine, November 2022.
18 “The Concept of ‘Atypical Psychoses’ from the Aspect of Clinical Genetics.” Hisatoshi Mitsuda, Acta Psychiatrica Scandinavica, 1965 (Volume 41, Issue 3).