by James A. Bacon
What a revelation. It turns out that a person’s genes have a big influence over how or his or her immunological system responds to the COVID-19 virus. A Charlottesville company, Ampel Biosolutions, has developed a blood test, which it claims predicts with 90% accuracy if a COVID-infected patient is at risk for a serious, life-threatening case.
Ampel executives say that the test, dubbed CovGene, could help physicians tailor treatments depending upon the patient’s genetic profile. It might make sense, for example, to implement anti-viral therapy such as Paxlovid for someone at acute risk, while patients at low risk could forego the expensive treatments.
The company based its findings on research conducted in collaboration with researchers at the University of Virginia hospital based on a longitudinal study of two-dozen COVID patients in UVa’s intensive care unit and a study of 100 patients from Duke and Harvard. The results were published in the Frontiers in Immunology journal.
Ampel officials make no claim beyond the efficacy of their blood test. Their pronouncements do not address broader issues regarding public health policy. Assuming its claims stand up to scrutiny, however, some conclusions about U.S. COVID policy seem warranted.
It has been widely known since early in the COVID pandemic that individuals respond differently to the virus. Most obviously, there was a powerful correlation between age on the one hand and hospitalizations and death on the other. But outcomes varied even within the same age cohort. Physicians learned that pre-existing conditions — obesity, diabetes, heart disease, lung disease, Alzheimer’s disease, Vitamin D deficiency, and low testosterone — put individuals at higher risk. Now Ampel provides strong evidence that genetic factors do as well.
The Masters of the Universe who dictated the U.S. response to the COVID pandemic issued one-size-fits-all diktats that limited public access to businesses, schools, universities, churches, and other public places without regard to personal risk factors. The resulting social isolation proved to be a catastrophe for mental health and K-12 learning. Dissenting views about optimal policy — the Great Barrington Declaration, which advocated “focused protection” for the most vulnerable, comes to mind — were actively suppressed on Twitter and other social media with the connivance of the federal government.
Additionally, instead of focusing on pre-existing conditions that actually influence the body’s response to COVID, America’s policy maestros, viewing public health through a social-justice lens, fixated on race, which is medically irrelevant except to the extent to which race might be correlated with actual risk factors like obesity, diabetes and hypertension.
How bad was U.S. COVID policy? Check out the Johns Hopkins University COVID map. Globally, it has been documented that 6.7 million people have died from COVID. In the U.S., 1.1 million people have died. Put another way, the U.S. accounts for 4.1% of the world’s population but 16.3% of its COVID deaths.
One must treat those figures with care. Some countries do a better job of identifying COVID deaths than others. The U.S. likely captures a higher percentage than, say, the Republic of the Congo. And who can trust anything coming out of the People’s Republic of China? Furthermore, it is reasonable to adjust for age. Countries with higher percentages of elderly are likely to suffer more COVID fatalities than countries with younger populations, regardless of the quality of their public health systems.
Even so, how can the U.S., which was thought to have the best-prepared hospital system in the world to deal with an emergency like this, and which first rolled out effective vaccines on a large scale, have one of the highest rates of COVID fatality in the world? I have yet to see someone ask that question, much less answer it.
Traffickers in snark will say the U.S. has the stupidest population in the world, and MAGA hat wearers died in disproportionate numbers because they refused to wear masks and take the vaccine.
I’ll throw out a different answer for readers to chew on: we have the most ineffectual ruling class in the world. The U.S. ruling class is peerless in its self- regard, without equal in its conviction that it knows better than anyone else, and unsurpassed it its ability to explain away its failures and ignore evidence that doesn’t fit its preferred narratives. An unstated thread of its COVID response is that policies should be applied to everyone, regardless of individual risk factors, that the only differences that matter are race and ethnicity, and that all dissenting views must be stifled. The science is settled!
Let’s set aside the debates over mask mandates, vaccine mandates, and Ivermectin. Let’s just consider that:
U.S. COVID policy did not factor obesity, diabetes, and hypertension into its guidance.
U.S. COVID policy did not factor Vitamin D deficiency into its guidance.
U.S. COVID policy did not factor Alzheimer’s disease into its guidance.
U.S. COVID policy did not factor in the possibility of an individual’s genetic makeup into its guidance.
If such factors were ever considered, neither the government nor the media communicated to the public that they were significant.
Ampel Biosolutions bills its CovGene tests as part of the larger “precision medicine” revolution, which is built around the recognition that medical responses should be tailored to a patient’s individual genetic profile, biochemical markers, and pre-existing conditions. That’s real science. But the insight was totally ignored during the COVID pandemic. We can only hope that it will carry more weight in the next one.
