Autopsy Study Finds Replicating SARS-CoV-2 in the Hearts of Long Covid

https://my.uscap.org/uscap/program/S0tc675/index.cfm?pgid=5167&sid=14770&abid=51228

by thenerdhead • 11 days ago

134 46 11 days ago

my.uscap.org

internet_user• 11 days ago

Has this been found in other tissues?

npunt• 11 days ago

Iirc yes. Viral persistence and viral reservoirs are the terms to search for

thenerdhead4• 11 days ago

strongest evidence so far in gut and immune cells for living organisms.

They did find it in the brain of one patient when doing an unrelated procedure at the NIH. That could be due to many things though. General findings around the CSF/brain have been negative.

Autopsy - https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-022-05542-y

Long covid - https://www.thelancet.com/journals/laninf/article/PIIS1473-3...

Also this exists in both children and adults.

nerdsniper• 11 days ago

I'd be curious to look for any investigation into whether extended paxlovid treatment fixes a significant subset of long COVID.

thenerdhead4• 11 days ago

they’ve done 15 days all null and the 25 day one was null but has some unique labs they tested but haven’t posted yet.

Paxlovid does something to antiviral genes and shows there’s something there though in secondary analysis (not posted but has been presented at conferences)

sadly Paxlovid doesn’t actually get rid of the viral pieces remaining and a PROTAC or other therapy might be necessary to degrade the proteins.

https://www.nature.com/articles/s41392-025-02539-7

liamrosen• 10 days ago

Yeah, it seems that most people don't have active viral replication which is the only thing that Paxlovid works for (it literally jams up the "scissors" that cut the viral data for replication).

It seems to work in a small subset, but that's about it.

realo2• 11 days ago

The science is interesting but I must admit I learned a new word today.

A deceased person is also a decedent. Adjective vs noun. Cool.

jgalt212• 10 days ago

Yes, but deceased is also a noun. The Economist's Style Guide would not approve.

rolph• 10 days ago

the antecedent decedent, was deceased and desistant.

mchusma• 10 days ago

After seeing studies like this, and how the shingles vaccine reduces dimensia, I have become increasingly convinced that it’s bad to get almost any disease, even transiently. I used to think that it was kind of good to train your immune system (kind of whatever doesn’t kill you makes you stronger). I no longer believe that. I believe that diseases often cause unknown effects and it’s better to avoid disease entirely, that vaccines are actually more beneficial than current studies show in this regard, and new universal vaccines to prevent the common cold and flu will likely have significant health span improvements over time beyond the acute prevention of symptoms.

thenerdhead4• 10 days ago

having posted on this topic for years, your comment is the first I’ve seen come to this rational conclusion. usually people double down on their original perspective

st-keller• 10 days ago

I came to the same conclusion and normally i don’t write about it. Beiing one of the few who pays 250€ to get my family vaccinated against SARS-CoV-2 every year here in Germany (i have to pay because our „StIKo“ doesn’t recommend the vaccination) kind of makes me hesitant to talk about it.

throw-the-towel• 10 days ago

s/dimensia/dementia ?

cyanydeez• 10 days ago

ok, so posit this is true; are you going to now become a bubble boy?

PaulKeeble• 10 days ago

I am now pretty certain every virus we have ever caught is just smouldering in our body somewhere constantly held in check by the immune system. We seem to just accumulate ever increasing issues until our body can't cope anymore and become symptomatic with damage and then ultimately die. We have had a huge blindspot for the damage viruses are doing to people, I doubt any infection leaves us.

The research from Covid is just finding so much evidence for tissue resident viral infection and prior work on ME/CFS autopsies showed other viruses doing similar in the brain. Catching anything is bad for our health.

jupiter_flyby• 10 days ago

For Long COVID and the brain follow Danielle Beckman: https://bsky.app/profile/daniellebeckman.bsky.social

DANmode2• 10 days ago

Makes eating your garlic, and other key foods, a bit more interesting.

postalrat• 9 days ago

Most everything is bad for you health. Attempting to avoid most things bad for your health is probably bad for your health. Don't overthink it and just enjoy you time.

Animats• 10 days ago

That's probably assuming too much persistence for some infections. Virus detection in autopsies has been around for a while.[1] But it's not routine. At least HIV, malaria, yellow fever, rabies, and hepatitis have been tested. So there's data to look at, not just belief.

[1] https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S266652472...

MrBuddyCasino• 10 days ago

This is why I‘m excited for the attempt to vaccinate against the common cold and influenza: https://blog.interceptfund.com/p/ending-respiratory-infectio...

underdeserver• 10 days ago

Isn't this exact idea a theme in Asimov's books?

I feel like doctors and physiology researchers have known this for some time.

ZpJuUuNaQ53• 10 days ago

I used to think that it was kind of good to train your immune system (kind of whatever doesn’t kill you makes you stronger). I no longer believe that.

Well, that's essentially what vaccines do, anyway, except that they train the immune system without requiring you to go through the full disease. As a side note, I developed myocarditis after a COVID vaccine which damaged heart tissue and caused an AV block.

grayhatter3• 10 days ago

I'm interested in your perspective, Do you think you're more mad you got the vaccine, or more greatful that you did because an organic infection would have done more damage?

M95D2• 10 days ago

You can and should train your immune system, but not by fighting the enemy. Train it with a sparring partner - a vaccine.

Many people think that viruses are as benign as common flu (influenza), or common cold (rhinoviruses), because that what they experienced themselves and parents and schools don't do a good job of explaining just how bad some diseases are. (To "protect" the children, perhaps?)

But most viruses are not as "polite" as the flu or a cold. All herpesviruses (chickenpox, classic herpesviruses type 1 and 2, papilomavirus, Epstein-Barr, CMV) stay with you forever. So does HIV, hepatitis C (until recently introduced efective treatment), sometimes hepatitis B, some types (the bad types) of papillomaviruses, etc. There are so many of them.

And there are permanet bacterial infections and parasites too: Mycobacterum leprae (rare now), and M. tubeculosis (where I live most people are infected, but don't manifest the disease and are not contagious), Helicobacter pylori (something like 2/3 of all people in the world are infected), malaria (curable, but many people don't know they have it), Toxoplasma (infects all warm blooded animals including birds, and many people have it - in their brain - and it's permanent).

There are some viruses (like HIV) that insert themselves into our cell's DNA, and if they infect our reproductive cells, we pass them on to our children just like any other gene. It happened a lot in our evolution. ~10% of our ordinary human genome is made of viruses. Ancient viruses, no longer functional, but some of their genes we repurposed them and made them work for us instead. If you count transposons (not technically viruses, but they can/could move in and out of DNA, switch places, just like text cut-and-paste, taking with them nearby genes), then it's more like 50% of our DNA.

dualvariable• 10 days ago

Many people think that viruses are as benign as common flu (influenza)

Had influenza in 2018, as a 46-year-old and it was not particularly benign.

3 days straight of 103 degree fever and think I had mild long-covid-ish symptoms for the next year or so.

apexalpha• 10 days ago

I used to think that it was kind of good to train your immune system (kind of whatever doesn’t kill you makes you stronger). I no longer believe that.

Vaccines are a method of training your immune system…

happymellon• 10 days ago

Based upon their comment talking about vaccines being good, I'm assuming they mean catching something intentionally to train your body at a convenient time.

I remember 30 years ago kids used to be put together if one had chicken pox so the others could catch it to get it out of the way. Covid parties, etc.

This is now considered a bad move.

esbranson• 10 days ago

Disease effects versus vaccine effects. Propaganda consumers ("news" viewers) seem to be generally clueless about one side or the other, which informs their balancing decision.

But you're right, a baby getting Hepatitis B versus the HepB vaccine. For the 0.15% of babies with perinatal HepB (2022 CDC cohort[1]) it's easy to say give them the vaccine after infection.

What about the other 90% of babies without HepB getting the vaccine (yes, they do)? Are our hospitals and elementary schools some version of Epstein Island? Are the hospitals competent enough to give the vaccines too incompetent to screen? What are population-level downsides to giving vaccines at such young ages before there is a reasonable risk of infection? I don't know, but I believe my preferred propaganda networks refuse to tell me, which makes the balancing decision harder for me in such cases than it is for you in your preferred case.

[1] https://www.cdc.gov/hepatitis-surveillance-2023/perinatal-he...

DANmode2• 10 days ago

I believe that diseases often cause unknown effects

We know it. That’s the best part. We know about the nervous system’s disruption in the presence of bacterial infections, viruses, any infection that the body wants to alter its blood chemistry to slow down, any infection that brings its own biolfilms and messes with your cellular electricities, any infection that throws off viral or bacterial waste for your heart valves to slog through…

We know these things, in isolation.

We just don’t teach them as they (almost certainly) apply here.

Because you need a peer-reviewed study that, for example, specifically proves COVID infection is linked to viral shedding which is linked to chest pain / heart, stamina problems.

You can’t just assume that’s what’s happening because that’s what always happens.

Looks where that’s getting us, though. Data says we’re all being thrashed by cancers, and endocrine instability.

tigerlily• 10 days ago

I have come to the same conclusion, especially in regards to anything affecting digestion, from food poisoning, campylobacter, salmonella, giardia, to any gut parasites or just bad bacteria. It can change your gut physiology, mess with enzyme production long term, fucking up your diet by reducing the kinds of foods you can eat. There's also the possibility of bowel cancer pathways via such diseases, which I read is currently under investigation.

rdmirza2• 10 days ago

It's established that COVID can persist in tissue/blood - particularly in immunocompromised patients - and is associated with long COVID [1]. This abstract only reports a cut-off of >60 days from COVID infection, so it's hard to know how many of these deceased patients are truly outside the acute infection phase.

Although this research area is the most promising avenue for long COVID -- wrt biologic rationale -- the major anti-viral trials for long COVID were negative.

STOP-PASC trial [2] and PAXLC [3] were both 15-day courses of Paxlovid and showed no benefit across patient reported outcomes.

The real question however, is whether anti-virals have benefit in patients with active viral replication. Like only cases of long COVID can be implicated to viral persistence.

STOP-PASC did collect stool PCR at baseline, but every tested sample was negative. PAX LC later reported a exploratory biomarker analysis of 82 PAX LC participants did measure circulating SARS-CoV-2 S1 and full-length Spike, and wasn't powered to find a difference. Notably, spike presence doesn't necessarily mean active viral replication [4].

As an aside, mchusma's post is probably right. Viral disease is not being associated with more and more long term diseases. EBV is being linked to MS, cervical cancer to HPV, and so on.

[1] https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S147330992... [2] https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jamainternalmedicine/fullar... [3] https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/40188838 [4] www.medrxiv.org/content/10.64898/2026.02.24.26347001v1.full

draebek• 10 days ago

Viral disease is not being associated with more and more long term diseases.

You meant to write "now being associated with more and more long term diseases", right?

rdmirza2• 10 days ago

Aye. Outside edit window unfortunately

Autopsy Study Finds Replicating SARS-CoV-2 in the Hearts of Long Covid

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