Speaker A
My wife and I both worked in healthcare through the COVID pandemic. We've both had CO more than once. We've both had the vaccines as required by our jobs.
A doctor reviews research on lingering post-COVID effects like fatigue, blood clots, and POTS, covering proposed mechanisms and what has helped patients.
Key Takeaways
- Long-term post-COVID symptoms like fatigue and vascular problems are real and well documented, though their causes are still not fully understood.
- Post-viral fatigue syndromes have been observed after multiple infections, not only COVID.
- Structured physical and cognitive rehabilitation and CBT have the best-supported benefits so far.
- Large safety data generally do not show increased clotting or stroke from mRNA vaccines, though a few studies report small signals.
What the video covers
- The speaker, an ear doctor and former special ops member, says he and his wife, both healthcare workers, experienced changes after multiple COVID infections and vaccinations, and sees patients with persistent fatigue, clots, strokes, and gut and lung issues in the ER.
- He explicitly sets aside the origins of COVID, politics, and conspiracy theories, framing the video as a review of what research shows about post-infection bodily effects.
- SARS-CoV-2 uses the ACE2 receptor, found throughout the body including heart, blood vessels, gut, and kidneys, which explains the variety of symptoms.
- Severe cases can involve a cytokine storm, where an overactive immune response damages the body's own tissues, and the blood vessel lining can be harmed directly.
- A large VA study of over 150,000 patients found increased one-year risk of stroke, blood clots, heart rhythm problems, and heart disease, including in some mild cases.
- Roughly four in ten people with long COVID report persistent fatigue, and similar patterns were observed after other infections such as glandular fever, Q fever, and Ross River virus.
- The video discusses proposed mechanisms including persistent viral fragments, autoimmune responses, and nervous system dysregulation such as POTS.
- Some studies suggest vaccinated people who became infected had a roughly 20-25% lower long COVID risk, while large surveillance studies found no increased clotting or stroke risk from mRNA vaccines, with a few small UK studies showing small signals.
- Treatments with evidence include structured physical and cognitive rehabilitation and cognitive behavioral therapy; many other proposed treatments have mixed or unconvincing results.
- Practical advice includes getting POTS evaluated, managing fluids and salt, and obtaining baseline lab data such as inflammation markers rather than guessing.
Chapters
- 00:00Introduction and Personal Context
- 01:00Scope and Disclaimers
- 02:23Background on the Pandemic and Vaccine Rollout
- 03:23How SARS-CoV-2 Enters and Affects Cells
- 04:41Long-Term Outcomes: Clots, Stroke, and Fatigue
- 06:49Proposed Mechanisms Behind Lingering Symptoms
- 08:00Vaccines and Long COVID Risk
- 09:00Treatments and Practical Recommendations
Full Transcript — Download SRT & Markdown
Speaker A
And since then, it feels like something's changed. When our kids bring home a virus now, which they do very frequently, we don't get the normal stuff that we used to, like a runny nose or a cough. We just get really, really
Speaker A
fatigued and weeks of it sometimes. We're not alone. I see this in the ER constantly. people with crushing fatigue since CO blood clots and strokes and people with zero risk factors, gut issues that kind of came out of nowhere
Speaker A
and lungs that still haven't returned to normal. Thing is, nobody can tell you exactly why yet. But that doesn't mean it isn't real and it doesn't mean that you're stuck with it forever. If we haven't met, I'm Seth. I'm an ear
Speaker A
doctor, former special ops guy, and now I focus on simplifying health to keep you out of the emergency department.
Speaker A
Today I'm going to talk about CO and it's going to be a bit of a long video.
Speaker A
But before we get into it, let me tell you what this video is not. This is not a video about where CO came from. It's not about politics and it's not about conspiracy theories. I'm not touching any of that. And if that's what you came
Speaker A
here for, this isn't it. What this is is a doctor looking at what the research actually shows right now about what happened to people's bodies after CO.
Speaker A
The clots, the fatigue, the weird lingering stuff that we can't find in a textbook yet. I'm going to walk through the data, the leading theories, and what's actually been shown to help. I have no agenda. It's just the science.
Speaker A
All right, that's what you're here for. Let's get into it. First, let's set the stage. CO 19 showed up in Wuhan, China in December 2019. By around January 30th, 2020, the World Health Organization called it a global health emergency. By March, they called
Speaker A
it a pandemic. What followed was something that almost nobody alive has seen before. Lockdowns, school closures, business shutdowns across nearly every country on Earth. By the time the dust settled, the WH estimated close to 15 million excess excessive deaths
Speaker A
worldwide in the first 2 years alone. In the US, we crossed a million confirmed deaths by 2022.
Speaker A
By December of 2020, less than a year after the virus was identified, the first vaccines rolled out in the US.
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Fizer and Madna under emergency authorization, hundreds of millions of doses followed over the next few years.
Speaker A
This created one of the most divisive periods in modern history. Lockdowns and mandates, vaccine passports, school closures, arguments at, I don't know, Thanksgiving dinner tables. Depending on who you ask, it was either the right call or a massive overreach. And I'm not
Speaker A
here to speak to that or adjudicate that. That's not what today is about. What I do want to talk about is what happened in people's bodies because five, six years out, we're still seeing patterns that we didn't before. Fatigue
Speaker A
that doesn't resolve, clots, and people, like I said, with no risk factors, gut and lung problems that showed up out of nowhere. The research into why this is still evolving. So, let's break down what the virus actually is and what it
Speaker A
does first so we all have a general understanding. SARS cove 2 is a corona virus. Coronirus used to just cause a common cold. Scientists call it that because under a microscope is covered in little spikes. You've probably seen
Speaker A
pictures of it. It looks like a crown, which is what corona means. Those spikes are the key that lets the virus break into your cells. Every one of your cells has little locks on the surface called receptors. The spikes on the virus
Speaker A
happen to fit into one specific lock almost perfectly. It's called AC2. Think of A2 as like a door handle on your bo um on your cells that your body normally util utilizes to help regulate uh things like blood pressure and blood vessel
Speaker A
function. The virus found that handle and learned how to use it to let itself into the cells. That door handle isn't just on the cells in your nose and your lungs though like it is for cold virus.
Speaker A
It's all over your body, your heart, your blood vessels, your gut, your kidneys. That's actually why the virus caused so many different strange symptoms in different people. As for where it came from, the WH's expert panel after years of review said in 2025
Speaker A
that the evidence most strongly points to a natural spillover from an animal, most likely through a bat or another species, similar to how past outbreaks like SARS and MS started. They also said they couldn't fully rule out an
Speaker A
accidental labrelated event because they never got full access to the records they requested. They were clear it wasn't a deliberately engineered virus though, although I'm not sure how they came to that conclusion. But both of these are as far as the official global
Speaker A
health investigation has been able to settle it. And that's as far as I'm going to go with that part of debate.
Speaker A
But once the virus gets into a cell, it hijacks it and starts making copies of itself. Your immune system notices it and fights back. And most people that fight stays pretty controlled and you recover. But in some people, especially
Speaker A
if the viral load is high or the immune system overreacts or is too weak, that fight kind of spirals. Your body starts pumping out so much inflammatory signals at once that it starts damaging its own tissues. We call this a cytoine storm.
Speaker A
It's basically your immune system uh alarm system kind of getting stuck in the on position. And it's one of the reasons why some people end up in the ICU while others barely noticed that they were even sick. However, people who
Speaker A
tended to be affected the most were those with weakened immune systems or underdeveloped immune systems. So, the sick, the very young, and the elderly.
Speaker A
Because that door handle, that AC2 sits right on the lining of blood vessels. The virus and the inflammation it triggers can damage that lining, too.
Speaker A
This is why we saw clots and vascular problems show up in people with no risk factors, even young people. So, to sum it up, three things happened. The virus got in through a lock that's all over the body. And some people the immune
Speaker A
response got out of control and the blood vessel lining itself took damage. So that's basically the setup. Now let's talk about what that actually did to people long after the infection cleared.
Speaker A
Okay. So what actually happened to people after the infection cleared? One of the biggest studies on this came out of the VA looking at over 150,000 CO patients compared to millions of people who hadn't had CO. A year out, COVID
Speaker A
survivors had a meaningfully higher risk of stroke, blood clots, heart rhythm problems, and heart disease. This wasn't just in people who had been hospitalized, either. Even people with mild cases that had uh never landed them in the hospital bed showed some
Speaker A
increased risk as well, though the biggest jumps were in people who had been in the ICU or been critically ill.
Speaker A
Fatigue is the most common lingering symptom by far. Across studies looking at this, roughly four in 10 people with long COVID report ongoing fatigue, not just normal tiredness, like the kind of tired where like a normal day or workout
Speaker A
whites you out for the rest of the week. And something that's interesting, this pattern isn't actually new to CO. We've seen this, you know, some version of this in uh other viruses in the past.
Speaker A
Back in uh 2006, researchers followed several hundred people after three completely different infections. glandular fever, Q fever, and a mosquito uh born virus called Ross River. 6 months later, about one in 10 of them had developed a measurable chronic
Speaker A
fatigue condition, no matter which of the three infections that they had. So, the body developed a long lingering illness after fighting off an infection.
Speaker A
This isn't some, you know, brand new phenomenon that we're just seeing now. It's just that CO is the biggest version of it that we've ever seen because so many people got CO all at once. Beyond fatigue, we're also seeing uh gut
Speaker A
issues, ongoing respiratory symptoms, and in some people, a condition called POTS, POTS, where your heart rate basically shoots up just from standing up because the part of your nervous system that regulates blood vessels and heart rate get got thrown off by the
Speaker A
virus. [clears throat] So, you've got clots and cardiovascular risk on one side and then fatigue driven multi-ym illness on the other side. Um, different people kind of landed in different buckets and unfortunately some of them, you know, landed in two buckets at once.
Speaker A
I want to quickly thank the sponsor of today's video and that is Cyogox Health.
Speaker A
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Speaker A
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Speaker A
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Speaker A
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Speaker A
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Speaker A
it's the same thing I'd recommend to anyone who's been feeling off since co and wants real numbers instead of just guessing. There's a link in the description if you want to check it out and get a discount with it. All right,
Speaker A
back to it. So, why does this stick around in some people and not others?
Speaker A
Well, unfortunately, I can't answer that because nobody has a single clear answer yet despite all the research being done.
Speaker A
But researchers have a handful of leading theories and I'm thinking it's probably not just one of them. That's likely some combination and different for different people just like most things. So theory one, leftover virus.
Speaker A
Some studies have found fragments of the virus pieces um and its proteins or genetic material [clears throat] kind of still hanging around the body months after the infection even when your standard COVID tests are coming back negative. The idea is that the immune
Speaker A
system never completely fully finished off the job. So it stays partially activated. There are other viruses that do this too. Theory two, the immune system gets confused and it turns on itself. And some people researchers have found antibodies that seem to be
Speaker A
attacking the body's own tissues, not just the virus itself. This happens when other with other infections too. It's not unique to CO. Again, but in this case, some researchers think the immune response got so cranked up during the
Speaker A
fight that it didn't fully stand down stand it down afterwards. All right. Theory three, old viruses waking back up. Most adults are already carrying dormant viruses that they got years ago.
Speaker A
This actually happens with a lot of viruses that you get. They just live inside of you forever. Epstein bar is a big one. It's what causes mono or monucleiosis or kissing disease if you've ever heard of that and almost
Speaker A
everyone has had it usually in your teen years. Normally your immune system keeps it locked down. Some researchers have found signs of signs that a uh co infection can let bar flare back up and that reactivation might be contributing
Speaker A
to some of the fatigue and brain fog that people are noticing. Theory four, damage to the blood vessel lining itself. We talked about this earlier. The virus can get directly into the cells lining your blood vessel called the endothelium. Some researchers
Speaker A
have found small sticky clumps called microclouds circulating in people with long COVID that doesn't dissolve the way they normally should. If that's happening at a small scale, but throughout the entire body, it could be part of why you do feel exhausted. All
Speaker A
right. And last, the nervous system itself can get thrown off. This is what happens uh with POTS, which I mentioned earlier. the part of your nervous system that's supposed to automatically adjust your heart rate and your blood vessels
Speaker A
when you stand up or you digest food or regulate your temperature. Basically, it stops working correctly. Being honest, none of these are proven beyond a doubt.
Speaker A
This is still evolving um evolving research. And the honest answer is we just don't fully know yet. We haven't figured it out. But this also isn't nothing. There are real changes showing up in people's blood work and on
Speaker A
imaging. This isn't like a it's all in your head thing. And if your doctor or anyone has told you that, I apologize for them because that's not the case.
Speaker A
But let's talk about the vaccines for a second. I know this is a controversial topic and again, like I said, I'm not going into that. I just want to talk about the science here. Here's what the data actually shows so far. On the
Speaker A
protective side, several large studies, uh, some looking at millions of people found that getting vaccinated before the infection was linked to a lower risk of developing long COVID. A lower risk, not no risk. One analysis pulling a bunch of
Speaker A
these studies found roughly a 20 to 25% reduction in longco risk in vaccinated people who got infected compared to unvaccinated people who got infected.
Speaker A
Other research found that the omocron variant itself carried a lower longco risk than the earlier delta variant somewhere around half the risk uh separate from the vaccine status entirely. The delta variant was the one that was absolutely brutal. Omocron
Speaker A
sucked it as well. Um some of us actually had both of them. It was terrible. But anyways, on the risk side, the vaccines do carry some real measurable side effects. Myocarditis, inflammation of the heart muscle, is one that has been studied the most. Um, it's
Speaker A
rare and it shows up disproportionately in young men, especially after a second dose of vaccine. Multiple large studies, some with tens of millions of people, found that myocarditis was still more common after a co infection itself than after the vaccine in most age groups.
Speaker A
The one exception researchers consistently flag is young men where in some studies the vaccine associated risk came close to or in a couple of analyses exceeded the infection associated risk.
Speaker A
As for clots and strokes, this one's mixed depending on which vaccine and which study you look at. The large adnavirus vector vaccines like Astroenica were linked to clotting disorder which is part of why that vaccine was pulled back or restricted in
Speaker A
a lot of countries. for the mRNA vaccines. Most large safety surveillance studies looking at tens of millions of doses did not find an increase clotting or stroke risk. A couple of individual studies out of the UK did find a small
Speaker A
statistically detectable increase in stroke risk in a narrow window uh after certain doses. There was a Yale research team um put out a study on what they're calling postvcination syndrome. And it's a cluster of symptoms like fatigue and
Speaker A
brain fog and dizziness that some people reported starting shortly after a vaccine dose. It's a small study just over about 40 people compared to you know a couple dozen controls and it hasn't gone through full peer review yet. The researchers who ran it were
Speaker A
pretty clear that it's preliminary and it shouldn't change anyone's vaccine decisions on its own yet. But it is now a real line of research and there is more doubt coming on that specifically.
Speaker A
So where does that leave us? The answer the honest answer is both things are probably true. Vaccination was associated with lower long COVID risk at the population level and the vaccines carry their own side effect profile that's still being studied including
Speaker A
this newer postvcination syndrome u that I just talked about. So I'm not going to tell you what decision to make with that information that's between you and uh your doctor. I'm telling you what the data shows right now. As for me and my
Speaker A
wife, we worked in healthcare. Like I said, we had COVID multiple times. We also got the vaccinations as work requirements. And somewhere in that combination, it definitely feels like something changed in our bodies. We genuinely don't know which exposure did
Speaker A
it, the infection, the vaccine, or you know, a combination of both. Nobody can tell us that with certainty. And if someone tells you that they can for either side of this, I'd be pretty skeptical at this point. So, what do you
Speaker A
actually do with all of this? Let's start with what's been tried. A large NIH funded trial tested extending paxlovid, the antiviral medication, out to 15 to 25 days in people with established long COVID. Well, guess what? There was no benefit. Not
Speaker A
surprised. Another trial tested metformin, a diabetes drug, in people who already had long COVID symptoms.
Speaker A
Also, no benefit. Although, interestingly, when metformin was given during the acute infection itself before long CO ever set in, it looks like it may have lowered the odds of developing it in the first place. That's a different question entirely than
Speaker A
treating it once you already had it though. And the evidence was, you know, plus or minus. A big review looking at dozens of supplement and drug trials found most of them like antioxidants, probiotics, uh various vitamins didn't hold up. CoQ10 specifically has been
Speaker A
studied a few times with mixed, mostly unconvincing results. What has actually shown some benefit is structured physical and cognitive rehab programs and a form of talk therapy called cognitive behavioral therapy.
Speaker A
Researchers do know that the effect is pretty modest though. Some people with long COVID have something called post-exertional malaise. That's a delayed crash hours or days after exertion where your symptoms get like dramatically worse. If that's happening to you, pushing through and powering
Speaker A
through a workout is the wrong move. It can actually set you back weeks. The official UK guidance on this uh flipped a few years back um uh specifically on the old advice which was pushing through it u gradually build up your exercise
Speaker A
and they found that it was actually making a subset of patients a lot worse instead of better like they had presumed. So if you've had lingering symptoms since co first thing to ask yourself is do you crash hard a day or
Speaker A
two after you push yourself physically? If the answer is yes, don't force workouts um on top of that. Uh rest within your limits first. let your body stabilize and then only build uh activity back up slowly once you're not
Speaker A
crashing anymore. If you don't have that pattern, if you just feel run down and tired without the delayed crash after exercise, then normal movement and sunlight and the basics are going to serve you well. Second, if you're having
Speaker A
heart palpitations or dizziness specifically when you stand up, that's worth getting checked out for POTS. It's treatable. Um more fluids, more salt, compression garments, sometimes medications. Work with your doc on this one. Okay. Third, get your actual numbers. Inflammation markers, uh, basic
Speaker A
metabolic panel, thyroid, heart health, don't guess. I'm putting the link for Cyox where I get my labs done in the description. I don't have information for any overseas u companies that do this, but these for anyone who's US-based, you can use that link below.
Speaker A
And fourth, whatever is driving any of this in your specific case, the foundations still matter more than anything else on this list. Sleep, um, real nutritional food, movement, stress management, none of that is going to single-handedly fix the postviral
Speaker A
syndrome. But it's the floor everything else stands on. And I've watched people climb out of some version of this by nailing the basics first. All right. So, here's where I leave you. Nobody fully understands long co yet. Not me, not the
Speaker A
researchers running the trials, not anybody. What we do know is that it's real. It's measurable. And for a lot of people, it's still here years later. If that's you, you're not making it up. And you're not stuck being told just push
Speaker A
through it. Whatever combination of infection, vaccination, or something else entirely got you here. The path out starts in the same place it always does.
Speaker A
Get real data instead of guessing. Respect your limits and build the healthiest foundation that you possibly can because whatever is going on underneath a strong foundation is what gives your body the best shot of sorting it all out. Developing that foundation
Speaker A
is exactly why I built the Primal 60 challenge. Real food, movement, uh, sleep, basics done right for 60 days.
Speaker A
It's not a cure for anything that we talked about today, but it's the strongest lever you have, and it's where I start people losing tons of weight, building muscle, getting off chronic uh medications, and reversing chronic diseases every single month. The link is
Speaker A
below if you want to join. We kick off on the first of the month. Until next time y'all.
Topics:long COVIDpost-COVID syndromeACE2 receptorPOTSchronic fatigueblood clotscytokine stormpost-viral illnessrehabilitationvaccine safety
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