The Mysterious Case of Zika-Microcephaly’s Disappearance

 The Zika Pandemic

• In 2015, a viral pandemic from Northeast Brazil exploded into the news, supported by breathless public health alarms that Zika - a flavivirus acknowledged for decades as harmless - was now suddenly responsible for congenital microcephaly (babies with small heads; diminished intellect).
• WHO-aligned experts within Latin America recommended that women forgo childbirth indefinitely - possibly until a Zika vaccine's fabrication (still unrealized).
• Massive panic predictably ensued.

Zika in Bahia

• In 2015, the Zika virus had heretofore never appeared in the Americas.
• Routine clinical Zika testing was nowhere available until many months after the announcement of the Brazilian pandemic.
• Zika represented the clay - through wishes and partial perceptions molded into full-bore actionable fear.
• Despite (or perhaps because of) Zika's void of prior significance, it became the unlikely prize within an ulteriorly-motivated medical treasure hunt.
• In 2014, physicians Carlos Brito (of Recife) and Kleber Luz (of Natal) formed a WhatsApp group with the literally expressed purpose of announcing a brand-new virus within Brazil; the discovery of which would address Brazil's societal inequities by bringing money and attention to Brazil's Northeast equatorial areas.

Microcephaly in Recife

• In 2015, Brazil declared a lax way of determining which infant had microcephalaly and which had not
• Brazil's overly broad criteria led to a massive overcounting of babies with physically small heads, but who were otherwise normal
• The normal neonate's hospital stay in Brazil is two days, but longer for this diagnosis, therefore around ten such cases might at any moment reside in-hospital normally throughout Recife

The Zika-Microcephaly Connection

• Brazil's Ministry of Health decided on Dr. Brito as the doctor to evaluate Recife
• Brito focused on 26 mothers of microcephalic babies: asking each retroactively about rash, fever, and aches 6-8 months prior
• For him, an affirmative answer qualified that case as "Zika" - even with no serologic testing
• This approach violated every basic principle of epidemiology
• His methodology involved selection bias, lack of blinding, observer bias, and recall bias

Scientists are bewildered

• Zika has left a puzzling and distinctly uneven pattern of damage across the Americas.
• To the great bewilderment of scientists, the epidemic has not produced the wave of fetal deformities so widely feared when the images of misshapen infants first emerged from Brazil.
• Microcephaly - aside from one severe, rare, genetically recessive "primary" version had never had a predominantly identifiable individual cause.
• It's a physical and statistical quantification medically characterized causally as "multifactorial," i.e. loosely connected to a myriad of potential agents (most of which coincide with poverty).

The First:

• Dr. da Silva Mattos' "Microcephaly in north-east Brazil: a retrospective study on neonates born between 2012 and 2015" retroactively fills in the prior-year comparison data unavailable to the Recife neuropediatricians.

The Second: Amidst the Zika outbreak uproar in late 2015, Brazil formed its "Microcephaly Epidemic Research Group" (MERG) which aimed to replicate scientifically the Drs. van der Linden and Brito examination process: focusing on the same city, Recife - but one year later.

• In contrast with the earlier effort this study had: no panic, no overdiagnosis, and no flooding the zone with alarmed moms; laboratory tests for Zika (and dengue); a control group; a single microcephly standard; organized and adjudicated research teams; no press leaks.
• Remaining weaknesses were these: no correlation of head size with actual cognitive abilities; and the continuing near-impossibility of differentiating Zika from Dengue.

The Third: An analysis in central Brazil, far from media-generated panic, showed microcephaly (after Zika exposure) at such low rates as to be in line with the world's baseline, pre-Zika

• Furthermore, two years of quiet on the Zika newsfront somehow rendered the virus 3.5 times less congenitally dangerous.

Zika-microcephaly's proponents, in the face of reality's capsizing their leaked predictions, have done a bit of each

• Zika now, instead, causes diffuse neurologic disturbances, labeled "CZS," Congenital Zika Syndrome
• The public health effort reversed Zika via awareness and avoidance
• Now we've settled on Zika as the smoking gun, but we don't know who pulled the trigger
• Another infection could combine with Zika to make the disease worse and increase the risk of birth defects

A Missing Virus for a Missing Pandemic

• Zika-microcephaly represents a universally accepted "emergency;" albeit one whose (hugely) major benefit to the pharmaceutical/public health-axis has not yet fully been extracted.
• Annulment of the theory eliminates a pharmaceutical pathway to profit and a public health pulpit.

Overturning Zika

• The Zika-microcephaly saga intertwines the romantic public image of intrepid, mission-driven physicians and researchers with the reality of compromised data and active subversion of science
• Science has no official "court" to determine rulings; rather (at least, in a pre-Covid-19 world) a free and open discussion mostly through journal articles
• Ultimately, science ultimately won't do well or be trusted if it embodies aspects more of a priesthood than a robust, free debate
• Media leaks of conjecture led to panic and compromised the timing and ability to gather adequate data
• Conjurers of Zika did not "benefit the public more" by cavalierly avoiding "immediately writing a scientific paper and publishing it." Their self-aggrandizing choices handicapped concurrent experimentation, amidst a declared pandemic

https://brownstone.org/articles/the-mysterious-case-of-zika-microcephalys-disappearance/