I don’t doubt that some people who have severe infection from COVID-19 can have permanent damage. Seems logical. But, I’m against the NIH spending over $1 billion to study something based on a dubious surveys where almost half never had a COVID test in the first survey and only 15.9% tested positive in the second survey. The NIH is using the politicized results of a political organization’s un-scientific survey to spend billions in taxpayer money.
The concept of long Covid has a highly unorthodox origin: online surveys produced by Body Politic, which launched in 2018 and describes itself atop its website’s homepage as “a queer feminist wellness collective merging the personal and the political.” In March 2020, the group’s co-founders created the Body Politic Covid-19 Support Group, and as part of their mission of “cultivating patient led research,” the organization coordinated a series of online surveys on persistent symptoms. Based on the results of these, Body Politic produced the first report on long Covid in May.
But many of the survey respondents who attributed their symptoms to the aftermath of a Covid-19 infection likely never had the virus in the first place. Of those who self-identified as having persistent symptoms attributed to Covid and responded to the first survey, not even a quarter had tested positive for the virus. Nearly half (47.8%) never had testing and 27.5% tested negative for Covid-19. Body Politic publicized the results of a larger, second survey in December 2020. Of the 3,762 respondents, a mere 600, or 15.9%, had tested positive for the virus at any time.
Wall Street Journal
Hey, it’s all funny money anyway now. So, really, who cares.