By David Tuller, DrPH
As I mentioned last week, George Monbiot, the British investigative journalist and longtime contributor to The Guardian, published a corker of a column about the mistreatment and abuse of people with ME/CFS, including those with Long COVID. Previous Monbiot essays on the issue—in March, 2024, and October, 2024–were equally blunt about the failures of the medical and academic establishments in this domain.
Monbiot hadn’t paid much attention to controversies over ME/CFS until he experienced a bout of COVID-19 early in the pandemic. To his surprise, it took him months to recover. He wrote about the experience—and then found himself tagged as a Long COVID super-spreader.
The tagger was Professor Michael Sharpe, who gave a presentation at an insurance industry gathering and claimed Monbiot’s column would trigger more reports from people who thought they had Long COVID. Monbiot then wrote about Professor Sharpe’s accusation—in the process learning about the entire debate, including the history of the fraudulent PACE trial.
Here’s the headline of Monbiot’s latest column: “Abandoned, dismissed and gaslighted: there is no excuse for the way ME sufferers have been betrayed.” And the subhead: “Changes in guidance and science seem to have little impact on millions of devastated lives. It’s a shocking social crisis playing out behind closed doors.”
I previously interviewed Monbiot about both of his 2024 columns, here and here. We spoke again about why he felt it was time to take up the topic again, how he became engaged with these issues in the first place, and related topics.