Tag: Long Covid

  • An Interview with Journalist Ed Yong

    In the early months of the coronavirus pandemic, journalist Ed Yong played a key role in alerting the public to the wave of people suffering prolonged symptoms after an acute bout of COVID-19—the phenomenon that has come to be called long Covid. Yong, who won a Pulitzer Prize for his coronavirus coverage in The Atlantic,…

  • Interview with Founders of The Sick Times, a New Online Publication

    Earlier this month, Betsy Ladyzhets and Miles Griffis, two smart, young American journalists, announced the launch The Sick Times, an online publication focused on long Covid and related post-acute infection syndromes, including ME/CFS. I have met both of them in the last couple of years and have been impressed with their work covering the pandemic,…

  • David Putrino on New Nature Study of Long Covid Immune Profiling

    I’ve posted two past interviews with David Putrino (here and here) about long Covid, ME/CFS, and related issues. Dr Putrino, a neuroscientist and physical therapist, is director of rehabilitation innovation at the Mt Sinai Health System in New York. Early in the pandemic, he began seeing patients with prolonged symptoms following acute bouts of Covid-19.…

  • An Interview with Yale’s Akiko Iwasaki

    Akiko Iwasaki, a professor of immunobiology at the Yale School of Medicine, is a leading investigator into long Covid and has recently been tapped to lead a new Center for Infection & Immunity. She was elected to the National Academy of Sciences in 2018, the National Academy of Medicine in 2019, to and the American…

  • More on the Perplexing Dutch Claim that Null Results for Objective Measures of Physical Activity Are Irrelevant to Fatigue

    I recently wrote about a Dutch study published a few months ago in the journal Clinical Infectious Diseases–“Efficacy of Cognitive-Behavioral Therapy Targeting Severe Fatigue Following Coronavirus Disease 2019: Results of a Randomized Controlled Trial.” The study, nick-named ReCOVer, found that unblinded trials relying on subjective outcomes will produce modestly positive reports in the group receiving…

  • Dutch Team Offers “Dog-Ate-My-Data” Excuses for Not Reporting Null Objective Findings

    Two months ago, Clinical Infectious Diseases (CID), a high-impact journal, published a study called “Efficacy of Cognitive-Behavioral Therapy Targeting Severe Fatigue Following Coronavirus Disease 2019: Results of a Randomized Controlled Trial.” The study, nicknamed ReCOVer amd conducted in the Netherlands, purported to provide the “first evidence for the positive effect of CBT in patients with…

  • My Twitter Thread about Slate’s Piece on Long Covid and Mental Illness

    Slate recently ran a piece by a young journalist and Stanford neuroscience graduate student, Grace Huckins, about purported links between long Covid and mental illness. I found it problematic. For one thing, in the same sentence it linked to both a story of mine in Codastory.com and one from The Atlantic‘s Ed Yong, and asserted…

  • Families with Long Covid Kids Fight Against Social Services

    For decades in the UK, parents of children with what was formerly called chronic fatigue syndrome have run the risk of being accused of making or keeping their kids sick and/or not pursuing proper treatment strategies. These cases have been based on the discredited belief that graded exercise therapy (GET) and cognitive behavior therapy (CBT)…

  • Dr Binita Kane on Kids with Long Covid

    Physician Binita Kane, a lung specialist in Manchester, England, and an Honorary Senior Lecturer at the University of Manchester’s School of Biological Sciences, has been outspoken on the subject of long Covid in children. Her passion about the issue has been fueled by her own daughter’s struggle with prolonged symptoms after an acute coronavirus infection.…

  • Dutch CBT Study for Long Covid Proves that Unblinded Studies with Subjective Outcomes Generate Positive Reports

    Three years ago, I wrote a blog post about a problematic Dutch study that had been funded by a major health agency and was being led by Hans Knoop, a professor of medical psychology at Amsterdam University Medical Centers. The study sought to test whether a course of cognitive behavior therapy starting months after a…

  • Some Recent Long Covid Articles from STAT/MuckRock, The Atlantic, and Nieman Reports

    *April is crowdfunding month at UC Berkeley. If you like my work, consider making a tax-deductible donation to Berkeley’s School of Public Health to support the Trial By Error project:  https://crowdfund.berkeley.edu/project/37217 STAT and MuckRock co-publish investigative report slamming NIH’s RECOVER initiatve Earlier this month, I wrote about the problem of exercise studies for long Covid that…

  • Professors Crawley, Chalder & Colleagues Investigate Pediatric Long Covid in Yet Another Study with a Stupid Acronym

    *April is crowdfunding month at UC Berkeley. If you like my work, consider making a tax-deductible donation to Berkeley’s School of Public Health to support the Trial By Error project:  https://crowdfund.berkeley.edu/project/37217 No human being should ever have to read as many papers as I have from Professor Esther Crawley, Bristol University’s methodologically and ethically challenged pediatrician,…