Trial By Error

Tag: Long Covid

  • French Dogs on the Trail; Impact of Long Covid on the US Job Market

    Can Dogs Smell Compounds Associated with Host Response in Long Covid? It can be unwise to pay attention to research published on a pre-print server before it has been through a peer-review process. Although passing through peer-review is itself no guarantee of quality, the process represents at least one layer of scrutiny. Nonetheless, some pre-prints…

  • Professor Lubet’s Take on The New Yorker’s Long Covid Article

    I wrote a post last month about the recent wave of Long Covid coverage—some of it excellent (The Atlantic) and some way over the edge in its assertions of psychogenic causation of symptoms (The American Spectator, Spiked). Then there was the seemingly sympathetic New Yorker article by a physician, with its more subtle form of…

  • BBC’s Problematic Coverage of New Long COVID Study

    Since the start of the coronavirus pandemic, suggesting an equivalence between COVID-19 and influenza has been a consistent approach among those seeking to downplay the current situation. So it’s not surprising to see something similar happen with comparisons between Long COVID and the delayed recovery some people experience after an acute bout of the flu.…

  • Medical Societies and new Komaroff-Lipkin Paper Highlight Long COVID and ME/CFS Links

    While some medical professionals argue that prolonged non-specific symptoms after acute COVID-19 are psychogenic and that “Long COVID” as a presumed clinical entity was concocted by a cabal of queers and feminists, others are getting on with efforts to disseminate more appropriate information to their colleagues. These efforts often involve drawing parallels with the pathophysiology…

  • Lowenstein’s Guardian Opinion; Eliot Smith’s Post-NICE View; Tack’s Take on Blinding Study

    The Guardian has published a lot of nonsense about Long COVID and has provided a platform for people who argue that robust manly thoughts are the path to recovery. Of course, it also published George Monbiot’s powerful columns on the topic, including his rebuttal of silly accusations that he was triggering more Long COVID cases…

  • Journal Editorial Calls for Caution in Exercise-Based Rehab Programs for Long COVID

    The Journal of Orthopaedic & Sports Physical Therapy recently published an editorial called  “Humility and Acceptance: Working Within Our Limits With Long COVID and Myalgic Encephalomyelitis/ Chronic Fatigue Syndrome.” The editorial emerged from a collaboration between rehabilitation specialists and patients, mostly from Canada. It confronts the conundrum of whether those experiencing what is called Long…

  • Prof Sharpe Fact-Checks Comment on Blog About How George Monbiot Is Causing Long COVID

    *April is crowdfunding month at Berkeley. I conduct this project as a senior fellow in public health and journalism at the university’s Center for Global Public Health. If you would like to support the project with a donation to Berkeley (tax-deductible for US taxpayers), here’s the place: https://crowdfund.berkeley.edu/project/25504 In a surprising development, Professor Michael Sharpe has…

  • Guardian Columnist George Monbiot Is Causing Long COVID, Says Professor Michael Sharpe

    *April is crowdfunding month at Berkeley. I conduct this project as a senior fellow in public health and journalism and the university’s Center for Global Public Health. If you would like to support the project, here’s the place: https://crowdfund.berkeley.edu/project/25504 In a remarkable display of—well, I’m not even sure what to call it–Professor Michael Sharpe has blamed…

  • Long COVID, the Long COVID Alliance, and ME International

    The advent of Long COVID has brought an enormous amount of attention to the illness or cluster of illnesses collectively known these days as ME/CFS. That attention is not always positive, as we saw recently with a Wall Street Journal opinion piece that dismissed both ME/CFS and Long COVID as forms of mental illness. The…

  • Biopsychosocial Brigades Seek Traction with Long Covid

    Last week, two major articles on long Covid appeared in well-known US publications—one in the Atlantic, the other in Vox. Like the New York Times Magazine article that ran in January, these stories addressed with nuance the complex and unclear relationship between the varieties of long Covid and the group of entities collectively known these…

  • National Institutes of Health Director Francis Collins on Plans for Long COVID Research

    The US government seems to be taking Long COVID seriously. In December, Congress allocated $1.15 billion over four years for research into the issue. This week, Francis Collins, director of the National Institutes of Health, announced the agency’s plans for that funding. (I’ve posted his announcement in full below.) In a post last month he…

  • New Biopsychosocial Paper on Long-Covid and Somatic Symptom Disorder

    Biopsychosocial Campaigners Target Long-Covid New papers from the biopsychosocial campaigners often provide opportunities to highlight unwarranted assertions, misleading use of data, and—in particular–associations interpreted as if they were causal relationships and not, well, associations. An article co-authored by Trudie Chalder, a professor of cognitive behavioural therapy at King’s Collge London, and published recently in the…