13 ms·

The NIH has poured $1B into long Covid research, with little to show for it

149 points by belltaco 4y ago

NotYourLawyer 4y ago
Some people, when confronted with a problem, think "I know, I'll use the federal government." Now they have two problems.
- majormajor 4y ago
  Of course, this attitude is one of the biggest reasons inefficiency goes unchecked. If the opposition option is simply to bang a drum of "do nothing at all and wash your hands of problems" then all the inefficient agency has to do to maintain the status quo is "look like a less bad option than doing nothing at all."
  - onos 4y ago
    The drug companies that produced the vaccines were real hero’s of the pandemic. I’m sure they benefitted from various forms of government support … perhaps we should focus government resources where it’s been impactful, such as to research grants like those that led to these results.
    - malfist 4y ago
      What do you think this was supposed to be?
    - bugglebeetle 4y ago
      > I’m sure they benefitted from various forms of government support …like paying for all the vaccines ahead of time, without any guarantee they worked, and the decades of government-sponsored research that made them possible in the first place? The drug companies were not in anyway “heroes,” but net beneficiaries of the enclosure of public research, which, combined with decades of bribing politicians to prevent state manufacturing capacity and enforce bogus IP restrictions, has resulted in wildly inequitable global vaccine access and countless, unnecessary deaths across the world.
      - megaman821 4y ago
        This is like saying LeBron James' mom is the real basketball star. She carried him in her womb and fed an clothed him throughout his childhood.
        bugglebeetle 4y ago
        This is a hilarious analogy because #1, I’m sure LeBron would say this publicly while drug companies pay millions of dollars to PR firms to lie about how much they profit from public research, #2 LeBron’s mom didn’t invent the techniques that made him a star player, while the publicly-funded research did this for MRNA vaccines: https://www.cbc.ca/radio/quirks/jun-12-missions-to-venus-learning-instant-replay-wrens-spectacular-duet-and-more-1.6061094/meet-the-canadian-scientist-who-paved-the-way-for-groundbreaking-mrna-covid-vaccines-1.6061099 https://www.cbc.ca/radio/quirks/jun-12-missions-to-venus-lea...
    - 908B64B197 4y ago
      > I’m sure they benefitted from various forms of government support The whole world can thank the Trump administration and Operation Warp Speed [0]. It provided billions of dollars and firm orders for any manufacturer who could get it's vaccine candidate on the market. All paid for by the American tax payer, of course. To fight a disease that most likely originated in a Chinese lab. Without it it would have been months of additional delay for R&D and production (see the vaccines not selected for Warp Speed or the CanSino program in Canada[1]) [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Warp_Speed https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Warp_Speed [1] https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/cansino-deal-canada-nrc-fifth-estate-1.6208241 https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/cansino-deal-canada-nrc-fifth...
  - NotYourLawyer 4y ago
    Obviously I’m not advocating for doing nothing. I’m saying the feds are gonna fuck up anything they possibly can, so maybe somebody else should be handling this.
    - soco 4y ago
      Maybe my comment is pointless because I'm not US american, but have you thought of, uh, fixing your feds? I mean, instead of either creating from scratch some ideal system or passing the hot potato to some privates which possibly have opposite interests?
      - bee_rider 4y ago
        If we start making incremental changes, there’s a chance our magic imaginary solutions might actually be implemented and get dirtied by the real world.
    - Bud 4y ago
      [dead]
    - majormajor 4y ago
      If you aren't advocating for doing nothing, but many parts of the federal government exist because nobody actually "handled things" in the "maybe someone else should be doing something" days prior to that part of the government getting created... then how do you actually propose making sure that "maybe someone should do something" gets turned into action?
- Alupis 4y ago
  I think you all know that I've always felt the nine most terrifying words in the English language are: I'm from the Government, and I'm here to help. A great many of the current problems on the [thing] were caused by government-imposed embargoes and inflation, not to mention government's long history of conflicting and haphazard policies. Our ultimate goal, of course, is economic independence for [thing], and through steps like the tax reform bill, we seek to return [thing]ing to real [thing]ers. But until we make that transition, the Government must act compassionately and responsibly. In order to see [thing]ers through these tough times, our administration has committed record amounts of assistance, spending more in this year alone than any previous administration spent during its entire tenure. No area of the budget, including defense, has grown as fast as our support for [thing]. - President Ronald Reagan[1], 1986 Sometimes it is appropriate to invest vast sums of public funds into unproven technologies and ideas. The pandemic seems to be a textbook example of where we can reasonably expect our federal government to act swiftly and decisively, for the greater good. That does not mean we should simply shrug our shoulders when, in hindsight, it becomes obvious a lot of misfeasance occurred during this unprecedented time. Billions of dollars were thrown around everywhere with very little oversight. It may be decades before we fully understand where all the money went, and most would likely be shocked to discover pandemic-fighting funds were used to prop up pet projects and ideological programs instead. Funds pitched to the public as destined to fight the pandemic were instead used for anything but - and collectively, red or blue, we are all suffering the consequences of those poor, often obfuscated decisions. We should scrutinize the relationships these farma companies had with the federal government before, during and after the pandemic. They mostly received a blank check for the government to "solve" the pandemic, and it's debatable if that is what really unfolded. [1] https://www.reaganlibrary.gov/archives/speech/presidents-news-conference-23 https://www.reaganlibrary.gov/archives/speech/presidents-new...
  - black_13 4y ago
    [dead]
  - __MatrixMan__ 4y ago
    > It may be decades before we fully understand where all the money went, and most would likely be shocked to discover pandemic-fighting funds were used to prop up pet projects and ideological programs instead. I, for one would, not be shocked. On the other hand, I would be shocked if we grew a collective spine and did something about it.
- dang 4y ago
  "Eschew flamebait. Avoid generic tangents." https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
  - NotYourLawyer 4y ago
    Was that flame bait? I thought it was common knowledge.
    - dang 4y ago
      Yes, it's generic ideological flamewar stuff. You can't have a substantive discussion where the only information is boo-vs.-yay about some politically divisive topic. It'll just lead to generic ideological battle, where people just repeat talking points at each other.
draw_down 4y ago
[dead]
jonas21 4y ago
> the few trials it is planning have already drawn a firestorm of criticism, especially one intervention that experts and advocates say may actually make some patients’ long Covid symptoms worse. > Instead, the NIH spent the majority of its money on broader, observational research that won’t directly bring relief to patients. Doesn't one kind of follow from the other? If the interventional studies all get hit with a "firestorm of criticism", then all you're going to be left with are the observational studies.
- giantg2 4y ago
  You'd need observational studies to make intelligent proposals on interventions. There's probably not a lot of appetite to be part of an intervention study if the observational results have not been published.
  - incone123 4y ago
    There probably is an appetite if someone had a promising treatment. I searched to see if the UK has any interventional studies but all I found was one that seemed to be about helping people to tailor their self-management. https://www.birmingham.ac.uk/research/quest/21st-century-healthcare/long-covid.aspx https://www.birmingham.ac.uk/research/quest/21st-century-hea... "Using their findings, the researchers will co-produce with patients a targeted intervention for Long COVID, tailored to individual patient need. Delivered remotely in the community, via the Atom5™ app, it will provide critical support and information to empower patients in self-managing Long COVID."
    - s1artibartfast 4y ago
      A promising treatment for what? IF you dont know what long covid looks like and how it acts, you can never claim to treat it.
      - incone123 4y ago
        Did you miss a few steps in this thread?
perardi 4y ago
I suggest you read the article—it may not be what you think from the headline. It’s not that NIH didn’t find a cause of “long COVID”…it’s not that they didn’t find any treatments for long COVID if such a thing truly exists…the NIH just did a whole lot of nothing. The National Institutes of Health hasn’t signed up a single patient to test any potential treatments — despite a clear mandate from Congress to study them. And the few trials it is planning have already drawn a firestorm of criticism, especially one intervention that experts and advocates say may actually make some patients’ long Covid symptoms worse. Instead, the NIH spent the majority of its money on broader, observational research that won’t directly bring relief to patients. But it still hasn’t published any findings from the patients who joined that study, almost two years after it started. A really spectacularly expensive whole lot of nothing.
- boringg 4y ago
  Sounds like they are a consulting group.
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
- Retric 4y ago
  Oddly enough that complaint doesn’t show the money was wasted, yet. Some studies really do take longer than 2 years and wait to publish data. As much as people complain about CEO’s focusing on the next quarter’s profits they still seem to want quick results. That said, most of the money was probably wasted.
- roenxi 4y ago
  Lets look at both sides of the coin here - this is research, it isn't meant to be quick. Throwing lots of money into research is about letting lots of people try to tackle a problem to find the 1 person in the ignorant, seething mass of average humans who happens to know how. It is expected that most money on research will be wasted funding people who, in hindsight, had no idea and were doing something that was in fore- and hind- sight obviously not going to work [0]. Although, that said, I do want to stand up for the anti-government argument here. The NIH isn't going to be as effective as a private market at identifying who is effective. Everyone is affected by COVID, it isn't like they need to force people with money to take an interest in what is happening here. Ironically, although the NIH is effectively throwing people at a problem here to play the odds, we'd probably find that a private organisation is much better at it by similar logic. I'd keep an eye on the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation myself, Gates seemed to be quite busy through COVID. Similar efforts by other wealthy people are also likely to be happening. [0] Vulcanization is a fun example. Both in fore- and hind- sight the experiment didn't work. Dude just happened to be clumsy.
fsckboy 4y ago
[flagged]
- majormajor 4y ago
  "The average takes 18 months" does not mean that "a new one should take 18 months" even if the only thing determining that duration was purely random which isn't the case with something like pandemics through history (where things like travel and lifestyle, etc, play big roles as well as just the unique nature of different diseases).
  - fsckboy 4y ago
    the average takes 18 months does absolutely mean you look deeper if you come out above average on the coattails of unprecedented new medical and epidemiological technologies and practices
    - majormajor 4y ago
      I mean, we're in a thread discussing a bunch of money allocated to look deeper into one aspect, and there have been continual studies throughout the pandemic, so I'm not sure who opposes the point of looking deeper. But I think that you're actually claiming you know the answer: "How much did we spend on covid with a 30 month achievement to show for it?" You seem pretty certain with that phrasing that the actions taken were either ineffective at best or counterproductive at worst. Without any broader discussion other than "here is a stat on past pandemics" and "here is a stat on current spending." That's not looking deeper. You complain about a different commenter pointing that there have been much worse ones as well. But you aren't actually doing much different other than saying "sometimes they don't last as long, what did we do wrong???" There's been a lot of discussion and study of transmission rate vs fatality rate vs incubation period etc that covers how this particular disease is different than many of the ones in that "average", and how that should change your expectations, go look it up. This is directly relevant to your "we actually were told that what was recommended was expected to shorten this black swan pandemic" thing - the data that early recommendations on was preliminary, and as more results came in, policies changed. March 2020 was different than September 2020 was different than March 2021 was different than October 2021 was different than post-spring-2022... Cause otherwise your "it could've been better" is backed up with not much more than anyone else's "it could've been worse."
monero-xmr 4y ago
This is pretty standard? A division I worked for years ago received $20 million per year from the DoD for a “pilot” that never even launched. We got paid for 5 years before the plug was pulled. The government is an endless fountain of cash.
none_to_remain 4y ago
The government extracted money from the broad populace and delivered it to PMC bureaucrats. Everything looks normal here
- nickff 4y ago
  What is "PMC"? I am only aware of that three-letter-acronym (TLA) being used for "private military contractors", and didn't see any definition of it in the parent comment. On a broader level, could we all just define our acronyms the first time we use them in a thread? Acronyms save very little time, and add a lot of confusion. edit: I thought about this more, and am now guessing you mean 'private management consultants"; is this correct?
  - Analemma_ 4y ago
    Professional-managerial class. Originally it was a term in Marxist and paleoconservative analysis to refer to an emerging class of workers who do not own the means of production (and hence are not "capital" per se) but have ended up de facto doing all the management of capital because of the distributed power and ownership structures endemic to modern society (and so are not quite the proletariat either). Colloquially (as the parent is using it) it is used derisively to refer to busybody white-collar workers who produce nothing of value and seem to exist only to further bureaucratic obstruction.
  - dsfyu404ed 4y ago
    "professional managerial class" which is basically interchangeable with "petite bourgeois" in a lot of contexts.
  - deleted 4y ago
    [deleted]
  - weeblewobble 4y ago
    Professional managerial class. Generally used derisively to refer to people with high paid jobs who serve the interests of the wealthy.
majormajor 4y ago
The graph labels 767M for "clinical research studies" and then says many studies haven't started or are in early stages, but... does that mean the money is already spent and those studies will require other money? or that the money is allocated to the only formally announced study but hasn't been spent yet? or that the money is allocated to 5 mostly-yet-unknown ones? The latter seems like the best case but one wonders why these 5 observational studies would need that much, and if there's any mechanism for pulling some of that funding back? EDIT: there's a bit "The agency said $811 million has been legally committed to various activities, and the rest is earmarked to support future research activities." so it seems like the last part, so: hideous mismanagement to promise to spend that money in fixed ways regardless of results...
danieltoomey 4y ago
[flagged]
- malfist 4y ago
  Why would a grant from the government for treating a disease require origin research?
anileated 4y ago
On this topic, an interesting paper about possible causes and treatments of long COVID has been published recently. Summary by an author: https://mastodon.nl/@vickyvdtogt/110196805189572082 https://mastodon.nl/@vickyvdtogt/110196805189572082
- AlexandrB 4y ago
  This seems really promising but a little too good to be true. Hope she's right.
  - anileated 4y ago
    Anecdotally, my latest COVID (acute only, I didn’t get the director’s cut) manifested itself as two days’ worth of strong pain in what seemed to be my legs’ muscle tissue, which I believe is connected to high lactate (why limbs hurt after heavy exercise). This symptom never accompanied a flu IIRC, though I recall it happening in the past after alcohol intake.
nerdchum 4y ago
[flagged]
tinus_hn 4y ago
Have they at least decided what long COVID is? That basic question already is so politicized it’s difficult the research.
- ratg13 4y ago
  I feel like I'm in this group, and although the jury is still out, my personal anecdata makes me think it's one of two things. (1) The virus is possibly hiding in the body creating these little reservoirs that allow it to persist. (2) Some people are likely just more susceptible to damage caused by the inflammation or whatever in the system and just take longer to recover. I have a feeling that it's likely a combination of both of these.
  - albatross13 4y ago
    Are you up to date on your boosters?
- minsight 4y ago
  They've found a great deal about what long Covid is. See: https://www.nature.com/articles/s41579-022-00846-2 https://www.nature.com/articles/s41579-022-00846-2
  - minsight 4y ago
    (Especially the "Major Findings" section)
  - tinus_hn 4y ago
    In the heading of this article Long COVID is the ‘often debilitating disease’. But then later on you have it if you have a slight headache for 2 months.
    - minsight 4y ago
      So it's not always debilitating. But it can be this way and still be often debilitating.
Workaccount2 4y ago
As someone with long covid (which is probably just nerve damage in my case, but i digress) I have been following long covid and been in the community from day 1 (sometime around april 2020 is when the first signs starting cropping up). Anyway, a few notes bullet points: - There are a few different types of LC. The array of symptoms is enormous, and people usually have a random(ish) spattering from a list of 100 things. - People with LC usually have normal everything. Blood work, EKG, spirometery, sleep study, whatever. Everything comes back fine. - The overlap between anxiety symptoms and LC symptoms can be pretty high, to the point where the venn diagram becomes just a circle. It's definitely not anxiety, but at least one hypothesis is that your body kind of gets stuck in anxiety mode, even though mentally you aren't anxious. - There are a lot of mentally unwell people in the LC crowd. Obviously having a terrible chronic condition like this and people not believing you will do you in. But their is a subset of people who do not have LC, but have convinced themselves that they do have it, and will not listen to anyone, especially doctors. - There is tons of distrust in the medical community. People really despise the whole system, and it leads to a lot of venomous encounters where people go to doctors just to yell at them. This isn't as fair as it may seem, since at the end of the day, people are upset doctors aren't curing them, but the truth is that there is no cure. The doctors who normally see patients aren't research doctors. They go by the book. All this makes for a pretty bad experience on the medical side. People who by all objective metrics are fine, but have basically dropped out of life from an invisible chronic illness, who are angry and a bit unhinged, and the medical books have zero information except "psychological".
- Animats 4y ago
  - People with LC usually have normal everything. Blood work, EKG, spirometery, sleep study, whatever. Everything comes back fine. Not everything.[1][2][3] Brain damage is showing up in MRI scans. [1] https://www.nature.com/articles/s41579-022-00846-2 https://www.nature.com/articles/s41579-022-00846-2 [2] https://neurosciencenews.com/post-covid-brain-21904/ https://neurosciencenews.com/post-covid-brain-21904/ [3] https://nnn.ng/study-finds-altered-brain-function-in-long-covid-patients-with-loss-of-smell/ https://nnn.ng/study-finds-altered-brain-function-in-long-co...
  - 4y ago
Animats 4y ago
Studying long COVID too much interferes with the narrative that the problem is over. Each round of COVID does some organ damage, and that's cumulative.[1][2] Immunity after infection or vaccination is temporary; it lasts 3-18 months. Getting COVID more than once is quite possible.[3] Mostly in people with other previous damage at this point. We don't have enough years on this yet to see the long-term pattern. [1] https://www.harvardmagazine.com/2022/12/covid-reinfection https://www.harvardmagazine.com/2022/12/covid-reinfection [2] https://medicine.wustl.edu/news/repeat-covid-19-infections-increase-risk-of-organ-failure-death/ https://medicine.wustl.edu/news/repeat-covid-19-infections-i... [3] https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2021.06.10.21256915v1.full https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2021.06.10.21256915v...
- AYBABTME 4y ago
  What about other regular illnesses, don't they also leave some sort of impact on your body at the end of the day? Occam's razor would suggest that COVID is just like other illnesses, for the most part, except for being an outlier in some areas (virality, severe symptoms).
  - deleted 4y ago
    [deleted]
  - maxbond 4y ago
    I think you're thinking of the null hypothesis. Occam's razor would prescribe determining the number of assumptions made by each explanation and preferring the one with fewer. You're introducing a new assumption here, and I don't see how it helps us better understand the evidence. "COVID is more severe than typical viral infections, and so leads to unusual outcomes" is a pretty simple explanation, well supported by the observations you yourself made that it is more contagious and has more severe symptoms than many others.
    - s1artibartfast 4y ago
      I think you are both saying the same or compatible ideas.
didgetmaster 4y ago
A billion here and a billion there. Before long you are talking about real money. Rarely are government budgets based in reality. Someone talks Congress into giving them X dollars to solve problem Y because many people think Y is a problem and want it solved. Instead they spend 3X dollars and only a tiny portion of it goes towards solving Y while the bulk of it goes into Z instead. Sometimes Z was the point all along and they were purposely deceiving us. Sometimes Z takes over because the people running the program decide that Z just became more important (to them at least).
thisarticle 4y ago
[flagged]
- xenospn 4y ago
  Yes, I remember back in early 2019 when they announced the virus is all about you. How are you doing?
  - thisarticle 4y ago
    Doing great now, thanks for asking.
- RhodesianHunter 4y ago
  Millions died from it globally. Your anecdote is not only irrelevant but also comes off as incredibly self-centered.
  - thisarticle 4y ago
    Billions didn’t. We don’t lock down for the flu.
    - RhodesianHunter 4y ago
      1. The flu doesn't kill as many as COVID did 2. The flu is a known, covid was a near complete unknown. It's easy in hindsight to say that we shouldn't have locked down, but if the thing had mutated and wiped out half the planet, you'd be singing a different tune.
      - thisarticle 4y ago
        I’d probably be dead.
- ljf 4y ago
  The lockdowns weren't there to stop you spending a day in bed. They were broadly to protect those who had the highest risk of getting seriously ill from covid. And actually, they didn't really care about those people, it was just that if those people were blocking up hospital beds, 'the rest of us' were going to start dying from the normal totally treatable things that happen to us. It was really about limiting the wider impacts, not helping someone in their 80s live a other 5 years (though I totally believe someone in their 80s or at any increased risk deserves that respect and support from the rest of society, and deserves people making small adjustments to protect them)
albatross13 4y ago
[flagged]
uptownfunk 4y ago
[flagged]
aftercoffeeplz 4y ago
Doesn't this mean long COVID isn't a thing they could test for reliably given the low rates and the inability to give people COVID for the test? Observational studies on people already showing symptoms is about the best they could have done.
thenerdhead 4y ago
This activism about this problem is ridiculous and is inside all of the long covid communities. I recently recovered from my second long haul and the people in those communities think they know better than world class clinical researchers tackling novel chronic illnesses. They continue to think that money is being wasted from this "limited" pool on things like exercise/pacing and CBT trials which are known tools to help certain long haulers but especially "harmful" to ME/CFS where there is already limited research on controversial PACE trials. They believe that we should just be throwing all that money towards trials of unknown medications that haven't been tested instead. Many promising ones have already seen mixed results. Also this tends to be a huge misunderstanding by armchair medical experts/"patient-led researchers" of what a DCC (data coordination center) is and how that would actually help with these trials long term. Look, I get it. My last 2 years have been hell on earth. I've blogged countless times on this and I wanted immediate relief too. But the only things that helped me were the "controversial" things(paced exercise, CBT, etc) outlined here.
- sp527 4y ago
  Could you please elaborate on what you did to recover?
  - thenerdhead 4y ago
    Here's my first post: https://jondouglas.dev/long-covid/ https://jondouglas.dev/long-covid/ And my recent one: https://www.reddit.com/r/LongHaulersRecovery/comments/12iv4p0/done_pushing_the_boulder/ https://www.reddit.com/r/LongHaulersRecovery/comments/12iv4p...
    - upsidesinclude 4y ago
      It is just strange to read this list as if it isn't a normal part of life. Your first five-seven are just standard day to day living and if you lived that way, it seems to me you would never experience "long covid". Note: Marathoning and other extreme excercise activities are not normal, regardless of how large the communties may be.
jdlyga 4y ago
I wonder how related to "long lyme disease" this is. I listened to a podcast, Patient Zero, about how a very small percentage of people who get lyme disease have symptoms for years.
sdze 4y ago
Long Covid is mostly a mental disorder. Just like ME/CFS.
- giraffe_lady 4y ago
  And? So what if it is? That makes it not real in some way, or not worth consideration or study? It's affecting a lot of people, their suffering is real. The cause is significant to understanding and relieving the effects. If we determine 100% that it's mental we still don't get to shrug and say alright then that's that good luck everybody.
  - sdze 4y ago
    Obviously, this "disease" joins all the other psychosomatic ones. So nothing new.
hayst4ck 4y ago
The author of this article is selling outrage and we are all buying. They are getting views and benefiting from this anti-government outrage. The author repeatedly appealed to long-covid patient authority like their medical opinion has any weight at all. This fear = views = status = profit conflict of interest is the problem in current America and why it feels like no one can understand anything and trust in our institutions is at a low. “The NIH RECOVER study is pointless,” said Jenn Cole, a long Covid patient based in Brooklyn, N.Y., who wanted to enroll in the study but found the process inaccessible. The research is “a waste of time and resources,” she said, and fails to use patients’ tax dollars for their benefit. “We didn’t need to recreate” existing studies that already answered these questions, said Cole, the long Covid patient. This isn't journalism. This is garbage. This article produces anger, not understanding.
- anigbrowl 4y ago
  There was a great deal more to the article than you're suggesting, and I didn't read it as 'anti government outrage.' You can support government interventions and still think the NIH is doing a mediocre job on this project. There's a lot of comparative and contextual information in the article that you seem to have ignored.
  - hayst4ck 4y ago
    We spend 4 billion a year on Alzheimers, and what do we have to show for it? We spent at least 500 billion on AIDS and we have PrEP after 40 years of research. The author's core assertion is that 1 billion should buy a potential treatment. The entire article is centered around this core premise. That is a flawed idea at it's core and shows that the author is writing on a subject beyond their pay grade. Worse, it's reinforcing emotions that other people who are not experts under the guise of being well researched. This article increases net ignorance. > Instead, the NIH spent the majority of its money on broader, observational research that won’t directly bring relief to patients. "Instead of spending money to solve the problem, they are first trying to understand the problem." Is that not absolutely absurd to you? Am I insane for reading the author's statement that way? Does the rest of the article really not follow the same conceit? The author makes the assertion that if there is no treatment there there is nothing to show. I would argue that to prove "nothing to show" you would have to argue that understanding of long COVID has not been increased. I do not think the article addressed what 1 billion got us, only what 1 billion did not get us.
tnel77 4y ago
I won’t say enough to identify myself, but the company I work for is working hand-in-hand with researchers as a part of this funding. I can’t speak for the entire sum of money, but some of it is definitely being put to good use and is making an impact via the research being conducted.
- myko 4y ago
  Please, don't let the flamebait get to you, I'm sure most of the folks are doing good work. It's sickening how twisted society has become over this.
glofish 4y ago
[flagged]
nextworddev 4y ago
And to think some people thought $100m into GPT3 training was a waste..

149 points by belltaco 4y ago

Some people, when confronted with a problem, think "I know, I'll use the federal government." Now they have two problems.

majormajor 4y ago
Of course, this attitude is one of the biggest reasons inefficiency goes unchecked. If the opposition option is simply to bang a drum of "do nothing at all and wash your hands of problems" then all the inefficient agency has to do to maintain the status quo is "look like a less bad option than doing nothing at all."
- onos 4y ago
  The drug companies that produced the vaccines were real hero’s of the pandemic. I’m sure they benefitted from various forms of government support … perhaps we should focus government resources where it’s been impactful, such as to research grants like those that led to these results.
  - malfist 4y ago
    What do you think this was supposed to be?
  - bugglebeetle 4y ago
    > I’m sure they benefitted from various forms of government support …like paying for all the vaccines ahead of time, without any guarantee they worked, and the decades of government-sponsored research that made them possible in the first place? The drug companies were not in anyway “heroes,” but net beneficiaries of the enclosure of public research, which, combined with decades of bribing politicians to prevent state manufacturing capacity and enforce bogus IP restrictions, has resulted in wildly inequitable global vaccine access and countless, unnecessary deaths across the world.
    - megaman821 4y ago
      This is like saying LeBron James' mom is the real basketball star. She carried him in her womb and fed an clothed him throughout his childhood.
      - bugglebeetle 4y ago
        This is a hilarious analogy because #1, I’m sure LeBron would say this publicly while drug companies pay millions of dollars to PR firms to lie about how much they profit from public research, #2 LeBron’s mom didn’t invent the techniques that made him a star player, while the publicly-funded research did this for MRNA vaccines: https://www.cbc.ca/radio/quirks/jun-12-missions-to-venus-learning-instant-replay-wrens-spectacular-duet-and-more-1.6061094/meet-the-canadian-scientist-who-paved-the-way-for-groundbreaking-mrna-covid-vaccines-1.6061099 https://www.cbc.ca/radio/quirks/jun-12-missions-to-venus-lea...
  - 908B64B197 4y ago
    > I’m sure they benefitted from various forms of government support The whole world can thank the Trump administration and Operation Warp Speed [0]. It provided billions of dollars and firm orders for any manufacturer who could get it's vaccine candidate on the market. All paid for by the American tax payer, of course. To fight a disease that most likely originated in a Chinese lab. Without it it would have been months of additional delay for R&D and production (see the vaccines not selected for Warp Speed or the CanSino program in Canada[1]) [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Warp_Speed https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Warp_Speed [1] https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/cansino-deal-canada-nrc-fifth-estate-1.6208241 https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/cansino-deal-canada-nrc-fifth...
- NotYourLawyer 4y ago
  Obviously I’m not advocating for doing nothing. I’m saying the feds are gonna fuck up anything they possibly can, so maybe somebody else should be handling this.
  - soco 4y ago
    Maybe my comment is pointless because I'm not US american, but have you thought of, uh, fixing your feds? I mean, instead of either creating from scratch some ideal system or passing the hot potato to some privates which possibly have opposite interests?
    - bee_rider 4y ago
      If we start making incremental changes, there’s a chance our magic imaginary solutions might actually be implemented and get dirtied by the real world.
  - Bud 4y ago
    [dead]
  - majormajor 4y ago
    If you aren't advocating for doing nothing, but many parts of the federal government exist because nobody actually "handled things" in the "maybe someone else should be doing something" days prior to that part of the government getting created... then how do you actually propose making sure that "maybe someone should do something" gets turned into action?
Alupis 4y ago
I think you all know that I've always felt the nine most terrifying words in the English language are: I'm from the Government, and I'm here to help. A great many of the current problems on the [thing] were caused by government-imposed embargoes and inflation, not to mention government's long history of conflicting and haphazard policies. Our ultimate goal, of course, is economic independence for [thing], and through steps like the tax reform bill, we seek to return [thing]ing to real [thing]ers. But until we make that transition, the Government must act compassionately and responsibly. In order to see [thing]ers through these tough times, our administration has committed record amounts of assistance, spending more in this year alone than any previous administration spent during its entire tenure. No area of the budget, including defense, has grown as fast as our support for [thing]. - President Ronald Reagan[1], 1986 Sometimes it is appropriate to invest vast sums of public funds into unproven technologies and ideas. The pandemic seems to be a textbook example of where we can reasonably expect our federal government to act swiftly and decisively, for the greater good. That does not mean we should simply shrug our shoulders when, in hindsight, it becomes obvious a lot of misfeasance occurred during this unprecedented time. Billions of dollars were thrown around everywhere with very little oversight. It may be decades before we fully understand where all the money went, and most would likely be shocked to discover pandemic-fighting funds were used to prop up pet projects and ideological programs instead. Funds pitched to the public as destined to fight the pandemic were instead used for anything but - and collectively, red or blue, we are all suffering the consequences of those poor, often obfuscated decisions. We should scrutinize the relationships these farma companies had with the federal government before, during and after the pandemic. They mostly received a blank check for the government to "solve" the pandemic, and it's debatable if that is what really unfolded. [1] https://www.reaganlibrary.gov/archives/speech/presidents-news-conference-23 https://www.reaganlibrary.gov/archives/speech/presidents-new...
- black_13 4y ago
  [dead]
- __MatrixMan__ 4y ago
  > It may be decades before we fully understand where all the money went, and most would likely be shocked to discover pandemic-fighting funds were used to prop up pet projects and ideological programs instead. I, for one would, not be shocked. On the other hand, I would be shocked if we grew a collective spine and did something about it.
dang 4y ago
"Eschew flamebait. Avoid generic tangents." https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
- NotYourLawyer 4y ago
  Was that flame bait? I thought it was common knowledge.
  - dang 4y ago
    Yes, it's generic ideological flamewar stuff. You can't have a substantive discussion where the only information is boo-vs.-yay about some politically divisive topic. It'll just lead to generic ideological battle, where people just repeat talking points at each other.

draw_down 4y ago

[dead]

jonas21 4y ago

> the few trials it is planning have already drawn a firestorm of criticism, especially one intervention that experts and advocates say may actually make some patients’ long Covid symptoms worse. > Instead, the NIH spent the majority of its money on broader, observational research that won’t directly bring relief to patients. Doesn't one kind of follow from the other? If the interventional studies all get hit with a "firestorm of criticism", then all you're going to be left with are the observational studies.

giantg2 4y ago
You'd need observational studies to make intelligent proposals on interventions. There's probably not a lot of appetite to be part of an intervention study if the observational results have not been published.
- incone123 4y ago
  There probably is an appetite if someone had a promising treatment. I searched to see if the UK has any interventional studies but all I found was one that seemed to be about helping people to tailor their self-management. https://www.birmingham.ac.uk/research/quest/21st-century-healthcare/long-covid.aspx https://www.birmingham.ac.uk/research/quest/21st-century-hea... "Using their findings, the researchers will co-produce with patients a targeted intervention for Long COVID, tailored to individual patient need. Delivered remotely in the community, via the Atom5™ app, it will provide critical support and information to empower patients in self-managing Long COVID."
  - s1artibartfast 4y ago
    A promising treatment for what? IF you dont know what long covid looks like and how it acts, you can never claim to treat it.
    - incone123 4y ago
      Did you miss a few steps in this thread?

perardi 4y ago

I suggest you read the article—it may not be what you think from the headline. It’s not that NIH didn’t find a cause of “long COVID”…it’s not that they didn’t find any treatments for long COVID if such a thing truly exists…the NIH just did a whole lot of nothing. The National Institutes of Health hasn’t signed up a single patient to test any potential treatments — despite a clear mandate from Congress to study them. And the few trials it is planning have already drawn a firestorm of criticism, especially one intervention that experts and advocates say may actually make some patients’ long Covid symptoms worse. Instead, the NIH spent the majority of its money on broader, observational research that won’t directly bring relief to patients. But it still hasn’t published any findings from the patients who joined that study, almost two years after it started. A really spectacularly expensive whole lot of nothing.

boringg 4y ago
Sounds like they are a consulting group.
deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
Retric 4y ago
Oddly enough that complaint doesn’t show the money was wasted, yet. Some studies really do take longer than 2 years and wait to publish data. As much as people complain about CEO’s focusing on the next quarter’s profits they still seem to want quick results. That said, most of the money was probably wasted.
roenxi 4y ago
Lets look at both sides of the coin here - this is research, it isn't meant to be quick. Throwing lots of money into research is about letting lots of people try to tackle a problem to find the 1 person in the ignorant, seething mass of average humans who happens to know how. It is expected that most money on research will be wasted funding people who, in hindsight, had no idea and were doing something that was in fore- and hind- sight obviously not going to work [0]. Although, that said, I do want to stand up for the anti-government argument here. The NIH isn't going to be as effective as a private market at identifying who is effective. Everyone is affected by COVID, it isn't like they need to force people with money to take an interest in what is happening here. Ironically, although the NIH is effectively throwing people at a problem here to play the odds, we'd probably find that a private organisation is much better at it by similar logic. I'd keep an eye on the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation myself, Gates seemed to be quite busy through COVID. Similar efforts by other wealthy people are also likely to be happening. [0] Vulcanization is a fun example. Both in fore- and hind- sight the experiment didn't work. Dude just happened to be clumsy.

fsckboy 4y ago

[flagged]

majormajor 4y ago
"The average takes 18 months" does not mean that "a new one should take 18 months" even if the only thing determining that duration was purely random which isn't the case with something like pandemics through history (where things like travel and lifestyle, etc, play big roles as well as just the unique nature of different diseases).
- fsckboy 4y ago
  the average takes 18 months does absolutely mean you look deeper if you come out above average on the coattails of unprecedented new medical and epidemiological technologies and practices
  - majormajor 4y ago
    I mean, we're in a thread discussing a bunch of money allocated to look deeper into one aspect, and there have been continual studies throughout the pandemic, so I'm not sure who opposes the point of looking deeper. But I think that you're actually claiming you know the answer: "How much did we spend on covid with a 30 month achievement to show for it?" You seem pretty certain with that phrasing that the actions taken were either ineffective at best or counterproductive at worst. Without any broader discussion other than "here is a stat on past pandemics" and "here is a stat on current spending." That's not looking deeper. You complain about a different commenter pointing that there have been much worse ones as well. But you aren't actually doing much different other than saying "sometimes they don't last as long, what did we do wrong???" There's been a lot of discussion and study of transmission rate vs fatality rate vs incubation period etc that covers how this particular disease is different than many of the ones in that "average", and how that should change your expectations, go look it up. This is directly relevant to your "we actually were told that what was recommended was expected to shorten this black swan pandemic" thing - the data that early recommendations on was preliminary, and as more results came in, policies changed. March 2020 was different than September 2020 was different than March 2021 was different than October 2021 was different than post-spring-2022... Cause otherwise your "it could've been better" is backed up with not much more than anyone else's "it could've been worse."

monero-xmr 4y ago

This is pretty standard? A division I worked for years ago received $20 million per year from the DoD for a “pilot” that never even launched. We got paid for 5 years before the plug was pulled. The government is an endless fountain of cash.

none_to_remain 4y ago

The government extracted money from the broad populace and delivered it to PMC bureaucrats. Everything looks normal here

nickff 4y ago
What is "PMC"? I am only aware of that three-letter-acronym (TLA) being used for "private military contractors", and didn't see any definition of it in the parent comment. On a broader level, could we all just define our acronyms the first time we use them in a thread? Acronyms save very little time, and add a lot of confusion. edit: I thought about this more, and am now guessing you mean 'private management consultants"; is this correct?
- Analemma_ 4y ago
  Professional-managerial class. Originally it was a term in Marxist and paleoconservative analysis to refer to an emerging class of workers who do not own the means of production (and hence are not "capital" per se) but have ended up de facto doing all the management of capital because of the distributed power and ownership structures endemic to modern society (and so are not quite the proletariat either). Colloquially (as the parent is using it) it is used derisively to refer to busybody white-collar workers who produce nothing of value and seem to exist only to further bureaucratic obstruction.
- dsfyu404ed 4y ago
  "professional managerial class" which is basically interchangeable with "petite bourgeois" in a lot of contexts.
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
- weeblewobble 4y ago
  Professional managerial class. Generally used derisively to refer to people with high paid jobs who serve the interests of the wealthy.

majormajor 4y ago

The graph labels 767M for "clinical research studies" and then says many studies haven't started or are in early stages, but... does that mean the money is already spent and those studies will require other money? or that the money is allocated to the only formally announced study but hasn't been spent yet? or that the money is allocated to 5 mostly-yet-unknown ones? The latter seems like the best case but one wonders why these 5 observational studies would need that much, and if there's any mechanism for pulling some of that funding back? EDIT: there's a bit "The agency said $811 million has been legally committed to various activities, and the rest is earmarked to support future research activities." so it seems like the last part, so: hideous mismanagement to promise to spend that money in fixed ways regardless of results...

danieltoomey 4y ago

[flagged]

malfist 4y ago
Why would a grant from the government for treating a disease require origin research?

anileated 4y ago

On this topic, an interesting paper about possible causes and treatments of long COVID has been published recently. Summary by an author: https://mastodon.nl/@vickyvdtogt/110196805189572082 https://mastodon.nl/@vickyvdtogt/110196805189572082

AlexandrB 4y ago
This seems really promising but a little too good to be true. Hope she's right.
- anileated 4y ago
  Anecdotally, my latest COVID (acute only, I didn’t get the director’s cut) manifested itself as two days’ worth of strong pain in what seemed to be my legs’ muscle tissue, which I believe is connected to high lactate (why limbs hurt after heavy exercise). This symptom never accompanied a flu IIRC, though I recall it happening in the past after alcohol intake.

nerdchum 4y ago

[flagged]

tinus_hn 4y ago

Have they at least decided what long COVID is? That basic question already is so politicized it’s difficult the research.

ratg13 4y ago
I feel like I'm in this group, and although the jury is still out, my personal anecdata makes me think it's one of two things. (1) The virus is possibly hiding in the body creating these little reservoirs that allow it to persist. (2) Some people are likely just more susceptible to damage caused by the inflammation or whatever in the system and just take longer to recover. I have a feeling that it's likely a combination of both of these.
- albatross13 4y ago
  Are you up to date on your boosters?
minsight 4y ago
They've found a great deal about what long Covid is. See: https://www.nature.com/articles/s41579-022-00846-2 https://www.nature.com/articles/s41579-022-00846-2
- minsight 4y ago
  (Especially the "Major Findings" section)
- tinus_hn 4y ago
  In the heading of this article Long COVID is the ‘often debilitating disease’. But then later on you have it if you have a slight headache for 2 months.
  - minsight 4y ago
    So it's not always debilitating. But it can be this way and still be often debilitating.

Workaccount2 4y ago

As someone with long covid (which is probably just nerve damage in my case, but i digress) I have been following long covid and been in the community from day 1 (sometime around april 2020 is when the first signs starting cropping up). Anyway, a few notes bullet points: - There are a few different types of LC. The array of symptoms is enormous, and people usually have a random(ish) spattering from a list of 100 things. - People with LC usually have normal everything. Blood work, EKG, spirometery, sleep study, whatever. Everything comes back fine. - The overlap between anxiety symptoms and LC symptoms can be pretty high, to the point where the venn diagram becomes just a circle. It's definitely not anxiety, but at least one hypothesis is that your body kind of gets stuck in anxiety mode, even though mentally you aren't anxious. - There are a lot of mentally unwell people in the LC crowd. Obviously having a terrible chronic condition like this and people not believing you will do you in. But their is a subset of people who do not have LC, but have convinced themselves that they do have it, and will not listen to anyone, especially doctors. - There is tons of distrust in the medical community. People really despise the whole system, and it leads to a lot of venomous encounters where people go to doctors just to yell at them. This isn't as fair as it may seem, since at the end of the day, people are upset doctors aren't curing them, but the truth is that there is no cure. The doctors who normally see patients aren't research doctors. They go by the book. All this makes for a pretty bad experience on the medical side. People who by all objective metrics are fine, but have basically dropped out of life from an invisible chronic illness, who are angry and a bit unhinged, and the medical books have zero information except "psychological".

Animats 4y ago
- People with LC usually have normal everything. Blood work, EKG, spirometery, sleep study, whatever. Everything comes back fine. Not everything.[1][2][3] Brain damage is showing up in MRI scans. [1] https://www.nature.com/articles/s41579-022-00846-2 https://www.nature.com/articles/s41579-022-00846-2 [2] https://neurosciencenews.com/post-covid-brain-21904/ https://neurosciencenews.com/post-covid-brain-21904/ [3] https://nnn.ng/study-finds-altered-brain-function-in-long-covid-patients-with-loss-of-smell/ https://nnn.ng/study-finds-altered-brain-function-in-long-co...
- 4y ago

Animats 4y ago

Studying long COVID too much interferes with the narrative that the problem is over. Each round of COVID does some organ damage, and that's cumulative.[1][2] Immunity after infection or vaccination is temporary; it lasts 3-18 months. Getting COVID more than once is quite possible.[3] Mostly in people with other previous damage at this point. We don't have enough years on this yet to see the long-term pattern. [1] https://www.harvardmagazine.com/2022/12/covid-reinfection https://www.harvardmagazine.com/2022/12/covid-reinfection [2] https://medicine.wustl.edu/news/repeat-covid-19-infections-increase-risk-of-organ-failure-death/ https://medicine.wustl.edu/news/repeat-covid-19-infections-i... [3] https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2021.06.10.21256915v1.full https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2021.06.10.21256915v...

AYBABTME 4y ago
What about other regular illnesses, don't they also leave some sort of impact on your body at the end of the day? Occam's razor would suggest that COVID is just like other illnesses, for the most part, except for being an outlier in some areas (virality, severe symptoms).
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
- maxbond 4y ago
  I think you're thinking of the null hypothesis. Occam's razor would prescribe determining the number of assumptions made by each explanation and preferring the one with fewer. You're introducing a new assumption here, and I don't see how it helps us better understand the evidence. "COVID is more severe than typical viral infections, and so leads to unusual outcomes" is a pretty simple explanation, well supported by the observations you yourself made that it is more contagious and has more severe symptoms than many others.
  - s1artibartfast 4y ago
    I think you are both saying the same or compatible ideas.

didgetmaster 4y ago

A billion here and a billion there. Before long you are talking about real money. Rarely are government budgets based in reality. Someone talks Congress into giving them X dollars to solve problem Y because many people think Y is a problem and want it solved. Instead they spend 3X dollars and only a tiny portion of it goes towards solving Y while the bulk of it goes into Z instead. Sometimes Z was the point all along and they were purposely deceiving us. Sometimes Z takes over because the people running the program decide that Z just became more important (to them at least).

thisarticle 4y ago

[flagged]

xenospn 4y ago
Yes, I remember back in early 2019 when they announced the virus is all about you. How are you doing?
- thisarticle 4y ago
  Doing great now, thanks for asking.
RhodesianHunter 4y ago
Millions died from it globally. Your anecdote is not only irrelevant but also comes off as incredibly self-centered.
- thisarticle 4y ago
  Billions didn’t. We don’t lock down for the flu.
  - RhodesianHunter 4y ago
    1. The flu doesn't kill as many as COVID did 2. The flu is a known, covid was a near complete unknown. It's easy in hindsight to say that we shouldn't have locked down, but if the thing had mutated and wiped out half the planet, you'd be singing a different tune.
    - thisarticle 4y ago
      I’d probably be dead.
ljf 4y ago
The lockdowns weren't there to stop you spending a day in bed. They were broadly to protect those who had the highest risk of getting seriously ill from covid. And actually, they didn't really care about those people, it was just that if those people were blocking up hospital beds, 'the rest of us' were going to start dying from the normal totally treatable things that happen to us. It was really about limiting the wider impacts, not helping someone in their 80s live a other 5 years (though I totally believe someone in their 80s or at any increased risk deserves that respect and support from the rest of society, and deserves people making small adjustments to protect them)

albatross13 4y ago

[flagged]

uptownfunk 4y ago

[flagged]

aftercoffeeplz 4y ago

Doesn't this mean long COVID isn't a thing they could test for reliably given the low rates and the inability to give people COVID for the test? Observational studies on people already showing symptoms is about the best they could have done.

thenerdhead 4y ago

This activism about this problem is ridiculous and is inside all of the long covid communities. I recently recovered from my second long haul and the people in those communities think they know better than world class clinical researchers tackling novel chronic illnesses. They continue to think that money is being wasted from this "limited" pool on things like exercise/pacing and CBT trials which are known tools to help certain long haulers but especially "harmful" to ME/CFS where there is already limited research on controversial PACE trials. They believe that we should just be throwing all that money towards trials of unknown medications that haven't been tested instead. Many promising ones have already seen mixed results. Also this tends to be a huge misunderstanding by armchair medical experts/"patient-led researchers" of what a DCC (data coordination center) is and how that would actually help with these trials long term. Look, I get it. My last 2 years have been hell on earth. I've blogged countless times on this and I wanted immediate relief too. But the only things that helped me were the "controversial" things(paced exercise, CBT, etc) outlined here.

sp527 4y ago
Could you please elaborate on what you did to recover?
- thenerdhead 4y ago
  Here's my first post: https://jondouglas.dev/long-covid/ https://jondouglas.dev/long-covid/ And my recent one: https://www.reddit.com/r/LongHaulersRecovery/comments/12iv4p0/done_pushing_the_boulder/ https://www.reddit.com/r/LongHaulersRecovery/comments/12iv4p...
  - upsidesinclude 4y ago
    It is just strange to read this list as if it isn't a normal part of life. Your first five-seven are just standard day to day living and if you lived that way, it seems to me you would never experience "long covid". Note: Marathoning and other extreme excercise activities are not normal, regardless of how large the communties may be.

jdlyga 4y ago

I wonder how related to "long lyme disease" this is. I listened to a podcast, Patient Zero, about how a very small percentage of people who get lyme disease have symptoms for years.

sdze 4y ago

Long Covid is mostly a mental disorder. Just like ME/CFS.

giraffe_lady 4y ago
And? So what if it is? That makes it not real in some way, or not worth consideration or study? It's affecting a lot of people, their suffering is real. The cause is significant to understanding and relieving the effects. If we determine 100% that it's mental we still don't get to shrug and say alright then that's that good luck everybody.
- sdze 4y ago
  Obviously, this "disease" joins all the other psychosomatic ones. So nothing new.

hayst4ck 4y ago

The author of this article is selling outrage and we are all buying. They are getting views and benefiting from this anti-government outrage. The author repeatedly appealed to long-covid patient authority like their medical opinion has any weight at all. This fear = views = status = profit conflict of interest is the problem in current America and why it feels like no one can understand anything and trust in our institutions is at a low. “The NIH RECOVER study is pointless,” said Jenn Cole, a long Covid patient based in Brooklyn, N.Y., who wanted to enroll in the study but found the process inaccessible. The research is “a waste of time and resources,” she said, and fails to use patients’ tax dollars for their benefit. “We didn’t need to recreate” existing studies that already answered these questions, said Cole, the long Covid patient. This isn't journalism. This is garbage. This article produces anger, not understanding.

anigbrowl 4y ago
There was a great deal more to the article than you're suggesting, and I didn't read it as 'anti government outrage.' You can support government interventions and still think the NIH is doing a mediocre job on this project. There's a lot of comparative and contextual information in the article that you seem to have ignored.
- hayst4ck 4y ago
  We spend 4 billion a year on Alzheimers, and what do we have to show for it? We spent at least 500 billion on AIDS and we have PrEP after 40 years of research. The author's core assertion is that 1 billion should buy a potential treatment. The entire article is centered around this core premise. That is a flawed idea at it's core and shows that the author is writing on a subject beyond their pay grade. Worse, it's reinforcing emotions that other people who are not experts under the guise of being well researched. This article increases net ignorance. > Instead, the NIH spent the majority of its money on broader, observational research that won’t directly bring relief to patients. "Instead of spending money to solve the problem, they are first trying to understand the problem." Is that not absolutely absurd to you? Am I insane for reading the author's statement that way? Does the rest of the article really not follow the same conceit? The author makes the assertion that if there is no treatment there there is nothing to show. I would argue that to prove "nothing to show" you would have to argue that understanding of long COVID has not been increased. I do not think the article addressed what 1 billion got us, only what 1 billion did not get us.

tnel77 4y ago

I won’t say enough to identify myself, but the company I work for is working hand-in-hand with researchers as a part of this funding. I can’t speak for the entire sum of money, but some of it is definitely being put to good use and is making an impact via the research being conducted.

myko 4y ago
Please, don't let the flamebait get to you, I'm sure most of the folks are doing good work. It's sickening how twisted society has become over this.

glofish 4y ago

[flagged]

nextworddev 4y ago

And to think some people thought $100m into GPT3 training was a waste..