[HN Gopher] Long-Covid R&D is collapsing: investors won't fund, ...
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       Long-Covid R&D is collapsing: investors won't fund, scientifically
       challenging
        
       Author : ck2
       Score  : 45 points
       Date   : 2024-09-19 17:34 UTC (5 hours ago)
        
 (HTM) web link (cen.acs.org)
 (TXT) w3m dump (cen.acs.org)
        
       | davidmurphy wrote:
       | outrageous.
       | 
       | gov't should be massively funding at an absolutely epic scale
        
         | nradov wrote:
         | Why? Is this a higher research priority than other medical
         | conditions such as cancer or HIV? Are there plausible reasons
         | to think that epic scale funding would significantly accelerate
         | results?
        
           | kbelder wrote:
           | I agree. We should research it at a level appropriate for the
           | damage long covid is causing. Which is probably a lot,
           | because it seems like a real thing that is impacting lots of
           | people; but it's far from the most important medical problem
           | we have.
        
             | wkat4242 wrote:
             | This same phenomenon isn't unique to Covid either. Other
             | illnesses can lead to similar debilitations. Research into
             | this will give great insight into processes we hardly
             | understand.
             | 
             | Of course it's not the #1 healthcare priority now but who
             | says we should only solve problem #1 and leave all the
             | others hanging?
             | 
             | I know a health worker that worked hard to save lives
             | during the first phases of Covid and her life is now ruined
             | due to this. I doubt she can be 'cured' but at least this
             | may be prevented for others.
        
           | stodor89 wrote:
           | I think he's being sarcastic.
        
         | ck2 wrote:
         | Senator Bernie Sanders has a plan with several co-sponsors to
         | try to make a 10-year "long-covid moonshot" but given how
         | politics work in this country it will never happen unless
         | watered down to something useless and meaningless.
         | 
         | https://longcovidmoonshot.com/
        
           | wkat4242 wrote:
           | Well unless big pharma can cash out on it like crazy. Then
           | it'll be a huge success.
        
         | LorenPechtel wrote:
         | This is talking about private funding. The problem is that we
         | don't have enough understanding to know where to start and
         | private funding works very poorly in such situations.
         | 
         | And I'm sure public funding is tied up in politics. Covid is
         | too politicized.
        
       | imperialdrive wrote:
       | This has very little to meaningfully do with anything, but I know
       | someone that had long covid, and it ruined their life and career
       | etc. because of barely being able to function more than a few
       | "good" hours a day. They got covid again about two year later,
       | was moderately sick for a week, and then completely healed, 100%
       | back to normal. Absolutely blew my mind.
        
         | bsder wrote:
         | A lot of the hypotheses about Long <insert virus here> are
         | about how well your body cleared the remnants. You can have a
         | persistent reservoir of something for quite a long time until
         | your body finally decides to clear it out.
         | 
         | One of the canonical examples of this are warts from HPV. There
         | are documented cases of people having persistent infections
         | until they "injured" a wart somehow, their body finally took
         | notice, and then their body proceeded to completely clear all
         | of them.
         | 
         | Modern medicine really does not deal with active viruses or
         | their aftermath very well.
        
       | TexanFeller wrote:
       | I'm mystified by long covid prevalence reports. I live in a major
       | TX city and have many friends and family that were covid deniers
       | and took no precautions. I know multiple people that had
       | measurable short term or long term severe lung damage, but aside
       | from those I've met zero people that had long term unexplained
       | effects like are described for long covid. I'm not saying it
       | isn't happening, just that it's hard to imagine it's as common as
       | people say.
       | 
       | Now I do know a number of neurodivergent people(ADHD, autism,
       | etc), I'm one, and people otherwise prone to depression and
       | anxiety that were massively harmed by the effects of lockdown.
       | It's extremely common for such people to report constant
       | exhaustion for weeks/months at a time, even in normal times. I
       | went through a long process of seeing multiple doctors about
       | exhaustion(pre-covid) and them finding nothing wrong, and then
       | finally having a therapist explain this is a common occurrence
       | for neurodivergents and I'm even more so than I realized. I do
       | wonder if many of the cases attributed to long covid are really
       | people who became depressed or experienced something like
       | autistic burnout due to the stresses and isolation of covid and
       | post-covid times. The psychological effects of what happened are
       | definitely underestimated.
        
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