The mobilization against COVID-19 was impressive. A similar investment is needed to understand and treat the chronic resulting illness.
The mobilization against COVID-19 was impressive. A similar investment is needed to understand and treat the chronic resulting illness.
Jesus these comments act like curing diseases is just a matter of attention and throwing money at it. Cancer still exists because it turns out science is actually really complicated. While we’ve made breakthroughs, they come at huge amounts of time and money (see KRAS G12D inhibitor).
Take fibrosis in the lungs post-COVID. That’s scar tissue. Your body magically stitched you up. The cells that were previously there for air exchange died, and are not coming back. Lungs don’t continually grow at adulthood. If they did, it would be prone to cancer, which is also going to be a huge risk if a treatment ever gets far enough to undo tissue fibrosis and stimulate proliferation of the existing cells in the lung. Not to mention they need instruction to form the alveolar structures (no way how they’re going to do that, they formed by budding in embryogenesis).
People think scientists are taking their sweet time on it, but don’t even have the patience to understand the problem in the first place.
My cousin was doing research into chronic fatigue syndrome (which shares a lot with some versions of long covid, and still isn’t ‘solved’) back in the 1990’s. It’s going to take time.
Edit: “Today, the National Institutes of Health launched and is opening enrollment for phase 2 clinical trials that will evaluate at least four potential treatments for long COVID, with additional clinical trials to test at least seven more treatments expected in the coming months. Treatments will include drugs, biologics, medical devices and other therapies. The trials are designed to evaluate multiple treatments simultaneously to identify more swiftly those that are effective.” - source