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Comment by rebeccaskinner | Hacker News Reader

> It's not a matter of "a bit inconsistent". There is no definition of "long covid". Literally anyone can claim they have it and not be wrong.

Individual studies tend to look at different things, but most of the relevant studies give a particular definition. It generally involves symptoms 3,6, or 8 months after an acute infection, and some studies further limit the definition to a particular set of symptoms. Most control for the occurrence of those symptoms in the general population too.

> No, there isn't, and "t-cell exhaustion" is not a thing. It's a phrase made up by pop scientists.

https://www.nature.com/articles/s41577-019-0221-9

https://www.pennmedicine.org/news/news-releases/2021/july/pe...

https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/34288064/

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7389156/

https://www.nature.com/articles/s41423-021-00750-4

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At least a few of those links are in fact pop science articles like the grandparent complained they would be, and when you leave a bunch of links like this with no consideration for the discussion or explanation for lay people, it's basically gish gallop[0], which is an informal fallacy / rhetorical technique that generally underlies a bad faith argument.

Anecdotally it's anti-science / conspiratorial types that tend to do these obscenely large link dumps with references to dense studies, and then pretend that they've read them all. I consider you and other proponents of the Long COVID theory to be in the same category; deploying gish gallop as a rhetorical tactic hurts your case more than it helps it, when encountered by skeptical people like me.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gish_gallop

All of these papers describe different molecular mechanisms -- underscoring the fact that this is not an established phenomenon -- and most are trying to apply some level of rigor to a term that has no definition. The very first link makes it clear:

> In this Viewpoint article, 18 experts in the field tell us what exhaustion means to them, ranging from complete lack of effector function to altered functionality to prevent immunopathology, with potential differences between cancer and chronic infection.

Also, the final link explicitly rebuts your claim:

> However, because CD8+ T-cell exhaustion is not evident in patients with COVID-19, it is assumed that COVID-19-experienced individuals successfully develop functional CD8+ T-cell memory following vaccination. Recent studies have reported that a single dose of mRNA vaccine robustly induces spike-specific T-cell responses in COVID-19 convalescent individuals [131].

> whether the differentiation state and transcriptional profiles of functionally impaired CD8+ T cells in respiratory viral infections are similar to those of exhausted T cells is not clear.

> In addition, the differentiation dynamics of CD8+ T cells during the course of COVID-19, particularly whether SARS-CoV-2-specific CD8+ T cells become exhausted, remain enigmatic.

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