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Comment by davidmurphy | Hacker News Reader

outrageous.

gov't should be massively funding at an absolutely epic scale

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/

Well unless big pharma can cash out on it like crazy. Then it'll be a huge success.

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.

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?

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.

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.

I think he's being sarcastic.

Per Poe’s law, which most of the Hacker News community is familiar with, assume sarcasm doesn’t exist unless the commenter explicitly tells it’s sarcasm.

I'd argue chronic conditions that are debilitating should have at least the same priority as cancer, assuming their prevalence in the general population is similar. Long covid is more like to affect productive age people compared to cancer, so a government would be wise to prioritize it.

Higher? No. But causes of chronic fatigue like ME/CFS are already massively underfunded relative to their impact on society and people's lives. Both HIV and most types of cancer are pretty manageable nowadays while having a much lower QoL impact than LCOV or ME.

Further, many of those conditions share enough common traits that it's plausible that insights into one will generate insights into others.

That seems really foolish. A certain percentage of the population will always have the latest, I have no energy and can’t work disease: long COVID, chronic fatigue syndrome, Lyme disease, fibromyalgia, gulf war syndrome, etc. Just wait a few years and it will be a whole new “epidemic”.

> Just wait a few years and it will be a whole new “epidemic”.

Considering COVID is still around and harming people... yes, yes it will, what are you even trying to say?

That everyone who's disabled due to undiagnosed fatigue and trying to find answers is just malingering?

If so, f you, that's a really bad faith argument.

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