The scientific community has increased calls on the Biden administration to funnel more resources into the study of long COVID-19, while Republicans are putting up a fight over requests for additional pandemic funding.
TRANSPARENCY PROBLEMS PLAGUE WHITE HOUSE’S REQUEST FOR MORE COVID-19 FUNDING
Long COVID-19 has become a catch-all term for a little-understood malady that is estimated to have affected up to 23 million Americans who were infected with the coronavirus and still experience troubling symptoms. Some of them include brain fog, chronic fatigue, muscle and nerve pain, and problems with cognition.
“We knew pretty early on that we were starting to see some signs of a more persistent state of COVID and yet most of our attention continued to focus on the acute phase of this infection because people were dying, people were being hospitalized, and our hospitals were being overrun,” said Dr. Priya Duggal, an epidemiologist at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health.
Symptoms of long COVID-19 cannot always be identified using clinical tools such as MRI tests and CT scans. A study published last summer found that post-COVID-19 patients who had apparently normal hearts and lungs were still struggling to ride a bike normally due to a problem with oxygen exchange in the muscles. Patients have also said that the constellation of symptoms they experience, such as exhaustion, a racing heart rate, and trouble breathing, have often been dismissed as anxiety or blamed on an asthma flare-up.
A cadre of scientists, including some who advised the Biden administration’s transition team on the pandemic, is pushing for a boost in federal resources to study long COVID-19. They unveiled a “road map” to pandemic recovery this week, calling for more studies to be funded by the National Institutes of Health, the sprawling government health research body. Of the hundreds of studies launched to investigate the causes of long COVID-19, only eight are funded by the NIH.
“Current long Covid research lacks a long-term focus, which risks creating further delays for therapy development. Most importantly, there is no urgency to get rapid answers to basic questions to guide public health and patient care decisions,” they said.
Greater investment on the part of the federal government into the study of long COVID-19 would likely aid frustrated patients who have been told their symptoms are unrelated to their previous infection. Sen. Tim Kaine, a Virginia Democrat, is no stranger to the frustration caused by a lack of clear-cut clinical understanding of long COVID-19 and how to address it. A neurologist told him after administering an MRI that everything looked fine, but Kaine, who had COVID-19 in spring 2020, still experiences nerve-tingling that “feels like all my nerves have had like five cups of coffee.” He introduced a piece of legislation last week that would fund research into the long-term effects of COVID-19 and expand treatment resources for people experiencing symptoms.
Still, Republican lawmakers are not expected to jump at the chance to funnel billions more in funding to deal with COVID-19. Many GOP senators balked at a recent request from the Biden administration for an additional $22.5 billion in funding to secure doses of treatments and vaccines, demanding first that the administration provide Congress with a list of pandemic expenditures using federal coffers.
“I have serious concerns about whether the administration’s request will go toward targeted and effective assistance when it can’t even account for how earlier relief dollars were spent,” Sen. John Boozman, an Arkansas Republican, told the Washington Examiner.
As the U.S. transitions from dealing with a pandemic to dealing with COVID-19 as a facet of the new normal, and more people recover from the disease, the study of long COVID-19 will expand. The most helpful studies, Duggal said, are those that include health information such as brain scans on patients both before infection and after recovering.
“Without that pre-measure, at this point where we are as our knowledge of COVID, I don’t know what’s COVID-related and what was already there and is now an incidental finding,” she said. “Perhaps with enough other studies we can get at [answering] are there certain areas of the brain we should be focusing on, are there certain types of tests that are going to be better for that diagnosis?”
CLICK HERE TO READ MORE FROM THE WASHINGTON EXAMINER
In the two years since the onset of the pandemic, scientists have identified specific markers in infected individuals that portend long-lasting symptoms. Among them is a measure of the amount of virus in the person’s body, also referred to as “viral load.”
Researchers from the National Institutes of Health and the University of Maryland reported late last year that once a person is infected with the coronavirus, the pathogen spreads through the body quickly, proliferating in the tissue where it can remain embedded for over seven months after symptom onset. In another study published Monday in the journal Nature, University of Oxford researchers reported that patients who had COVID-19 were more likely to see an overall decrease of whole brain volume and increased tissue damage in the areas of the brain directly involved in the sense of smell.
