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Trial By Error: Two Reports on the Financial Burden of Long Covid and Its Impact on ME/CFS Prevalence

20 April 2022

By David Tuller, DrPH

*April is crowdfunding month at UC Berkeley. If you like my work, consider making a tax-deductible donation to Berkeley’s School of Public Health to support the Trial By Error project: https://crowdfund.berkeley.edu/project/31347

It is clear that long Covid—however that term is defined–is having enormous impacts on employment, social benefits, disability insurance, and other domains. Even the coronavirus pandemic were to end today, those impacts would continue long into the future. The pandemic is also likely to lead to a rise in the numbers of those diagnosed with the disease or cluster of diseases currently being called ME/CFS.

Two publications this month shed some light on the situation in the US. First, the Solve Long Covid Initiative published a “white paper” called “Long Covid Impact on Adult Americans: Early Indicators Estimating Prevalence and Cost.” Second, three authors revisit their own earlier estimates of the economic burden of ME/CFS in relation to levels of government research spending. This time, they have incorporated into their analysis the expected increase in cases stemming from the pandemic. (I’m not a statistician or any kind of math whiz, so I’m not commenting on the models and calculations used in these analyses.)

[Read more…] about Trial By Error: Two Reports on the Financial Burden of Long Covid and Its Impact on ME/CFS Prevalence

Trial By Error: An Interview with Meghan O’Rourke, Author of “The Invisible Kingdom”

18 April 2022

By David Tuller, DrPH

*April is crowdfunding month at UC Berkeley. If you like my work, consider making a tax-deductible donation to Berkeley’s School of Public Health to support the Trial By Error project: https://crowdfund.berkeley.edu/project/31347

Last Friday, I interviewed poet, journalist and editor Meghan O’Rourke about The Invisible Kingdom, her insightful and affecting memoir of living with chronic illness. As the book recounts, O’Rourke initially began experiencing perplexing physical signs and sensations not long after graduating from Yale in the late 1990s–“daily hives, dizziness, chronic pain, and drenching night sweats.” She struggled for years with a range of debilitating symptoms, and finally found some relief after being treated for chronic Lyme disease—itself a controversial diagnosis. In 2013, she wrote an extended piece about the issue for The New Yorker.

[Read more…] about Trial By Error: An Interview with Meghan O’Rourke, Author of “The Invisible Kingdom”

TWiV 890: Looking into a booster crystal ball

18 April 2022

This episode of TWiV is focused on COVID-19 vaccines and antibodies: who should get boosters, whether a variant matched mRNA vaccine is superior to a historical vaccine, and how the interval between vaccination and infection influences the quality of the antibody response.

Hosts: Vincent Racaniello, Dickson Despommier, Rich Condit, and Brianne Barker

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Show notes at microbe.tv/twiv

TWiV 889: COVID-19 clinical update #110 with Dr. Daniel Griffin

16 April 2022

In COVID-19 clinical update #110, Dr. Griffin covers hospital admissions during variant outbreaks, viral load in vaccinated and unvaccinated individuals, predictive capacity of symptoms in children, comparison of antigen tests, incidence of myocarditis after vaccination, steroids during replication phase, Paxlovid efficacy and safety, fluvoxamine, sabizabutin, colchicine, and prevalence of infection in Africa.

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Trial By Error: The UK Health Research Authority’s Missteps on PACE and the Declaration of Helsinki

14 April 2022

By David Tuller, DrPH

*April is crowdfunding month at UC Berkeley. If you like my work, consider making a tax-deductible donation to Berkeley’s School of Public Health to support the Trial By Error project: https://crowdfund.berkeley.edu/project/31347

*Note: To give credit where it’s due, Magical Medicine: How to Make an Illness Disappear, an exhaustive investigation from Malcolm Hooper and Margaret Williams, first mentioned the PACE team’s violations of the Declaration of Helsinki 20+ years ago.

The PACE authors and their allies routinely cite the UK’s Health Research Authority as having given this boondoggle of a trial a clean bill of health. The HRA, which oversees research ethics processes and procedures, conducted a review of PACE and issued its findings in January, 2019. The agency assessed PACE as having been conducted properly, but it noted that its purview was limited to “whether the study was properly approved by the Research Ethics Committee (REC),” and questions about the “quality of the study” were beyond its scope.

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TWiV 888: Molnupiravir with Richard Plemper

14 April 2022

Richard joins TWiV to discuss the SARS-CoV-2 antiviral drug Molnupiravir , including how it was discovered, its mechanism of action, whether it is a mutagen for cells, and the future of drugs for treatment of COVID-19.

Hosts: Vincent Racaniello, Alan Dove, and Brianne Barker

Guest: Richard Plemper

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Show notes at microbe.tv/twiv

Q&A with A&V Livestream 4/13/22

13 April 2022

Virologists Amy Rosenfeld and Vincent Racaniello answer your COVID-19 questions (or any virus questions) on this livestream of 4/13/22 at 8:30 PM eastern US.

Trial By Error: PACE Team Stages a Comeback Tour

11 April 2022

By David Tuller, DrPH

*April is crowdfunding month at UC Berkeley. If you like my work, consider making a tax-deductible donation to Berkeley’s School of Public Health to support the Trial By Error project: https://crowdfund.berkeley.edu/project/31347

Professors Peter White, Trudie Chalder and Michael Sharpe seem to have embarked on what could be called the PACE Rehabilitation Tour.

This is an apparent effort to salvage their reputations and save professional face now that the UK’s National Institute for Health and Care Excellence (NICE) has officially rescinded its previous recommendations for graded exercise therapy and cognitive behavior therapy as treatments for what the agency currently calls ME/CFS. It is also an effort by these professors to gain a foothold in the long Covid marketplace. They hope their crumbling GET/CBT treatment paradigm for ME/CFS can revive its fortunes in a post-coronavirus world.

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TWiV 887: Bonfire of the monocytes

10 April 2022

TWiV explains why this season’s influenza vaccine is not protecting against mild to moderate disease caused by H3N2 virus, and that antibody-dependent entry of SARS-CoV-2 into monocytes is a major contributor to severe COVID-19.

Hosts: Vincent Racaniello, Dickson Despommier, Rich Condit, and Amy Rosenfeld

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Show notes at microbe.tv/twiv

TWiV 886: COVID-19 clinical update #109 with Dr. Daniel Griffin

9 April 2022

In COVID-19 clinical update #109, Daniel Griffin discusses cardiac complications after infection or vaccination, long COVID in children, fourth vaccine dose in Israel, no need for fourth vaccine dose in EU, dexamethasone dosing, immunomodulation therapy, MIS outcomes in children, US long COVID effort launched, and herd immunity.

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Show notes at microbe.tv/twiv

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by Vincent Racaniello

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ME/CFS
Inside a BSL-4
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Interviews With Virologists

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