Thanks for paying your taxes this week, comrades, your hard-earned money is going toward more than $1 billion worth of “long COVID” research that has been a complete waste of time, according to a recent report.
On Thursday, Stat News reported that in 2021, the National Institutes of Health was given a gigantic sum of money to study how COVID might be affecting a potentially sizable number of Americans, long after they recovered from the initial infection. Millions of Americans suffer from brain fog, lack of smell and other weird changes, and fatigue well after getting the virus. Nobody is quite sure why, if it is even related to COVID, or how to stop it. So, the NIH was tasked with getting to the bottom of it.
Except they haven’t. Not only has the NIH not even bothered to test any sort of relief on “long COVID” sufferers, but they haven’t released any studies from their “observational research” either. It’s been two years since they were given the money, and a mandate to study long COVID, and the NIH doesn’t seem to have any urgency at all on this topic.
According to the vice provost for global initiatives and co-director of the Healthcare Transformation Institute at the University of Pennsylvania, Dr. Ezekiel Emanuel, the brother of former President Barack Obama’s chief of staff Rahm Emanuel, the American people have not “gotten anything for a billion dollars.”
“That is just unacceptable, and it’s a serious dysfunction,” Emanuel said to Stat News.
The NIH is supposedly working with different universities to conduct five separate trials for a study dubbed RECOVER. But those have all been delayed and NIH hasn’t signed up a single patient yet. Emanuel says that the NIH’s strategy does not make any sense, even if they don’t quite have the logistics of it figured out.
“If you don’t have the pathobiology figured out, you try things. You don’t just slow, slow, slow, walk it,” he said,
Eric Topol, the founder and director of the Scripps Research Translational Institute, also told Stat that he expected that the NIH would have had a lot more to show by now given how much money Congress allotted them.
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“I don’t know that they’ve contributed anything except more confusion,” Topol said.
Now, certain readers will probably wonder if these guys are giving the NIH the benefit of the doubt. Varying evidence shows that the NIH regularly wastes mountains of taxpayers’ money each year. All federal agencies do, it’s sort of their shtick.
Perhaps the NIH is dragging its feet with this study because if they do any more research into “long COVID,” then it might reveal that the virus is not one of natural origin and instead was made in a laboratory, which could explain the bizarre ongoing symptoms. Now, that’s a layman’s suspicion, but this author has the benefit of being outside the medical establishment and looking at this with a skeptical eye.
Whatever the case, thanks for paying your taxes to fund this study that has accomplished little. If you’re feeling down about it, just remember it’s only a portion of the money going toward Ukraine. If you need to explain to your kid why he can’t go to summer camp or why you are stuck eating cube steaks each night for dinner, just explain that your money is supporting a “war for democracy” and a “long COVID study,” neither of which are yielding results.
The views expressed in this piece are the author’s own and do not necessarily represent those of The Daily Wire.