Don’t believe the feds’ fearmongering about long COVID

CDC Director Dr. Mandy Cohen is spreading misinformation telling Americans the new updated COVID vaccine prevents long COVID.

What she doesn’t say is Pfizer’s new COVID vaccine was Food and Drug Administration-approved two weeks ago based on data from 10 mice, and there is absolutely no evidence it reduces long-COVID risk.

In fact, the new vaccine lacks any clinical-outcomes data whatsoever. 

The nation’s chief drug regulator, FDA Commissioner Dr. Robert Califf, has made similar claims about vaccines reducing long COVID risk despite zero scientific data to support the claim.

If Pfizer made such a statement, it would normally be fined by the FDA for making a marketing claim beyond its approved indication.

But not this FDA. (In the event of a government shutdown, FDA says it will retain 998 employees to work on the COVID response, but it’s unclear what these people are doing.)

It’s amazing public-health officials are still citing flawed studies to stir up fear, sternly warning all Americans that 20% of COVID infections can result in long COVID, as if it’s a lightning strike that indiscriminately disables one in five people.

It’s not. 

A new study published Monday in the medical journal BMJ found that long COVID is virtually indistinguishable from long-haul symptoms after other infections. In other words, the authors suggest long COVID may not be unique from any other respiratory-illness recovery.

What’s clear is public-health officials have massively exaggerated long COVID to scare low-risk Americans, including healthy children.

Long COVID was first noticed in 2020 as neurological complaints that lingered for months after infection and nearly always self-resolved. But since then, doctors have witnessed the incidence of long COVID decreasing with each new variant. Now studies have discovered long-haul symptoms after COVID are the same as long-haul symptoms after any infection.

One study found the only medical factor that predicted long COVID was pre-existing anxiety, which was associated with a 2.8-times increased risk of developing long COVID.

The study, published in the Annals of Internal Medicine, ran an exhaustive battery of tests on 48 people with long COVID and 50 people without long COVID. It found no blood test or physiologic abnormalities in people with long COVID.

In another study of well-being after different infections published 10 months ago in the Journal of the American Medical Association, COVID patients actually did better than non-COVID patients.

While there are certainly unique hallmark sequela of COVID like loss of smell (most noted with the original Wuhan variant), new research is showing that any respiratory infection, like flu and respiratory-syncytial virus, can similarly knock you down for a while.

Mild fatigue or weakness weeks after being sick, inactive and not eating well can be normal.

Diagnosing many of these cases as long COVID represents the medicalization of ordinary life.

At the same time, our government is pouring more than a billion dollars into the long-COVID testing-industrial complex.

The Biden administration is absolutely fixated on it, spending more than $1.2 billion on the condition.

To date, the return on investment has been nothing for the patients with long COVID. Most of the money has gone to MRI centers, lab testing companies and hospitals that set up long-COVID clinics.

In talking to staff at some of these clinics, it’s unclear to me what they are actually offering to people beyond a myriad of cumbersome and expensive tests.

What’s remarkable about the National Institutes of Health’s intense dedication to studying long COVID is its simultaneous lack of interest in vaccine-induced myocarditis, recently shown to result in long-term scar tissue in some people.

An epidemiological analysis several national colleagues and I published last year found that routine booster vaccines for all college students results in a net public-health harm, due to myocarditis.

But the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention last week continued to incorrectly present the risks of myocarditis and downplayed them, citing its own flawed studies.

NIH and CDC also haven’t had any interest in funding research on natural immunity, boosters in children or even vitamin D, which was discovered earlier this year to lower COVID mortality — a study that tragically came two years too late.

Probably because it doesn’t fit the White House narrative.

Choosing to selectively dedicate research dollars to magnify COVID complications while not formally studying vaccine complications represents the modern-day politicization and weaponization of scientific study itself.

A study Lancet Regional Health published this year looked for long COVID in 5,086 children aged 11 to 17 and found COVID-positive and -negative children did the same.

“Prevalence patterns of poor well-being, fatigue and Long COVID were broadly similar,” the authors noted. Take-home message — long COVID is not the mass disabling complication that has permanently damaged a generation of children (social isolation and generational learning loss are).

The CDC and NIH’s constant fearmongering around long COVID has also been used to support COVID restrictions. Last November, the Biden administration issued a report on long COVID stating that mask mandates and vaccination “protect people from infection or reinfection and possible Long COVID” despite zero scientific evidence to support the claim.

Given the broad reach of population immunity to COVID today and the less severe nature of the illness, long COVID is less common and less severe than it was in the past.

The CDC has removed the section disclosing real-time vaccination rates with the new vaccine on its website as it has always done in the past. It probably knows no one trusts it and hardly anyone is going to follow its opinion-based recommendations that lack any scientific support.

In my experience of treating thousands of patients over two decades, people can be very forgiving if you are honest with them.

If public-health officials want to regain the public trust, they should show more humility and less absolutism when it comes to the facts around long COVID.

Marty Makary, MD, MPH, is a professor at the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine and author of “The Price We Pay.”