Long COVID activists crash Senate hearing. Here’s what they’re demanding
Only 10 minutes into the hearing, activists stepped into the center of the floor, holding signs the size of themselves.
“Declare long COVID a national emergency,” they said in a video shared by Sen. Bernie Sanders. “Twenty-eight billion now!”
A security guard rushed behind them and escorted them out.
The Jan. 18 hearing was for the Senate Committee on Health, Education, Labor, and Pensions (HELP). The topic of the day was long COVID, a chronic condition that results from a COVID-19 infection for a subset of people.
Symptoms of long COVID are numerous, ranging from fatigue, brain fog and shortness of breath to varying degrees of disability, immune dysregulation, and organ and tissue damage, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. It affects 16 million working-age people nationwide, according to the committee news release.
The group with the signs was the Long COVID Action Project, a nonpartisan group demanding treatment and support for people with long COVID. According to LCAP’s website, it aims to mobilize public awareness and drive government accountability.
After LCAP was escorted out, the HELP Committee proceeded with testimony from panels of researchers, followed by patients and families.
According to an LCAP news release, the organization believes the HELP Committee excluded a large swathe of long COVID voices from the meeting.
“Many Long Covid patients experience disease progression and symptomatic flares so severe that they can rarely leave their homes let alone show up in person to testify before the Senate,” the group said in the release.
The group says that to get accurate testimony, remote accommodations should have been made for people suffering from severe long COVID at home.
The group compared the COVID-19 virus to HIV/AIDS in the news release, insisting the government isn’t doing nearly enough to help the millions afflicted.
“Patients are developing AIDS-like immunodeficiency and succumbing to opportunistic infections and cancer. But these stories are not being told,” Linda Roberts, one of the LCAP activists and a long COVID survivor, said in the group’s news release. “The situation is urgent. We have no treatments and no seat at the table to shift the focus to one that will save lives.”
LCAP demands that $28 billion be allocated to long COVID programs and research for a cure.
Studies show that millions of “long haulers” have to pause their lives due to symptoms. Desperate for a solution, many have turned to research for answers. And while experts say long COVID is one of the biggest mysteries in modern medicine, science has already yielded some breakthroughs.
Researchers in Munich took a big step toward finding long COVID’s inflammatory signature in a study published Jan 19.
Finding the inflammatory signature — recognizable markings of a disease within the body — is like solving a riddle. A biomarker for an illness is often the key to being able to identify, diagnose and treat it.
In the new study, researchers examined the blood of people experiencing long COVID alongside the blood of healthy people. They assessed nearly 6,600 proteins across 268 blood samples to determine which proteins were associated with long COVID. In the end, the group found common markers in the blood of people with long COVID.
“The new report offers hope that complement markers in the blood can be used as a biomarker, which is something we really need in the clinic to confirm diagnosis,” wrote physician and writer Eric Topol in his overview of the study on Substack.
Carlo Cervia-Hasler, a researcher in the study, wrote about what the findings could lead to in a post on X, formerly known as Twitter.
“They provide a basis for new diagnostic solutions and possibly targeted treatments,” Cervia-Hasler said.
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