Long Covid patients, in search of relief, turn to private company

NBC News

A full two years into the coronavirus pandemic, long-haul Covid patients remain sick and in desperate search of answers. They've lost jobs. They've lost their sense of self. Many say they have lost faith in the medical community.

Despite multiple studies, the launch of dozens of specialized long Covid clinics and $1.15 billion in federal funding for the National Institutes of Health to study the condition, there remains a dearth of proven treatments for people who are suffering from lingering illness after their infection. 

"There is no one right answer for many of our patients," said Dr. Ben Abramoff, director of the Post-COVID Assessment and Recovery Clinic at Penn Medicine, which has seen more than 1,100 long Covid patients.

WASHINGTON — The Biden administration on Tuesday formally began allowing Americans who had ordered free coronavirus tests this winter to request a second round of four tests per household, through the same U.S. Postal Service program that President Biden unveiled in January.

The move, which Mr. Biden had promised last week during his State of the Union address, followed a crush of interest in the program when it debuted in January. At the time, case rates had skyrocketed because of the Omicron variant and tens of millions of households scrambled to obtain the free tests.

6 Months of U.S. Data Support Safety of mRNA COVID Vaccines CDC reports find that most AEs were minor, transient, and few patients sought medical care Molly Walker medpagetoday

Nearly all local and systemic adverse events (AEs) reported after Pfizer or Moderna's COVID-19 vaccines were mild and transient, and only a fraction of individuals reported seeking medical care, according to data from the Vaccine Adverse Event Reporting System (VAERS) and CDC's v-safe tracker.