Long Covid is a ‘national crisis.’ So why are grants taking so long to get?

Some content has been removed for formatting reasons. Please view the original article for the best reading experience. David Putrino, a neurophysiologist at the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai, labored through his holiday last Christmas to write a grant application for urgently needed Long Covid research. With colleagues, he hoped to tap into $1.15 billion in funding that Congress granted the National Institutes of Health (NIH) in 2020, as Long Covid emerged as a major public health problem. NIH had solicited grant applications in December 2021, just weeks before their January due date. The agency said it planned to issue decisions by late March. But as of today, Putrino was still waiting to hear whether NIH will fund his effort to discover whether microclots might be a meaningful diagnostic biomarker for many types of Long Covid. “Maybe they should hire people who are dedicated to accelerating these programs,” says Putrino, who specializes in rehabilitation medicine. “[Long Covid] is a national crisis. This does not deserve to be somebody’s second or third job. What we need from the NIH right now is their full attention.” Putrino’s is not the lone complaint about NIH’s management of Long Covid research—an initiative dubbed RECOVER, for Researching COVID to Enhance Recovery. RECOVER’s flagship, an observational study of up to 40,000 people, has come under fire from patient advocates and some scientists who say it lacks tr...
Source: Science of Aging Knowledge Environment - Category: Geriatrics Source Type: research