Deep Phenotyping of Neurologic Postacute Sequelae of SARS-CoV-2 Infection, Mina, Nath et al, 2023

Thanks Brian. In that case, the harm caused by the regulation was magnified. There's a reason why studies have controls, they are not just a nice to have.

Do you know, how long did the visitor restrictions last and when were the Long covid participants processed? To put the Covid-19 risk in context, the healthy volunteers for the LC study would have been coming in one at a time. So, it would have been fairly easy to have the volunteer test and isolate for a week before starting the testing. If you put that extremely low risk to the healthy volunteer and staff against the potential benefit of getting information out that might materially change the lives of millions of people caught up in a pandemic of Long covid, it doesn't seem to add up. Maybe there was a restriction for a while, but at some point, someone should have been able to make the case for the healthy volunteers to come in.

I've googled a bit. There's a spring 2020 newsletter for the NIH Clinical Center, when researchers were coming back in to work. There is talk about protocols for visitors of the patients. They were allowing visitors of patients at that time. There is talk in many documents about how research related to covid-19 needed to be prioritised.

They even had construction workers coming in.

Healthy post-infection controls were needed for that Long Covid study; without them, its value is enormously diminished. There really is no credible conclusion other than the study was not a priority for the NIH. It clearly was judged as not worth doing properly.