Dr. Hyde from the interview:
"The actual injury is a micro-circular [microcirculatory] injury."
He says that, as opposed to polio, which injures the nerve endings of the anterior part of the spinal cord, the injury is to the small blood vessels going to that area.
"If anyone took this terrible disease seriously, they would have developed something to prevent the acute inflammation of these small arteries in the brain because that is the cause of the disease. The virus gets there and injures the circulation... injures the brain function."
I found this interesting for a couple of reasons.
First, it sounds very much like Dr. Systrom's hypothesis for why blood returning to the hearts of ME patients has
too much oxygen. Something is restricting oxygenated blood from reaching the smallest of blood vessels and the capillary bed - so, some of the oxygen is never delivered and it returns to the heart.
Second, this was also Dr. Ryll's explanation for a viral outbreak of "infectious venulitis" (which he believed was an ME variant) in a Sacramento, CA hospital and environs in 1975. In some of these cases, frank bruising was visible on the surface of the skin - a feature which distinguished it from typical ME.
The idea that constriction of the microcirculation is a factor in ME has been around for a while. I know there have been studies on it in the last decade or so - most concerned with nitric oxide and its relation to endothelial dysfunction. A writeup by Cort at PR regarding a 2020 study can be found
here.
I'm not sure if it could be called "inflammation," since the actual effect seems to be to
reduce the blood supply at the smallest scales. Something would be causing the constriction of tinniest blood vessels, but it couldn't be so complete and pervasive as to actually kill cells wholesale. It would just impair their function.
I have no idea if this is, in fact, a part of the ME puzzle, but it does keep showing up from different directions.
ETA: Link the to 2020 study:
Peripheral Endothelial Dysfunction in Myalgic Encephalomyelitis/Chronic Fatigue Syndrome