I think you possibly misunderstood what I meant here. This article certainly doesn't feel like blaming anyone for not recovering. I wanted to emphasize that many articles in Switzerland about Long Covid read like they are written more to reassure the public that the situation isn't that bad and less to lay the focus on those still affected, the inadequacy of their care, the lack of research and that something must be done to improve this situation.
And regarding Chantal Britt, she really frequently talks about M.E. in her public statements and interviews, she also stated having mild M.E. herself. So while you maybe could argue with that when explaining why there are more articles about Long Covid than ME, I think the fact that ME is hardly or just very briefly mentioned inside these Long Covid articles in Switzerland has little to do with her personally.
I can understand that, with its focus on high recovery rates for Long Covid, the article might seem at first glance to downplay Long Covid and ME/CFS and reassure the general public that it is not an urgent health problem.
However, if you take into account that voices claiming these illnesses are psychosomatic and can be overcome with brain training have recently grown louder in Swiss media, there is good reason to read this piece quite differently: as a targeted, strategic pushback against BPS models and an argument for a somatic understanding of LC and ME/CFS.
In my opinion, the most important message for the Swiss public is the paragraph in the middle of the article. There, the new head of the Long Covid clinic at Unisanté in Lausanne—de facto the top Swiss Long Covid specialist as the only physician at a university hospital setting—is quoted with a short, clear statement: Long Covid is unambiguously a somatic disease. Psychosomatic explanatory models are to be firmly rejected, as biomedical scientific evidence is now available.
This is contrasted with the note that the website of the BAG (health ministry) has not been updated in two years—meaning the topic has politically gone to sleep in Switzerland, even though so many patients remain ill and lack adequate support.
I consider this to be a very cleverly written article that meets the general public where it currently stands, only to then deliver one single, clear message in a targeted way: patients suffering from a serious physical illness are underserved, and politically, hardly anything is being done. To me, this seems like a very sober, objective description of the current situation in Switzerland.
An interesting detail on the side: The article was published on Sunday shortly before the end of the Tour de France Femmes, so the two topics—at least through editorial logic and personalization—were placed right next to each other. Marlen Reusser is currently the most prominent person affected by LC in Switzerland, after recently explaining in a lengthy SRF interview how she allegedly overcame her illness using self-hypnosis and working on unconscious dysregulations. The fact that this clarifying article appears right now feels like a deliberate editorial decision by SRF: giving the many thousands of people who visited the website for Reusser finishing the Tour an immediate scientific correction to the BPS narrative.
(Translated from German with Gemini)
