Petition: UK Funding for ME & Long Covid research into treatment

The MEA shared this UK Parliamentary petition on their Facebook page recently, it may have been shared elsewhere, so sorry if this is a duplicate

Urgent funding for research into Long Covid and ME/CFS treatments and cures

“Around a quarter of a million people are suffering with ME/CFS in the UK and over 2 million with long Covid. Many of these people are severely disabled. There are no cures of specific medicines for these conditions. Urgent funding is needed for research to find effective treatments and cures.”
https://petition.parliament.uk/petitions/630551

Can only be signed by UK citizens and/or UK residents.

 

This petition poses a question which is very easy to bat back. There is already funding for, and research into, these conditions.

A more pertinent ask would be for a change in the level of funding, perhaps to the level of diseases with similar impact. Or it could helpfully call for moratoria on publicly funded BPS research.

If this petition had lots of critical mass already it might be worth signing and socialising, but it only has 3k signatures so far.

I don’t understand the MEA at all.

 

The MEA shared the petition without any additional information. It was created by a Nadine Wilkus. A web search brought up a charity fund raiser with this name, but I don’t know if it is the same person.

The full text of the petition is:

It might have been helpful to cite the information of historic underfunding of ME research compared to other conditions and also to give clear reasons why the government should intervene specifically in relation to these conditions, given the recent Parliamentary questions on this matter tend to be fobbed of with the standard response that it is not for the government to decide research funding and that there are existing medical research funding bodies better able to make these decisions.

Also there should have been some explaining why ME and Long Covid are related in terms of research needs, namely that in the region of 50% of people with Long Covid meet the diagnostic criteria for ME/CFS.

Parliamentary petitions work best as part of an ongoing media and publicity campaign, but I have no idea if there is anything in the pipeline.

 

I wrote a tweet to share, if you are on twitter and want something fast and easy to RT?

https://twitter.com/user/status/1635576898003562496


In our area, a small group of us have engaged our MP since 2018 and one of our first asks was for ringfenced funding into biomedical research (not our preferred wording)

https://questions-statements.parliament.uk/written-questions/detail/2018-05-14/143805

He continues to fight our corner, is very aware that ring fenced funding has been announced since 2018 for Brain Tumours and MND, and he maintains contact with various researchers in the UK.

 

Sean O'Neill, from The Times, on Twitter promoting this petition,

 

The UK Government has responded to this petition:

So far the petition has 11,550 signatures, but to progress to the next stage and be debated in Parliament it needs to get to 100,000. Petitions are live for six months so it has less than a month to run.

 

Completely expected bog standard response which this petition was always going to receive.