Wired Magazine: The Painful Truth About Long Covid by Alan Levinovitz, 2026

Wired again….



“I gave WIRED the exclusive on our hands launch, and they wrote a really weird article about how we are sexualizing robotics…

wired.com/story/the-1x-n…

I felt pretty betrayed because that’s not what they told me they were writing about not is that what I’ve ever been about… actually I stand for quite the opposite… But I’ve come to find a lot of dishonesty and malice in the journalism community so I wasn’t surprised.

This is what I sent the author… I’m only sharing this because I hope it encourages journalists to resist the click bait trap and tell truly awesome stories because I for one don’t believe journalism is dead— I think it’s just starting and just needs to evolve past the weird corner of the internet where data driven optimization turns everything into smooth brained shocking brain rot bullshit.

The technological revolution we are going through should inspire a journalism renaissance. Not let it fall into further decay. There is so much brilliance at play in the world and the stories should be told!

My note:

“[author name redacted], it was nice talking to you, but I wanted to let you know that I didn’t enjoy your article at all.

I understand the need to be inflammatory because that seems to be the only thing that gets clicks these days but that doesnt mean you shouldn’t recognize when something special is in front of you.

I trusted our PR team in saying we should offer you the exclusive on what is one of the most important technological developments in the history of Mankind and I deeply regret it.

Good luck with the rest of your writing career.

-Dar Sleeper”
 
Reddit post by Scott Hugo:
TL;DR: 25+ patient-advocates and MEAction have filed an ethics complaint against WIRED for "The Painful Truth About Long COVID." The complaint was submitted to the Society of Professional Journalists and Columbia Journalism School; it details allegations of serious violations of journalism ethics and calls for a full investigation and report.

Please amplify and support this effort! [text copied below]
Visit the LinkedIn post and comment, repost, share, save, and cross-post to other platforms. Cross-posts to X, BlueSky, and Facebook are especially helpful (I'm not active on them.)

Read the filed ethics complaint!

Every action you take to increase the reach of this increases the pressure on WIRED and increases the chances of our success. Show up for the #millionsmissing!

[Edit: here is some history on the WIRED retraction campaign.

First post: first open letter

Second post : Dr. Putrino

Third post: second open letter

change[.]org petition

You can learn more about the retraction campaign by visiting my LinkedIn page or my IG. Hope this doesn't violate self-promotion!]

*****

I started a WIRED retraction campaign a month ago because I was appalled by how many people - already marginalized by chronic illness and disability - had been harmed and would continue to be harmed as long as “The Painful Truth About Long COVID” remained on Wired’s website. I wish Wired had not made this effort necessary. I also contacted Conde Nast and asked them to engage with the concerns raised by patients, clinicians, and journalists. I have not received a response.

I felt morally compelled to fight for all those harmed by this article - past, present, and future. After weeks of unsuccessfully trying to convince Wired to do the right thing, I felt further compelled to write this ethics complaint for two reasons.

First, I believe in the role of responsible journalism as a bulwark of democracy. When journalism fails to meet accepted standards, it harms people and violates the public trust. We especially need accurate, ethical, and scientifically sound coverage of poorly understood diseases like Long COVID and ME. A thorough ethics investigation and public report will advance that effort.

Second, I hope that this will convince Wired to change course and finally listen to the movement of patients, researchers, and journalists who have repeatedly raised serious concerns about the feature article. WIRED can still do the right thing: retract the article and replace it with another one that meets ethical standards. I hope that Wired will choose to emerge from this with greater integrity and more responsible editorial practices.

Like many people with Long COVID and ME, I have to balance my desire to advocate for justice alongside my health and the limits imposed by my disability. This complaint was written over more than a dozen 15- to 20-minute sessions over the course of a week. I hope you’ll read the ethics complaint and reach your own conclusion about what justice requires.

[complaint hosted by MEAction]

I am beyond honored to be joined by over 25 fellow patient-advocates and the extraordinary team at MEAction. “Scott and the patient advocates that developed this are fighting a narrative that has done substantial harm in the past and #MEAction is proud to amplify this effort.” (Laurie Jones, Executive Director)

Journalism can deepen the stigma that the marginalized already face - or help dismantle it.
We raise our voices to ask that journalists advance justice through accurate, compassionate, and responsible reporting.

We are the millions missing.
We are still sick.
We are still fighting.

With hope and fire,
Scott

Media contact: press@meaction[.net]

WANT TO SUPPORT? Drop a comment and sign the petition!

️ Tag a patient, caregiver, physician, researcher, and/or journalist who should be aware of this effort!
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neurophusion said:
@Learningandlistening. Perhaps the reason members of this forum thought you abandoned the debate is because you stopped posting here and announced on Twitter, "I'll be stepping away from this specific topic on social media for the next few months."?



Contrary to what seems to be a common caricature, the presence of ME/CFS symptoms do not suddenly make people inherently close-minded about the potential of mind-body approaches, this doubt develops after humiliating reality checks delivered by the nature of this illness.

The negative stance towards the biopsychosocial model applied to ME/CFS is not a "non-negotiable truth", it is a working conclusion drawn from spending many hours assessing the evidence through the lens of critical thinking and rational skepticism. This conclusion can change when convincing evidence is presented, and it is concerning that we are expected to significantly lower the standards because you think "mind-body therapies are quite difficult to trial". There is no reason why brain retraining cannot be subject to clinical trials.

As far as I can tell, this forum consists of people who largely engage in equal opportunity skepticism: low quality biological research gets grilled here like everything else.

All the CBT/GET proponents had to do to be more convincing about their approach to ME/CFS is to employ a stringent diagnostic criteria and show clinically useful improvements on objective outcome measures. Yet they failed to do so after three decades, therefore we will continue to dispute their claims.

Furthermore, the underlying rationale of brain retraining can be tested using biological measures as objective proxies for the processes that are supposedly mediating subjective symptoms.

Your WIRED article mentions discussions with mindbody proponent Vegard Bruun Wyller. Did he mention that in the early 2010s he was involved with research into the use of low dose clonidine to inhibit the sympathetic nervous system activation that was supposedly driving the sustained stress arousal feedback loop? While the drug worked to inhibit catecholamines, CFS patients became worse at the endpoint, not better, suggesting that the increased sympathetic nervous system activity (if actually present) is a compensatory mechanism.

www.healthrising.org

'Sustained Arousal' Hypothesis Not Sustained: Wyller's Clonidine Trial for Chronic Fatigue Syndrome Fails - Health Rising

Specifically, we suggest that CFS is caused by sustained arousal. Wyller Brun Wyller’s drug/behavioral approach to chronic fatigue has been controversial in Norway. Embraced by many in the medical community there it’s emphasis on psychological factors has dismayed many in the ME/CFS community...
www.healthrising.org

It makes sense that an illness characterised by post-exertional malaise or exacerbation of symptoms after stressors (physical, cognitive, emotional) could benefit from managing such stressors or responses to it, but that is not the same as the illness being primarily perpetuated by internal psychological factors stuck in a feedback loop of the stress response.
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That Wyler point is really interesting

I think we have a thread along the lines of important arguments for things like pace/bps abd this one seems worth adding

It would be interesting to see if there is a thread on the study too as I’m thinking of it in context of narrowing down things going on via the buspirone thread and putting pictures together of different findings that together narrow things down etc
 
AL comment on substack

Alan Levinovitz
Book GloryJul 19


I think the idea that if something has an "actual physical cause" then it can't be helped by a "psychological" or "brain retraining" approach is intuitive but not necessarily true. Consider alcoholism. Cravings and withdrawal are 100% physiological. There are very clear biomarkers. There are even pharmaceutical aids for dealing with withdrawal and overcoming addiction. Not "in your head." But...many people have success overcoming this very real, very in-your-body condition with a combination of peer support and counseling, namely AA (or a version of it). There's no reason that something with a "physical" etiology — withdrawal, cravings, etc — can't be overcome with a "non-physical" approach. It's not always the case, of course! But sometimes it is.

Maybe there's a subset of people with ME/CFS and long Covid who do respond to these kinds of interventions. If so, it's essential that they be supported in trying the interventions, and also that they aren't dismissed as not having "actual physical causes" at play in their illness.
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Yup, if you just suddenly stop drinking you can die, you have to reduce your alcohol intake safely which is why medical detox and supervision is recommended.

These false binary oppositions argue really boring me, as is the dancing between medical reasons and general conversational reasons.

I think he left for good, I don’t see the point of joining a thread about your article where you refuse to discuss your article then being annoyed people aren't engaging with you. Or your article.
 
@AlanLevinovitz tweeted: [the lengths people go to in order to avoid admitting they got something even a little wrong like how can anyone who supported woke 1.0 or Trump be like “nope, still stand by everything 100%!”]

Remember when a researcher who was interviewed by AL (Wyller) previously had a paper retracted because of a PubPeer comment, but when republishing it, failed to properly acknowledge or address those problems?

Pepperidge farm remembers.

Remember when (again) Wyller published a study which put into serious doubt the sustained stress arousal hypothesis but he continued to follow this line of investigation full steam ahead with brain retraining?

Pepperidge farm remembers.

Remember when Esther Crawley was ordered to have about a dozen articles corrected due to false or misleading ethics statements, which took persistence from David Tuller to get acknowledged and executed?

Pepperidge farm remembers.

Remember when (again) Esther Crawley engaged in questionable research practices in a pediatric study, and after multiple letters of protest pointing out the problems, the BMJ reluctantly republished the paper but only with a "massive correction/clarification and an editor’s note articulating laughable excuses for not retracting the paper" (Tuller)?

Pepperidge farm remembers.

Remember when Richard Horton of the Lancet refused to demand the PACE trial investigators hand over the protocol-specified results despite the fact that would be good practice for sensitivity analysis, and the meeting minutes of the TSC literally states that both the (original) protocol-specified results and revised-protocol results would be included in the Lancet publication in order to avoid criticism?

Pepperidge farm remembers.

Remember when the PACE trial investigators and QMUL refused to admit to any of the dozen or so problems and discrepancies identified, or even to obvious factual errors, despite having them pointed out repeatedly in correspondence, open letters, a literal court case involving a stack of documents and a three-day hearing costing 250,000 pounds on legal fees to challenge a decision made by the Information Commissioner's Office, internet forums and blogs which the investigators or QMUL clearly knew about because they cited them as evidence of 'harassment'?

Pepperidge farm remembers.

Remember when the first PACE trial re-analysis was posted on a blog, and in response, Peter White and an associate lied in news articles about the nature of the analysis by claiming that the protocol-specified recovery figures were gained by tweaking the dataset? Then when the re-analyses of recovery and improvement made their way into formal publications, the same tired old excuses were used to undermine the re-analyses?

Pepperidge farm remembers.

Remember when patients tried to have a critique of CBT/GET published in the BMJ (who ironically promoted the phrase "Patient Power"), in collaboration with a professor of psychology, and one of the reviewers launched into a full scale diatribe failing to address anything except questioning the diagnosis of the patient authors?

Pepperidge farm remembers.

Remember when Wessely and the Science Media Center, instead of admitting anything was wrong, instead were behind a literal smear campaign to silent critics of the PACE trial by associating them with violence and extremism, then gloated about it at a celebration meeting?

Pepperidge farm remembers.

Remember when supporters of the PACE trial threatened the Journal of Health Psychology and parent Sage Journals with legal action because said supporters wanted to suppress all criticism of the PACE trial regardless of validity?

Pepperidge farm remembers.

Remember when PLoS caved into pressure from PACE trial supporters, did not facilitate the release of the dataset in accordance to their own publication policies, and had James Coyne barred from writing about the PACE trial altogether and eventually removed all his PLoS Mind The Brain blogs?

Pepperidge farm remembers.

Remember when a revised meta-analysis of CBT/GET, which downgraded the certainty of the evidence when taking into account problems of the Oxford criteria, triggered NICE to consider reviewing their outdated guidelines on ME/CFS, and proponents of CBT/GET went into existential crisis mode fighting tooth and nail to prevent the revision process from taking place. Then when the draft was released, behind the scenes pressure and tantrums managed to pause the publication for months, and then when it was finally published, spent years trying to undermine the authority of NICE with bogus arguments and logical fallacies?

Pepperidge farm remembers.

(Add the Cochrane shenanigans too!)

And so on and so forth. Beginning to see a pattern here.
 
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Stop dunking on AL, he’s trying to be an edgy outsider with a quirky view of everyday something something whatever, loads of people think he’s great.
He should realise loads of people think Trump is great that’s why he keeps getting elected.
People have different opinions, who knew?
 
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