Summary
This week, we celebrate one year of The Sick Times! The Sick Times team discusses the newsroom’s origin story, what the publication means to them, and what the next year (and hopefully years, plural) holds. Also in this episode: the latest COVID-19 numbers, and recapping the team’s coverage of the Fall 2024 PolyBio Symposium on Long COVID Research.
Find our podcast on Spotify, Apple Podcasts, Pocket Casts, Amazon Music, iHeartRadio, or listen below and jump to the start of the podcast transcript.
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Still Here is an abridged version of The Sick Times’ newsletter, which publishes weekly.
Mentioned in this episode (in order of appearance):
- The Sick Times: National COVID-19 trends, November 12
- CDC wastewater dashboard
- Biobot wastewater risk reports
- WastewaterSCAN dashboard
- CDC: Serologic Evidence of Recent Infection with Highly Pathogenic Avian Influenza A(H5) Virus Among Dairy Workers
- Instagram: @ppeforcalifornia
- U.S. free COVID tests: COVID-19 Testing
- The Sick Times: Live blog: Following the Fall 2024 Polybio Symposium on Long COVID Research
- The Sick Times: Press release: The Sick Times announces one year of covering the Long COVID crisis
- The Sick Times: ‘They bungled it:’ NIH documents reveal how $1.6 billion Long Covid initiative has failed so far to meet its goals
- The Sick Times: Q&A: NIH Director Dr. Monica Bertagnolli
- The Sick Times: A brief, oral history of mask blocs: Part 1
- The Sick Times: A brief, oral history of mask blocs: Part 2
- The Sick Times: A brief, oral history of mask blocs: Part 3
- The Sick Times x Them: These are the drag artists and organizers fighting to make queer spaces more COVID safe
- The Sick Times: Introducing Long COVID Essentials, a new resource series
- Public Health is Dead
- Death Panel
Additional audio in this episode:
- Rude Mechanical Orchestra: Which Side Are You On? (orig. Florence Reece)
- Pixabay: Party horn
- Pixabay: Happy Birthday To You – Bossa Nova style arrangement
- Pixabay: Thunder and the beginning of rainfall
Your support helps The Sick Times continue to chronicle the ongoing Long COVID crisis.
Transcript
Intro (0:00)
[Instrumental snippet of theme song, the Rude Mechanical Orchestra’s rendition of “Which Side Are You On?” begins playing. Birthday party horns background the music.]
James Salanga: This is Still Here, a podcast from The Sick Times.
Miles Griffis: I’m Miles Griffis.
Betsy Ladyzhets: And I’m Betsy Ladyzhets.
[Instrumental ends]
Betsy: We’re the co-founders of The Sick Times.
James: And I’m James Salanga, Still Here’s producer.
Miles: Many public health authorities are ignoring the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic.
Betsy: But here at The Sick Times, we’re not. So we’re bringing you the latest Long COVID news and commentary each week.
Miles: Without pandemic denial, minimizing, or gaslighting.
James: This podcast is an abridged version of our newsletter.
Betsy: And each week, we share the latest on Long COVID and COVID-19 levels in the United States.
Miles: And today, we’ll have another episode with our research update before our top story.
This week in Long COVID research, we’ll be talking about the 2024 Fall Polybio Symposium that happened last week. Our team live-blogged it on Friday and condensed about almost 30 presentations into about 3,000 words.
So we’re going to break down some highlights for you here.
James: Each podcast episode, we’ll talk about one or two of the stories we’ve published on The Sick Times website this week.
But today’s episode is special because we’re looking back at one year of The Sick Times.
[‘Happy Birthday’ in a bossa nova arrangement plays]
We’ll be joined again by Heather Hogan, The Sick Times’ Engagement Editor, to reflect on the occasion.
Heather Hogan: Hello!
James: Good to have you here with us again, Heather. Before we look back at the year, we will hear from Betsy for our COVID forecast.
[Sound of thunderclap and light rain]
COVID-19 forecast (1:29)
Betsy: The COVID forecast is similar to what we’ve been dealing with the last couple of weeks, which is kind of a moderate lull in between surges.
It’s still been a few weeks since the summer surge kind of came down. And we haven’t seen that late fall/winter uptake yet, really, in the United States.
It’s a bit unusual compared to past years.
If you look at 2022 or 2023, typically, we’re more into that kind of increase with the colder weather by now. But this year, that hasn’t happened yet.
However, it’s still anticipated by many experts that we will have an increase [of COVID-19] thanks to people gathering indoors, travel for the holidays, and generally, the lack of collective COVID precautions at this point in the still-ongoing pandemic.
I did note from the wastewater data that cases might be starting to go up in the Midwest and the East Coast just a little bit. It’s not really a huge trend yet, but it’s something that we’ll be keeping an eye on in the coming weeks and kind of makes sense, given that those regions start to have colder weather before other parts of the country.
It’s also important to remember, of course, that wastewater numbers are not a perfect measurement of cases.
It’s more of a proxy. So wastewater can often give a bit of an early warning, but data from hospitals and testing centers that are still open and still reporting to the CDC gives a more complete picture of how COVID continues to spread in the US.
Miles: And you can find out more about the way we develop our COVID trends on our website.
Betsy: Also, while COVID remains at more kind of moderate levels right now, we are seeing somewhat concerning news about H5N1, the bird flu that has been spreading among cattle and farm workers over the last few months in the United States.
So this past week, the CDC did a study where they tested 115 dairy farm workers for H5N1 antibodies, which would indicate that they recently had the virus.
And of those 115 people across two states, eight were positive, which indicates, you know, there are a few infections happening and these were not people who were kind of caught by the healthcare system.
While there is not yet evidence that this virus is spreading significantly outside of those agricultural settings, you know, scientists are really closely watching this and it kind of gives another reason for people to continue taking precautions, like wearing a high quality mask.
Also for H5N1 news, WastewaterSCAN has identified it spreading in some sewersheds in California, including in Los Angeles.
Wastewater data is pretty inspecific when it comes to this kind of detection.
So this doesn’t mean that there are a bunch of people in LA with bird flu, but, you know, it is something to keep an eye on and something that we’ll hope to see more kind of public health surveillance get a clearer picture of exactly how this virus is continuing to spread and potentially evolve over time.
Miles: Yeah, that’s super interesting. Thanks for that update, Betsy.
I think it’s helpful to explain sort of what the wastewater looks like with these cases and sort of what it suggests.
James: Yeah. And I think in California, there is like a coalition of mask blocs that has been trying to get high-quality masks to farmworkers. If you’re interested in learning more, I will put more info about that in the podcast additional links.
As I’ve been saying for the past few weeks, U.S. folks, you can still get your four free rapid tests per household at covidtests.gov.
Like Betsy said, this other soup of factors that could create a winter surge is coming up. So if you just want to have more tests on hand and you haven’t ordered them yet, now is as good a time as ever.
And next, we’ll chat about research.
Research (5:14)
[Miles’ voice echoes the word “Research” accompanied with a party horn sound]
Miles: In this episode’s research update, we wanted to highlight our live coverage of the 2024 Fall PolyBio Symposium on Long COVID Research that happened last week.
PolyBio has a consortium of researchers from all around the world.
About 30 got together on Friday and they shared short updates, each about 10 minutes long on projects that they’re working on that PolyBio is helping fund or supporting.
Heather and James, you helped with the coverage with me as we were liveblogging.
Were there any sessions that really stood out to you?
Heather: Yeah, you know, it feels like, even just over the last year, these researchers have been circling, and circling, and circling, and now they’re really starting to get to some real conclusions.
It seems like we’re getting close to biomarkers. It seems like we’re getting closer to ideas of treatments that might work and why they don’t work.
One of the most interesting sessions to me was talking about the differences in gender and viral persistence and the idea, sort of the theory that more women have Long COVID because they don’t mount the correct T-cell response to SARS-CoV-2 and so it sort of gets in these reservoirs and the gut microbiome and stuff.
And it was so interesting because the researcher was talking about, there were people who were on gender-affirming testosterone therapy. The longer they were on the testosterone, their immune system evolved and began to be able to mount a different kind of T-cell response than they were before the testosterone.
And I just thought that was so fascinating.
So I felt, I came away feeling really tired but also really hopeful.
James: Hopefully, you know, with our coverage and when they release a video and the transcript, that will make it a little bit easier for folks to follow along.
It was really interesting. And I feel like really solid projects that folks are working on.
I think a couple that stood out to me, there was a team there that was working on machine learning identification of Long COVID endotypes. So looking at, you know, symptom clusters for specific groups of people living with Long COVID.
I know they’re working on trying to reaffirm the results that they came up with in the computational modeling.
And so they actually identified, I believe, 11 different endotypes for people living with long COVID. And so that is something that hopefully helps more clinicians diagnose Long COVID and get people to more care that they need.
The other thing that I thought was kind of interesting is just this clinical trial that Dr. David Putrino, who is the head of Mount Sinai’s CoRE, brought up. It’s a trial that’s, they’re looking at this tech from a cognitive [neuro]science company, Humanity Neurotech.
People are saying we don’t want, like, brain games or anything like that when it comes to clinical trials related to cognitive symptoms.
And this is definitely not a game. So that one starts recruiting in January, if you want to stay on the lookout for that opening.
Miles: One of my bigger takeaways was what Dr. Amy Proal opened with, which was the PolyBio Consortium Project Explorer, which is this new sort of interactive feature that’s on their website.
It has this interesting human model. It shows all the different parts of the body, organ systems, et cetera. And you can sort of click on these different things and see what these different researchers are working on.
We talk about Long COVID as a multi-systemic disease a lot. And it’s very clear when you see these depictions of it.
And I think we struggle so much sometimes to explain what Long COVID is to people who aren’t reading the research.
So things like this that really show it is incredible.
It’s just interesting to see research on biomarkers, on viral persistence, on upcoming clinical trials.
James: If you want to read the full coverage of the symposium, that’s on our website and coming up after a quick musical break, we’ll reflect on The Sick Times’ one-year anniversary.
[Instrumental segment of theme song plays]
One year of The Sick Times (9:05)
The Sick Times: Press release: The Sick Times announces one year of covering the Long COVID crisis
James: November 14, 2023, marked the first ever newsletter from The Sick Times.
So that makes today our birthday. [Editor’s note: This episode was initially scheduled to release November 14, but there were some production delays.]
[Happy Birthday sound in the Bossa Nova style with party horns after plays]
Betsy, Miles, do you both want to walk our listeners through that conversation and how The Sick Times came to be?
Betsy: Yeah, so in December of 2022, I was visiting Los Angeles, visiting my sister who had an internship there at the time.
And I was staying in the apartment of Miles and my mutual friend, Fi Lowenstein, but they were out of town at the time.
So Miles met up with me to give me their keys and we ended up having lunch and just like talking for a long time, about how frustrating it was to be covering Long COVID as a freelancer and different challenges that we had had in trying to pitch stories or talk to editors.
Prior to the Sick Times, I wrote a COVID data newsletter and blog for like three and a half years.
And it was kind of becoming clear to me by summer of 2023 or so that unfortunately, there was just less and less data to write about.
But I still really wanted to continue covering the pandemic and really was recognizing that there was so much more to do.
And I was just thinking about, you know, the feedback that I had gotten on stories I had done about Long COVID and the need to really, like, double down on that. And to be reporting really, like, for the community.
So that was kind of where the idea for The Sick Times came from.
And I’m forever very grateful that you were, like, willing to jump in on this with me, Miles, because I feel like it just took so much of our time before we ever started paying ourselves.
I feel like it was a real leap of faith.
And so yeah, thank you.
Miles: No, thank you. It was — I’m so glad that you reached out to me.
The idea, idea officially came. You, like, texted me or something in late July 2023.
And I remember you were like, “Do you want to talk about this project I want to work on?” or something.
So I was like, “Okay, cool.” Like, “Maybe we’ll co-byline something,” or, you know, whatever, even though we’d, like, talked about the idea of, like, what a publication could be like or you know, how cool that would be.
But then you brought this idea to me.
And I think, like, immediately in that call, I was just like, “Yes, let’s do it.” Like, we have to.
So we started, we set up a weekly call, which is — we still have now, basically. And now we, you know, now Heather and James join us. It’s not just Betsy and I now.
We just started talking with more people with Long COVID, medical workers, people who have launched similar publications, other journalists who have been covering Long COVID or ME or HIV. And just started to think about what we wanted The Sick Times to look like.
James: How did the name come about?
Miles: We had such a long list of like, “The Long View”, “The Long…”, like, so many of “The Long”s.
Betsy: We didn’t want it to just be, like, “Long COVID News” or “Long COVID Something” because [we were] thinking about, unfortunately, like, it seems like we’re gonna need to continue doing this reporting for a long time.
And so we wanted it to be prepared for the name Long COVID potentially changing.
And also so that we could cover other related and similar diseases like ME and dysautonomia and MCAS and also things that may emerge with future infectious disease outbreaks, like covering avian flu.
You know, I think I like “The Sick Times” because it’s like, we are living through sick times. Everybody is fucking sick all the time. [laughs] Like it just works really well.
James: Heather, you know, I thought we could also both say a little bit about how we found out about The Sick Times since we came onto the team this summer, as Betsy and Miles have already, like, laid this groundwork.
And I know for me, I can’t remember, honestly, the exact moment that I found out about The Sick Times.
I feel like it was definitely probably through other, you know, social media and COVID-conscious accounts, which is a testament to the work that you were doing on social, Miles.
I’ve just also been so grateful because as a disabled journalist, you know, something that, like, really had been hard for me working in local news was the cognitive dissonance of, you know, “We’re journalists, we follow the facts. And the facts still say that COVID is bad. But just because, you know, President Joe Biden ended the public health emergency in May 2023, suddenly, I guess, we’ve all forgotten how to read the science and the facts?”
And that was really frustrating and felt like a real failing of journalism at large.
And so I was really grateful for The Sick Times, because it just felt like, you know, something that reaffirms that I don’t know, I’m not going off the rails, right?
For looking at the science and for caring about, like, disability justice and caring about how COVID continues to affect so many people’s lives while, like, journalism at large is littering in their “post-pandemic” or “during the pandemic” little phrases.
Yeah, Heather, what about you? How did you come to The Sick Times?
Heather: Well, it was Fi Lowenstein. They tweeted about it the day that it launched and it came across my timeline.
And I thought, “This is so cool.” And I followed immediately.
I kind of grew up in the rural South as a lesbian when there was like no representation. There were like no gay characters on TV, whatever.
And I was just very lonely for a very long time. And I found, through the queer internet, such a sense of community and belonging.
And when The Sick Times launched, I thought, “This is going to do for people with Long COVID what all of this queer internet has done for people like me.”
I got COVID in March 2020 in the first wave in New York.
And I spent so much, very sad, time in my bed by myself, like, just looking out the window and feeling so alone and The Sick Times made me feel like I wasn’t alone anymore.
And so when Miles and Betsy put out their call to work for an engagement editor, I was, like, desperate.
So I wanted it so badly.
Betsy: I think you were one of the first applications we got too. It was like that afternoon.
Heather: Yeah, that day I was, like, walking out the door to the grocery store and I had my phone and I saw the tweet come up, “The Sick Times is hiring an engagement editor!” and I just turned around and went right back to my desk.
I typed up the cover letter and through the whole process, I just remember telling my wife, I kept saying, “I’m gonna play it cool, I’m gonna be cool.”
But every step of the way, I was the least possible cool way you could be. [laughs]
Uh, when Miles called to offer me the job and he was like, “You can think about it.”
And I was like, “No, I accept the job.” [laughing]
I feel so lucky to be here and just being able to do the small, even the smallest little bit to help people who have felt the way that I felt.
James: I don’t feel like your work is small bits, Heather!
I feel like you have done so much.
Betsy: I mean, to the other point of this episode, like please donate and help share this so that we can pay both of these wonderful people more so that they can work more.
James: And so we can pay Betsy and Miles more too.
Betsy: Yeah, yeah, yeah, okay. (chuckles)
James: We’ve been trying to bring you all the latest in Long COVID news and commentary and research without pandemic minimizing like so many other media outlets have done.
And so I guess I just also wanted to ask, for you all, what have been your highlights of the past year?
Betsy: So for me, one big highlight has been just continuing my work covering the NIH RECOVER Program.
This publication has allowed me to not only do, like, the investigative stories, but also to continue keeping an eye on it and putting updates in things like our newsletter and also just making sure that those stories are reaching, like, the audience that most needs them.
Being able to do the most recent piece that came out in May, like specifically for The Sick Times with that audience in mind, it was very meaningful for me and really impacted the way I thought about the reporting, in terms of making sure I was talking to a lot of people who were in, like, patient advocacy roles, in RECOVER, or thinking about which questions I was asking of the NIH and stuff like that.
Also kind of related to that reporting, I had the opportunity to interview the director of the NIH.
I actually got to talk to her twice, both for comment for that story that we put out in May, and then also kind of a longer Q and A that happened a couple of months later.
So I wanted it to not just be my questions, but it to be like all of our readers’ questions, so we put out a newsletter and we posted on social media asking people to send me what questions they had.
And I think we got like 150 questions in less than 24 hours that I had to prepare for this interview.
So, um, [laughs], like if you were one of those people and you’re listening to this now, thank you.
You know, I think this work helps to hold these agencies accountable for what they’re doing and to really say to them like, “Hey, people with Long COVID and people with ME and people with these other related diseases are disappointed about XYZ. They want more funding. They want you to be doing the research more thoughtfully. They want you to be moving fast towards clinical trials and all of this stuff.”
And so it’s just a great opportunity to be able to directly bring that to the government official.
The mask bloc oral history series, I also, I’m really proud of. I was so glad we were able to publish that, and so many other pieces by freelancers, but that was one that came to mind for me.
Miles: I’m so, I think it’s so cool that we’ve been able to do just more commentary from people with Long COVID in really specific angles that I don’t think are typically covered in the mainstream media.
So that’s been really powerful, whether it’s a mother writing about her daughter having Long COVID and how that sort of transformed her into an advocate, to all the commentary.
I loved that I was able to do a collaboration with Them, looking specifically at drag performers and how they are working at mutual aid efforts and trying to make their shows safer by incorporating mask blocs with them or bringing masks to their shows and really centering disability justice.
I think my other big takeaway from The Sick Times this year has just been how it sort of changed how I think about journalism.
I think when you become a journalist, you’re sort of — the ideal thing that is projected before you is big long-form features at these big publications like The New Yorker or covering a beat for big publications.
And I think those can be really great.
[But] The idea of service journalism is so much more important to me now and how you can actually make greater change and highlight stories that are often ignored and help provide resources and useful things.
Like journalism can be more interactive this way, and that’s kind of what The Sick Times has taught me.
And I hope that it is helping our readers, and I’m always open to feedback of how we can make that better.
Heather: Yeah, I actually think that’s what’s the coolest thing about my job.
I get to see the impact that the work has because I’m interacting with our readers on a variety of social media platforms.
For the number of followers that The Sick Times has for a “niche” publication, a big-time publication would cut off the arm of any social media director to get the kind of numbers that The Sick Times has.
And so I’ve been able to, like, look at the proof of exactly what Miles and Betsy are saying, which is that the work is really important and it’s also impactful every single story, every single day, every single update.
These are having, like, an actual impact on people’s lives and it’s giving them hope and it’s giving them actual practical advice to follow and it’s giving them the courage to continue to mask.
It’s giving them resources to share with their family and friends, both believers in Long COVID and people who don’t believe.
When I came on, I told Miles and Betsy that they needed a hype woman and that’s what I wanted to do. I wanted to be their hype woman.
Betsy: Yeah, you’re doing great.
Heather: Thank you.
Every experience I’ve had in media, people say they want “real journalism”, but they really just want to read about celebrities.
Like, you know, it bears out in the stats. But that is not the case here at all.
And I was just saying how surprised I was that people were as interested in Stevie Nicks wearing a mask as they were in Betsy explaining wastewater to them.
I have so much admiration for our readers and they have, these are, you know, energy-limiting chronic illnesses that we all deal with.
And yet they’re using so much energy to, like, give back to us and, you know, to share our work.
And it just feels cool to just be involved in that cycle.
James: One thing that like really sucks about journalism, and just the way that like, people get interviewed is that, you know, people implicitly trust something more when there has been writing about it and when there’s like institutional backing of some kind.
I think a lot of people discount the value of lived experience and even more so for, you know, people living with Long COVID, especially because many people living with Long COVID are already, you know, multiply marginalized.
And it’s, you know, Long COVID itself is something that unevenly impacts people based on different demographics.
The odds are already stacked against a lot of folks with Long COVID about being taken seriously.
And I think that The Sick Times providing this kind of backing to like just affirm even more that, you know, people’s lived experience is real. It’s like a real thing that is continuing to impact their lives. It’s something that, you know, we should all care about.
I think that’s something that really means a lot to me and that I, I really appreciate The Sick Times existing for. That it can be that bastion of support in people’s corner when they’re advocating for their needs, whether that be with like some of the service journalism pieces that we’ve published, like the Long COVID Justice partnership where we published, you know, these guides about what to do when you get COVID, what to do if you think you might have long COVID, what things like tachycardia and dysautonomia are.
I think that’s just something that I’m really grateful that The Sick Times can do.
You know, I know we’ve been talking a lot about just our work and recapping all that we’ve done, but we’ve also been talking about, you know, the end-of-year fundraiser that’s going on now.
And so if either of you, Betsy or Miles, want to give a quick update on that and maybe share a little bit, and if you all have things that you’re particularly looking forward to for the next year of The Sick Times, we’d love to hear a little bit about those too.
Betsy: Yeah, so I last looked at the numbers this morning. I should say we’re recording this on Tuesday morning, when we usually send our newsletter.
So I was looking at the numbers to include an update. And we have raised about $18,000 since we announced the fundraiser on November 1st.
So that brings us more than a third of the way to our goal of $50,000, which is amazing. We’re so, so grateful to everybody who has chipped in or shared the fundraiser or sent it to a friend or a family member.
Like we really appreciate it. And just to remind folks of the opportunity here, so we are aiming to raise $50,000 over November and December.
And donations will be matched or doubled both by NewsMatch and by other supporters.
So your donation potentially can have double the impact.
Miles: Yeah, and looking forward, I mean, we have so many stories that we want to do.
I feel like it — they’re just endless, so I am so excited to get started next year.
I think some highlights will be certainly holding the Trump administration accountable with their handling of the ongoing pandemic or mishandling. We’ll see as well as how they respond to Long COVID and Long COVID research.
Something we talked about today in our meeting that I’m really looking forward to is filing Freedom of Information requests on different public health agencies, local public health agencies, governors, these other sort of things that are also very responsible for continuing and normalizing COVID-19 and ignoring Long COVID.
Betsy:
Also, we really want to do more collaborations with local news outlets, just looking at what Long COVID communities and resources are like in different places.
For example, like we’ve done a couple of stories about specific Long COVID clinics or specific issues for healthcare.
And I think there’s just like so much more to do on that front, especially if you look at, you know, other communities like communities that are also marginalized in other ways, like people who live in rural areas or people who have, who had existing disabilities prior to COVID.
And we’re really looking forward to seeing what freelance pitches people bring to us as well.
Heather: I think that really we’ve just scratched the surface of how we can engage with our audience and how our audience can engage with us.
And I think we’ve built a lot of trust. You know, one of the things that I love about working here is the constant reminder to center patient voices. And I’m excited to figure out, you know, more ways to do that.
And I’m excited to help our readers figure out how to reach — you know, in some ways, they’re kind of a conduit to people that we can’t reach.
And I want to figure out how to equip them to reach people as well, that they want to talk to that we can’t talk to.
I just, I feel like we’re just at the very beginning.
And I’m so grateful to everyone who has, just to help us get this far.
Betsy: I should say too, like with our fundraiser, one of the big goals that we mentioned earlier is just like for everybody to be able to work more on The Sick Times.
This is not our full time, believe it or not, this is not our full time jobs yet.
Like all of us still have to do other work, Miles and I in particular, like, we still are doing other work to pay the bills.
And so the fundraising goal that we came up with would really help all of us to increase our hours and, you know, double down on every, not only double down on everything we’re doing, but also work more on making this a more sustainable publication in the long term.
Folks may remember that we got a significant grant in the spring of 2024, and that is budgeted out to essentially last us through next fall.
So we have that until that time to figure out more of, like other grants, sponsorships, events, maybe just other ways of like becoming a more sustainable newsroom. You, the listener can really help us get there.
James: Yeah, I mean, that’s a huge thing that we can look for on the horizon, hopefully.
And I really, you know, I’m really hopeful that we can continue to do more special episodes, especially things like bringing in you, as the listeners, voices into call-in episodes and to potentially collaborate with other similar podcasts like “Death Panel” or the upcoming “Public Health is Dead.”
And yeah, I mean, there’s just so many various ways that our work can grow in the coming year and coming years, hopefully. And yeah, we really appreciate any and all support that you might be able to give, whether that be, you know, through sharing our fundraiser, or sharing our work, or through supporting us through donating to our fundraiser.
But yeah, if you wanna send us a birthday gift, you can find the link to support us through a donation via our website and in the podcast description.
And as always, you can share this episode and The Sick Times’ website and work with a friend or on social media, just to show your appreciation because we appreciate you for being here.
Thanks for joining us, Heather.
Heather: It’s always good to hang out with you guys.
James: Glad to have you here.
Outro (28:54)
James: Yeah, that’s it for this week. You can stay up to date with our newsletter and coverage at thesicktimes.org.
[Instrumental theme song excerpt plays underneath the rest of the podcast]
Miles: We’ll continue reporting the information that you need to better practice care.
Betsy: Solidarity with everyone still here.
James: This podcast and The Sick Times are supported by you. You can help us keep this work going and celebrate our birthday by donating on our website.
Still here is a production of The Sick Times, a nonprofit newsroom chronicling the ongoing Long COVID crisis.
Our theme song for this episode is the Rude Mechanical Orchestra’s rendition of “Which Side Are You On?”, originally by Florence Reese.
I’m James Salanga and I produced this episode. Our engagement editor is Heather Hogan, Sophie Dimitriou designed our podcast cover art, Miles Griffis and Betsy Ladyzhets are your co-hosts and The Sick Times’ co-founders.
Thanks for listening.
[Sound of party horn]
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