Mission statement
The Sick Times is a journalist-founded website chronicling the Long Covid crisis.
We report on the common, life-changing disease following Covid-19 infection that affects over 65 million people worldwide and can be fatal. Our coverage spans related infection-associated chronic conditions such as myalgic encephalomyelitis, dysautonomia, mast cell activation syndrome, and more. Unlike many outlets, we continue to report on the impact of the ongoing Covid-19 pandemic. No denial, minimizing, or gaslighting here.
Join us as we investigate injustices, challenge powerful institutions, wade through the latest research, assess Covid-19 data, and offer a platform for those most affected by the crisis.
This page also introduces our editors and advisory board. For details on our finances and editorial policies, see our Transparency & policies page.
Editors/co-founders
Betsy Ladyzhets is an independent science, health, and data journalist and writer focused on Covid-19 and the future of public health. Prior to The Sick Times, she ran the COVID-19 Data Dispatch, a newsletter and blog that provided news, resources, and original reporting on Covid-19 data — and outlasted the CDC’s own Covid-19 data newsletter. She was recently a journalism fellow at MuckRock, where she contributed to award-winning and impactful Covid-19 investigations such as the Uncounted project, investigations into the National Institutes of Health’s RECOVER program, and stories covering public health responses in several states. Early in the pandemic, she served as a volunteer Shift Lead for the COVID Tracking Project at The Atlantic.
Contact: betsy@thesicktimes.org, @betsyladyzhets on Twitter/Bluesky.
Miles Griffis is an independent journalist and writer who covers Long Covid, science, and LGBTQ+ issues. He developed Long Covid at the beginning of the Covid-19 pandemic and has used his lived experience to report on the disease for a variety of publications. He’s written about how Long Covid affects wildland firefighters, the shortcomings of Long Covid Clinics, and the forgotten “magna carta” of HIV/AIDS activism.
Contact: miles@thesicktimes.org, @mileswgriffis on Twitter/Bluesky.
Advisory board
Dr. Monica Verduzco-Gutierrez is an accomplished academic Physiatrist and Professor and Distinguished Chair of the Department of Rehabilitation Medicine at the Long School of Medicine at the University of Texas Health Science Center at San Antonio. She is also the Medical Director of Critical Illness Recovery and Neuro Rehabilitation at Warm Springs Rehabilitation Hospitals in San Antonio. Her area of clinical expertise is the care of patients with traumatic brain injury, stroke rehabilitation, interventional spasticity management, and Long Covid. She has over 100 publications in these areas, as well as topics related to health equity and inclusion. She is also a sub-investigator in the NIH RECOVER trial through her institution and has a grant through AHRQ to expand multi-disciplinary Long Covid care.
Julia Moore Vogel, PhD is a Contributor at the Patient Led Research Collaborative and a Senior Program Director at Scripps Research. She is using her over three years of lived experience with Long COVID and Myalgic Encephalomyelitis to conduct research that aims to ease Long COVID and other infection-associated chronic illness symptoms through efforts such as the Long COVID Wearable Study. She is also the co-Principal Investigator for The Participant Center of the All of Us Research Program, overseeing efforts to accelerate medical breakthroughs through an inclusive health research program, and the ImmunoCARE Study, which aims to improve COVID-19 outcomes for immunocompromised individuals. She previously managed genomics initiatives at the New York Genome Center and The Rockefeller University. She has a PhD in Computational Biology and Medicine and an MBA both from Cornell.
Julie Rehmeyer is an award-winning science and mathematics journalist and the author of Through the Shadowlands: A Science Writer’s Odyssey into an Illness Science Doesn’t Understand. She has written for the New York Times, Washington Post, Discover Magazine, Science News, Wired, STAT News, and many other publications.
Ed Yong is a science journalist, and the author of two bestselling books, An Immense World and I Contain Multitudes. For his coverage of the COVID-19 pandemic, he won the Pulitzer prize in explanatory reporting among other honors. He has written repeatedly about Long Covid and its related illnesses.
Gratitude
Many thanks to the non-profit collaborative news site, MuckRock, for taking us on as our fiscal sponsor. We’re also grateful to our incredible graphic designer, Sophie Dimitriou, for our sick logo and Caladrius mascot, which represents a mythical healing bird throughout history.
Lastly, we’re indebted to everyone — people with Long Covid, physicians, advocates, researchers, public health experts, and fellow journalists — who helped us shape the concept for our project with their advice and lived experience.