
Recent policy changes around COVID-19 vaccines are already sowing chaos and confusion and restricting vaccine access — including for people who should still be eligible to receive them.

Advocates pushed back against threatened funding cuts and won continued support for Long COVID work in the Minnesota legislature’s final 2026–27 budget.

Long COVID was at the top of legislators’ priority list during today’s Senate Health, Education, Labor, and Pensions (HELP) Committee hearing with Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. Senator Bill Cassidy (R-L.A.), who chairs the HELP Committee, asked about federal health agencies’ commitment to addressing Long COVID in his first question to the Secretary.

Myalgic encephalomyelitis (ME), Long COVID, and other chronic disease advocates demonstrated outside the Capitol Building in Washington, D.C., this afternoon. Organized by the advocacy group #MEAction, demonstrators demanded that the federal government fund ME research and preserve vital social support systems like Medicaid and telemedicine.

Cuts could end Long COVID research, communications, and grants in Minnesota, which has been a leader in state-level public health responses to the crisis.

Long COVID research and communications projects in several states may be forced to shut down or curtail their efforts due to recent Trump administration cuts to public health funding. In these cuts, announced in late March, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) abruptly canceled $11 billion in grants for COVID-19 and public health…

When H5N1 first landed in North America, borne on the wings of migratory birds blown off course from Europe in late 2021, Seema Lakdawala followed the developments closely, but she wasn’t overly worried about it leading to a pandemic in humans yet. There were still a few steps the highly pathogenic avian influenza needed to…

Long COVID research grants from the National Institutes of Health’s RECOVER program will be restored following news stories about their abrupt cancellations and advocacy to restore the funding, according to patient representatives in the initiative.

Some grants for Long COVID pathobiology research in the National Institutes of Health’s RECOVER program are among those rescinded by the federal government this week under a new order to cut all funding for COVID-related research. Up to 45 grants awarded in 2022 and 2023 may have been revoked, as well as more recent grants…

The Trump administration is set to dismantle the federal government’s Office of Long COVID Research and Practice (OLC) this week as part of a larger restructuring of health agencies, sources have told The Sick Times. This news, also reported by POLITICO and the Substack Inside Medicine, represents another blow among several moves this administration has…
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