Opinion: Bernie Sanders: America Must Confront Its Long COVID Crisis

As the chairman of the Senate Health, Education, Labor and Pensions Committee (HELP Committee), I have heard from Americans of all ages about their struggles with Long COVID and the challenges they face are absolutely heartbreaking.

In America today, far too many patients suffering from Long COVID have struggled to get their symptoms taken seriously. Far too many doctors and medical professionals have either dismissed or misdiagnosed those who have contracted Long COVID . Far too many people with Long COVID have found themselves stuck at home, unable to socialize, unable to work, unable to spend quality time with their families, unable to get out of bed and desperate for help.

That is unacceptable and that has got to change.

Long COVID is real. It is negatively impacting tens of millions of people throughout the United States and the world. We can no longer ignore it or sweep it under the rug.

Earlier this year, I chaired a hearing on the Long COVID crisis. It made me more determined than ever to address this ongoing public health emergency. This is what we heard:

A former athlete from Los Angeles told us that her chronic Long COVID symptoms of insomnia, brain fog, confusion, sleep apnea, heart palpitations, fever and severe migraines prevent her from socializing with friends and leaving her house on most days. Adding insult to injury, her initial symptoms of blood clots, mini strokes, brain swelling, seizures, severe shortness of breath, and numbness in her face, hands, and legs were brushed off by her doctors as just a case of anxiety.

A human resources director at a community college in Southeastern Virginia told us that Long COVID forced her to leave the job she loved three years ago and that she continues to experience extreme fatigue, chronic pain, headaches, and dizziness. These debilitating symptoms have made it difficult for her to just get out of bed and she is no longer able to lead an active life with her children.

A mother in rural Virginia told us that before her 16-year old daughter came down with Long COVID she received straight A’s and was an active member of the school’s marching band. Today, she struggles with extreme fatigue, low blood pressure, an increased heart rate, severe joint pain, nausea, vomiting, a severe inability to concentrate, and depression. Her daughter is now isolated, struggles to do her schoolwork and is slowly working on her GED from home.

Sadly, they are not alone. In America today, nearly 18 million adults suffer from Long COVID. And, despite what you may have heard, Long COVID does not just impact adults and the elderly. It impacts people from all ages and all backgrounds. In fact, nearly 6 million children in our country have been affected by Long COVID.

Further, recent studies have found that only 8 percent of people who have Long COVID have been able to recover from this debilitating disease after 2 years.

What is deeply concerning to me is that Long COVID can affect anyone who has tested positive for COVID—from those who experienced mild symptoms to those who were severely ill. Furthermore, although you may not have Long COVID after your first COVID infection, each reinfection can substantially increase the risk of developing it.

This escalating danger, particularly for those who have suffered repeated infections, poses a severe threat to public health that demands our immediate and focused attention.

Let’s be clear. The impact of long COVID-19 is not just a health issue. It’s an economic one as well. It’s estimated that as many as 4 million Americans are out of work due to long COVID-19. The annual cost of those lost wages alone is about $170 billion a year.

In my view, the time has come to start treating the Long COVID crisis as the public health emergency that it is.

What does that mean?

It means we need to educate medical professionals on how to adequately diagnose Long COVID, better understand the risks associated with it, and identify potential therapeutic options. This crisis is made even worse by the fact that Long COVID patients often require multiple specialists to treat their complex systems.

We need to do a much better job at disease prevention. The best way to avoid getting Long COVID is to prevent people from getting COVID in the first place. That means making sure that people throughout the world get the most up-to-date vaccines. It means wearing masks when appropriate. And it means making rapid tests available to people when they are feeling sick.

Most importantly, we need to do everything we can do to find treatments and cures for Long COVID.

We can no longer tolerate patients trying to address their symptoms without any guidance on effective therapies from our nation’s public health professionals.

That is why I recently introduced the Long COVID Research Moonshot Act of 2024. This legislation provides the world’s largest investment into Long COVID and is critical to support research, expand care, and provide relief to the millions of Americans suffering from it.

It provides $10 billion in federal funding to the National Institutes of Health, the largest funder of biomedical research in the world, to develop treatments for Long COVID and to find potential cures for those who suffer from it.

Importantly, this bill will give patients, researchers, and advocates a seat at the table to determine how these funds are spent.

It will require data on Long COVID research to be broadly shared with other researchers so that potential treatments and cures may be found as quickly as possible.

And, among many other things, it will make sure that once treatments are approved by the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) they are reasonably priced so that every patient can afford to take them.

The fight against Long COVID is not just a medical challenge. It is a moral one. While we have learned much about this disease and its aftermath, the truth is there’s still a great deal we don’t know about Long COVID.

But here’s something we do know: We can no longer turn our backs on the tens of millions of people in America and throughout the world who continue to struggle with Long COVID or the millions more who may contract it in the future.

Long COVID is a very serious illness that has devastating consequences for those who contract it.

Yes. The time has come for a Long COVID Moonshot.

Read more at The Daily Beast.