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Opinion: How long Covid’s scientific stalemate made it politically erasable
Mitchell Miglis had two months left. The Stanford University neurology professor had spent two years studying what long Covid does to the human nervous system — why patients’ hearts race when they stand, why their blood pressure collapses, why their bodies lose the ability to regulate themselves. His National Institutes of Health RECOVER grant was weeks from completion, data collected, analysis underway.
On March 25, 2025, a termination notice arrived. The grant was “incompatible with agency priorities.” No modification could bring it into alignment. “This is not only disappointing and demoralizing from a scientific perspective,” Miglis wrote in the Sick Times, a publication about long Covid, “but in a broader sense, as a clinician who sees these patients every day, a much larger disappointment to the patient community.”
Mitchell Miglis had two months left. The Stanford University neurology professor had spent two years studying what long Covid does to the human nervous system — why patients’ hearts race when they stand, why their blood pressure collapses, why their bodies lose the ability to regulate themselves. His National Institutes of Health RECOVER grant was weeks from completion, data collected, analysis underway.
On March 25, 2025, a termination notice arrived. The grant was “incompatible with agency priorities.” No modification could bring it into alignment. “This is not only disappointing and demoralizing from a scientific perspective,” Miglis wrote in the Sick Times, a publication about long Covid, “but in a broader sense, as a clinician who sees these patients every day, a much larger disappointment to the patient community.”