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1) A new study estimated the disability and prevalence of Long Covid and compared it to NIH research funding. Long Covid should receive $740 million per year, but it only gets 14%-50% of that amount, depending on how you count. ME/CFS only gets 1% of its proportional funding...

2) The authors used Long COVID prevalence from Census Bureau surveys (9/2022-8/2023) and disability weights from the Global Burden of Disease Study. The NIH matched its funding to these categories using the Research, Condition, and Disease Categorization (RCDC).

3) For Long Covid, the disability weight was 0.21 (0 equals full health, 1 equals death). It's equivalent to that of traumatic brain injury (0.21) and complete hearing loss (0.22), but less than moderate rheumatoid arthritis (0.34), migraine (0.44), and ME/CFS (0.46)

5) RCDC funding listed for Long Covid is $106.3 million, but that doesn't include RECOVER's $1.15 billion. So the authors used a second ('holistic') estimate that added $287.5 ($1.15 billion/4 years). But even this holistic estimate is only half of YLD-commensurate funding.

6) ME/CFS got only $13 million in NIH funding, while its YLD-Commensurate share would be more than a billion ($1382 million). So it got only 1%. There's, however, a big caveat about these ME/CFS numbers...

7) First, its disability weight didn't come from the GBD study like others, but from older, less reliable studies. Second, the ME/CFS prevalence estimate was high (1.3%) and came from the problematic National Health Interview Survey (NHIS), which is based on self-report.