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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)

4) If we multiply by the prevalence, we get the 'years lived with disability (YLDs)' per 100,000 U.S. adults. For Long Covid, this figure was 319, similar to asthma. For ME/CFS, it was 598.

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...

8 ) For issues with the NHIS data, see this discussion on the S4ME forum: www.s4me.info/thread... But even if ME/CFS disability or prevalence was overestimated, the difference was so enormous that it's clear it's getting way too little funding.

9) A bigger issue is that this study didn't include mortality estimates in estimating proportional funding. As a result, it undervalues diseases with a low life expectancy. Normally, studies estimate DALY = “years lived with disability” (YLD) + “years of life lost” (YLL).