Two steps forward, one step back. For #LongCOVID awareness day today I had the honor of joining thousands of other New Yorkers in a peaceful protest to stand against many of the current administration’s recent damaging and thoughtless policies and executive orders. Let there 1/

be no misunderstandings here: many of the executive orders and policies being proposed and passed into law will erase entire populations of historically and currently excluded communities. Under the facile goal of “improving efficiency”, decisions are being made that not only 2/

harm the vulnerable, but weaken a nation by taking away its true strengths: diversity, morality and innovation. Today of all days, my ask of the complex chronic illness community to take heart: if it is the wish of this administration to start a constitutional street-fight, 3/

then perhaps they’re about to learn that people who have earned their seat at the table can fight that much smarter and that much harder than privileged trust fund babies who have been handed their seat at the table just like everything else in life. So, we fight, we sue, we 4/

protest and we remind these wannabe autocrats that this is a nation of laws and democratic process. In the meantime, on the clinical and scientific side of #LongCOVID and complex chronic illness, we keep learning new tricks and running new trials: immunomodulation drugs, combo 5/

antivirals and monoclonals are all on the agenda for the next few years and we are intent on funding these initiatives almost exclusively on non-federal funding so that the work will not be slowed or stalled by anything that this administration, or any other, chooses to do. So 6/

I’ll end with a message of hope: we are learning every day. Progress is slow and difficult, but what I see in the trenches is that my teams (and other teams around the world) are slowly learning how to help individual patients one breakthrough at a time. We will be here for as 7/