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.”
It was a stunning act of institutional abandonment. But it was not a surprising one.
Long Covid’s erasure from federal policy was meticulously planned. On Jan. 20, 2025, President Trump’s second Inauguration Day, long Covid data disappeared from federal websites. Within six days of confirming his Department of Health and Human Services secretary, an executive order disbanded the federal advisory committee on long Covid before it had held a single meeting. The Office of Long Covid Research and Practice was closed, too.
