NIH's proposal for long COVID exercise trials sparks concern.
Patient advocates are urging the US National Institutes of Health (NIH) to reconsider its decision to include exercise trials in its RECOVER initiative, which aims to study and find treatments for long COVID. Advocates argue that a large proportion of people with long COVID have reported experiencing post-exertional malaise (PEM) and worry that putting certain RECOVER participants through exercise trials could cause them harm. The NIH has stated that the exercise trial would use “inclusion and exclusion criteria to make sure that people who could be harmed by exercise will not be included in that platform trial”.