Senator Marshall Discusses Severity of Long COVID at HELP Committee Hearing

Washington, D.C. – U.S. Senator Roger Marshall, M.D. discussed the ways his family has been personally impacted by Long COVID at a Senate Health, Education, Labor, and Pensions (HELP) Committee hearing. During the hearing, Senator Marshall sympathized with the witness’s symptoms and pleaded for federal health agencies to focus on diagnostics and treatment for Long COVID rather than doubling down on Covid-19 vaccines and boosters. 

You may click HERE or on the image above to watch Senator Marshall’s full remarks. 

Highlights from Senator Marshall’s remarks include:

On the CDC’s focus on Covid-19 vaccine and boosters rather than investments in Long COVID research and awareness: 

“This is personal for me. One of my loved ones is one of those 16 million people who suffer from Long COVID, incapacitated for some two years. People often ask me, well, what’s Long COVID? And I think that we have some loose definitions, but I tell people, it’s like if you had Mono that never goes away. There’s brain fog, there’s aches and pains, and sometimes the pains follow nerve tracks, the vagus nerve, the femoral nerve, and maybe it’s a venous process, and there’s micro blood clots.”

“I am frustrated that our CDC [and NIH] seems to be more focused on just vaccines than they are treatment for Long COVID. I mean, simple questions still have not been answered.” 

“If you take Paxlovid that early on, even though you’re young and healthy, does that help decrease the incidence of Long COVID? I don’t think we know the answer to that. Do vaccines increase or decrease the incidence of Long COVID? If you’ve already had Covid, does the vaccine increase or decrease your risk of Long COVID? You know, we don’t know the answers. So I couldn’t be more frustrated that it’s vaccines, vaccines, vaccines, rather than focused on diagnosis and treatment.”

On the CCP having the Covid-19 virus sequence leaked weeks before letting the world know: 

“Remember, it only took two days for Moderna to develop a vaccine. If we would have had the vaccine earlier, how many Long COVIDs would we have prevented if we knew that this was person-to-person transmission, which the Chinese certainly did by then, if we would have known this was person-to-person transmission, that this came from a laboratory, that it was a superbug, maybe we could have prevented some of these 16 million people.”

“I guess my question for you all, and I think it goes to the mental health of my patients, my family members, the people I talk to, if we knew where Covid came from, and what are we doing to prevent it?”

Background: 

Senator Marshall has actively worked to address Long COVID. Prior to joining the Senate, he supported the passage of the Consolidated Appropriations Act, 2021 that provided the National Institutes of Health (NIH) nearly $1.2 billion for Long COVID research. It has used the funds for an initiative to conduct clinical trials that identify risk factors and causes. This initiative has faced scrutiny from both patients and scientists because NIH has not prioritized funding to deliver treatments quickly enough and address the underlying causes of Long COVID.

In addition, Senator Marshall had seven bipartisan bills signed into law as part of the PREVENT Pandemics Act, comprehensive legislation that applies lessons learned from the COVID-19 pandemic. More recently, he supported the Committee’s passage of the reauthorization of the Pandemic and All-Hazards Preparedness Act which requires federal health agencies to coordinate on all federal activities to address Long COVID.