“Do you classify Long Covid as a neurological condition, for everyone, regardless of their symptomatology?”

“Absolutely yes, I think a major component of Long Covid is neurological, and by neurological I don’t mean only central neurological, peripheral neurological….”

“I estimated those costs all together… for the US would be about $3.5 trillion dollars which is a huge amount of money, which just tells you kind of the scale of the number of people who have Long Covid, and how disabling it can be both in terms of their health and in terms of their incomes, their ability to work, and how much medical spending is involved.”

“So here comes the immune system. What are we doing for it? Well, it's inflammatory. It's over activated. And it's basically in hyperdrive. One of the 10 commandments of immunology is the immune system is antigen driven. It doesn't just turn on because it wants to turn on, it is turned on because something pushed the ‘on’ button.”

“You have this chronic central nervous system influence on the body, such that there's inadequate return of blood to the brain… but the problem is not with the not with the veins, the problem is not with the blood return, the problem is not even with the nerves… The problem is with the central command system… so in this model, the idea would be that Covid is the trauma and that's it's turned on this switch, and Long Covid is the failure to turn off the switch.”

“The number one symptom that people present with when they've got Long Covid or pernicious anaemia or iron deficiency is fatigue. So that is across the board in all three conditions. And then the second most common symptom is shortness of breath, palpitations, dizziness, fainting, difficulty sleeping, brain fog, pins and needles joint pain, depression and anxiety…”

“They found that the strongest signal was coming from serotonin. Peripheral serotonin levels were very similar between those who are acutely active with Covid and those who had Long Covid and much lower than those who had recovered from Covid and did not have persistent symptoms.”

“60 to 70% of the Long Covid patients with that specific people phenotype - that type of pattern of symptoms - got quantifiable, abnormal pain PET scans, which puts the problem, I think, really in the brain.”

“We're going to look at our antibody spectrum to do a diagnostic accuracy study. What I expect to find is there'll be groups of patients where some of them have holes around the onset of the of the Long Covid symptoms. “

“When we talk about Long Covid on planet Earth, I think the lower estimates are about 60 million and the upper estimates are at 400 million globally. It's not a disease of the wealthy worried well in the UK or the US or whatever, it's a disease of six to 10% of everybody on planet earth has ever had COVID-19, no matter where they are. So if the stakes are that high, why on earth can't we regain some of that battle spirit and momentum? I think it does come into kind of policy and politics.”