Alan Levinovitz

There was a 2026 study in Cell that came out from a sort of prominent long COVID immunologist named Akiko Iwasaki.

She's at Yale.

And people were tweeting this at me, sending it to me.

And they're like, oh, you say long COVID is fake.

You say we don't know the mechanism.

What about this study?

So I'm looking at the study.

And what Iwasaki said, it's an interesting study.

They took antibodies that are statistically significantly more elevated in people with long COVID, although it's not clear exactly how much and certainly nothing like you would see in like an MS cohort.

But these antibodies are slightly elevated.

and they injected them into mice, and they seemed to see similar symptoms in the mice as to what you see in long COVID, and another group replicated.

For people who really want to prove that COVID is real, and by real they mean the symptoms are caused entirely by elevated autoantibodies, which in turn are caused entirely by the COVID infection,

This study looked like proof, but for any professional immunologist, this study looks like exactly what it is, a very preliminary hypothesis-generating study that has some promise, but there's all sorts of confounders, all sorts of variables that weren't controlled for.

It doesn't matter to people.

That's the same as these studies about strawberries, right?

They're good.

They're important in certain ways.

We need to be doing research on all kinds of stuff, but they don't prove anything.

And yet every time a study comes out, you know how it is.

You drop the abstract in, you drop the link in, you're like...