There's been great attention in the US to funding for Long Covid research, and a campaign to fund a $1bn "Long Covid Moonshot". We calculate the US has already spent over $4 per capita on research.
But we fear that other wealthy nations are not matching this effort.
So we started by researching where philanthropic funding for Long Covid has gone in the UK in the past couple of years. Open data from 360 Giving for about £20m of this funding suggests it peaked in 2021, and has been plummeting ever since. Also, there are real gaps in funding for awareness and prevention work. Nothing against wellness, nature, and breathwork, but we need to stop the spread of the virus and biomedical research into therapeutics.
Further analysis of the UK's National Institutes for Health Research funding, £48m since 2020, reveals that it too is dropping off since 2022. And the government keeps citing this funding over and over again when asked what it is doing right now to research Long Covid.
Data from European members and the EU is even less encouraging.
We discovered there is also an interesting global dataset of Covid research funding (archived as of 2023) that has numerous projects tagged "Long Covid", that we're working on coding and preparing for visualisation.
We're working on creating a data visualisation app where users can explore UK and global data.