Can antiviral drugs prevent long COVID?
Experts explain what we know about preventing and treating long COVID, at this point.
Dr. Al-Aly a physician-scientist; he directs the Clinical Epidemiology Center and serves as the Chief of Research and Development Service at the VA Saint Louis Health Care System. He is a senior clinical epidemiologist at Washington University in Saint Louis. He has several research interests including pharmacoepidemiology, environmental epidemiology, global health, and most recently short- and long-term effects of COVID-19 on health outcomes. He led work which provided systematic characterization of the post-acute sequelae of SARS-CoV-2 infection (also called Long Covid) and subsequently characterization of the increased risks of cardiovascular disease, neurologic disorders, diabetes, dyslipidemia, kidney disease, and gastrointestinal disorders following SARS-CoV-2 infection. His laboratory was the first to produce evidence characterizing the effects of vaccines on Long Covid, the health consequences of repeated infections with SARS-CoV-2, and the effect of antivirals on the short- and long-term outcomes of SARS-CoV-2 infection. Dr. Al-Aly co-chaired the U.S. Biden-Harris Administration committee that developed the National Research Action Plan for Long Covid. He serves on the US Government Interagency Long Covid Coordination Council. He advised the Chief Science Advisor of Canada (Mona Nemer – Government of Justin Trudeau) on Long Covid strategy. He currently serves on a consensus committee at the U.S. National Academy of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine looking at the long-term health effects stemming from COVID-19 and their implications for the U.S. Social Security Administration. He is also a member of the White House Cancer Moonshot Task Force for data and innovation. Dr. Al-Aly's work is published in prestigious medical journals including Nature, Nature Medicine, the New England Journal of Medicine, the British Medical Journal, the Journal of the American Medical Association, the Lancet and several others. According to Google Scholar, his work has been cited more than 100,000 times. His work is frequently featured in major national and international media outlets including New York Times, Wall Street Journal, Washington Post, LA Times, NPR, BBC, CNN, the Guardian, Bloomberg, The New Yorker, the Atlantic, Rolling Stones, Scientific American, Science Magazine, Nature Magazine, and several others. Several of his studies on Long COVID have generated exceptionally high public and media engagement, ranking in the top 10 of more than 23 million research papers ever tracked by Altmetric, a firm that monitors public engagement in academic research. Dr. Al-Aly serves on multiple national and international committees and boards, and on multiple editorial boards and serves as Associate Editor of the Journal of the American Society of Nephrology — the flagship journal of the American Society of Nephrology.
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