RFK Jr. hosts roundtable on long COVID (Sep 18, 2025) Video

[Michael Harrop]

https://www.hhs.gov/press-room/hhs-secretary-kennedy-long-covid-roundtables-action.html


View: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NzGbNCAzkcI

This video makes this administration seem like a big fucking scam. All the big players in this video know about the gut microbiome and FMT, including Senator Roger Marshall, M.D., who says he has a loved one suffering from the condition. Yet not a single mention of it. No one on the panel said anything remotely promising.

They've all been given this information that shows the gut microbiome playing a central role in long COVID, and FMT being an existing treatment: https://forum.humanmicrobiome.info/threads/the-gut-microbiome-covid-19-and-long-covid-collection-of-studies.348/

At 44:20 Dr. Jay Bhattacharya lists the trials NIH is going to do for this. This is incredibly maddening. He lists pharma drugs that are in no way a cure. Like the vast majority of pharma drugs, they may mildly reduce some of the symptoms for a small to medium percentage of people.

This blatant handout to the pharma industry, and the continued ignoring of an existing non-pharma treatment, is everything RFK railed against. This is the strongest piece of evidence to date that RFK is lying.

Apparently, they're all willing to sacrifice their own loved ones to their pharmaceutical company overlords. It's disgusting.

They have some significant audio & video problems.

This is part 2, which starts around 30:30:


View: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tmDhCxy6YnM

This is so obviously 100% corrupted by the pharma industry. They clearly have zero interest in actually finding and making available a cure. One big fucking scam that the news media is refusing to cover.

 

[SFBayFMT5]

Is there any long COVID patient group where people have discussed success with FMT? Dr. Bhattacharya mentions several times that the NIH took hints on what to try from anecdotal stories in patient groups, so if there was a group where people were saying they improved from FMT, then they might take notice.

A patient without long COVID who merely hypothesizes that it could work for that condition, by extrapolation of his experience with other illnesses, likely won't get the attention that a consensus of actual COVID patients would. I looked a bit at clinical trials of FMT in long COVID and there's one in Hong Kong that showed a benefit--if I were you I'd put that front and center in the materials you send to these people (rather than links to your own writings). Not that it HAS to be a clinical trial, as shown by their willingness to try other treatments based on patients' experiences alone, but it could certainly help.

 

[Michael Harrop]

Is there any long COVID patient group where people have discussed success with FMT?

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No clue. My experience with patient groups over the past 10 years is that 99.9% of people in them do not care. They are there to complain, not to strive for solutions.

One person on this forum posted in a bunch of reddit groups and the posts got thousands of votes, comments, and views and no one did anything. No one else on this forum has tried anything similar.

likely won't get the attention that a consensus of actual COVID patients would

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You should know this is a ridiculous notion. It requires that high-quality donors be widely available for those patients to try, and those patients would need to be well-informed enough on the microbiome to try FMT, then those patients would have to have the motivation to stick around and continually tell their success stories.

None of those things match reality.

There is plenty of actual scientific support, which I linked to, which supercedes anecdotes.

clinical trials of FMT in long COVID and there's one in Hong Kong that showed a benefit

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Why didn't you cite it?

if I were you I'd put that front and center in the materials you send to these people (rather than links to your own writings)

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That's a really dishonest and misleading statement. The link I cited above is very clearly a list of citations, not "my own writings".

 

[SFBayFMT5]

No clue. My experience with patient groups over the past 10 years is that 99.9% of people in them do not care. They are there to complain, not to strive for solutions.

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I have noticed this as well. However, there ARE some among them who are resourceful and creative. I was in a ME/CFS group once where people were discussing ordering chemicals from a research supply company that had been shown in the literature to inhibit pathogens theorized to contribute to the disease yet that were not available for human use yet.

One person on this forum posted in a bunch of reddit groups and the posts got thousands of votes, comments, and views and no one did anything. No one else on this forum has tried anything similar.

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Congratulations to whoever that was.

You should know this is a ridiculous notion. It requires that high-quality donors be widely available for those patients to try, and those patients would need to be well-informed enough on the microbiome to try FMT, then those patients would have to have the motivation to stick around and continually tell their success stories.

None of those things match reality.

There is plenty of actual scientific support, which I linked to, which supercedes anecdotes.

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There is plenty of support that dysbiosis of the microbiome occurs in many conditions, including but not limited to long COVID. This is definitely true. However, there's a significant difference between that and "proof of principle" of an actual intervention, either anecdotally or in clinical trials.

Many of the gut microbiome studies in animals that try interventions end up trying typical lactic acid bacteria probiotics or general prebiotics like dietary fiber, which we all know from personal experience are insufficient at least for "difficult cases", if even helpful rather than harmful. Even when FMT is tried in humans (for non-C. diff conditions), like for example for IBS, studies are far from unanimous. I'm well aware that you blame this inconsistency on inconsistent donor quality--but doctors will just see it as "this disease doesn't respond reliably to FMT". In other words, they see it as ALL FMT being mediocre, as opposed to some FMT being miraculous and some other FMT being useless. That's where a bunch of long COVID patients saying "this turned my life around" could easily help.

Why didn't you cite it?

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Why didn't I cite it where? I haven't talked to anyone about trying FMT in long COVID. But here is the description of the study, which was last updated in 2023:

https://clinicaltrials.gov/study/NCT05556733

This seems to be the results of that trial, given that it recruited in 2023 and was in Hong Kong:
https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/38908733/

They mention specifically sleep disturbances and don't assess other aspects of long COVID, which wasn't apparent from the study description--possibly they emphasized this in the results post hoc because the other results were nonsignificant. However, they clearly say "additional trials are warranted".

That's a really dishonest and misleading statement. The link I cited above is very clearly a list of citations, not "my own writings".

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That link specifically doesn't have anything wrong with it (assuming that the version you sent to Congresspeople didn't have the blurb at the top about how you're sure FMT will be ignored, which I'm gathering you added for the benefit of us here on the forum to have context). However, I have seen previous drafts of letters to politicians with links to pages that had rants about the state of humanity and pictures of unhealthy people that the recipients would have had to scroll past to get to the actual data and/or research proposal.

 

[Michael Harrop]

there ARE some among them who are resourceful and creative. I was in a ME/CFS group

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So are you reaching out to those groups about the current situation?

Why didn't I cite it where?

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In your previous comment.

here is the description of the study

This seems to be the results of that trial

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It's already in the link I shared. So you're telling me to switch to doing what I'm already doing.

However, there's a significant difference between that and "proof of principle" of an actual intervention, either anecdotally or in clinical trials

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This is a deceptive statement. There is plenty of support for FMT as an actual intervention.

but doctors will just see it as "this disease doesn't respond reliably to FMT". In other words, they see it as ALL FMT being mediocre, as opposed to some FMT being miraculous and some other FMT being useless.

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This seems irrelevant and baseless. Donor quality is not a difficult concept.

That's where a bunch of long COVID patients saying "this turned my life around" could easily help.

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So what's your plan to bring that about?