I'm afraid all my funding analyses are way out of date. But I'm pretty sure that my comment about the total spent on biomedical research into ME over the last 40 years is still around one week's current funding into HIV/AIDS. It might now be safer to say two weeks' funding. That's a calculation that needs a lot of estimation, but the NIH investment alone into HIV/AIDS comes out at around $58 milion per week (actual spending 2018). Given that the spending up to 2011 into biomedical research runs at just a handful of millions, all the recent activity still doesn't make much of a dent into it.
Mind you, if you add on Big Pharma spending on HIV (unknown, but large) and on ME (unknown, but probably zero), it would probably work out at much less than a week's money.
It wouldn't be too much trouble to look at NIH spending and compare amounts allocated to various chronic conditions, similar to my bubbles video (
https://report.nih.gov/categorical_spending.aspx): in the UK it is much harder to get an analysis of spending by category – the MRC do not believe in producing that sort of analysis.
Overall, the UK's economy is about one-sixth of that of the US, but we spend less in proportion on medical research in terms of government grants, but contribute more in proportion through money collected through charities. In the UK the two main government funded sources are the MRC and NIHR (the research wing of the NHS), each spending broadly the same amount of money. It's only very recently that NIHR has invested in research into ME, and, from memory, that has been psych stuff.
There are two very big charitable foundations that often fund medical research. In the UK it is the Wellcome Trust and in America it is Bill Gates' charity. They are broadly equal in size. I don't think Bill Gates has funded research into ME, and until recently neither had the Wellcome Trust.
