So good to see this important issue covered in TIME. Excellent advocacy once again from Wilhelmina Jenkins!
TIME:
Black Women Fighting For Recognition as Long COVID Patients
Quotes:
It took five years of chronic pain, nausea, fuzzy thoughts and a cruel mixture of fatigue and insomnia for Wilhelmina Jenkins to be diagnosed with myalgic encephalomyelitis/chronic fatigue syndrome (ME/CFS). But even after she received that diagnosis, in 1988, she faced her fair share of doubters—not because her symptoms didn’t meet the bar for diagnosis, but because she is Black.
At that time, researchers mistakenly thought ME/CFS, a syndrome that sometimes follows a viral illness and leads to long-term pain, fatigue and other symptoms that can last decades, primarily affected upper-class white women. It was pejoratively
labeled “yuppie flu,” and many doctors believed it to be psychosomatic.
....
When COVID-19 hit last year, and case clusters began popping up
in Black communities, Jenkins, now 71, braced herself for another fight. She knew that, since ME/CFS can follow viral illnesses, COVID-19 could be a mass trigger. She also knew that, particularly in communities of color, many patients would have no idea why they weren’t getting better after a couple weeks. “I knew they were not going to be reached,” she says.
She ended up being right on both counts.