1. Maybe actually read my comment, where I acknowledge that post-covid sequelae are absolutely a thing. I myself experienced long-term sense of smell screwups.
2. Psychological components of an illness are still an illness, and I'm not suggesting that long covid is a "fabrication." You need to get over your internalized stigma, psychological effects can be incredibly powerful.
People experiencing CFS get similarly outraged when people suggest there is a psychological component to the disease. This is due to stigma. Indeed, if anything, CFS is good evidence of the strong impact that even a (probably) psychologically derived illness can have on one's physical well-being.
3. Even saying that something is at least partially driven by the media does not mean it is not a "serious" problem. Media coverage of high profile suicides leads to a measurable increase in the number of suicides in the general population. Those people killing themselves is not a "fabrication" and is in fact a really serious problem. i would be surprised if we hadn't seen something like cfs for covid emerge given the level of scary (to be clear, not irrationally scary, justifiably scary) media coverage around covid.
> This is due to stigma. Indeed, if anything, CFS is good evidence of the strong impact that even a (probably) psychologically derived illness can have on one's physical well-being.
AFAIK there is no strong consensus that (even covid-unrelated) CFS is probably psychosomatic in constrast to, say, immunologic.
It's hard to get a "strong consensus" on a negative. I think the general belief is that the weight of evidence is towards most of these cases being psychosomatically driven, as well as some poorly understood post-viral sequelae.
Perhaps it doesn't matter that much at all, the treatment for either is the same. Indeed, if you tell people with CFS that they instead have post-viral sequelae, their outcomes are significantly better.
Basically, the current status is no mechanism has been identified to cause CFS, there is a huge diversity of symptoms and demographics of who gets CFS, and there is substantial circumstantial evidence suggesting large psychological components (differences in effectiveness based on what you call the disease, larger correlation between self-reported illness vs. serological results, etc.) that all come together to form a broader whole. PACE is largely accepted in the medical research community, it has only been "debunked" in the blogosphere and news articles.
2. Psychological components of an illness are still an illness, and I'm not suggesting that long covid is a "fabrication." You need to get over your internalized stigma, psychological effects can be incredibly powerful.
People experiencing CFS get similarly outraged when people suggest there is a psychological component to the disease. This is due to stigma. Indeed, if anything, CFS is good evidence of the strong impact that even a (probably) psychologically derived illness can have on one's physical well-being.
3. Even saying that something is at least partially driven by the media does not mean it is not a "serious" problem. Media coverage of high profile suicides leads to a measurable increase in the number of suicides in the general population. Those people killing themselves is not a "fabrication" and is in fact a really serious problem. i would be surprised if we hadn't seen something like cfs for covid emerge given the level of scary (to be clear, not irrationally scary, justifiably scary) media coverage around covid.