Following Recover’s February 2021 debut, the National Institutes of Health held a call out for research proposals. However, it took until early June 2021 for the first awards and September for NYU Langone Health to be in charge of the $470 million study, which is about 40 percent of Recover’s funding for longer COVID research.
The study called for observing about 40,000 people in different groups without intervention. As of August 23, it has enrolled only 7,600 adults out of a target of 17,680, and about 624 children out of a target of 19,500. (Here’s the place to sign up.)
One of Recover’s chairs, the director of the NIH’s National Heart, Lung and Blood Institute, Gary H. Gibbons told me that this is fast by historical standards – but we are racing against the pandemic, not history.
As with the rest of our pandemic response, the fragmented nature of our health care system has been a problem. Recover has started recruiting from over 200 sites which, surprisingly, is cumbersome.
Furthermore, while the study was trying to move forward, the Omicron wave may have infected at least 60 percent of the country’s population with the COVID-19. Of the 2,680 targets in the RECOVER study, only 940 are uninfected recruits. Such scarcity makes it difficult to maintain control groups of sufficient size.
Stuart Katz, a New York University cardiologist and principal investigator of the RECOVER study, told me in mid-June that the study was trying to modify protocols in response to the Omicron wave, specifically to recruit infected people more than once. However, he said, such updates require approval by the Recover Steering Committee, the NIH Executive Committee, and the NIH Observational Data Safety Monitoring Committee. As of mid-August, the protocol update was not implemented.
(This story has not been edited by seemayo staff and is published from a rss feed)