Recently, the BBC interviewed former NIAID director Tony Fauci about the prospects for COVID this fall and winter, and Fauci uttered:

Even though you’ll find the vulnerable will will fall by the wayside, they’ll get infected, they’ll get hospitalized, and some will die. It’s not going to be this tsunami of cases that we’ve seen.

While the vile disregard for the welfare of the “vulnerable” caught people’s attention, what noticeable is the absence of any statement about long COVID. I have been writing since May 2020 that, for most people, their primary concern should be long COVID. The good news is that vaccination dramatically lowers the odds of that outcome, but the bad news is that it still occurs at a non-trivial level, somewhere between one to five percent. And so there’s no confusion, that range is for debilitating long COVID which can last for months or be permanent, which I define an inability to work full time or at all: the likelihood of ‘annoying’ crap you just have to deal with is higher.

But legacy media outlets–or any outlets for that matter–simply refuse* to ask policy makers et alia for specific numbers for the likelihood of contracting long COVID, even if you’ve been vaccinated, something that isn’t done for other policy areas. Because it’s not just medically vulnerable people who should be concerned about COVID.

*There have been many stories about long COVID, but none interrogating policy makers. At this point, it has to be considered willful ignorance by much of the press corps, not an oversight.

Someday, this question will be asked, just apparently, not by the BBC.