It Appears My Initial Skepticism of "Long COVID" May Have Been Well-Founded

I don't recall if I've opined on the matter in writing before, but I certainly have in personal discussions: 

Ever since the term "Long COVID" started showing up on my radar, I've been skeptical. Not entirely dismissive -- I have no particular reason to believe that there aren't or can't be long-term effects associated with the virus -- but doubtful as to definition.

So far, "Long COVID" strikes me as a grab-bag of symptoms, any or all of which may be related to a prior COVID-19 infection, but many of which may not be, rather than an identifiable syndrome defined on the basis of hard data and well-explained causality. It's early days, of course, but there seems to be a lot of post hoc ergo propter hoc in play at the moment.

Disclosure of priors: I've had occasion to wonder about this thing before. Specifically, "Gulf War Syndrome." I've had symptoms myself that I attribute to likely sarin exposure (from an incident the US Department of Defense insists wasn't a chemical attack despite chemical monitor sensors being set off -- I slept through the whole thing), but when I read that "Approximately 250,000 of the 697,000 U.S. veterans who served in the 1991 Gulf War are afflicted with enduring chronic multi-symptom illness," with "a wide range of acute and chronic symptoms," I have to think that there are probably lots of different involved and that not all of them are necessarily causally linked to the war itself at all, let alone to any specific piece of the war.

So anyway ...

As Phillip W. Magness notes at the American Institute for Economic Research, it appears that the initiators and popularizers of the "Long COVID" idea, although praised by National Institutes of Health director Francis Collins as "citizen scientists," were actually "an odd assortment of psychic healers, magic crystal gurus, and alternative medicine activists" which "frequently relied on self-reported descriptions of Long Covid symptoms, instead of independent medical verification [and] had a habit of diagnosing people with Long Covid even after they tested negative for Covid-19 itself."

I'm not opposed to researching the possible long-term effects of COVID-19. But it should be real research that starts from hard facts, not from throwing every bad thing into one basket and attributing it to one cause.