Still Here: A Podcast From The Sick Times

What do you do when your medical providers don’t know about Long COVID and internet personalities promise you they have the cure?
In this episode, Miles Griffis and Betsy Ladyzhets talk to Long COVID physician, patient and advocate Dr. Zeest Khan about her Long COVID journey, how she looks at new research and off-label treatments as a physician, and how to spot misinformation and pseudoscience online.
Subscribe to Still...

Mal was tired of mainstream media misrepresenting COVID-19 and Long COVID, so she picked up a mic and a camera and told the story herself. Thus, Lola Germs was born.

In this episode of Still Here, co-hosts Miles Griffis and Betsy Ladyzhets talk to Lola Germs about her path from online COVID-safer community member to viral science communicator, and the research behind her latest project, “what if everything we thought we kn...

Oonagh Cousins was preselected for the Tokyo Olympics as a professional rower on the British team — until Long COVID derailed everything.
In this episode of Still Here, co-hosts Miles Griffis and Betsy Ladyzhets talk to Cousins about developing severe Long COVID at the start of the pandemic, her years-long attempt to return to elite training, and the relapse that ultimately forced her retirement in 2022. She is one of many...

To wrap up LGBTQ+ Pride Month 2026, The Sick Times hosted Virtual Pride, a COVID-conscious drag show featuring queer and disabled performers in the Long COVID community from across the country, hosted by Sick Times contributor and poet Khalil Dennis.
In this episode of Still Here, we’re sharing the Q&A that followed the show. Performers Taipei, Mondo Millions, King LOTUS BOY, Ginger Ail, and Katie Drackert open up abou...

In June, the Food and Drug Administration approved the drug Xocova (ensitrelvir) as the very first post-exposure prophylaxis for Sars-CoV-2, and if taken within 72 hours, it could stop a SARS-CoV-2 infection in its tracks. The drug is also being studied as a potential Long COVID treatment and even maybe as a preventative. But how accessible will this drug be?
In this episode of Still Here, Betsy Ladyzhets talks to co-host and Si...

As many governments shutter and defund their Long COVID programs, Minnesota is ramping up.

In this episode of Still Here, co-host Betsy Ladyzhets talks to Kate Murray (Minnesota Dept. of Health) and Terri Wilder (#MEAction) about Minnesota’s recently launched Roadmap to address Long COVID and other post-viral conditions, and how their broad coalition led to a human-centric plan forward.

Subscribe to Still Here wherever ...

When you’re sick, eating can be pretty miserable.

In this episode, Miles Griffis talks to writer and artist Aisha Mirza, founder of misery collective and author of misery meals: a crip community anti-cookbook for when eating and cooking is hard. Miles and Aisha discuss the book, how Aisha went from an anti-foodie to a cookbook author, and what it looks like to be in community even from the solitude of your own home.

Sub...

The U.S.'s flagship Long COVID research program has received over a billion dollars in funding and had years of input from people with the disease. But its first round of clinical trials are failing, at least in the results out so far.

In this episode of Still Here, producer Melanie Marich talks to co-host and Sick Times co-founder Betsy Ladyzhets about the initial results from the NIH’s RECOVER trials, and why those results h...

What happens when your body and the climate break down at the same time?
In this episode, Still Here co-host Miles Griffis talks to Lorraine Boissoneault, science journalist and Sick Times contributor, about her new book, Body Weather: Notes on Chronic Illness in the Anthropocene. Lorraine shares how she came to see the links between her own chronic illness and the broader climate crisis, from barometric pressure and wildfire sm...

As one of the last newsrooms still reporting on the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic, we get a lot of questions about how we track the SARS-CoV-2 virus, from whether or not to trust CDC data to how wastewater data monitoring works.

To answer those questions and assist in finding and interpreting data on COVID-19 and other pathogens, The Sick Times hosted a webinar on April 28, 2026. This episode is an abridged version of tha...

Why is Long COVID so underreported worldwide?

Hosts Miles Griffis and Betsy Ladyzhets speak with health journalist Jamie Ducharme about why Long COVID is dramatically underreported globally, and hear from South African advocate Mlindeni Gabela about fighting for diagnosis and breaking stigma in his community.

Subscribe to Still Here wherever you get your podcasts, and leave us a review telling us what you think of this episod...

What can love look like when you’re disabled — and how do you write about grief when the crisis is still ongoing? In this episode of Still Here, hosts Miles Griffis and Betsy Ladyzhets sit down with poet, author, and disability justice organizer Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarsinha to discuss their new poetry collection, The Way Disabled People Love Each Other.
Leah shares how the book came to be, what it means to documen...

Long COVID Awareness Day is gaining official recognition around the world, driven by a growing network of people with Long COVID and their allies.

In our season two premiere of Still Here, hosts Betsy Ladyzhets and Miles Griffis talk to Nicholas Rodelo of Clean Air Los Angeles about how he and his fellow organizers secured a City Council resolution recognizing Long COVID Awareness Day, and how they hope to leverage that into furthe...

In this episode of Still Here, the finale of our season 1 ends the way it started, with a recap of the latest RECOVER-TLC workshop.

The transcript for this episode can be ⁠⁠⁠⁠found on our website⁠⁠⁠⁠, or jump to a specific part of the podcast below:

(00:00:00) ⁠⁠Intro⁠⁠

(00:01:30) ⁠⁠Recap of 2025 RECOVER-TLC workshop

(00:28:00) ⁠Outro⁠

-

Mentioned in this episode (in order of appearance):

• The Sick Times:Live blog: RECOVER-TLC worksho...

In this 2-way episode of Still Here: Co-host Betsy Ladyzhets interviews Caitlin Rivers, an epidemiologist at Johns Hopkins University’s Bloomberg School of Public Health and author of the popular newsletter, Force of Infection, as well as the book Crisis Averted: The Hidden Science of Fighting Outbreaks.

Rivers discussed which data sources she relies on for her trend updates, interpreting data for day-to-day decisions, questi...

In this 2-way episode of Still Here: In spring 2025, Salvatore and Stephanie Mattera launched the new site Help for Long COVID, inspired by Salvatore’s challenges finding healthcare after he developed the disease. Salvatore talks with podcast co-host Betsy Ladyzhets about how the project — which he describes as a community Wikipedia-type database — came about, feedback they’ve received so far, his advice for...

In this episode of Still Here: A two-way between Miles Griffis and Betsy Ladyzhets comparing and contrasting Long COVID and ME clinical trial designs for drugs targeting immune dysregulation and viral persistence.

The transcript for this episode can be ⁠⁠⁠found on our website⁠⁠⁠, or jump to a specific part of the podcast below:

(00:00:00) ⁠Intro⁠

(00:01:36) ⁠Recap of 2nd Keystone Symposia on Long COVID⁠

(00:20:33) Research

(00:22:48) O...

In this episode of Still Here: A two-way between Miles Griffis and Betsy Ladyzhets comparing and contrasting Long COVID and ME clinical trial designs for drugs targeting immune dysregulation and viral persistence.

The transcript for this episode can be ⁠⁠⁠found on our website⁠⁠⁠, or jump to a specific part of the podcast below:

(00:00:00) Intro

(00:01:05) 2-way: Long COVID clinical trial design for JAK inhibitors, drugs targeting vir...