Key Workers Petition UK

We are a new advocacy and campaign group for Key Workers with Long Covid. You can email us at [email protected]

[Key Workers Petition UK @KeyWorkerPetUK]

1/ PRESS RELEASE
Keyworker Petition Campaign Awaits Release of UK Covid Inquiry Module 3 Report

[Disability News Service @johnpringdns]

Whately appears to agree social security spending is not spiralling after all… as Tories plan £36 billion-a-year cuts
#CPC26 @Helen_Whately
https://t.co/cdoyryTmw1

[DPAC @Dis_PPL_Protest]

#TimmsReview

Jean-André Prager, a member of the Timms review steering group, is the leading author of a new report calling for extreme cuts to child DLA for mental health, learning difficulties and neurodevelopmental conditions.

https://t.co/zQLWfxSkyI

[DPAC @Dis_PPL_Protest]

#SocialCare

Outrageous @andyburnham what about disabled people?

Andy Burnham’s announcement of free personal care as part of a new National Care Service will only apply to those over 65, and not to working-age disabled people, No 10 has confirmed

https://t.co/cjOBim2Vos

[LurgeeLiz @LurgeeLife]

Apparently "ministers feel confident that opposition (to welfare "reform") has waned"

So, if you feel able, remind your MP of your opposition to upcoming Govt proposals for ill & disabled LCW/LCWRA/ESA

Feel free to utilise any info in my updated blog 👇
https://t.co/tg8Cvcs64M

[Rachel Hext @HextRachel]

Just a reminder that after sacrificing our health, career and financial stability working the front line without protection from #Covid-19, this is the vanilla goodbye you can expect to receive. #longcovid #herotozero #clappedthensacked @theRCN @nmcnews @UNISONOurNHS @1goodtern

[Dawni Q 🎨 @Dawni_Q]

#Disabled people need to know this: Rail Delivery Group has awarded @nimbusdis a £1.75m contract to decide Disabled Persons Railcard eligibility, reviewing medical/benefit evidence. This goes far beyond an access card. Where is the scrutiny of assessors, appeals and safeguards?

[Cat in the Hat 🐈‍⬛ 🎩 🇬🇧 @_CatintheHat]

Hospitals in Scotland are already facing ‘extreme pressure’.

Not surprising because there’s a large COVID wave underway…

…but Scotland’s IPC team don’t worry about COVID because:
▪️it’s NOT severe
▪️is UNLIKELY to spread
▪️vaccines are readily available

…apparently?! 🤔

[Cat in the Hat 🐈‍⬛ 🎩 🇬🇧 @_CatintheHat]

🚨NHS HOSPITALS DECLARING CRITICAL INCIDENTS

These alerts have all been posted in the last 3 days.

It’s not even October yet. Flu season hasn’t got going yet.

This should not be happening…

…and yet it is, because there’s another pesky virus we’re not allowed to mention 🤫

[FreeScot 🏴󠁧󠁢󠁳󠁣󠁴󠁿 🐕💜🤍💚 @roorooyes4]

Here's how NHS Scotland is clearing their waiting lists:
I've been waiting for cataract surgery since June 2025 (I know). Expecting it around Feb 2027 from what they've said previously. Today I get a letter saying If I don't agree to go to Glasgow or Inverness instead...

[tern @1goodtern]

I understand that it's hard to cope with the idea that a new common virus can disable anyone, including you.

But that's your fear to deal with. Don't deal with it by telling the people it disabled that their illness is all in their heads.

[Deirdre O'Kelly 🕷🎵🇪🇺🇬🇧🇮🇪#FBLC #FBPE @deeokelly1]

This was basically the popular opinion of men in the 19th century when women had illnesses that were hard to diagnose, which today might be called ME or fibromyalgia; Long Covid disproportionately affects women, so here we are again with misogyny and ableism given a free pass.

[Rae :-) @Chuffin_ell]

….@yorkbarbican, your website says disabled customers must register through Nimbus to access accessible ticketing. Where in the Equality Act is third-party Nimbus registration required & what alternative do you offer disabled people who don’t wish to use Nimbus?

[Cat in the Hat 🐈‍⬛ 🎩 🇬🇧 @_CatintheHat]

Data threads like this from @1goodtern always blow my mind 🤯

So much data… so many charts… all beautifully presented.

But these are not just numbers.

Behind each bar on these charts are real people.

Real people suffering.

And the trend in almost every chart tells a story.

[Dan O'Hara @skeuomorphology]

NHS alerts today:

- East Kent Hospitals: critical incident, beds are full
- Calderdale and Huddersfield NHSFT: under pressure with respiratory disease
- Wrightington Wigan and Leigh, and
Newham Hospital (Barts): A&E under pressure

[Dawni Q 🎨 @Dawni_Q]

@nimbusdis Why should a #disabled person who already has official evidence, PIP, Blue Badge, medical reports or stuff, have to satisfy a private third-party assessment before a venue will provide an adjustment?

Who decided this extra gatekeeping was necessary?

[Paula Peters @paulapeters2]

#PIP
#TimmsReview

a two tier pip system?
A phone call that decides if you get PIP 2 form or no cash award

https://t.co/DxOCWb55TS

[Tagg @TeemuTagg]

I know a kid who had a Covid stroke. If an increasing number of kids are having strokes, why is no one looking into why? Is it because they already know the answer? Is UK kids never having been vaccinated compounding the issue even further? Where is the ventilation in schools?

[Paula Peters @paulapeters2]

#TimmsReview

So, what’s being mooted with PIP is a phone call triage
Which will decide if you go to no cash award and adaptions or support or a PIP2 form and an assessment
Poverty will skyrocket
So will claimant deaths
Labour hang your heads in absolute shame

[Cat in the Hat 🐈‍⬛ 🎩 🇬🇧 @_CatintheHat]

THE BIG REVEAL:

Scotland’s IPC team have decided to place COVID in the R1 category.

That means they consider that COVID:
▪️does NOT cause severe disease
▪️is UNLIKELY to spread to the community
▪️and there IS prophylaxis or treatment readily available.

https://t.co/3iqghSLKM8

[Jack | amatica health @JackHadfield14]

A brief history of how ME/CFS ended up stigmatised and underfunded for decades. It wasn't an accident.

In 1970, two psychiatrists reviewed the case notes from the 1955 Royal Free Hospital outbreak in London and concluded it was mass hysteria. They didn't interview a single patient, but the idea that ME was psychological became the default view in medicine from then on.

In the UK, psychiatrists Simon Wessely, Michael Sharpe and Peter White developed this into the "illness beliefs" model, where a virus might trigger the illness but deconditioning and unhelpful beliefs keep people sick. They had huge influence over funding and policy, sitting on MRC panels and advising NICE and the DWP, and Sharpe and White also advised disability insurers. Much of the UK's ME research funding went into their trials, and their diagnostic criteria only required six months of fatigue, so the trials were full of people who didn't have ME.

The largest was PACE, which cost £5M and was published in 2011 as proof that CBT and graded exercise worked. It became the basis for NHS treatment. PACE had disingenuously loosened its recovery criteria partway through the trial, but still claimed success. A patient, Alem Matthees, took them to tribunal and got the data released in 2016. Under the original criteria, recovery fell from 22% to around 7%, and there was little change on objective measures like walking distance or return to work. CBT and graded exercise didn't work. NICE didn't remove graded exercise until 2021.

In the US, the CDC dismissed the 1984 Lake Tahoe outbreak, named the illness "chronic fatigue syndrome" in 1988, and the media called it "yuppie flu." In the late 90s, auditors found that of around $23M Congress gave the CDC for CFS research, about $13M had been quietly diverted to other programs and misreported. The NIH then spent roughly $ 5-6M a year on ME/CFS for decades, some of which also went to CBT, exercise and psychological research, and a chunk to university overheads, making it one of the lowest-funded diseases relative to how many people it affects. The CDC recommended CBT and graded exercise until 2017.

Most of Europe either followed the UK model or ignored the disease entirely. Germany did both, treating it as psychosomatic while barely funding research.

Long COVID has started to change this, because millions of previously healthy people developed the same illness at the same time and it became much harder to dismiss. Germany has now committed €500M over ten years, and biomedical research is consistently finding immune, neurological and autoantibody changes in ME/CFS patients.

All psychological intervention studies failed and when we finally started looking at physiological mechanisms, we have found hundreds of alterations. The psychiatrists responsible for the history of ME have millions of deaths on their hands and are largely to blame for the modern stigmatisation of patients. Thankfully that won’t continue much longer, I expect we will finally have breakthroughs in the next years now the shift is made.