Congress provided the NIH with $1.15 billion to help patients in December 2020 — and the agency has now spent most of that funding, according to a detailed new budget breakdown shared with MuckRock and STAT, with the majority going towards observational research rather than clinical trials.

A powerful Democratic lawmaker is interrogating the National Institutes of Health over its slow progress in addressing long Covid, citing a recent STAT and MuckRock investigation into the agency’s lack of urgency.

A new investigation from STAT and MuckRock, based on interviews with nearly two dozen government officials, experts, patients, and advocates, and more than 100 pages of internal NIH correspondence, letters, and public documents, shows that the nearly $1.2 billion in taxpayer money for long Covid research has resulted in few tangible results.

According to People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals, as many as 100 million animals are used in U.S. laboratories every year. In order to have a better understanding into these practices in California, Assemblymember Brian Maienschein introduced new legislation to provide added transparency into animal research reporting.

Public records aficionados know they’re in for a waiting game - requests can take weeks or years to get a response. In a 24-hour news cycle, how are last week’s documents still relevant?