#MEAction & Community Responds to Harmful Wired Article
- #MEAction
- Jul 14
- 2 min read
We want to share advocacy efforts being taken by #MEAction and the community to bring attention to Wired’s failure of journalistic ethics in its recent article about Long COVID.
Advocate and person with ME, Scott Hugo, has filed a complaint to request a formal ethics investigation of Wired for their June 2026 feature article, “The Painful Truth About Long COVID.” The complaint is being submitted to the Society of Professional Journalists and Columbia School of Journalism.
#MEAction has signed on to the complaint, along with 25+ other patient-advocate cosigners, and is supporting Scott’s efforts to move this complaint forward to hold Wired to journalistic standards.
The Wired article about Long COVID presents scientific fallacies as facts, and resurfaces old, harmful narratives that psychologize the symptoms of ME and Long COVID.
If you are hearing about this article for the first time, please DO NOT search for it, click on it, or engage with it online. Every click and every comment benefits the article's reach. (You can read an archived version here that won’t contribute to the SEO views: https://archive.ph/mJNcw.)
In the complaint, Scott writes: “We are not requesting your organization to resolve legitimate scientific disagreement, or to pronounce on the mechanisms of Long COVID itself; instead, we are requesting that you assess whether the article and Wired’s subsequent response complied with journalistic standards for accuracy, context, fairness, transparency, and accountability.”
Join the call for retraction: YOU can add your name to a change.org petition calling for Wired to retract the article:
#MEAction is taking this issue seriously. While we do not wish to draw undue attention to a fallacious article, we are contacting the Wired editor directly to explain how inaccurate articles like this one perpetuate harm and fail journalistic ethics. We are also working to increase our press engagement, and are in the process of pitching counter editorials that raise the profile of ME and Long COVID.