The Schmidt Initiative for Long Covid has awarded researchers from the CUNY Institute for Implementation Science in Population Health (ISPH) at CUNY SPH $300,000 to maintain one of the few remaining independent platforms for tracking vaccine behavior, long COVID, and emerging public health threats in the U.S.
The award will support continued follow-up of the CHASING COVID Cohort (C3), a national study of thousands of participants from all 50 states that has been running since the start of the SARS‑CoV‑2 pandemic. Since early 2020, C3 has followed thousands of participants across the nation to generate high-quality, longitudinal data on SARS-CoV-2 burden, long COVID incidence and persistence, vaccine beliefs and uptake, and related outcomes including mental health and food insecurity. With follow-up now extending to six years (as of March 2026), C3 is among the few national cohorts capable of characterizing the long-term trajectory and population burden of these conditions.
With this new funding, the team will conduct two to three additional surveys to monitor vaccine knowledge, beliefs, intentions, and uptake, and rapidly field questions on other urgent public health issues at a time of shrinking federal surveillance capacity. “The U.S. is experiencing a rapid erosion of federal public health workforce capacity and infrastructure, including its ability to conduct core surveillance of population health behaviors and outcomes,” says PI Denis Nash. “Recent federal policy shifts have created critical gaps in timely, reliable public health data. These trends pose a significant and immediate threat to the nation’s capacity to monitor and respond to emerging health risks.”
“By sustaining C3, this grant helps ensure that policy makers, clinicians, and communities are not flying blind,” Nash says. “We will have the independent, high-quality data we need to understand these conditions, anticipate emerging threats, and protect the health of people across the United States.”
Reposted with permission from CUNY SPH.
