Forty million Americans live with long COVID at a projected $3.7 trillion economic cost, yet zero Food and Drug Administration (FDA)-approved treatments exist—while specialized clinics can only see 700 new patients annually, creating an access crisis of staggering proportions.

Dr. David Putrino, Director of Rehabilitation Innovation at Mount Sinai and medical provider to Red Bull athletes and the US Olympic team, has released America's first clinical manual for infection-associated chronic illnesses and is conducting trials using Artificial Intelligence (AI) to repurpose drugs like Truvada and Maraviroc—compressing 15-year development timelines to months.

This conversation explores how AI transforms treatment through rapid drug repurposing, patient phenotyping to distinguish disease subtypes, and democratizing specialized medical knowledge when traditional healthcare infrastructure cannot scale to meet the need.

Long COVID didn't create the gap between medical capability and medical access—it just made it statistically impossible to ignore, and AI may finally force us to choose whether expertise remains scarce by design or by necessity.