TheChek News Flow

Kim Jong Un swaps threats for praise, calling South Korean leader’s drone-incursion apology a wise move

SEOUL—At a rare Workers’ Party congress recently, North Korean leader Kim Jong Un’s rhetoric grew fiery when discussing his southern neighbors. The South, he said, was the “immutable principal enemy.” Pyongyang, if provoked, could very well produce Seoul’s “complete collapse.”

That made Kim’s fresh assessment of South Korean President Lee Jae Myung all the more surprising.

The left-leaning Lee is a “frank and broad-minded” man, the North Korean leader believes, according to a new statement from his sister, Kim Yo Jong, who serves as the regime’s mouthpiece.

The unexpected appreciation resulted from Lee’s apology Monday over South Koreans having flown drones into North Korean airspace. Within hours, Kim Yo Jong conveyed her brother’s appreciation and praised Lee’s “very fortunate and wise behavior.” Lee’s office responded by hoping the “rapid” expression of intentions would lead to “peaceful coexistence on the Korean Peninsula.”

At a time when border states are firing at one another, North Korea’s abrupt friendliness—however fleeting—lowered the temperature between two countries still technically at war.

The Kim regime has little apparent reason to start a fight now, despite the U.S. having rotated some of the region’s air-defense capabilities and Marines to the Middle East.

At a Monday press conference, President Trump, while issuing threats to bomb Iran back to the stone ages, took time to tout his warm relationship with the North Korean leader.

Kim is unlikely to change his negative view of the South soon. Still, the compliments about Lee show Pyongyang’s wrath toward Seoul isn’t absolute.

The Kim regime appears to be managing the risk of escalation ahead of Trump’s planned visit to China in May, to refrain from stirring up trouble ahead of the high-stakes summit between the major powers, said Hwang Jihwan, a professor of international relations at the University of Seoul.

“But the de-escalating rhetoric is unlikely to move the needle for inter-Korean relations,” said Hwang.

Lee’s administration seeks to appease Pyongyang through offers of private-sector engagement and scaling back some combined military drills with the U.S. North Korea hasn’t responded to any of the overtures.

By Tuesday night, North Korea had reverted to form, as a senior official declared that Seoul’s interpretation of Kim Yo Jong’s statement as a friendly response was “nonsense” and a “hope-filled dream reading” of the warning by Pyongyang to prevent future drone incursions.

As if for emphasis, on Wednesday morning North Korea fired several short-range ballistic missiles into waters between the Koreas and Japan.

With Elon Musk focused on artificial intelligence, investors and analysts discuss a merger of his biggest companies

Elon Musk surprised onlookers with the quick merger between SpaceX and xAI. Now analysts, investors and close Musk observers are debating the merits of what some see as the ultimate combination: SpaceX and Tesla TSLA -1.75%decrease; red down pointing triangle.

As SpaceX approaches an initial public offering, some investors are discussing the idea of a mega-Musk merger as a follow-up. Musk has said he thinks his companies are converging, but he hasn’t commented on speculation of a merger.

Still, some Tesla supporters argue that combining the companies could accelerate Musk’s artificial intelligence ambitions by bringing his projects under one roof—and potentially create one of the most valuable companies in history.

Alexandra Merz, an influential individual Tesla investor who goes by the screen name Tesla Boomer Mama, posted on Musk-owned X that her best-case scenario is a stock-for-stock merger in June or July that values both companies equally.

If such a transaction were to happen at today’s valuations, it would give a slight premium to investors in Tesla, which has fallen 22.5% since the start of the year, according to FactSet.

While she warned she could be wrong, she described her hypothesis as “connecting public breadcrumbs.”

Others, like James Robertson, a Texas IT executive, are more skeptical. Robertson, who bought shares in Tesla in 2014, said he worries a combined company could go the way of other failed conglomerates like General Electric, risking the success of both businesses. Still, he is eager to invest in the SpaceX IPO, which could be the largest in history, when he gets the chance.

“I think it would be more valuable long term to own stock in both companies,” he said.

Musk hasn’t been shy about aligning his companies to achieve his life’s ambition of building human civilization on Mars. Morgan Stanley’s former Tesla analyst Adam Jonas dubbed the project the “Muskonomy.” In recent weeks, other Wall Street analysts have picked up where Jonas left off, with some telling investors they see some logic to a merger.

“The main investor question we have received is whether Elon eventually plans to combine Tesla with SpaceX, thus forming a broader ‘Elon Inc.’—an idea that TSLA megabulls have frequently hoped for,” Barclays analyst Dan Levy wrote in February.

“While at this point a Tesla/SpaceX combination appears less likely, we see the potential for a combination down the road,” he wrote.

SpaceX confidentially filed for an IPO last week and is aiming to go public by July. The company was last valued at $1.25 trillion in February following its merger with xAI.

Tesla, meanwhile, is already public, with a market valuation of $1.1 trillion.

A deal combining the two companies would rank as the largest merger ever.

Musk stoked the flames with the announcement of new joint ventures between Tesla and SpaceX. Those include a new, shared chip factory called the Terafab in Austin, Texas, and a new AI agent called Digital Optimus that streamlines Tesla and xAI’s software development.

Along with it, he has pushed a new philosophy around artificial intelligence that pegs the success of Tesla’s AI initiatives, which include humanoid robots and autonomous cars, to SpaceX’s plan to build data centers in space. While the technology isn’t proven, in theory, space-based data centers could be powered using solar energy from the sun, mitigating concerns about the vast amounts of energy and real estate needed to power them on Earth.

Musk has long sold his vision for Tesla to become the world’s most-valuable company, hypothesizing an eventual $30 trillion valuation on the strength of its robotics and AI products.

That vision has played well with individual investors, who have buoyed Tesla’s performance on the public markets even though its core automotive business, and main source of revenue, has declined.

While its first-quarter electric-vehicle deliveries were up 6.3% from a year earlier, the company’s total share of the EV market has been on a downward path over the past two years.

In a note Monday, JP Morgan analyst Ryan Brinkman warned that Tesla’s stock price could fall 60% by the end of 2026 as the company struggles to execute on its new strategy.

A $1 trillion pay package approved by Tesla shareholders in November asks Musk to boost the company’s valuation to $8.5 trillion and hit a series of operational milestones with ambitious targets for its new AI products.

At the same time, SpaceX has surged in value on the private markets, in part through its February combination with xAI.

Should Musk eventually propose a deal between Tesla and SpaceX, Columbia Law Professor Dorothy Lund says it would likely face antitrust scrutiny. Working in its favor would be the fact that Tesla and SpaceX aren’t competitors and, assuming President Trump is still in office, Musk’s close relationship with the administration, Lund said.

She also points out that any merger vote would require approval from shareholders of the company targeted for acquisition.

While he was able to merge SpaceX and xAI without a formal process because he was a controlling shareholder in both, a deal with Tesla would be different since he has a smaller stake in that company.

“You couldn’t do this overnight because you need to hold that vote,” Lund said.

Perplexity revenue jumps 50% in pivot from search to AI agents

San Francisco-based start-up surges from push into more complex and potentially more lucrative AI services

Perplexity’s revenues have jumped 50 per cent in a month, as the start-up accelerates its shift into AI agents in an effort to keep pace with larger and better-funded rivals.

Estimated annual recurring revenue rose to more than $450mn in March, after the launch of a new agent tool and a shift to usage-based pricing, according to figures seen by the FT.

The move marks a shift of focus away from its chatbot-style search engine, once seen as the biggest challenge to Google in two decades.

Instead, it is pushing AI agents that can carry out tasks on users’ behalf, as companies across the sector experiment with pricing models to reflect the higher costs of running them.

The start-up has more than 100mn monthly active users from its search and agent tools, according to executives, including tens of thousands of enterprise clients. It makes money through consumer and enterprise subscriptions, with tiers ranging from $20 to $200 monthly.

With the launch of its AI agent Computer in February, Perplexity has also added a usage-based pricing model, under which top-tier subscribers receive a set number of credits before paying for additional use.

Unlike subscription revenue, usage pricing can be a more volatile metric for estimating annual growth and less comparable with previous months. Before the new pricing system, the start-up had grown its ARR from $16mn to $305mn over two years, according to the figures seen by the FT.

Even so, Perplexity’s growth trajectory is dwarfed by other leading AI start-ups. Coding company Cursor has grown to $2bn ARR from less than $100mn in 2024. Anthropic said its ARR hit $19bn at the end of February, compared to the $20bn OpenAI generated last year.

The company’s focus on AI agents comes after its efforts to launch an AI-powered search engine proved controversial. It has faced lawsuits alleging copyright infringement and plagiarism by publishers such as The New York Times and Britannica, alleging that it is “illegally copying” content. A recent privacy suit claims it shared user data with Google and Meta without consent. The company has denied wrongdoing on these claims.

Perplexity also put itself forward as a potential acquirer of the US arm of TikTok last year, a proposal that gained little traction as a group of existing investors and others with ties to the Trump administration eventually took control of the social media business.

Last year, Perplexity launched its AI web browser, Comet, one of the first of this kind to market. Comet can act as an agent on users’ behalf, following voice and text commands to perform tasks such as shopping, summarising social media feeds and sending emails. This year, Perplexity launched its agentic product Computer, as well as Model Council, which runs queries through different models and shows outputs side-by-side.

The company offers a range of models from OpenAI’s GPT and Anthropic’s Claude, to open-source offerings from Chinese companies such as DeepSeek’s R1 and Moonshot’s Kimi.

AI groups are now exploring pricing models to pay for heavier workloads driven by more agentic systems.

After Nvidia chief executive Jensen Huang encouraged the audience at its annual conference last month to subscribe to Perplexity’s computer tool and “pay the maximum amount”, Aravind Srinivas, Perplexity’s chief executive, replied: “There is no limit, you can spend as much as you want.”

Perplexity was last valued at $20bn in September, up from $500mn at the beginning of 2024.

Its investors include Nvidia, SoftBank’s Vision Fund 2, venture capitalists New Enterprise Associates and IVP — as well as Amazon founder Jeff Bezos and Meta’s former chief AI scientist Yann LeCun.

A Perplexity executive told the FT that revenue retention was “strong”, without providing a figure.

Lossmaking Perplexity pays model providers like OpenAI and Anthropic to use their models, as well as the inference costs of running queries.

However, one person close to Perplexity said the start-up’s advantage was being able to triage requests to the most efficient model for each purpose. For example, OpenAI’s Codex and Anthropic’s Claude Code for coding; OpenAI’s GPT-5 for writing or Anthropic’s Opus for reasoning, they said.

Proposed transaction would combine world’s largest music group with a blank-cheque company

Bill Ackman’s Pershing Square Capital has offered to buy Universal Music Group in a mostly stock deal that values the world’s biggest record label at about €55bn and would shift its listing from Amsterdam to New York.

The proposed transaction would merge Universal, home to artists including Taylor Swift and Kendrick Lamar, with a blank-cheque company set up by Ackman, one of the world’s best-known hedge fund managers.

The move comes as the explosive growth of AI reverberates across the music industry, with investors fearful that the technology could erode profits at the handful of dominant labels and threaten their copyright.

Shares in Universal, which listed in Amsterdam in 2021 after it was spun out by French media group Vivendi, have slumped more than 30 per cent over the past six months.

The shares rose 11.4 per cent to €19.06 on Tuesday after Pershing, which already owns a stake in Universal, set out the terms of a deal that it said valued the music company at €30.40 a share.

However, that figure assumes a higher valuation for the new company, based on Pershing’s earnings forecasts and a plan to sell Universal’s stake in music streamer Spotify for €1.5bn in net proceeds.

Under the deal, Universal shareholders would receive €5.05 in cash — a total of €9.4bn — and 0.77 shares in the new company for every Universal share they owned, Pershing said.

Announcing the plan, Ackman said: “UMG’s stock price has languished due to a combination of issues that are unrelated to the performance of its music business and, importantly, all of them can be addressed with this transaction.”

The deal would need to be approved by two-thirds of Universal shareholders who vote at a meeting — a threshold the hedge fund billionaire said he was confident of clearing.

Matt Pincus, a longtime music investor who runs a LionTree-backed fund, is sceptical of Ackman’s proposal, likening it to the failed blank-cheque companies of the pandemic era.

“He’s saying: this is a 75 per cent premium to the value of Universal’s stock. But I’m only giving shareholders $5bn in cash, and the rest of it I’m giving them in a publicly listed blank cheque company, with the idea that simply moving it to a US listing creates the uplift. It’s basically ‘add water and you get a higher valuation’. But where is the real value creation?”

A critical factor will be the stance of the Bolloré Group, Universal’s largest shareholder, which holds 28 per cent of the company, including the 10 per cent holding of Vivendi, in which it is the largest shareholder.

Ackman said the “first phone call” he made the day before going public with his proposal had been to the French conglomerate.

“The words I got back were: ‘This is music to our ears,’” he said, adding that the group was “intrigued” but that “the devil is in the details”. He cautioned that “without Bolloré we don’t have a transaction”.

Another large shareholder said Ackman’s diagnosis of Universal’s problems was correct though a takeover was not required to address these, adding that Bolloré would be “kingmaker” in any deal.

Vivendi shares closed up 9.1 per cent on Tuesday for a market value of €2bn, while Bolloré Group’s stock gained 3.8 per cent.

Universal’s board on Tuesday evening said it had received the “unsolicited” proposal and would review it, adding it had “complete confidence” in the company’s management team and strategy. The Bolloré Group did not respond to a request for comment. Vivendi declined to comment.

Ackman’s pursuit of Universal has been years in the making. Pershing Square built a roughly 10 per cent stake in 2021 ahead of the group’s Amsterdam listing.

The investment was originally planned to be executed through his pandemic-era blank-cheque vehicle, but the structure collapsed under regulatory scrutiny. Ackman’s hedge fund stepped in instead, leaving Universal as one of Pershing Square’s largest positions.

Ackman joined Universal’s board and became a vocal champion of the company, arguing ownership of music rights — from the Beatles to Taylor Swift — offered “forever” cash flows in the streaming era.

But Universal’s shares have lagged behind broader markets since the listing, and disagreements emerged over how to unlock value. Ackman pushed for changes including a US listing to attract a deeper pool of investors and improve liquidity.

He quit the board in 2025 and trimmed his stake but has continued to argue that Universal is undervalued.

Last month, Universal delayed its own plan for a secondary listing in New York, saying that “uncertainty” had created a “meaningful dislocation” in the company’s valuation.

Under Ackman’s proposal, former Disney president Michael Ovitz would become Universal’s chair and two Pershing representatives would join the board.

Ackman said he and Ovitz had presented their proposal to Universal chief executive Sir Lucian Grainge over dinner in recent weeks.

He added that Grainge had encouraged them to submit a formal proposal that the company would “take a hard look at”.

Any deal would require Universal’s board approval and is contingent on Grainge remaining as CEO.

China’s Tencent is Universal’s second-largest shareholder with an 11.4 per cent stake, while Singapore’s GIC sovereign wealth fund holds a nearly 5 per cent stake.

Pershing Square would put in €2.5bn, including €1.05bn from investors in Ackman’s blank-cheque vehicle Sparc Holdings, with the new Universal Music entity borrowing an additional €5.4bn, according to Ackman’s letter to the company’s board.

Some industry executives questioned whether the takeover attempt was intended to secure control of Universal, or to force through changes Ackman had advocated as a board member, such as the US listing.

Ackman is known for making multibillion-dollar bets on public companies that he regards as attractively priced, high-quality businesses with pricing power in their sectors. He has large stakes in companies such as Alphabet, Amazon and Brookfield, with his main hedge fund managing almost $18bn.

The hedge fund manager is in the middle of an IPO process for Pershing Square USA, a new closed-end fund to be listed on the New York Stock Exchange. Ackman aims to raise between $5bn and $10bn in a transaction that will also give investors a slice of his hedge fund’s management company.

Eramet’s top shareholder weighs exit as $500mn capital raise looms

Duval family hires Lazard to advise on 37% stake in troubled mining company

Eramet’s largest shareholder has hired bankers as it considers the sale of its stake in the troubled French mining group. 

The Duval family has appointed Lazard to explore options for its 37 per cent holding and to advise them ahead of the company’s looming capital raising, according to three people familiar with the matter. 

Eramet in February outlined plans to raise €500mn this year to stabilise a “deteriorated financial situation”. Its shares are down almost a fifth since the start of January, taking its market capitalisation to roughly €1.4bn.

With operations spanning nickel to manganese ore mining, Eramet has been hit by a series of setbacks in recent months including sliding prices and a fire at its mineral sands facility in Senegal. It swung to an almost €500mn loss in 2025 while net debt rose 50 per cent to almost €2bn.

The company has also become embroiled in a governance crisis — its board fired chief executive Paulo Castellari in February just eight months into the job, citing divergences in “operating methods”, and shortly afterwards suspended chief financial officer Abel Martins-Alexandre.

Chair and former CEO Christel Bories has been temporarily reappointed to the top job. 

The industrial family has been a major shareholder in Eramet since the miner’s 1999 takeover of Aubert & Duval. Eramet in 2022 sold the maker of fighter jet and submarine parts to a consortium backed by Airbus and engine maker Safran. 

The French government is Eramet’s second-largest shareholder, owning 27 per cent, and along with the Duvals has agreed in principle to the capital raising. The move, which will be put to shareholders at the end of May, will dilute the family’s ownership if they do not stump up more cash. 

They may struggle to find buyers for the stake, two people familiar with the discussions said, given that any industrial rival may prefer to acquire the company in full. 

As part of its turnaround plan, Eramet has said it is exploring possible asset sales.

While he was still finance chief in December, Martins-Alexandre outlined plans to sell Eramet’s stake in the world’s largest nickel mine as he warned that the company needed an “immediate equity injection”, according to an internal memo seen by the FT. 

The Weda Bay mine in Indonesia “must be a clear candidate for disposal whilst we have the opportunity of engaging into a credible sales process,” he wrote. With Eramet’s balance sheet having been “left to deteriorate,” the memo said, Martins-Alexandre’s priorities for the start of 2026 included obtaining “a binding offer” for the mine.

Eramet declined to comment on any potential ownership change or details around the Weda Bay mine. The company said it was looking at a range of options for various assets as part of its review, but could not “provide details of specific ongoing discussions or potential transactions”.

The Duval family declined to comment.

The governance crisis at the miner appeared to be part of a broader culture clash, according to several people familiar with the situation. 

They added that the action taken against Castellari and Martins-Alexandre by the board had been linked to their decision to draw down on a revolving credit facility without first informing board members and shareholders. That had caused tension, even though the executives had no obligation to inform them in advance, they said.

Castellari had raised concerns over governance and potential financial mismanagement when he was dismissed, the FT has reported. 

Turkey’s gold sales deepen bullion slump

Central bank arranged $20bn of sales and swaps in March as it battled to support the lira

Turkey has sold or loaned out $20bn tonnes of gold since the outbreak of the war in Iran, in a flurry of bullion disposals that contributed to the biggest monthly price drop for the metal since 2008.

The Central Bank of the Republic of Turkey sold 52 tonnes of gold between Feb 27 and March 27, according to analysis by consultancy Metals Focus based on official data, bringing Turkey’s net central bank holdings to 440 tonnes, their lowest level in more than two years.

The central bank also arranged about 79 tonnes of gold swaps — which involve leasing out gold bars to generate income and add to downward pressure on bullion prices by increasing the supply available to markets — during the period, as it battled to support the value of the lira. 

The combined sales and swaps are worth nearly $20bn at current prices, according to FT calculations.

The global energy shock and widening war in the Middle East have prompted a growing number of countries, including Russia and Poland, to consider selling gold to bolster their currencies or improve their fiscal position.

The CBRT was also among global central banks selling US Treasuries in a bid to support their currencies.

While central banks were a big driver for the multiyear bullion rally that propelled prices to a record high for more than $5,500 a troy ounce in January, a recent shift in their behaviour has pulled down gold prices, analysts say. Last month prices fell by 11.5 per cent in bullion’s worst month in 18 years.

“Central banks’ sales are the dominant driver of the $1,000 price fall over the past few weeks,” said Nicky Shiels, analyst at refiner MKS Pamp. “The market has always assumed that central banks have been the backstop . . . But the recent data flows and official statements are sort of refuting that.”

The pace of Turkey’s gold sales accelerated towards the end of March, with 31 tonnes sold in the week ending March 27, the Metals Focus figures show. 

“Turkey’s central bank has been holding 60 to 70 per cent of its reserves in gold. So it had to sell or swap some of that to raise needed dollar liquidity,” said Uğur Gürses, a Turkish economic commentator who once worked in the bank’s gold reserve management department.

“If 50 tonnes enters the gold market, that can have a huge effect on prices,” Gürses said, adding that he believed the CBRT now had sufficient liquidity and no immediate need to sell more gold.

The gold sales underscore Turkey’s determination to prop up the lira, because currency stability is a central plank in the country’s more than two-year-long campaign to curb inflation, currently running at 31 per cent.

Turkey’s net international reserves have fallen by almost half to $46bn since the Iran war began, according to calculations based on official data by Bürümcekçi Research and Consulting.

The sales also exemplify a broader shift in global central banks’ management of gold reserves.

Last year, central banks’ net gold purchases were about 860 tonnes, a decline of 20 per cent from the previous year, according to data from the World Gold Council, an industry body.

This year, besides Turkey, known sellers include Russia, which disposed of 15 tonnes in January and February. Meanwhile, Poland’s central bank chief recently proposed selling bullion to raise funds for defence, although the government has opposed the plan. 

Market participants say further sales this year could come from oil-importing countries hit by the energy crisis, such as India, or from Central Asian nations with significant gold reserves. 

Gold’s sharp decline last month, which belies its traditional status as a safe haven and inflation hedge, also reflects four weeks of outflows from gold exchange traded funds since the war began as some investors rushed to take profit on winning trades as conflict erupted in the Middle East. The metal has fallen back to about $4,650 a troy ounce.

A growing number of central banks are also choosing to repatriate their gold, including France, which last week said it had finished a years-long repatriation programme and no longer held any gold in the US. 

Not all central banks are selling. The People’s Bank of China bought 160,000 troy ounces in March, its biggest reported purchase in more than a year, according to data released on Tuesday. 

Shaokai Fan, head of Asia Pacific at the World Gold Council, said China’s accelerated buying could reflect a desire to take advantage of lower prices. 

“We are seeing central banks take both sides in this movement of the gold price right now,” Fan said. “The interest in gold among central banks has increased in the last few months — but it cuts both ways.” 

New research predicts impact of lower productivity and workers quitting because of long-term illness after Covid-19

The impact of long-term illness suffered by people after Covid-19 infections is estimated to cost OECD countries a total of up to $135bn a year and will dog their economies for at least a decade, according to new research.

The projected hit to GDP from lower productivity, increased absences or employees quitting work altogether will dwarf extra health spending burdens stemming from the sickness, says the OECD study published on Wednesday.

The paper is a rare attempt to quantify the economic effects from so-called long Covid, which has a debilitating effect on sufferers but remains poorly understood scientifically and is patchily monitored for data collection.

“This work is important because it provides for the first time a comprehensive estimate of the economic burden of long Covid across EU and OECD countries,” said Guillaume Dedet, the publication’s co-ordinator and a senior health economist at the Paris-based organisation.

“It shows that the costs of Covid-19 did not end with the acute phase of the pandemic: the virus continues, and will continue, to weigh on societies and economies for years to come.”

The report forecasts losses of between 0.1 and 0.2 per cent of GDP, amounting to a total loss of $135bn annually across all OECD countries, in scenarios where “low or moderate” residual coronavirus transmission led to ongoing new cases.

The economic fallout of long Covid is “substantial and mainly stems from the indirect costs from reduced productivity and participation in the workforce”, the report said. Its predictions are probably an underestimate of the true burden, it added.

The OECD argues the repercussions are more serious because they add to existing problems, including sluggish growth and productivity in ageing workforces.

Economists have previously struggled to quantify the impact of long Covid on employment and economic growth because few countries continued tracking people who were affected by the condition after the pandemic’s peak.

The OECD drew on new survey evidence from the US, showing a lasting increase in health-related absence and exit from the labour market, as well as academic studies from the UK, Australia and elsewhere.

It said all available data from high-income countries gave a consistent message: “persistent post-infection symptoms are not only a health challenge but also a structural brake on economic output”.

The OECD’s 38 member states include leading economies in Europe, the Americas and east Asia, although China is not a member.

While many countries have developed policies for long Covid recognition and response, important gaps often remain, the report said. These include in the provision of long-term care pathways for patients and the training and support of healthcare workers.

Government action on long Covid is often focused on the health sector, with limited co-ordination with employment, education and social protection policies, the paper said.

Long Covid — defined as a condition lasting at least three months after the initial viral infection — has been estimated to affect 18mn adults in the US. Sufferers report symptoms including shortness of breath, fatigue and cognitive decline — brain fog — lasting months or years.

Scientists remain unsure about exactly why some people experience long Covid and how the condition should be treated. Research suggests the viral infection triggers a heightened immune response and chronic inflammation in long Covid sufferers, indicating that damping these could be a way to tackle the condition.