Professor John Lambert

Professor John (Jack) Lambert, MD, PhD, is an infectious diseases consultant with almost 40 years of experience as a specialist in Infectious Diseases, Medicine, and Pediatrics, qualifying as a consultant in adult and pediatric infectious diseases in 1990. He has been dealing with complex infectious diseases since that time.

Trained in the USA at Michigan State University Medical School, followed by specialist training in adult and pediatric infectious diseases, he held professorial and consultant appointments at the University of Rochester Medical Center, New York, and later at Johns Hopkins Hospital and the University of Maryland Institute of Human Virology in Baltimore before returning to the UK in 1999.

He held consultant positions in Pediatric Infectious Diseases at Great Ormond Street Children's Hospital between 2001 and 2005. He subsequently became a Consultant in Infectious Diseases in Dublin, Ireland, at the Mater Misericordiae University Hospital and the Rotunda Maternity Hospital, and is a Full Professor at the UCD School of Medicine, Dublin.

Professor Lambert was Director of the High Consequence Infectious Disease Unit at the Mater, where he managed Ireland's first COVID-19 patients in early 2020. He also established Ireland's first Long COVID Clinic with funding from the Irish Health Research Board.

This funding led to a number of publications on Long COVID, the establishment of a cohort of Long COVID patients, and the first published study from the Mater Hospital on the use of Low Dose Naltrexone (LDN) for Long COVID patients. He has taken a special interest in better understanding and treating this complex condition.

Professor Lambert has seen over 2,000 patients with Long COVID over the years and currently runs private clinics in Dublin and Edinburgh, managing patients with this condition.

Over his years in Dublin, Professor Lambert has secured more than €3 million in research grant funding, published over 240 articles indexed on PubMed covering a wide range of infectious diseases, and authored more than 20 publications focused specifically on COVID-19 and Long COVID.

His research has explored the pathogenetic mechanisms of Long COVID and identified different and distinct phenotypes, which are important in tailoring support and treatment for individual patients.

Professor Lambert's key messages for Long COVID patients are that it is a real condition with five potential pathogenetic mechanisms: neuroinflammation, immune dysregulation, viral (DNA virus) reactivation, mitochondrial dysfunction, and microclots/blood vessel inflammation.

Time alone does not heal Long COVID, and pushing through symptoms often makes the condition worse rather than better. Instead, the focus should be on repairing the underlying damage. Individualised treatment protocols can be designed and prescribed to enhance each patient's chances of recovery.