Why does COVID-19 damage vascular beds?

Peter Libby, MD, a cardiovascular medicine specialist, Brigham and Women’s Hospital, and  Mallinckrodt Professor of Medicine, Harvard Medical School, explains his research into COVID-19 and how it damages the endothelium on blood vessels. This has been implicated as the primary cause of thrombosis in COVID patients, and the possible cause of many post-COVID sequelae symptoms.

He presented on mechanism for COVID's proclivity for vascular beds at the 2022 American Heart Association (AHA) meeting. Libby has been a major researcher in the role of inflammation in vascular diseases, and early on saw COVID-19 as a vascular disease as much as it is a respiratory virus.