My immediate thought was that these personality type findings could potentially be explained by the overlap of hypermobility with both ME/CFS and neurodivergence—although I don't know whether these links have been properly researched yet.

I don't have the capacity to read the full article atm, but based on this summary it seems that you're being very selective in only looking at the VO2 max results. Plenty of differences were found between ME patients and sedentary controls in other measures.
www.healthrising.org/blog/2024/07...

Of course they're not going to be forthcoming about that in their own paper. This was something that came to light after the FOI request was granted.

www.statnews.com/2016/09/21/c...

Given the recently replicated 2-day CPET findings, nothing approaching traditional "rehab" will be safe for this cohort.

There just hasn't been enough study done to make the claim you're making. This is a complex disease, and there is likely heterogeneity in exactly what's going on for different patients. There may be a subset for whom it's solely ANS based, but I doubt this is universal.

Idk, I think it's pretty fraudulent to claim your intervention is effective after changing the goalposts so much mid-study that people who got worse can be called "improved", but maybe that's just me

Citation needed for "patients can recover with rehab"—and not the fraudulent PACE trial

What evidence? The only way you'd get to that conclusion is by ignoring all the studies finding physical abnormalities in ME patients

Thank you so much for acknowledging this! I've been seeing a frustrating amount of ME erasure in recent long covid awareness posts, all the while using terminology gleaned from the ME community (e.g. "post exertional malaise").

And now we're doing similar damage on a societal level by allowing covid to run rampant (3-point IQ drop for a "mild and resolved" infection; 6 points for those with ongoing symptoms, 9 for those admitted to intensive care) 😢
www.scientificamerican.com/article/covi...