Media celebrated Long COVID Awareness Day by denying its existence

Long COVID is a thorn in the side of "back to normal." Attempts to silence patients are intensifying.

Just a week ago, in response to an NPR piece that framed a disabled man’s existence in an inaccessible society as a burden to those around him, I wrote:

Long COVID is the faulty, load-bearing beam in the rickety pandemic denial superstructure. Were the public to grasp how common and how severe it is, the entire post-pandemic facade would come crumbling down.

Therefore, as Long COVID patients become louder, as their presence becomes more undeniable, as their numbers grow, the COVID normalization project must pivot from attempting to disappear these victims to steadily stigmatizing them.

Four days later, on March 15 aka Long COVID Awareness Day, outlets across the globe chose to elevate an unpublished, un-peer-reviewed, observational text-message based “study,” and its absurd claim that Long COVID is nothing new and everyone should stop talking about it.

This political choice- elevating a single unpublished study which examined a total of zero patients and ran a total of zero tests- when tens of thousands of others contradict its findings, is unsurprising. The political choice to do so on a day intended to draw attention to the suffering of tens of millions of people is cruel in the extreme.

Long COVID Awareness Day intended to do just that; create awareness through organized actions, many of them put on by disabled people struggling with day-to-day activities. Major media outlets ensured that the top “Long COVID” results on Google that day would be minimizing, unscientific propaganda instead of news about activists, their work, their message, and their illness.

It feels tiresome to continually relitigate those tens of thousands, if not hundreds of thousands, of studies demonstrating the existence of post-COVID health impacts and in particular the cluster of symptoms known as Long COVID. Viral persistence, microclots in the blood and endothelial dysfunction, immune system dysregulation, mitochondrial damage leading to severe fatigue and exercise intolerance, blood-brain barrier disruption have all been documented in Long COVID patients. The CDC’s most recent data found that 6.8% of Americans are currently suffering from Long COVID, or approximately 24 million people. There is no legitimate scientific debate, whatsoever, about whether Long COVID “exists.”

If it feels like a waste of time to debate every minimizer and grifter popping up to proclaim COVID, a novel virus that has killed tens of millions of people since 2020 in one of the deadliest pandemics in human history, can’t possibly harm “healthy” people (whatever that means), it is. It is the same propaganda playbook used by Big Tobacco and Big Oil. Deny, deny, deny. Get people arguing with you about their very existence; they won’t have time to argue about their rights.

While we might expect the NYPost to run such propaganda- in their case under the disgusting headline, “On Long COVID Awareness Day, Remember This: Long COVID is Fake!”, more respected outlets like The Guardian ran the same story with the same message, albeit under the more liberal-friendly “Time to stop using term ‘long COVID’ as symptoms no worse than those after flu.” The average person is infected with COVID 5-10 times more frequently than flu, for the record. So even if post-COVID effects were comparable to post-flu effects (they aren’t), we’d still have a public health issue 5-10 times as large, on top of the pre-existing burden of flu.

None of this is about evidence, papers, studies, charts, or data. If it were, media would splash “Long Covid and Impaired Cognition”, the self-explanatory title of a recent article in the New England Journal of Medicine, across their front pages. Is it not front-page news that a disease we’ve all been encouraged to repeatedly contract, for the rest of our lives, causes cognitive damage? Aren’t there some concerning implications to the scientific finding that people are losing cognitive ability with every infection, and the entire public is being repeatedly infected with no end in sight?

Media outlets, their corporate owners and their editors have one view of COVID-19: the crisis is over. Therefore, any evidence that might indicate otherwise is presented quietly, if at all. Evidence that confirms their pre-conceived notions- notions which just happen to align with the worldview that all is well, and our beneficent capitalist overlords are ruling wisely- will be loud and unavoidable.

We see the same phenomenon with climate reporting, for the same reasons; although there is more coverage now of the looming catastrophe, it has never been presented with the urgency merited. The people behind these publications do not understand the true nature of the climate emergency, because they still believe in the “meritocracy” they sit atop. To question its doings, to ask aloud if this system might just kill us all in the end, is to question their own identity and sense of superiority. In other words, they simply cannot believe that those in charge could be so stupid and so wrong, to take us down a path so destructive and so irrational. It’s important to internalize that those in charge have done so with climate and are doing so with COVID; there are no adults taking care of us, only oligarchs squeezing profit from us.

The dehumanizing debate over the existence of Long COVID patients assumes, first and foremost, that Long COVID patients cannot and should not speak to their own experiences. The Guardian’s piece does quote a dissenting doctor, toward the end of its article. It does not quote a single patient living with this disease that they are once again encouraging people to ignore, dismiss, and doubt. Articles like these aren’t simply insulting or offensive; they have material impacts. Every suffering patient going to the ends of the Earth to convince their family members, friends, and even doctors that yes, they have a real disease, is set back by these articles. They are materially and violently harmed by such pieces.

Many people living with Long COVID cohabit with people who do not understand or believe in it; the wife from NPR’s article is one relatively benign example. Although she does want to force her husband to risk lifelong disability to eat in the inside part of the restaurant, she does at least still mask in many places. She does not believe Long COVID is “fake,” but also does not seem to fully internalize the risk of exposure. Other patients deal with angry, mocking family members who refuse to test or mask at all, who purposely expose them, who believe they are lying or malingering. Articles like this reinforce their beliefs and behavior.

Additionally, such misinformation harms those who do not yet have Long COVID. Most Long COVID patients will tell you that they did not know that COVID could leave them long-term ill or disabled when they got sick. Four years into the crisis, that’s not an oversight. There is a deliberate, highly successful effort to misinform the public that COVID cannot harm them. President Biden has mentioned the words Long COVID aloud once or twice. A quick search of his twitter account reveals it has never been mentioned there. To this administration, the inconvenient victims of “letting COVID rip” with zero mitigations in place simply do not exist. The press is doing the necessary ideological and social work of convincing the public that anyone who claims otherwise is lying or crazy.

It’s hard to think of anything more awful than attacking people your policies already disabled. But discrediting victims is the only way to continue to double down on forever COVID infections.

If we take a step back- back from the years of blinding, top-down propaganda, back from the inane questions, back from the social denial- the absurd basis of the entire push to disappear Long COVID patients is the idea that a dangerous virus cannot hurt anybody. That instead of listening to all the millions of patients who’ve been harmed and are trying to warn us, we should listen to a handful of prominent minimizers who want you infected. That is what the press, in a thousand different ways, with a thousand different tactics, continually tries to impress upon the public. COVID won’t hurt you. If it hurt someone else, it’s because they’re unlucky, bad, lying, or insane. The political purpose of this is to encourage you to risk COVID, again and again and again. It is a comforting fantasy; stripping away the years of unscientific reporting, you should be able to see it for what it is: a complete absurdity.

Never in the history of public health have citizens been encouraged to contract and spread disease. Never in the history of viral illnesses, outside of anti-vaxxer spaces, have people been encouraged to believe that pathogens improve the immune system (they don’t!). Never in the history of humanity have societies welcomed disease and disease spread as a good or neutral event. These outlets are brainwashing you not only to accept COVID, but to accept that nothing can be done about it, and that those who want something to be done about it are bad and crazy. They are brainwashing you, in fact, to accept and embrace COVID; why else are those wearing masks treated as freaks for wanting to avoid it?

To pretend COVID- like any other disease- cannot be mitigated- is bizarre, unscientific, defeatist logic, and it is, in fact, a lie! We have the technology to drastically reduce airborne disease spread; we are choosing not to use it because it requires spending money on the public. After several years of strange, upside-down world messaging in favor of reinfections, people are siding with a fantasy over the shouts of the many harmed, and siding with COVID over their own health.