RFK Jr. Gave His Son Long COVID. Whoops!
Disabling the Young for the Fantasies of the Old
Well, here’s a dark twist for the history of the pandemic: America’s most prominent anti-vaccine crusader for pestilence just admitted before Congress that his son has been “devastated” by Long COVID. This is quite awkward, considering that many of his handpicked MAHA goons, like Marty Makary, deny that the condition even exists. Much of his fan club insists that the vaccine, not the SARS virus, is responsible.
At no point did the HHS Secretary take a hard look in the mirror and admit that his years of demonizing vaccines and public health, including marching with neo-Nazis alongside a child abuser, might have contributed to his son developing this condition.
The sad reality is that layered mitigations, including vaccine boosters & N95 respirators, would have greatly reduced the probability of RFK Jr.’s son, and millions of other Americans, from developing Long COVID. We had some idea that such a condition was a risk from the original SARS-CoV-1 virus, and we knew in 2020 that young unvaccinated Americans were developing MIS-C and even organ damage. We still have no cure or treatment for Long COVID.
Sadly, this is yet another tragic example of how the young have, time and time again, had their health and futures sacrificed in service of the fantasies of the old throughout the COVID-19 pandemic.
The Swedeaboo Fantasy
Years ago, we covered the Swedish State Epidemiologist Anders Tegnell, who rejected hard science to instead take pandemic policy guidance from an anti-Semitic conspiracy theorist social media troll by the name of “FatEmperor.” Deciding that the best way to manage a new SARS virus was to infect millions of Swedes before a vaccine was available, Tegnell’s disastrous response caused widespread disruption & significantly more death when compared to similar countries. A few years later, a Swedish insurance company found that a third of young adults were struggling with cognitive impairment. Just recently, another study from Sweden saw that those with Long COVID were struggling in the workplace with declining health.
Did Anders Tegnell apologize for failing his fellow Swedes? Nope! He paraded himself around the world like he was some sort of heroic freedom fighter. He even came to Stanford to speak at a quack-ridden “Pandemic Policy” conference with an audience free of Stanford students but chock full of old white conservatives. You can even buy his book or give him a bunch of money to have him speak at your event. The facts don’t matter. You are supposed to celebrate Tegnell as some sort of hero for getting millions of his countrymen disabled.
These young Swedes didn’t get much of a choice in being served up as human sacrifice for an ignorant old man’s fantasy. Many American-based disinformation artists now hold up a totally fictionalized account of Tegnell’s failures as some sort of model we must follow should another pandemic arrive. This can only end in disaster.
From Denial to Horror
Back here in America, some grimly cracked jokes about COVID-19 in 2020, calling it the “Boomer Remover.” However, we also spent the first year of the pandemic watching younger people develop serious long-term complications instead of “natural immunity,” as Ed Yong’s reporting from June of that year shows. Those who championed mass infection of the unvaccinated refused to acknowledge or even outright denied that this was a potential risk factor, most notably the elder academics behind the Great Barrington Declaration. In fact, GBD author Jay Bhattacharya recently whined that he was the true victim of the pandemic, claiming he lost 30 pounds because his useless online petition was criticized. His co-author Martin Kulldorff demanded in April 2020 (!) that young people have a civic duty embrace a brand-new virus that was killing so many.
After electing a new President (with a history of getting thousands of young Americans killed & disabled) as some sort of pandemic savior, much of the American public became more receptive to misleading propaganda. Had the public been warned that a former deli owner with zero medical or scientific credentials would be appointed COVID Czar, or that the pledged pandemic response plan would be immediately tossed for junk like “Doordash and Wallgreens are teaming up to deliver Paxlovid to underprivileged communities,” they might have been more cautious.
Instead, the public found themselves bombarded endless torrent of minimizing propaganda encouraging the abandonment of most mitigations & the embrace of mass reinfection. The pediatric death toll doubled in a matter of months the back half of 2021, and countless children found themselves developing all sorts of serious long-term health issues. Students developed cognitive impairment, young athletes were forced to abandon their dreams due to chronic fatigue, singers found their vocal chords damaged & other horrors. Pandemic pundits wrote this off as “immunity debt.”
Not an ounce of acknowledgement of this was made by the geriatric plagiarist who previously insisted that Iraq had weapons of mass destruction, or that Theranos was the laboratory of the future. Instead, he gleefully slashed pandemic relief in a gleeful victory lap over a mountain of suffering. The young had their health and futures sacrificed for the delusional narcissistic fantasies of the old.
Closing Thoughts
We shouldn’t have to see a constant stream of news reports of how children and young people have had their lives upended by a virus they were promised was harmless to them, while cantankerous old men act like immature brats on social media. Let’s not stop with COVID-19. Look towards the accelerating climate collapse: If the young people of today truly understood not just what the old and powerful have done to them, but were willing to do to them, they would burn down the nursing homes with us inside.
America has let itself be dragged into a reactionary spiral of anti-intellectualism, in which impotent mythology is valued over scientific fact. If we are to ever escape from this whirlpool towards eldritch horrors, we must first reset our priorities.
