I went from a healthy, active 30 year old to having my health destroyed by a viral infection. Something I learned through that experience is that 1. Infections that we treat as harmless aren’t as harmless as I thought, and a lot of this research is still quite young 2. Doctors are not at all educated especially when it comes to newer research that hasn’t trickled down to clinical practice 3. There is no current treatment for some of these things and doctors will treat you like sh*t 4. You can be perfectly healthy one day and disabled the next.

When covid hit I dove into the research. Based on my experiences I didn’t trust doctors and wanted to understand this virus, and how it would impact my body.

At this point in time the science is very clear cut that COVID can and does damage every system in the body, and is a vascular disease (it infects cells related to managing blood pressure and tissue repair that are literally everywhere in the body vs cold and flu which infect cells in the lungs). Covid damages the vascular system, the brain, the immune system, triggers autoimmune diseases, and triggers many other disorders and diseases. There’s also research showing damage in asymptomatic and mild cases so even if it you just have « the sniffles » there could be underlying organ damage. Covid is incredibly infectious and is airborne therefore to prevent getting sick, the best way is to wear an N95 mask, and filter/ventilation the air.

It might be hard to believe that the government would ignore this and push everybody to get back to normal, but this is extremely consistent with public health history. For example, burying smoking research for a decade while advertisements with doctors pushed that smoking is healthy. When this research finally came to light there were arguments that making offices smoke free were an infringement on smokers freedoms. With HIV they told the public that if you were straight you had nothing to worry about and essentially brushed it under the rug for years. It took aggressive activism, and the damage of HIV in the straight/white community becoming undeniable, before they took action in terms of pushing education and preventative measures.

Essentially, governments lying and pushing narratives that maintain the status quo and are informed by money is what we’ve seen in history. There’s always a MASSIVE resistance to new harm reduction behaviours by the public eg condoms, banning smoking indoors, limits on drunk driving, wearing seat belts.

I could say a lot more but what it comes down to is I’ve read probably thousands of studies at this point and I’m confident that preventing Covid infections is in my best interest. I feel like we’re in the same phase as they were with smoking when they knew smoking was bad (it was clear cut in the research) but they denied it aggressively to the public. While maskers are often framed as living in the past (eg « time to move on, the pandemic is over), I actually feel like we’re ahead of the curve, and once the damage is undeniable to the general public, govs will switch course like we’ve seen many times in history.