00:00My mom is watching and my cousin is watching for her interior design class. She gets lead credit.
00:07Anyway, distinguished guests, thank you for having me. I feel so humbled to be here.
00:12I represent a generation that in many ways already knows how we've been failed.
00:18We are no strangers to protesting injustice. This summer alone has seen youth uprisings in Nepal, Angola, and Indonesia
00:24to say nothing of ongoing youth mobilization worldwide for free Palestine.
00:28And wherever we live, we've grown up in the shadow of the climate crisis with the threats, sacrifices, and
00:35scarcities that will entail looming over us. We know what that means for our lives in no small part
00:40thanks to the people in this room. And we are told by leaders across the board that we are the future.
00:46But when it comes to the ongoing pandemic, our present is being stolen right in front of our eyes.
00:52For adults, the relentless beat of back to normal, ignoring, downplaying, and concealing both the
00:57prevalence of airborne transmission and the threat of long COVID manifested in a series of choices.
01:03Young people lacked both real choice in the matter and information about what was being chosen for us.
01:09Here's what we know about SARS-CoV-2. It is airborne, floating and lingering in the air.
01:14One infection can result in disabling damage to almost every cell in the body from the brain and heart to the nerves and blood vessels.
01:20Every subsequent infection increases the risk of long COVID and places people who already have it in greater danger.
01:27Here's what we don't know, is what it does to reinfect children over and over and over again with no end point in sight from the day they are born.
01:35We are about to find out.
01:37As Dr. Akiko Iwasaki says, at this point, the whole population is the control group.
01:43And after only five years, long COVID has surpassed asthma as the most common chronic illness in children.
01:49Five years.
01:51I am terrified for the children who do not or soon will not know a world without debilitating pain and exhaustion,
01:58who cannot trust their bodies to play, explore, and imagine,
02:01and who will not know the potential of their own minds unfettered by the cognitive damage from a COVID-19 infection.
02:07And I am furious on their behalf.
02:10It is neglect of the highest order to look children in the eyes and say,
02:13we knew how to protect you and we didn't do it.
02:16We have access to a technology to prevent airborne disease,
02:20something that millions of our ancestors and millions of people around the world today would kill for.
02:25And we refuse to use it.
02:27And I shudder to think of where we will be in another five years of unmitigated infection and reinfection.
02:32But let me say on the topic of generational memory,
02:37that while I imagine no one in this room was alive in the time of Jon Snow or Ignace Semmelweis,
02:41many of you fought the long and hard battle against indoor smoking.
02:45My only memory of that era at almost 20 years old is being confused as a child about the no smoking signs on planes.
02:51Who would do that?
02:52That's gross.
02:53My hope for this event and my belief in this community rest on the belief that we can and we must do that again.
03:01We can recognize filtered air as a human right as intuitively as we do filtered water.
03:06We can create clean air infrastructure that is so ubiquitous and so obviously necessary,
03:11tomorrow's children don't even know why we need it.
03:13We need the people who remember 2020, who were not like me, 14 in 2020,
03:19to be loud about the world that we were promised at the onset of the pandemic,
03:24one where we and our institutions promised each other that if we only got out of that desperate acute phase,
03:29we would do everything we could to protect our communities going forward.
03:33And we need the people who are born now, we owe it to the people who are born now,
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