00:00Distinguished guests, thank you for having me. I feel so humbled to be here.
00:04I represent a generation that in many ways already knows how we've been failed. We are no strangers
00:11to protesting injustice. This summer alone has seen youth uprisings in Nepal, Angola, and Indonesia
00:17to say nothing of ongoing youth mobilization worldwide for free Palestine. And wherever we
00:22live, we've grown up in the shadow of the climate crisis with the threats, sacrifices, and scarcities
00:27that will entail looming over us. We know what that means for our lives in no small part thanks to the
00:33people in this room. And we are told by leaders across the board that we are the future. But when
00:39it comes to the ongoing pandemic, our present is being stolen right in front of our eyes. For adults,
00:45the relentless beat of back to normal, ignoring, downplaying, and concealing both the prevalence of
00:50airborne transmission and the threat of long COVID manifested in a series of choices. Young people
00:55lacked both real choice in the matter and information about what was being chosen for us.
01:01Here's what we know about SARS-CoV-2. It is airborne, floating and lingering in the air. One
01:07infection can result in disabling damage to almost every cell in the body from the brain and heart to
01:11the nerves and blood vessels. Every subsequent infection increases the risk of long COVID and
01:16places people who already have it in greater danger. Here's what we don't know is what it does to
01:22reinfect children over and over and over again with no end point in sight from the day they are born.
01:28We are about to find out. As Dr. Akiko Iwasaki says, at this point, the whole population is the control
01:35group. And after only five years, long COVID has surpassed asthma as the most common chronic illness
01:41in children. Five years. I am terrified for the children who do not or soon will not know a world
01:48without debilitating pain and exhaustion, who cannot trust their bodies to play, explore and imagine,
01:53and who will not know the potential of their own minds unfettered by the cognitive damage from a
01:58COVID-19 infection. And I am furious on their behalf. It is neglect of the highest order to look
02:04children in the eyes and say, we knew how to protect you and we didn't do it. We have access to a
02:10technology to prevent airborne disease, something that millions of our ancestors and millions of people
02:15around the world today would kill for. And we refuse to use it. And I shudder to think of where
02:20we will be in another five years of unmitigated infection and reinfection. But let me say on the
02:27topic of generational memory, that while I imagine no one in this room was alive in the time of John
02:32Snow or Ignace Semmelweis, many of you fought the long and hard battle against indoor smoking.
02:37My only memory of that era at almost 20 years old is being confused as a child about the no smoking
02:43signs on planes. Who would do that? That's gross. My hope for this event and my belief in this
02:48community rest on the belief that we can and we must do that again. We can recognize filtered air
02:55as a human right as intuitively as we do filtered water. We can create clean air infrastructure that
03:00is so ubiquitous and so obviously necessary, tomorrow's children don't even know why we need it.
03:05We need the people who remember 2020, who were not like me, 14 in 2020, to be loud about the world
03:13that we were promised at the onset of the pandemic, one where we and our institutions promised each
03:18other that if we only got out of that desperate acute phase, we would do everything we could to
03:23protect our communities going forward. And we need the people who are born now, we owe it to the
03:29people who are born now, that they take that world for granted. Thank you.
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