00:00It's a great delight to now welcome Violet Affleck. Violet is a youth advocate, she's the voice of Gen Z,
00:08she's a climate champion, and she's a clean indoor air advocate, Violet.
00:17Thank you so much. Which way is the live stream camera?
00:20I mentioned it straight down.
00:22Thank you. Okay.
00:23My mom is watching and my cousin is watching for her interior design class. She gets lead credit.
00:27But anyway, distinguished guests, thank you for having me. I feel so humbled to be here.
00:34We've grown up in the shadow of the climate crisis with the threats, sacrifices, and scarcities that will entail looming
00:40over us.
00:41We know what that means for our lives in no small part thanks to the people in this room.
00:45And we are told by leaders across the board that we are the future.
00:50But when it comes to the ongoing pandemic, our present is being stolen right in front of our eyes.
00:55For adults, the relentless beat of back to normal, ignoring, downplaying, and concealing both the prevalence of airborne transmission and
01:02the threat of long COVID, manifested in a series of choices.
01:06Young people lacked both real choice in the matter and information about what was being chosen for us.
01:13Here's what we know about SARS-CoV-2.
01:15It is airborne, floating and lingering in the air.
01:18One infection can result in disabling damage to almost every cell in the body from the brain and heart to
01:23the nerves and blood vessels.
01:24Every subsequent infection increases the risk of long COVID and places people who already have it in greater danger.
01:31Here's what we don't know is what it does to reinfect children over and over and over again with no
01:37end point in sight from the day they are born.
01:39We are about to find out.
01:41As Dr. Akiko Iwasaki says, at this point, the whole population is the control group.
01:47And after only five years, long COVID has surpassed asthma as the most common chronic illness in children.
01:53Five years.
01:54It is neglect of the highest order to look children in the eyes and say, we knew how to protect
01:59you and we didn't do it.
02:01We have access to a technology to prevent airborne disease, something that millions of our ancestors and millions of people
02:07around the world today would kill for.
02:09And we refuse to use it.
02:11And I shudder to think of where we will be in another five years of unmitigated infection and reinfection.
02:18My hope for this event and my belief in this community rest on the belief that we can and we
02:24must do that again.
02:25We can recognize filtered air as a human right as intuitively as we do filtered water.
02:30We can create clean air infrastructure that is so ubiquitous and so obviously necessary tomorrow's children don't even know why
02:37we need it.
02:37We need the people who remember 2020, who are not like me, 14 in 2020, to be loud about the
02:45world that we were promised at the onset of the pandemic.
02:48One where we and our institutions promised each other that if we only got out of that desperate acute phase,
02:54we would do everything we could to protect our communities going forward.
02:57And we need the people who are born now.
03:00We owe it to the people who are born now that they take that world for granted.
03:04Thank you.
03:07Thank you.
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