Violet Affleck, the daughter of Ben Affleck and Jennifer Garner, presented a passionate statement at the United Nations on Tuesday, September 23, advocating for clean air and masks to avoid the spread of long COVID-19.
“We are told by leaders across the board that we are the future,” Violet, 19, said. “But when it comes to the ongoing pandemic, our present is being stolen right in front of our eyes.” She gave the address while wearing a K95 mask.
Violet subsequently lashed out at adults for “the relentless beat of back to normal, ignoring, downplaying, and concealing both the prevalence of airborne transmission and the threat of long COVID.”
She is a freshman at Yale University and recently wrote an academic article about the January wildfires in Los Angeles County.
“Young people lacked both real choice in the matter and information about what was being chosen for us,” she pointed out.
She then went into depth about the virus that causes COVID-19. “Here’s what we know about SARS-CoV-2,” Violet remarked. “It is airborne, floating and lingering in the air; one infection can result in disabling damage to almost every cell in the body, from the brain and heart to the nerves and blood vessels.”
She also stated, “Every subsequent infection increases the risk of long-term movement and places people who already have it in greater danger.”
“As Dr. Akiko Iwasaki says, at this point, the whole population is the control group, and after only five years, long COVID has surpassed asthma as the most common chronic illness in children five years and under,” Violet said.
She then raised concern about the virus’s proliferation in schools, stating she was “terrified” for children who “will never know a world without debilitating pain and exhaustion, who cannot trust their bodies to play, explore, and imagine” after being infected with COVID-19.
“I am furious on their behalf,” she stated. It is the height of neglect to look children in the eyes and say, ‘We knew how to protect you but didn’t do it.’ Despite having access to technology that could prevent airborne sickness, something millions of our ancestors and millions of others around the world would sacrifice for, we choose not to use it.
“And I shudder to think of where we will be in another five years of unmitigated infection and reinfection,” she said, before going on to discuss another public health issue: the campaign to prohibit smoking in public places.
“Many of you fought a long, hard struggle against indoor smoking. At nearly 20 years old, the only memory I have of that era is being perplexed by the no-smoking signage on flights. Who would do that? “That’s gross,” she recalled, eliciting laughter from the crowd.
“My hope for this event and my belief in this community pressed on the belief that we can and we must do that again,” she recalled. “We can recognize filtered air as a human right, as intuitively as we do filtered water.”
She went on: “We can create clean air infrastructure that is so ubiquitous and so obviously necessary that tomorrow’s children don’t even know why we need it.”
In a July 2024 L.A. County Board of Supervisors meeting, she spoke during the Public Comment session, as shown in a video published on X at the time.
At the time, she pushed for mask availability and high-quality free testing while simultaneously opposing mask bans.
“I developed a post-viral illness in 2019,” the youngster confessed during her lecture at L.A.’s Kenneth Hahn Hall of Administration, adding, “I’m well now, but I learned firsthand that medicine does not always have answers to the implications of even mild infections. The COVID-19 epidemic has brought this into closer focus.”