Last week, a meme went mega-viral on multiple platforms. The original featured a very young man, with the text superimposed: “The lion does not concern himself with his noticeable memory loss, brain fog and slight cognitive decline.” Millions liked it. Tens of thousands of comments rolled in.

“slight?”

“ok genuinely what is the cause of this why is it happening to everyone Help”

“what could this be? I have this and I’m 19-20”

“the brain fog’s so bad, the lion can’t even bring himself to care about anything”

The fact that COVID infections damage our brains is not debatable. There are hundreds of studies to support that COVID affects the brain, leading to memory, attention, executive function, and mental health issues.

What interests me about the “the lion does not concern himself” meme is the cracks it puts in the central fiction of the lies being told about Long COVID since 2022: the idea that Long COVID is real, it exists, but only a certain kind of person gets it, and it’s a small minority of people. There’s something special about them, it must be genetic or something, and it doesn’t really affect most people.

What I see with “the lion does not concern himself” meme is those gigantic masses of people who didn’t get immediately, devastatingly harmed by COVID questioning the symptoms that are slowly accumulating over time and infections. They are being harmed, more slowly, in more subtle ways. Disabled people, and people with Long COVID, have been calling ourselves canaries in the coal mine for a reason. We may have been harmed first and worst, but we are warning you that COVID is dangerous because our bodies are made of flesh and blood - hearts and brains- just like yours.

Often when people online claim that the studies about Long COVID “can’t be true,” their evidence is that we’d be seeing a catastrophic level of damage around us by now were their findings accurate- and I’d argue that you can’t see what you refuse to see.

If thousands of studies are telling you to look for a certain kind of harm and then millions of people start wondering why they are experiencing exactly that type of harm, is it so hard to connect those two dots?