Thread by @RVAwonk

I was about to post a long, thoughtful thread about long-term effects of COVID & how we, as a society, decide on informational priorities & norms, & how right now we’re setting things up so long COVID will be another one of many chronic diseases that Drs don’t take seriously.. /1

But alas, I’m too exhausted to do that right now, so I’ll come back to it at a better time. For now, here’s my adorable, sweet, joyful daughter.

I will mention, though, that I keep coming back to this nightmare scenario where long COVID remains nebulous and primarily affects women & minorities, so over time, Drs start to doubt its existence and refuse proper pain management b/c we taught them that all opiates are evil.

There’s a type of mis/disinformation research that is basically an extension of gatekeeping and uses the mis/disinfo problem to tell us who is allowed to be deemed credible and what info is allowed in the public square. This has historically harmed all but high SES white men.

There are some well-intentioned, extremely smart people who are unintentionally helping what will ultimately end up harming a lot of good people. So I hope I can encourage people in this field to look critically at the history, practice, & harms of disguised gatekeeping.

And I see the seeds of this being planted w/ long COVID. It’s still early. It’s still being studied. But so is COVID. The difference is that we have a simple, binary test for COVID, but we don’t for long COVID. For many w/in the medical community, this will be a problem.