Thread by @milehighcarson

@demeatloaf @lionel_rich1 I'm happy to share my story. When COVID hit in 2020, I was working in a nursing home. It was terrifying. We had so many residents die that it made COVID seem like an unstoppable virus. Early in the pandemic, I began participating heavily in COVID related subreddits. The... (1/x)

@demeatloaf @lionel_rich1 2/x entire world bought into it and locked down, which further reinforced my belief that the panic I was feeling over COVID was warranted and logical. 2020 went by with our state/city mostly locked down, so it wasn't something I had to think about. In Dec. 2020, I was one of the

@demeatloaf @lionel_rich1 3/x first few thousand people in America to receive the COVID vaccine. My wife was vaccinated in February and we decided it was time to start resuming normal life. At this point, I had been more or less locked down for 11 months. I briefly went back to living a normal life, but

@demeatloaf @lionel_rich1 (4/x) soon found myself finding anecdotes of people having breakthrough infections despite the vaccine. I was so immersed in reddit coronavirus culture and the echo chamber that it just started seeming like doomsday. I turned to Twitter and that is where things got really bad.

@demeatloaf @lionel_rich1 5/x I became absolutely obsessed with AJ Leonardi and his t-cell theories and some of the prominent long COVID accounts on here. I had my own account (since nuked) that had 10k+ followers that mostly RTd content from fringe COVID posters. During that time, I barely left my

@demeatloaf @lionel_rich1 6/x house except for work, and when I did I wore a respirator everywhere. In the nursing homes, masks were still required, twice weekly testing was mandatory, and we were still more or less locked down. This further affirmed the viewpoint that COVID was a terrible disease and

@demeatloaf @lionel_rich1 that the government was actively engaging in a coverup to promote economic activity. After all, why would we have so many government mandates in the nursing homes if this wasn't the case. From April/May 2021 until February 2022, I lived in a state of self imposed isolation.

@demeatloaf @lionel_rich1 8/x I often times brought my wife and kids into that isolation. Not because I forbade them from leaving the house, but because when they went out maskless, I would isolate myself in our guest room to avoid potential exposures, which meant my wife had to function as a single

@demeatloaf @lionel_rich1 9/x parent in those moments. During the omicron wave, my wife and kids got COVID (I didn't due to being locked in a guestroom). I feel into a deep depression because I truly believed that their lives were ruined by airborne HIV and that they would develop post COVID symptoms

@demeatloaf @lionel_rich1 10/x In March of 2022, my wife approached me and asked for a separation. She told me that if I was unable to return to normal she didn't see a future with me and that she had no interest in herself and our kids living in indefinite fear of COVID. I decided that the risks I felt

@demeatloaf @lionel_rich1 11/x were posed by COVID were facing to try and preserve my family. My initial idea was to try to form a compromise that would allow some preventions to be kept while still maintaining what I felt was a reasonable level of safety for our family. I texted out to several people

@demeatloaf @lionel_rich1 12/x in the COVID cautious online community (by this point I was communicating by phone and discord with these people and they knew my identity) to get solutions on which mitigations would be most important to keep and where I could give up mitigations to help form a compromise

@demeatloaf @lionel_rich1 13/x Several of these people doxxed my wife on social media and began harassing her, calling her a eugenicist and a terrible mother and about how her desire to return to normal would end with our children's deaths. At no point had I asked them to act like that.orninplied it was

@demeatloaf @lionel_rich1 14/x something I wanted. I pretty much immediately saw it for what it was. I was in a cult, I was becoming an apostate, and they were lashing out at the person they believed was responsible for my apostasy. I immediately shutdown my old Twitter account, blocked everyone, and

@demeatloaf @lionel_rich1 14/x took some much needed space away from the online world. I found a therapist who specialized in anxiety disorders and underwent nine months of desensitization therapy. I wasn't able to just flip a switch and give up precautions, even though I wanted to by that time. It took

@demeatloaf @lionel_rich1 15/x several months of therapy for me to feel comfortable going back to dining indoors in restaurants, for example. The behaviors had just become so engrained in my daily life that giving them up was causing panic attacks and doubts about whether I was doing the right thing

@demeatloaf @lionel_rich1 16/x Its now been just over a year since I finished therapy. I'm happy to report that I'm pretty much back to normal and living an average life. My wife and I have reconciled (very long process that is still, honestly, a work in progress). I've since had COVID and it was

@demeatloaf @lionel_rich1 17/x unremarkable. One of the reasons I've become so active in speaking out on Twitter against the zero COVID movement is that I see a lot of posts here and on Reddit from people who have allowed their families to be ripped apart and have lost so many friends. It makes me sad

@demeatloaf @lionel_rich1 because I know the echo chamber they are being bombarded with and the fear of leaving the movement. I feel like many of these people could mend those relationships if they could break away from the cult, but online algorithms and self-selected online social groups make that

@demeatloaf @lionel_rich1 19/x nearly impossible to do. What makes me most angry is that I believe that most of the big names in the COVID cautious online sphere are grifters who do not actually believe or follow their own rhetoric. It's all in the name of direct or indirect profit without any regard

@demeatloaf @lionel_rich1 20/x for the people they are actually harming. Even worse, I feel like the zero COVID movement is increasingly being taken over by people who are themselves profoundly mentally ill. My biggest worry is that it has reached a doom cycle where the moderate voices have been

@demeatloaf @lionel_rich1 21/21 siphoned off and replaced with increasingly more fringe actors. I feel like more direct public health pushback against the zero COVID movement is needed. But most public health experts are obviously busy with other work and hesitant to jump into that mess.

@demeatloaf @lionel_rich1 I'm hoping I linked all my replies correctly. I've never done a long form post like this on Twitter before, but I don't know a better method of sharing it and I'm not going to pay for a blue check to post longer content. If it's not linked right, can someone let me know?