Violet Affleck and healthy indoor air

Filtered air is a “human right”, the teenage activist Violet Affleck has told the United Nations.

Speaking from behind a large face mask and clear goggles, the daughter of divorced Hollywood stars Ben Affleck and Jennifer Garner accused older generations of neglecting children who have Long Covid.

High neglect

Affleck joined global leaders, policymakers, scientists and health experts at the “Healthy Indoor Air: A Global Call to Action” event, to deliver an address about the effects of Long Covid among children and the need for clean air infrastructure.

“We are told by leaders across the board that we are the future,” she said, “but when it comes to our ongoing pandemic, our present is being stolen right in front of your eyes”.

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Wearing an N95 mask, she criticised the “relentless beat of back to normal”, which is “ignoring, downplaying, and concealing both the prevalence of airborne transmission and the threat of Long Covid”. She went on to say that when there is access to technology to prevent airborne disease, refusing to use it to protect children is “neglect of the highest order”.

Affleck, who has suffered from Long Covid personally, said “filtered air” should be a “human right”, and we must “create clean air infrastructure that is so ubiquitous and so obviously necessary”, that “tomorrow’s children don’t even know why we need it”.

A Yale University student, Affleck has attended White House state dinners to advocate for clean air and the prevention of Long Covid, but not everyone is convinced by the attention she’s received.

Writing on X, the broadcaster Meghan McCain said that “every single thing about all of this is why people hate nepo babies so much,” adding that Affleck has “no business” speaking at the UN, said The Independent.

A hot issue

Nevertheless, air filtration has become a hot issue since the pandemic. Research carried out on Covid wards at Addenbrooke's Hospital in Cambridge during the “height of the second wave” suggested that air filter machines “removed almost all traces of airborne Covid virus”, said the NHS.

“We were really surprised by quite how effective air filters were at removing airborne SARS-CoV-2 on the wards,” said Dr Andrew Conway Morris, from the Department of Medicine at the University of Cambridge. And on the standards of air quality, Dr Vilas Navapurkar, a consultant in intensive care medicine, said: “We’re all familiar with the idea of having standards for clean water and of hygiene standards for food”, so we must agree “what is acceptable air quality”.

A July 2021 report from the Centre for Disease Control in the US also suggested that portable HEPA air cleaners could reduce exposure to SARS-CoV-2 indoors, after researchers focused on conference rooms, but said Which, ”there's a lot more real-world evidence needed”.