Ann Coulter has always been a bomb-thrower. She traffics in saying outrageous things and then sits back and watches the fallout. Whether she believes half the stuff she says is anyone's guess.
On a recent episode of her "Unsafe" podcast with Scott Adams, she compared long-haul COVID to UFOs and blamed New York liberals for making it up.
"I hope you're not one of these, but I've been a little disappointed in some of my fellow conservatives running off on this UFO thing," she began. "UFO things have always driven me crazy. Like ghosts, I'll believe it when I see one."
"And the other one, and I again, I hope you don't think you have long-haul COVID," she told Adams. "Long-haul COVID is total B.S. It is invented. It's neurotic liberal women in New York. Have you noticed this is all women who have long-haul COVID?"
Scott Adams and I discuss "long haul covid" - pic.twitter.com/MlHDJiLuGL
— Ann Coulter (@AnnCoulter) May 20, 2024
Well, good for you, Ann. I'm glad you haven't had to deal with the effects of COVID long after being infected by the Wuhan virus. The fact that you don't know any conservatives who have long COVID is perhaps more a reflection of who you hang out with than anything else. (Yeah, I said "Wuhan virus." Go ahead and demonetize this column, Google.*)
I was infected with the virus early on in the pandemic — spring of 2020. I knew I had it before I was even tested because I immediately lost the ability to taste and smell. Several weeks later, it returned, but only partly. Now, four years later, I've only regained around 10% of what I had before catching COVID. Usually, what happens is that I'll smell something for a few seconds, and then it goes away. The same goes for my sense of taste. I'll taste something when I first put it in my mouth, and then it's gone. Some scents that I used to love smell nasty to me now. I brought a bouquet of peonies into the house yesterday, and they smelled rancid.
Most of the time, it's not a big deal. I've learned to live with it and don't really think about it much. Other people have it much, much worse. But sometimes, it can be scary, like last night when my husband came home and found the house smelling of propane. I had wiped down the stove about 45 minutes earlier and must have inadvertently bumped one of the knobs. The thing is, I didn't smell it. I recall something smelling vaguely of cauliflower, but I didn't notice the house filling up with propane. It's terrifying to think what might have happened if he hadn't come home when he did or if, God forbid, this had happened when I was babysitting the grandkids.
I've also been dealing with long-term fatigue, which could very well be, as Adams noted, just me getting old and/or working out too hard. But there's no other explanation for the loss of smell and taste.
Yes, there has been some hysteria and social contagion surrounding long-haul COVID, and there are most certainly people who want to use it as a pretext for locking us down again. But to say it doesn't exist is stupid. Maybe Ann Coulter's neurotic liberal New York friends are faking it, but not all of us are. (Let me know if you're a long-hauler in the comments.)
*There's another kind of long-haul problem resulting from COVID: Since the beginning of the pandemic, nearly everything we've written on the topic has been demonetized — Google disables ads on these articles, and we lose money because we still have to pay our writers. (Ben has a list here.) That hasn't stopped us from writing about COVID or anything else the Ministry of Truth wants to hide from the public.
When other sites caved to Anthony Fauci's narrative about COVID-infected bat soup in Wuhan, we continued to report the possibility of a lab leak because we trust our readers to look at the facts and decide for themselves rather than being spoonfed the Government Narrative. We'll continue to report the facts for as long as we can remain financially viable.
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