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. Since that time, we’ve had two main narratives about Long COVID. The first, usually spewed on the right but too often adopted by the left as well, is that Long COVID is not real. It’s made up, it’s something lazy people use to stay in bed and get out of work, and/or it’s hysteria and conversion disorder.

But the second, more often left-wing narrative, is the one which is really punctured here. This is the narrative the left uses because it allows them to be “sympathetic” to Long COVID patients while refusing to mask or take any sort of preventive action. This is 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.