When Will the Lion Concern Himself

Joking memes make light of the uncomfortable reality: everyone's got a little of that post-COVID brain damage these days

An image went mega-viral on multiple platforms last week, of a very young man with this text superimposed: “The lion does not concern himself with his noticeable memory loss, brain fog and slight cognitive decline.” The original Tiktok garnered 1.4 million likes over the course of the next several days, and a screenshot of the Tiktok reposted on X (formerly twitter) has so far been liked 287k times.

A sampling of comments:

“slight?”

“ok genuinely what is the cause of this why is it happening to everyone Help”

“what could this be? I have this and I’m 19-20”

“the brain fog’s so bad, the lion can’t even bring himself to care about anything”

“Getting reeeeeeeeeeal sick of all these viral anything-but-covid posts”

Copycat posts followed, with others sharing tongue-in-cheek lists of symptoms they’re “not concerning” themselves with. A summary on X said that the meme “prompted users to share personal stories of Long COVID symptoms including chronic fatigue and heart palpitations. Long COVID impacts 10-35% of infected individuals worldwide, with 2025 studies in the New England Journal of Medicine and BMC Neurology confirming persistent cognitive deficits like memory and executive function.” X user latkedelrey shared the summary, stating “well i’m glad everyone’s thrown in the towel on the matter since we’re all doing so well”.

The fact that COVID infections damage our brains is not debatable. There are hundreds of studies to support that COVID affects the brain, leading to memory, attention, executive function, and mental health issues. Dr. Ziyad Al-Aly already put together a great compendium of information and research concerning what we know about COVID and the brain last year- although, of course, more has emerged since then.

His piece, COVID-19 Leaves Its Mark on the Brain, is subtitled, “Research shows that even mild COVID-19 can lead to the equivalent of seven years of brain aging”. The piece thoroughly reviews the cognitive risks of COVID; below is a selection from a longer list of studies in the piece:

• Large epidemiological analyses showed that people who had COVID-19 were at an increased risk of cognitive deficits, such as memory problems.

• Imaging studies done in people before and after their COVID-19 infections show shrinkage of brain volume and altered brain structure after infection.

• A study of people with mild to moderate COVID-19 showed significant prolonged inflammation of the brain and changes that are commensurate with seven years of brain aging.

• Laboratory experiments in human and mouse brain organoids designed to emulate changes in the human brain showed that SARS-CoV-2 infection triggers the fusion of brain cells. This effectively short-circuits brain electrical activity and compromises function.

• Studies show that even when the virus is mild and exclusively confined to the lungs, it can still provoke inflammation in the brain and impair brain cells’ ability to regenerate.

• COVID-19 can also disrupt the blood brain barrier, the shield that protects the nervous system – which is the control and command center of our bodies – making it “leaky.”

Al-Aly goes on to cite this large NEJM study, which found that people infected with COVID-19- even those who had mild infections - “had significant deficits in memory and executive task performance.”

It would be wasteful for me to rewrite Dr. Al-Aly’s entire article. Please do read it. The evidence has been building for years and has been consistent; COVID causes brain damage. Despite the clear evidence, we’ve continued to infect the population, not once, but repeatedly, with no plan to end the onslaught of reinfections.

I think of COVID as a double threat. Yes, it is a dangerous virus because it is a deadly and disabling virus. Yes, it is dangerous because it attacks the brain, heart, organs and immune system. It can kill you if you contract it; it can also disable you long-term. It can cause you to drop dead of a heart attack or stroke months later, to develop an autoimmune disease or diabetes over the following year, or reactivate your latent EBV or HPV or chickenpox, giving you shingles.

But the other threat of COVID, particularly at the population level, is its ability to reinfect.

Because if COVID were a one and done virus- a virus that bestowed lifelong immunity, like measles or polio (generally) do, the cruel logic of “let it rip” and “back to normal” would ultimately work for the “survivors”. For those who didn’t die, for those who didn’t develop Long COVID from their one and only infection, for those who didn’t suffer brain damage or too much bodily damage on their first shot out of the gate, then that would’ve been it. We really could’ve gone back to normal. For those who’d been harmed, well life sucks. Losers lose, winners win. And this is the attitude that the people who consider themselves “unharmed” by COVID have very publicly and boisterously put on as they took their masks off these last several years.

But COVID isn’t a one-and-done virus. And it doesn’t reinfect at a rate that is similar to other viruses of its severity. It’s more severe than the flu, yet the average person only contracts flu once or twice a decade. People are contracting COVID every year or so (and if you think you aren’t, bear in mind that 40+% of COVID infections are asymptomatic)- some people twice a year. People are spinning that roulette wheel- or rather, the Russian roulette wheel- often. Like, really often. Like, way, way, way too often.

The danger of COVID is its inherent danger, yes, but it’s also its relentlessness. It’s that when you get away with your 5th infection it’s coming right back for you a 6th time. A 6th time in year 6? And you’re a 6-year-old child? Is it really such a mystery that teachers are complaining that “COVID babies” can’t say their names or tie their shoes coming into kindergarten? We’ve been serially infecting children with a virus that damages their brains. We know it does this. And we just…. keep doing it?

What’s odd about the political climate surrounding forever COVID is that I really don’t see what the counterargument is against the idea that we should stop infecting children with a brain damaging virus. Reactions online seem to be simple disbelief that COVID damages brains- but this is anti-science. The science is clear. However, today we still have a hegemonic refusal to acknowledge COVID as a threat- from the far-right to the far-left, it is a largely united front to treat COVID as the cold it is so clearly not.

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.

Even people with Long COVID themselves sometimes buy into this idea. I see it in our support groups. We’re the unlucky ones, everyone else is walking around getting it a billion times and they’re “completely fine”.

But I don’t trust anecdote, I trust science. And science says that with each infection, risk is cumulative. Risk to the heart is going up. Risk to the brain is going up. People may react to the virus is different ways, at different rates. But nobody can get a virus that is objectively bad for you, objectively harmful, that we know invades the brain, degrades the immune system, and attacks the blood vessels, dozens and dozens of times, and just “be fine”. That is not how human bodies work.

Just last week, a devastating new study from The Lancet found that risk of Long COVID in children didn’t go down after their second infection; instead, it more than doubled. And this was in the Omicron era, with no significant difference noted between vaccinated and unvaccinated kids. The threat of Long COVID does not disappear with more infections. It amplifies.

What I see with “the lion does not concern himself” meme is those gigantic masses of people who didn’t get immediately, devastatingly harmed by COVID questioning the symptoms that are slowly accumulating over time and infections. They are being harmed, more slowly, in more subtle ways. Disabled people, and people with Long COVID, have been calling ourselves canaries in the coal mine for a reason. We may have been harmed first and worst, but we are warning you that COVID is dangerous because our bodies are made of flesh and blood - hearts and brains- just like yours.

Often when people online claim that the studies about Long COVID “can’t be true,” their evidence is that we’d be seeing a catastrophic level of damage around us by now were their findings accurate- and I’d argue that you can’t see what you refuse to see.

If thousands of studies are telling you to look for a certain kind of harm and then millions of people start wondering why they are experiencing exactly that type of harm, is it so hard to connect those two dots?

Does anyone want to connect those two dots?

Is anyone going to concern themselves?