AJ Leonardi

AJ on Twitter

I presented considered views that were intended to contribute to the scientific discourse. Views that are grounded in evidence, based on my experience conducting research at the NIH and elsewhere. My reward for sharing these views was to be labeled a ‘crank’ and a ‘grifter’ by a small but very vocal community of scientists and COVID commentators on Twitter like Marc Veldhoen and Zeynep Tufekci. I don’t have my own lab. I’m not in receipt of grants and my work on COVID has not benefited my career whatsoever. In fact, it has cost me. I have privately paid for the journal publication fees, and have suffered harm to my reputation because of how this vocal group chose to engage with me, attacking me as a person, rather than engaging with and refuting the science. What started as a small group quickly grew. I know members of this group reached out to other scientists privately to discredit me as an alarmist. They felt that the broad stimulation and hyperactivation of T cells was only valid during 1) severe disease and 2) acutely Little did they know the mechanism of T cell aging and death would behave in an "as above, so below" instance. What I mean is, that if you have a continuous broad stimulation, you have continuous broad turnover of cells. This is how in part people with Long Covid are missing unactivated naive T cells. There is a broad stimulation, which happens acutely, happening chronically as well. So they dismissed my alarm of 'kiss your naive T cells goodbye' when I wrote it in 2020