The last of the Covidians The emergency mindset drove them mad

The way the world learned that podcaster Leslie Lee III died at the age of 43 last week was through a pair of harrowing posts on his own X account — written by his partner, “YB”. The first post announced that he was missing (“he is without jacket, wallet, keys, and glasses”). Hours later came the follow-up about his sudden death. There was no elaboration, no story, no explanation — just the bare, devastating fact of a life ended. 

Within hours, tributes began to circulate. On Reddit, strangers tried to figure out what had happened, with some assuming it was related to his bout with “long Covid”, while others believed, reasonably under the circumstances, it was suicide (YB didn’t reply to my requests for comment). On YouTube, podcasters eulogised Lee. And across X, the platform where he spent so much of his last five years, the reactions carried a stunned grief. 

I expected to feel ambivalent. I had known Lee only through a couple of antagonistic exchanges online this year. In our final exchange in August, I blocked him after I refused to debate him about Covid on his show, Struggle Session. But I could only muster sadness and pity for him. The “Zero Covid” or “Covid cautious” community he helped sustain had hardened into something like an emotional pandemic, long after the biological one had faded into the background of American life.

To understand that movement, we have to return to 2020.

The institutional failures of the early pandemic are well documented: the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s infamous mask flip-flop; the agency’s fixation on surface transmission; missteps on testing; mixed messages about risk; and a possible coverup of the origins of the novel coronavirus. For many Americans, the CDC’s credibility cracked. For people already predisposed to distrust institutions — especially on the far Left and Right — it shattered.

Into that breach stepped the so-called People’s CDC, a self-appointed, grassroots alternative. It was a coalition of activist scientists, public-health researchers, and highly online progressives, united by the belief that only a bottom-up, morally pure movement could save the marginalised. They were united by a shared belief that the official CDC no longer “followed the science” and had been corrupted by MAGA and capitalist institutions, which demanded everyone go back to work to shore up the corporate bottom line. The People’s CDC began issuing biweekly “risk maps” that almost always seemed to point toward continued caution, regardless of the data. 

Even after vaccines arrived, even as hospitalisations fell, even as scientists updated their understanding of risk, the People’s CDC preserved the emotional realities of early 2021: masks were always necessary, indoor gatherings were inherently suspect, and any attempt to resume normal everyday social life was problematic. The group wanted the United States to be on full lockdown like China, even as the Middle Kingdom abandoned its hard-line Zero Covid policies. For many, this alternative CDC filled an emotional void or offered clarity during a bewildering moment. For others, it became something more — an identity.

The Zero Covid movement’s nerve center is a 32,000-member-strong subreddit called ZeroCovidCommunity. The members are convinced that the pandemic never truly ended, that the emergency has become a permanent condition. The radical edge of this community codified itself into what some observers half-jokingly called COVIDTELPRO, a quasi-ironic name evoking the FBI’s secret surveillance program of the 1960s. This group primarily targets Left-wing organizers, journalists, union members, and anyone else who dares to propose a future that includes socializing, bars, or maskless joy. The result is a constant churn of denunciations, loyalty tests, and ritualistic online shaming of those who don’t wear N95 masks in public.  

I encountered them firsthand. In February, I wrote a brief essay urging young adults — Gen Z, in particular — to revisit offline social life, to resist the isolation that had become endemic. I intended to push against the extreme safety-ism that had metastasised among the Left and young people since 2020. Humans are inherently social animals, as Aristotle taught, and meeting others face-to-face is a fundamental aspect of physical, mental, and even political health. But in the eyes of Zero Covid activists, I had committed an inexcusable offence — telling people to get a life. 

One of the most persistent of the Covid-cautious commentators was Leslie Lee. He had a career long before his activism swallowed him. He taught high-school English, wrote for the Huffington Post and other progressive outlets, and co-hosted a number of Lefty podcasts. 

In the late 2010s, Lee was sharp, blunt, funny, and often pugnacious — an online personality who knew how to provoke. Then Covid struck; for him, the “long” variety. On his GoFundMe page, he described brain fog, excruciating migraines, constant fatigue — all of which made his once-fluid creative process painfully slow: “one show every month or two,” he admitted. What he did have energy for, at least publicly, was venting endlessly about “Covid deniers” like me. Once Lee put me in his crosshairs as the enemy on X, I received hundreds of angry tweets from those in the movement — including from Seventies actress Morgan Fairchild and the forever-masked influencer-journalist Taylor Lorenz, arguably Zero Covid’s biggest icon. 

What surprised me most during the weeks-long harassment wasn’t the volume; it was the emotional intensity. My opponents posted as if they lived in a perpetual emergency, and I was part of the problem. Many of these people were polite in private over direct messages or phone calls, including Lorenz. But in public, they wanted a pound of flesh from me, a groveling apology, even as they threatened real-life harm. The rhetoric kept escalating. Disagreement meant harm. Harm became violence. Violence turned to genocide. I was an “ableist” and eventually accused of being — yes — Hitler for the immunocompromised. One wrote: “People like you make it impossible for me to exist in public spaces.” 

I was far from the only one on the receiving end. Activists told me they were tired of every event photo being ammunition for the Covid-cautious to scream bloody murder at the sight of unmasked faces. A national newspaper columnist contacted me privately to say she had endured 18 straight months of being called “a murderer” and worse for her positions on lockdowns and school closures. “I just want you to know you aren’t alone,” she wrote.

As political journalist David Weigel has observed, these online crusades have been disastrous for the Left. Progressive spaces — activist meetings, book talks, union gatherings — became some of the last places in America still requiring masks, vaccine cards, or elaborate safety rituals years after the broader public abandoned them. Many simply stopped showing up, and a movement already known for its internal fragmentation became more physically and emotionally atomised. A rally in 2024 or 2025 featuring a sea of N95s doesn’t project seriousness; instead, it signals an inward-facing subculture that pillories dissent. 

Yet the Zero Covid crowd viewed this online invective as necessary and themselves as noble martyrs burdened to save the world from a crisis that everyone else had forgotten. Another prominent community member, Alice Wong, embodied such thinking. Wong, who coincidentally also tragically died this month, was a MacArthur “Genius” grant recipient, best known as the founder of the Disability Visibility Project. She reportedly died of an infection in a California hospital at the age of 51, not long after her Teen Vogue disability column got canceled. 

Just as segments of too-online progressive spaces once espoused that black women were inherently magical (Remember #BlackGirlMagic?), or that autism imbues people with superhuman powers, Wong called herself an “oracle” due to her experience with muscular dystrophy. She co-founded the Society of Disabled Oracles, which framed disabled people as holy priests possessing what she called prophetic perception: an ability to sense power dynamics others can’t see, and to perceive hidden knowledge from the past or the future. “Disability is a generative force. It’s magic,” reads a banner on the group’s site.

This might all sound like a harmless New Age-y fantasy, but the reality is that these delusions do not appear to be making anyone happy. On ZeroCovidCommunity, where Wong was revered as a visionary, you can see the emotional consequences of this cosmology laid bare. A recent thread titled “Does anyone else struggle with life feeling…” reads like a collective diary of people trapped in a state of self-victimisation.

The responses are chilling. Posters describe losing friends, losing hobbies, losing whole years. A few confess they no longer feel connected to their own bodies — that masking and hypervigilance have rewired how they relate to themselves and to others. One admits that the mask has become a psychological crutch — not for safety, but because it provides “a barrier between me and other people”, a permission structure for avoidance. Some say the pandemic ruined their 20s or 30s; and now the Zero Covid community has become the only place that recognises their pain. But recognition is not the same as healing. 

The pattern becomes clear: the Covid-cautious online community didn’t merely attract people with existing vulnerabilities. It amplified their fear, rewarded their withdrawal, endowed their anxiety with moral weight, and continues to tell them they are righteous for feeling this way, that they are saving countless lives. It is a feedback loop between individual fragility and a worldview that says fragility is wisdom. 

Lee and Wong deserve our sympathy, as do many of the Zero Covid die-hards. But it is difficult to read their words without feeling the weight of what the movement has done — perhaps not maliciously, but inevitably. A political identity built around a permanent emergency can’t shepherd people out of an emergency. It can’t guide them back to the world. It can only freeze them in the moment when everything first went wrong, and prevent them from re-entering a world they no longer trust — with devastating consequences for well being. 

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