Breathe This

Our guest for this Adam Van Bavel, who is a long COVID survivor and a fierce advocate for other survivors and for everyone who wants to avoid indoor airborne pathogens. He started the indoor-air-quality advocacy group, Maryland Indoor Air Quality Advocates, to promote the improvement of indoor air quality in schools. Learn more about Maryland Indoor Air Quality Advocates: https://miaqa.org/.

Dr. Jonathan Howard is an Associate Professor of Neurology and Psychiatry at NYU Langone Health and the Chief of Neurology at Bellevue Hospital. He is the author of Cognitive Errors and Diagnostic Mistakes: A Case-Based Guide to Critical Thinking in Medicine as well as several textbooks in neurology. He writes on social media about COVID, vaccines, and the disinformation about public health that's being spread by many so-called experts. He has been interested in vaccines since long before the pandemic.Books:We Want Them Infected, published April 20, 2023 - https://redhawkpublications.com/We-Want-Them-Infected-p547021769 Everyone Else is Lying to You, published Sept 2025:https://redhawkpublications.com/EVERYONE-ELSE-IS-LYING-TO-YOU-How-the-medical-establishment-weaponized-doubt-to-spread-COVID-normalize-quackery-and-undermine-public-health-p774121522Twitter: https://x.com/19joho 

Our guest for this episode is Julie Lam, the founder of Mask Together America, a grassroots organization that began in 2020 with a simple but powerful idea: using storytelling, art, and community engagement to promote COVID prevention, support long COVID awareness, and advocate for health equity. She's also a community representative at NIH Recover, a research initiative for recovery from Long COVID. Julie’s background spans advertising, photography, and writing — and she has brought all of those talents into her public health work, creating campaigns that center the experiences of real people while pushing for evidence-based policy and compassionate messaging.Living with autoimmune conditions herself, Julie has a deeply personal perspective on what prevention and accessibility mean, and she has emerged as a leading advocate for layered protection, long COVID support, and federal programs that ensure no one is left behind.Today we’re going to talk about her journey, the mission of Mask Together America, and the future of public health messaging.

Welcome to Breathe This from Public Health Action Network. The hosts for Breathe This are PHAN's CEO Tarz Ludwigsen, and PHAN communications manager Theresa O'Connor. This podcast is about clean indoor air, airborne pathogens like COVID, how to avoid being infected by airborne pathogens, and how we can prevent transmission of them. COVID can lead to long COVID, which can damage your heart, lungs, kidneys, eyes, brain, and immune system. Clean indoor air for everyone is the key to reducing transmission of airborne pathogens like COVID, colds, flu, RSV, measles, and plenty of other diseases. Until we can get clean indoor air everywhere, we can take mitigations like masking, ventilation, using air purifiers, and avoiding crowded indoor spaces. We'll talk to those who've been affected by COVID and long COVID, public health professionals, healthcare workers, scientists, clean-air technology inventors, and others involved in providing clean air and preventing transmission of airborne pathogens. Join us!