Ben Affleck and Jennifer Garner’s daughter Violet made an impassioned speech at the United Nations on Tuesday.
The 19-year-old called for post-COVID mask mandates — while wearing one of her own — to combat “unmitigated infection and reinfection.”
The teen also advocated for “clean air infrastructure that is so ubiquitous and so obviously necessary … that tomorrow’s children don’t even know why we need it.”
The Yale University student wishes to “recognize filtered air as a human right, as intuitively as we do filtered water.”
She railed against the “relentless beat of back to normal, ignoring downplaying, and concealing both the prevalence of airborne transmission and the threat of long COVID.”
Violet, who previously revealed she “contracted a post-viral condition in 2019,” added, “We are told by leaders across the board that we are the future. But when it comes to the ongoing pandemic, our present is being stolen right in front of our eyes.”
The teenager noted that she is “terrified” for children — and “furious on their behalf” — as COVID-19 “surpasse[s] asthma as the most common chronic illness in children in five years and under.”
She continued, “It is a neglect of the highest order to look children in the eyes and say, ‘We knew how to protect you and we didn’t do it. We have access to a technology to prevent airborne disease … and we refuse to use it.”
Violet’s speech came one year after she spoke about the same topic at a Los Angeles County Board of Supervisors meeting.
During her July 2024 comments, she called for “mask mandates in county medical facilities,” as well as mask availability and high-quality free COVID-19 testing.
While revealing her “post-viral condition” at the time, Violet confirmed that she was “OK now.”
Prior to her speech, Violet had been photographed wearing a mask while out and about with her parents on multiple occasions.
She is the former couple’s eldest child, with Affleck and Garner, both 53, also welcoming Seraphina, 16, and Samuel, 13, while married from 2005 to 2018.
The actor went on to wed Jennifer Lopez in 2022, whom he has since split from, while Garner has been in an on-again, off-again relationship with John Miller for nearly seven years.
The “13 Going on 30” star amicably co-parents with Affleck, and the duo teamed up to drop Violet off at her New Haven, Conn., college last year.
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‘ Some details of this article were extracted from the following source pagesix.com ’
