Separating COVID-19 From Politics
What an honorable surprise!
Prelude: Did you hear the news about RespiraWorks competing in the CoVent-19 Challenge? If so, here’s a little sequel! If not, please feel free to scroll through our previous Medium articles to find a description. To briefly summarize it, the ventilator design that our team created has shown so much success and potential that it was judged by Harvard medical professionals. Among hundreds of other groups who created ventilators, we won third place. Thank you, Harvard! Our team is still feeling very honored to have won the CoVent-19 award, and here’s the surprise:
To add an accent to our golden moment, we just got a formal congratulatory letter from Senator Elizabeth Warren for our achievement! Thank you, Senator Warren!
Now, as you all may know, RespiraWorks is a 501(c)(3) organization, so we will never be campaigning for any candidates of any political office. Our direction is strictly toward helping people stay alive by having more health care access to ventilators and respirators, especially during the current COVID-19 pandemic. Viruses attack anyone, regardless of what leaders they support. It’s like watching Game of Thrones; COVID-19 is the White Walker army that has a mission to take over the humans, and in order for the White Walkers to be conquered, all of these kingdoms who hate each other have to finally cooperate, show support, and be civil. It is all about teamwork and solidarity. It is wonderful to have such a first-hand experience in seeing that there are important public officials who are trying. They are looking deeply into finding resources that are necessary in order to keep managing through this pandemic to the best of their ability.
As much as it would be utopian to view this honor as a tool for gaining more publicity and/or funding, that ideology is extremely far from the truth. What RespiraWorks currently needs in order to bring our new strategies to fruition is more people contributing to the cause. Sharing our posts on social media is helping bring awareness, donation contributions are helping us bring in more testing supplies, grants will help us distribute our ventilators much much much much more quickly (which is needed badly right now), and so on. To put it bluntly, the more people we have contributing to the cause, even just by distributing information, the more lives we will be able to save. We have had many wonderful people contribute to this cause, and it has given us a confident positive reminder that there is such a large amount of people who care, who are concerned, who are able to help, and who have the drive to reach our goal. With this in mind, we are continuously striving to find those people. Thank you for your support, and stay safe!
