Actor Christopher Meloni had a rough time traveling from New York City to Washington, D.C. this week. In an Instagram post on Sunday, he explained how delays had plagued both of his commutes – one by train and the other by airplane. He joked that there must be some kind of conspiracy working against him.
“Took [the] train back from DC Monday – got stuck on [the] tracks for 3.5 hours,” Meloni wrote on Instagram, alongside a selfie where he looked distinctly unhappy. “Down to DC Friday – flying! 1.5 hours delay so far.” He capped this anecdote off with the hashtag “deep state trying to mess with me.” Fans shared their sympathy with Meloni in the comment section, with many even asking if they could help him get around by car instead. Unsurprisingly, Meloni has not responded to any of these offers.
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Meloni went to the nation’s capitol to meet with other activists reaching out to the U.S. Congress, calling for government funding to help combat chronic Lyme disease. Meloni has been outspoken about this cause for years, saying that he learned about it firsthand when a member of his family contracted the disease – though he has not disclosed who. Now he has teamed up with documentary filmmaker Lindsay Keys and the subject of her latest documentary, Julia Bruzzese, to try and get the attention of lawmakers.
Keys’ movie is called The Quiet Epidemic, and it mainly follows Bruzzese’s day-to-day life in Brooklyn, New York living with Lyme disease. The illness has Bruzzese confined to a wheelchair, and she, Keys, and Meloni argue that severe cases like hers could be avoided if the government would fund more precise testing for this increasingly prevalent disease.
“They’re just now understanding how incredibly complicated this disease is. How it presents itself,” Meloni told reporters from Fox 5 DC. “My family saw eight different specialists because it presented itself as ‘oh this is a GI issue.’ The headaches, maybe he has brain cancer, so you get a CAT scan and you get needles shoved into your head. They take samples of your spinal fluid.”
Aside from wasting time and putting patients through unnecessary pain, Meloni points out that all these tests add up. He said: “It’s prohibitively expensive. I mean if you get chronic Lyme, even if you have insurance, you’re in a boatload of trouble because insurance companies won’t cover it because it’s not officially recognized.”
“We are going to be calling for a congressional hearing to thrust this topic into the spotlight,” added Keys. “It’s really been unfolding and growing in the shadows. It’s an invisible illness. So, we’re coming here to make some noise and hopefully they’ll join us and we’ll be able to get this on the record and what’s happened, how we got to this point, and where we go from here. We need a test that works to let people know they have Lyme disease. We need treatments for all stages of the illness. And we also need more research into overlapping tick-borne infections because ticks carry far more than just Lyme disease.”
The Quiet Epidemic is streaming now on Apple TV+ and Prime Video. As for Meloni, he spent his travel delay time interacting with fans on social media, discussing Lyme disease, government funding, and air travel.
