Since the beginning of early 2020, the deaths of disabled people have been trivialized for the sake of providing relief to the general public about the dangers of COVID-19. Alarmingly, this sentiment and its ableism was recently repeated by the Center for Disease Control itself.
Ableism in The CDC
“The overwhelming number of deaths, over 75%, occurred in people who had at least four comorbidities, so really these are people who were unwell to begin with, and yes really encouraging news in the context of Omicron.”
These were the words of Rochelle Walensky, the director of the CDC. Walenksy answered questions about the recent Omicron variant of the COVID-19 virus early January 7th, 2022 on Good Morning America. She gave the above response to a question about “positive headlines” suggesting that vaccinations would prevent severe illness despite the contagiousness of the new strain of the coronavirus. Taken optimistically, the director of the CDC was simply trying to affirm that the virus was not as lethal as it could be, which is obviously cause for celebration. However, her choice to use the deaths of people with comorbidities (medical conditions other than COVID that contributed to their death) as a sign of relief sparked resentment among disabled citizens and allies.
Twitter user @alissacaliente wrote “you should feel horrified and enraged by the CDC dismissing the deaths of the disabled ideally because you recognize the value of all life, but also because we occupy a world where the fates of the oppressed are all inextricably linked, and that (likely) includes you!” In addition to rebuttals from individuals, Walenksy also received an open letter from the Disability Rights Education & Defense Fund, a national civil rights law and policy center run by people with disabilities. The writer of the letter pointed out that Walensky’s language “perpetuates widely and wrongly held perceptions that disabled people have a worse quality of life than nondisabled people and our lives are more expendable” and implored the CDC to “convey that all lives are valuable, and the loss of any life from COVID-19, whether it is the life of a person with a disability, an older adult, or a 32 year old with no known disabilities, is a tragedy.”
Ableism in Healthcare
The letter also referenced a Health Affairs study whose abstract says that in their “survey of 714 practicing US physicians nationwide, 82.4 percent reported that people with significant disability have worse quality of life than nondisabled people. Only 40.7 percent of physicians were very confident about their ability to provide the same quality of care to patients with disability, just 56.5 percent strongly agreed that they welcomed patients with disability into their practices, and 18.1 percent strongly agreed that the health care system often treats these patients unfairly.” Beyond the simple inhumanity of the disabled by hand-waving their deaths, these attitudes can create a tangible effect on the quality of healthcare disabled people receive.
In December of 2020, NPR published an investigation into the death of a woman named Sarah McSweeney, based on “a dozen reports of discrimination in Oregon: Of doctors and hospitals denying equipment like ventilators; insisting that an elderly or disabled person sign a DNR — maybe when they couldn’t understand it and in the middle of a crisis — or even denying a COVID-19 test.” McSweeney had several disabilities including quadriplegia and cerebral palsy. A man named Heidi Barnett reported that despite her helping McSweeney to fill out a form confirming her desire to live, a doctor in charge of her care had insisted on giving her “Do Not Resuscitate” status. This was based in part on the belief that McSweeney’s inability to speak or walk gave her too low a quality of life to spend dwindling hospital resources mid-pandemic. McSweeney loved life–according to her close friends, she loved shopping, country music, and makeup, and above all, certainly wanted to continue living. McSweeney is just one of 61 million adults in the US who has some form of disability; how many lives could be lost if physicians and those in power continue to treat disabled lives as disposable?
Ableism in Politics
Unfortunately, the minimization of the deaths of those with comorbidities serves as convenient political rhetoric for those opposed to or frustrated with quarantine measures, and has done so since the beginning of the pandemic. In 2020, some social media users claimed that the majority of COVID-19 deaths were, in fact, caused by comorbidities rather than the virus itself. This was based on a factual CDC report which showed that only 6% of COVID deaths solely involved the coronavirus as a cause. Commentators in need of a way to criticize the quarantine used this as evidence that the virus was a non-issue, only killing people who were basically dead anyway. This claim is, philosophically speaking, ridiculous. One could use the same logic to argue that autoimmune diseases, like HIV, have never killed a single person: they were killed by whatever disease got to them after their immune system shut down. More importantly, this attitude propagates the idea that the lives of disabled people are “already lost” or that people with comorbidities are “already dying anyway.” Anti-quarantine advocates then conclude that “normal people” should not have to suffer restrictions on their living in order to protect lives that were either already doomed or not worth living in the first place.
How To Humanize the Disabled
There is no easy solution to the ableism that seems so endemic to US culture, media, and politics, and the situation will only worsen for those with disabilities as the government continues to lower quarantine times and remove restrictions on business. The best that can be done is to remind ourselves that all human life is worth saving, and to understand the diversity of human life. We all have strengths and weaknesses that make us more or less susceptible to disease, but none of those make us more or less worthy of help to survive it.
