Disabled Lives Are Worthy: The History of Medical Discrimination in the Pandemic and the Policy Change We Deserve
By: Jalyn Radziminski
This week, the Director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), Dr. Rochelle Walensky made the following concerning remark during the ABC interview:
“If I may just summarize it: A study of 1.2 million people who are vaccinated between December and October. And demonstrated that severe disease occurred in about 0.015% of people who were — received their primary series– and death in 0.003% of those people. 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. This means not only just to get your primary series but to get your booster series. And yes, we’re really encouraged by these results.”
People who have “comorbidities” are people with disabilities, and this statement confirmed what we knew all along: the public health response to COVID-19 has callously treated the lives of people with disabilities as less valuable than those of others. We are in solidarity with the #MyDisabledLifeisWorthy movement and conversation started by Imani Barbarin.
Dr. Walensky’s comments highlighted a trend of long-standing policy failures that have slowly eroded the trust of the people with disabilities, especially those who are Black, Indigenous and People of Color (BIPOC), in the pandemic response by the CDC and other agencies. Disabled lives are worth protecting from COVID-19. The CDC and other public health agencies must engage the disability community as they are making decisions related to the pandemic and beyond — something they have failed to do time and again.
As we enter the third year of this pandemic, the disability community has been fighting to survive after systematically being left to die. Studies show that people with mental health disabilities, like those with other chronic conditions, are at significantly higher risk for COVID-19 due to barriers to access healthcare, immunological disturbances, effects of medication, and other social determinants. At the start of the pandemic, many state health systems allowed hospitals to turn away people with disabilities who had contracted COVID-19 because of their disabilities. The Bazelon Center formed a coalition with other civil and disability rights groups to file complaints against those states whose crisis “standard of care” protocols excluded and gave lower priority to people with disabilities.
The Bazelon Center, the Disability Rights Education and Defense Fund (DREDF), and other co-authors of the report “The Impact of COVID-19 on People with Disabilities” for the National Council on Disability (NCD) have articulated additional concerns, including that:
- People with disabilities at higher risk from COVID-19 were not recognized as priority populations when vaccines were distributed within states.
- Despite numerous attempts to reduce the number of people living in psychiatric hospitals, nursing homes, and jails, many individuals with disabilities are forced to live in these congregate settings, at extreme risk of COVID-transmission due to a lack of community-based treatment options.
- Too many people with disabilities, including mental health disabilities, died in congregate settings that were not provided effective, timely guidance for how to keep them safe.
Black, Indigenous and People of Color (BIPOC), disabled people, higher-weight people, and older adults historically experienced and continue to experience discrimination, negative biases, and inaccurate assumptions about their value, quality of life, capacity to communicate and make decisions, and the likelihood of survival.
It is long past time for the CDC and other public health entities to address these historic wrongs, including by regularly consulting with people with disabilities as public health guidance is developed and disseminated. Among other things, we call on the CDC to center people with disabilities, who are among those most at risk, in its COVID-19 response efforts, and issue guidance firmly based on data and science — not outdated stereotypes about which lives are most worth living.
We call on Dr. Walensky to rebuild trust by centering the voices, experiences and lives of people with disabilities, including those with mental disabilities, and especially those of color. We hope that the furor around her comments lead to a more effective, and less stigmatizing, public health response in the future.
