For my second post I want to zoom out a little and ask a question aloud:
How did we get here? At what moment, with what new evidence, with what justification have we gone “back to normal”?
The answer, as far as I can see, is that a combination of capitalist drive, pandemic burnout and a government predisposed to choose political expediency over science led us to a moment where the social balance tipped and most of us just… went with it, even though the risks hadn’t significantly changed from a year ago.
To be clear, we’ve had varying degrees of agency in this process. Some of us can still choose to work from home, while capitalism has forced “essential” others to remain working in person throughout the pandemic. Some workplaces are making it difficult for employees to wear a mask anymore, even if they want to. Over the course of this year, many have been forced “back to normal” in a lot of respects.
There is also the coercive nature of social and power dynamics. How many social events can you miss out before your career is off track or you lose your friends? How many drinks missed down the pub with your colleagues? How many conferences? The social pressure to go back to pre-pandemic life has been intense.
And then our leadership has been abysmal. While I follow many researchers and medical and public health professionals who remain outspoken about what they’re seeing every day, a frightening number have fallen in line with a politically and economically driven CDC. (Some desire to maintain their connection to institutional power, some are likely afraid of being perceived as “fearmongering”, others are perhaps just as susceptible as any of us to states of fear and denial.)
If President Trump had declared the pandemic over while this much harm was still happening, I think a lot of us would have been up in arms. But somehow Biden gets a pass for implementing pandemic policy based on his polling firm rather than any scientific evidence. (Don’t @ me, the very reason I continue to vote against fascism is so that I have the right to criticize when our leaders fail us. )
Consent is a complicated thing when power is involved (which it invariably is.)
But then of course, a lot of us wanted to get back to normal. The “pandemic years” (in quotes because they are ongoing) were so damn hard, in so many ways. The isolation, the fear, the lack of touch and physical connection. (For me and so many other chronically ill and disabled folks, that too is ongoing - with the added pain of finding even able-bodied leftists “moving on” from Covid and abandoning disabled solidarity. Eugenics is quite literally in the air that we breathe right now - more on that later.)
But would we think it was worth it if we knew the full picture? I believe many have entered the “let it rip” phase of the pandemic without informed consent. (Granted, a lot of folks don’t really want to know. Denial is a powerful human instinct. But many others haven’t been given the chance.)
While it is completely unacceptable that we’ve normalized (in the United States) a minimum of 400 people dying of Covid every single day (the third leading cause of death, behind heart disease and cancer), I believe the focus on hospitalizations and deaths has misled us. It is a mistake to think of the dangers of Covid as simply what happens during the initial infection (now often “mild” with mass vaccine uptake) rather than the long term impact.
I’ll be writing more in future posts about this, but Covid affects pretty much every system of the body and not a week goes by that I don’t see a new study on the toll Covid takes: cardiovascular disease, brain damage, liver damage, disruption to the gut microbiome, the reactivation of latent viruses, etc. Because these impacts are not immediately apparent during the acute infection, people won’t always put two and two together when their health status changes in the year following. And of course, it’s early days yet, for fully understanding the implications of this novel virus.
I don’t know how long it’s going to be before the numbers are tracked properly and we have data as to the scale of the problem. We do know something momentous is happening however, both from overwhelming anecdotal evidence from medical professionals, from research studies, and the rise in excess deaths since Covid began. We also know that each reinfection compounds the risk of serious impact- and therefore even if you’ve been infected before, every infection you are able to prevent from here on in counts. It’s not too late to turn around. As the executive director of the WHO Health Emergencies Program says on this video, “You don’t want to get this disease once if you can help it - and you don’t want to get it four times for sure.”
This Nature article paints a frightening picture of the dysregulation to the immune system in acute and Long Covid patients alike. Note that this study concludes after 8 months, but that the damage to the immune system for Long Covid patients has not yet resolved at this point, so we do not know how long these effects will last. An estimated 24 million Americans currently have Long Covid. For those who do not get Long Covid, this study also shows that after a Covid infection patients showed similar disruption to the immune system for a full four months afterwards.
With so many immune systems dysregulated through millions upon millions of infections, we have a pretty compelling explanation for the preponderance of RSV hospitalizations in children at this time. (I really wish people would see the “immune debt” theories for the bunk propaganda they are. I’ll save that for another post.)
So setting aside the preposterousness of me, a layperson, relying on my obsessive neurodivergent research to weave this all together from valiant medical professionals and community spaces on Twitter in lieu of real moral leadership in the government or much of the media, I want to put my sociologist hat on now. From a young age I’ve always been deeply curious what “history” we were living through in this moment, that we would one day look back on, agog, wondering “how did they all just accept that?” Over the years I’ve accumulated a mental list of forms of structural oppression we’re culturally normalized to - but it’s wild to watch most of us acculturate to fresh oppression in real time.
In this moment we have, somehow, collectively decided that it is OK that our most vulnerable members of society - the elderly, immunocompromised, the chronically ill and disabled, are being systematically excluded from participating in social life outside of the home, indefinitely. For the most part, we do not even mask in medical offices or grocery stores to better protect them/us. They/we can either remain isolated, or risk death. Make no mistake, this is the normalization of eugenics.
Then we look back to the facts about Covid: we are living through a mass-disabiling event. Perhaps your first infection left you feeling seemingly fine. Perhaps your second one did too. Keep spinning the Covid roulette wheel with that 5-15% chance of long Covid disability each time. (That is our best estimate in this moment and doesn’t take into account other cumulative damage to endothelial cells, leaving us vulnerable to sudden cardiac events, strokes and more.)
The lie that ableism tells us is that we’ll never be that vulnerable. That we are somehow “healthier” and therefore perhaps unconsciously in some way “better” than those who are. The vulnerable are pitiable, or perhaps we have genuine compassion for them, but they are not “us”.
What do we lose with this illusion of separation?
I don’t want to give the impression that I’m the only person out there saying these things. Outside of medical Twitter, there are a small handful of good journalists and of course the entire disability justice community who have been vocal throughout the pandemic. But I find that in the broader sex positive and psychedelic communities that I’m connected to, things have gone deathly silent with regards to Covid. Call me naive, but this seems shocking in light of the principles of radical inclusion and consent central to sex positivity. And I thought if we could agree that psychedelics teach us anything, it’s about our deep interconnectedness, the illusion that ego creates to maintain a sense of “self” and “other”.
Less esoterically, the reality is that we are all only ever temporarily able-bodied. Covid is accelerating that realization for many of us.
Which of us will be next to be left behind?
Really though, it shouldn’t take us realizing that we’re all vulnerable to Covid for us to realize the importance of protecting those who are already commonly understood to be so.
If you’ve ever wondered what you would be doing if you lived in one of the scary times in history, when a society had decided some people had less value than others, where structures of power colluded to whitewash the truth about harm that was happening to hundreds of thousands of people each day, when social norms had shifted to normalize death and suffering of many for the benefit of the few?
You’re doing it right now.