COVID Safety in Healing, Care, & Liberation

Mar 7

CONTENT CONTAINS DISCUSSIONS ABOUT STATE-SANCTIONED EUGENICS, MASS DEATH AND DISABLEMENT, AND SYSTEMIC, MEDICAL, AND INTERPERSONAL ABLEISM, RACISM, SANISM, ANTI-BLACKNESS, ANTI-INDIGENEITY, AND CLASSISM.
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the covid pandemic did not end with the state of emergency, leaving the burden of survival on those most impacted and harmed.

As of February 2024, ~2,000 people continue to die of COVID per week in the US, with millions more disabled by Long COVID (for which there’s currently no cure). Ending the state of emergency only ended the US governments’ responsibility to provide accessible education, healthcare, and financial support for paid sick leave, clean air infrastructure, and research on vaccines and treatments.

The science on COVID has not changed: it is a highly infectious airborne virus that can cause lasting damage to every organ in the body and cumulative damage with every reinfection, even in asymptomatic and “mild” cases.

This negligence disproportionately impacts Black, Indigenous, and people of color; poor and working-class people; children and elders; and chronically ill, immunocompromised, and disabled people, who are already systematically denied choice, care, and support.

a call for accountability:

COVID safety for all the “collective liberation” claimants

COVID safety is an issue inextricably connected with all other forms of oppression and therefore movements towards justice. Examples:

Labor justice: Workplaces fail to provide safe working conditions by retaliating against employees who mask and ending paid COVID sick time (while the US in its second-highest surge in the entire pandemic). Poor and working class people, undocumented workers, immigrants whose survival relies on working essential jobs are forced into taking risks with their health with less power to self-advocate for safer working conditions.
Racial justice: Black people are more likely to die of COVID — they encounter many barriers to accessing healthcare then often endure medical racism and neglect while receiving treatment; Black people also have to risk being even more prominent targets for police brutality when wearing a mask. Sinophobic (anti-Chinese) rhetoric and violence has increased during the pandemic, leading to threats and violence against all Asian Americans.
Indigenous sovereignty and Land Back: Spreading disease and misinformation are well-documented colonizer tactics. Indigenous people experience significantly higher infection and mortality rates due to inaccessible healthcare, poverty, abuse, and neglect as a result of systemic racism and colonialism. If you support Indigenous sovereignty and Land Back, you support Indigenous people being alive to get their land back and well enough to live on it.
Disability justice: Lack of societal and structural COVID safety practices have continued to keep immunocompromised, chronically ill, and other high-risk disabled people isolated and otherwise treated as disposable burdens on society while everyone else resumes their “normal” lives. Every time we have to go out in-person to essential activities at places where people aren’t taking precautions, we are forced to risk getting COVID—which may complicate our health further if not kill us outright. Unmitigated COVID has also led to millions of people developing Long COVID, post-viral chronic illnesses, and autoimmune conditions and becoming disabled.
Mad liberation: Due to mainstream propaganda and public health officials gaslighting the public, many people and healthcare providers dismiss or pathologize COVID concern as a form of health anxiety, paranoia, and even aggression. We are deemed mentally ill, crazy conspiracy theorists, and fearmongerers who dare disturb the peace of the privileged, so therefore any concerning conclusions we’ve drawn from the plethora of research and personal anecdotes must be illegitimate. In fact, our anxiety about COVID is a justified response to what is state-sanctioned abandonment and eugenics: an unmitigated illness that is still actively killing and disabling entire swaths of our population with no government leadership or funding towards strategies to keep us safe.

your liberatory praxis is incomplete if it doesn’t include disability justice.

Collective liberation must include the liberation of sick and disabled people. That requires that you recognize how you’re participating in the mass neglect, abandonment, and disposal of sick, immunocompromised, chronically ill, and disabled people when you refuse to take COVID precautions, especially if you have white, non-disabled, and/or class privileges and other forms of social capital. That also requires you to realize that your health and able bodied-ness are temporary, and that you too will be deemed disposable by society once you’re too chronically sick or tired to keep up with the costs of living.

Policy decisions and public health guidelines are now protecting profit interests, not human lives. We can advocate for structural change at the same time that we’re adopting harm reduction practices and increasing the precautions we take with each other.

COVID safety for all the healers and wellness advocates

your healing is performative if it doesn’t include covid safety.

If you and your in-person sessions or events don’t take COVID precautions, how can you say what you’re doing is in service of healing when you’re willfully exposing yourself and others to a deadly and disabling virus? We do not exist separately from each other or the world. We share air. If your actions only benefit your and some privileged others while simultaneously contributing to mass death and disablement, you are perpetuating harm. If you are claiming to engage in individual or collective healing without acknowledging your role in or striving to change any of the social conditions that are harming people, you are perpetuating harm.

Did you know?

With every reinfection, the risk increases for contracting complex chronic illnesses and autoimmune conditions such as Long COVID and ME/CFS. The risk of death also increases. “Young and healthy” people included.
When seeking care from the medical industrial complex, especially for complex and chronic conditions, marginalized folks are at risk of experiencing medical racism, ableism, transphobia, misogyny, classism, xenophobia, fatphobia, and more. It can take years of mental and emotional labor and thousands of dollars to get a diagnosis, much less appropriate treatment.
It’s a privilege to be able to take time off to recover or to afford healthcare that gets you the services you need. Are you going to help pay for your client’s or your event attendee’s bills if they get sick? If their infection becomes Long COVID and they can no longer work enough to support themselves or their family?

If a direct by-product of your healing is more harm, it’s not healing.

COVID safety for all those who tout “community care”

your community care is performative if it doesn’t include covid safety.

If you’ve read this far, I hope you’ve gotten the point by now—you don’t care for community members by willfully exposing them to illnesses for which there are minimal structural supports in place. “Anyone who wants to mask can” and “masks are encouraged but not required” are incredibly passive and performative statements that vaguely acknowledge the importance of masking as necessary without naming for who and why. This enables and reinforces the marginalization, exclusion, and erasure of high-risk community members from being involved in their community spaces, in addition to spreading misinformation about the ongoing pandemic and relaxing precautions when research calls for the opposite. Prioritizing individual comfort over protecting actual lives is not community care. Community care is a community effort. Listen to community members who are telling you what changes need to be made for the community to be safer and more accessible.

COVID safety and the future

collective safety practices strengthen us for what’s yet to come.

By educating ourselves on COVID, adopting multilayered precautions, and advocating for collective safety practices, we strengthen our individual and collective capacity and creativity in resisting oppression and disposability. Clean air strategies and masking will help us prepare for more climate crises, pandemics, and state surveillance. Cross-movement solidarity that responds to the needs of those most impacted will benefit everyone.

Our public health organizations have failed us, so it’s up to us to keep each other safe through sharing education, skills, and resources. It’s never too late to catch up on the science and start taking precautions again. For those reading who have willfully chosen to ignore or deprioritize any COVID-related call-ins: it’s never too late to do better.