Several government resources about accommodations for people with Long COVID have become unavailable in the last week, following purges of government websites and datasets under the Trump administration. These pages offered crucial information about rights under the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA) for people with Long COVID and their employers.
In 2021, the federal government recognized that Long COVID can be considered a disability under the ADA. Pages and articles on AskJAN, a public-facing website by the U.S. Department of Labor’s Job Accommodation Network, explained how people with Long COVID could use this law to request accommodations that would make their jobs, schools, or other aspects of their day-to-day lives possible.
As of February 11, Long COVID is no longer included in AskJAN’s directory of disabilities. The website’s Long COVID resources — which previously included information about the disease’s legal status, key symptoms, and suggestions for accommodations — are also unavailable. (View an archived copy of AskJAN’s Long COVID landing page here.)
Look at me, I’m the long term disability now. - current government
“The erasure of information and resources on Long COVID from government websites is both deeply disturbing and, frankly, unsurprising,” said Dom Kelly, co-founder and president of New Disabled South, in an emailed statement. The erasure follows damaging policies and rhetoric from both the first Trump administration and the Biden administration, Kelly said, as both are responsible for hundreds of thousands of COVID-19 deaths and millions of Long COVID cases.
Unlike Long COVID information, pages about other specific diseases and disabilities remain available on the AskJAN site.
Don’t you just love when they decide to erase your disability… Yay, now I have the freedom to starve to death.
I really don’t understand why they made this disease into such a political thing. Like what’s even the point? The disease is going to spread and kill people nonetheless, so why exploit it as a political divider?
Control.
Conservatives saw COVID as the government telling them what to do.
“Conservatism consists of exactly one proposition, to wit: There must be in-groups whom the law protects but does not bind, alongside out-groups whom the law binds but does not protect.”
They do not want to be bound by the law and, if anything, want to completely be outside of it.
So all the masking mandates, vaccine requirements…they saw that as government oppression.
So anything that hurts their narrative is going to be removed.
I think politics, especially, but not exclusively right wing politics strives for division to create an in and out group.
Ignorance is Strength
I think this is because Trump realised that we’re all disabled. We’re all disabled by the social norms and conditioning that surround us. No one is intrinsically disabled; we are only made to suffer disability by the unreasonable expectations placed upon us from outside.
Trump it taking us one step closer towards waking up.
I agree with you in a way, but your comment feels a little minimising towards long COVID! There are people who have been bedridden and tubefed for 5 years now because of it.
I think it’s ironic that Trump and Musk are trying to implement the kind of shock that might wake someone up and bring them around. If nothing else, they are making clear the absurdity of Government and the contradiction that we call democracy. I think there’s something hideously ironic there.
But that is not to say that I deny the pain and suffering of those who suffer from any kind of disability.
I doubt that the authors of Health Communism are Trump’s first choice of Death Panel, but I want to make their words from the intro part of this thread:
“Health is capitalism’s vulnerability. There is no capital without health—it is capital’s host. And capitalism’s greatest trick is convincing us that it exists independent of this parasitic grasp. That it is indifferent.
Health has no fixed meaning. It is fluid. Under capitalism health has been defined to embody many meanings at once: from the hyper-individualistic, biological “health” any one person possesses—always a possession, not an ontology—to global society-level constructs which attempt to give language to chances for survival at the population level. Health is a vulgar phenomenon. A race-and-class-stratified matrix of constantly intersecting regimes of artificial scarcity. A destination, something one must always orient one’s life toward. Healthy physically, socially, economically, and metaphysically. More than a thing, and so often difficult or impossible to describe, health becomes defined by the things it is not. Non-cancerous, dis-abled—as though the purest state of health is to simply not exist.
Health under capitalism is an impossibility. Under capitalism, to attain health you must work, you must be productive and normative, and only then are you entitled to the health you can buy. This fantasy of individual health under the political-economic conditions of capitalism only ever exists as a state one cannot be, to which one must always strive.”