Covid sign on campus - Photo by Ali Meizels ‘23
By Annabelle Mackson ’23
Human Resources Coordinator & Staff Writer
Content warning: this article discusses ableism and mass death.
The COVID-19 pandemic has greatly affected the lives of every human being for over two years. People are tired of restrictions, tired of fear and tired of putting their lives on hold for a virus that keeps spreading and mutating, especially as stubborn holdouts refuse to get vaccinated. This sentiment is entirely justified; I am annoyed and frustrated by how much my college experience and my early 20s have been negatively impacted by the virus. What is not justified, however, is the idea that we should normalize living with the virus and return to business as usual because it seems that people are now more likely to get it than not. Though this idea has recently taken hold in much of the United States, its roots lie in corporate greed. While the average vaccinated and boostered individual will likely avoid hospitalization and death if they contract the virus, as shown in a Jan. 7 study from the CDC, those who are immunocompromised and disabled may not. The fact that their concerns are being pushed to the side for the sake of returning to the status quo is horrifying to me, yet unfortunately, unsurprising.
Although scientific literature surrounding COVID-19 is constantly being adjusted, there currently appears to be a link between disabled and immunocompromised people and increased hospitalizations and COVID-19 deaths. The CDC study from January determined that in breakthrough COVID-19 cases — cases in which the patient is vaccinated — nearly 57 percent of survivors with severe respiratory failure and ICU hospitalization had multiple risk factors that made them more susceptible to disease. Additionally, 78 percent of the people who died had multiple risk factors that greatly decreased their odds of survival. An August 2021 Drexel Now article that highlights the increased risk of COVID-19 in autistic individuals, explains that autistic individuals and the neurodiverse population in general are at a higher risk of contracting the virus due to a higher likelihood of them needing to rely on the care of others to survive. Drexel Now also highlighted a 2021 report from the scientific journal Autism and spoke to the importance of increasing vaccination outreach to these populations so they have the best protection available to them.
Despite increased efforts, there are still people for whom vaccines are not effective or whose immune systems are so weak that they cannot receive a vaccine at all. Often, these conditions are comorbid, meaning that an individual might have a disability and be immunocompromised, and the treatment of one greatly affects that of the other. These compounded risk factors put individuals with comorbid conditions in danger of severe illness or death should they contract the virus. The COVID-19 response regarding disabled people was already lacking, as reported in a NorthJersey.com article from November of last year, but things have gotten worse for disabled people in a very public way. The article mentions a hospital point system developed by a Pittsburgh hospital in the early days of the pandemic which scored people based on survivability in determining usage of the very scarce ventilators available. Patients with lower scores were put on ventilators first, because they were more likely to survive treatment, while patients with higher scores, and who had a higher chance of dying even with medical intervention, were not put on them. It does not seem to have been intentionally designed to deny care to disabled patients, but given diseased and disabled people’s increased risk factors and shorter life spans, they would more often than not be left without treatment.
In December 2021, Delta Airlines requested that the CDC shorten the COVID-19 isolation period from 10 days to five for vaccinated individuals with breakthrough infections, and the CDC complied. Delta’s argument was centered around the essential service their airport employees provide, and how a truncated isolation would allow them to more quickly resume that service. While this could be seen as evidence of a decrease in COVID-19’s danger, the implications of a massive corporation asking a government-funded organization for leniency for the sake of profit is sickening. This shows that the CDC will prioritize keeping companies’ profit margins up and supporting corporations’ hold on the working class over the health and safety of Americans.
This push for people to go back to work, possibly before they have fully recovered from COVID-19, puts vulnerable individuals at even more risk. Even if they don’t catch COVID-19 from their caregivers, disabled and immunocompromised people will likely receive a lesser quality of care, since those responsible for their well-being aren’t being given the time to recover themselves. These people are being put in more vulnerable circumstances than before and aren’t being heard even when they advocate for themselves. The U.S. National Council on Disability outlined government changes that need to be made in order to avoid further increase in deaths among disabled and immunocompromised people. The report these provisions appeared in, including a proposal for a disabled patient’s Bill of Rights and allocating funds for providing compensatory education to disabled children affected by the pandemic, was published at the end of October, and as of February 2022, no major legislative action has been taken.
The nail in the coffin for me, and I assume many others, came in a statement from the U.S. director of the CDC, Rochelle Walensky, which aired on Good Morning America in early January. Walensky was largely there to comment on the spread of the Omicron variant, but she also called the aforementioned study of vaccinated people “encouraging,” since over 75 percent of those who had died “had at least four comorbidities,” according to a Newsweek article covering the interview. Additional comments quote Walensky as saying that “these are people who were unwell to begin with,” implying that healthy individuals need not worry since they aren’t the ones at risk of dying. Disabled professional advocate Kayle Hill wrote in a Teen Vogue op-ed that Walensky’s later clarifications did little to dispel Hill’s heightened fears, and that “if anything, it feels like an attempt to appease the disability community, with no tangible indication from CDC policies that they are prioritizing the lives of immunocompromised people.” I agree with her. The CDC did not care enough in December when they folded to the demands of Delta’s truncated isolation period, and they certainly don’t care now. In fact, they lowered restrictions for vaccinated people even further by saying that if they are exposed to COVID-19 but don’t display symptoms, they do not have to quarantine.
I am vaccinated and boosted and I had COVID-19 over the winter break. I have no conditions that negatively affect my immune system, but I am still dealing with lingering issues from being ill over a month ago. As much as I hate how much my life has been affected by this virus, I am not willing to throw caution to the winds and stand by as immunocompromised people are essentially treated as biological cannon fodder by a system that refuses to protect them — or anyone else, for that matter. I hope I am not the only one.