This is a post whose seeds have been bouncing around in my
head for years. I always intended to write it up and publish
it on Cohost, and so the twilight of that storied website
seems like as good a forcing function as any.
In this post, I seek to understand and explain the pervasive
phenomenon of COVID denialism from the perspecitve of
disability justice, specifically as someone who remains
extremely cautious and anticipates doing so indefinitely. It's
not intended to excuse this behavior—denialism is actively
harmful to everyone the denialist interacts with and
fundamentally eugenicist in effect whether or not in
intention. But understanding and even empathizing with people
who believe falsehoods and do harm can be valuable, especially
when they make up such a huge portion of the world and for
many of us are inescapably part of our networks and
communities.
COVID in the Social Model of Disability
The first crucial thing to understand is that, if you're at
least on board with the basic idea that COVID denialism is a
pervasive problem,
COVID-19 has already disabled you. Even if it
didn't give you long-term side effects, even if you're lucky
enough never to have caught it, you have been disabled by it.
Or to be more precise: you're disabled
with respect to COVID-19. The specific agent of your
disability is the society that subjects you to snide remarks
and outright harassment for wearing a mask, that closes off
opportunities for social interaction and employment to you,
that makes it impossible for you to exist within it without
putting your health at risk.
This is an analysis based on
the social model of disability, a major branch of disability theory that emphasizes the way
disability is created by a society's failure to provide
accommodations for certain bodies and minds rather than
intrinsic aspects of those bodies and minds themselves. To use
a lightly clichéd example: my severe nearsightedness doesn't
function as a disability, because I exist in a society
that accepts it as "normal" and provides easy access to
socially unremarkable assistive devices (glasses), or even
invisible assistive devices (contacts) if I so choose. But my
sleep disorder is a disability—society doesn't
consider it "normal" in the same way, and so it's seen as my
personal failure and I have to work to make sure it doesn't
affect my relationships
or employability.
Using this model, if you exist in a society that has accepted
the uncontrolled spread of COVID-19 as normal, the attempt to
avoid catching this disease is itself a disability.
Society is organized to systematically deny accommodations
like mask mandates, sanitizing ventilation, lockdowns and contact tracing, and free access to vaccines,
prophylatics, tests, treatments, and protective equipment.
Depending on the specific activity and your risk tolerance,
public existence while taking reasonable COVID precautions
ranges from requiring serious equipment and preparation to
being outright impossible. Even if your body isn't any
different than it was in 2019, you…
