This story has a happy ending. Well, maybe. We’ll see.
It all began on January 7, when Dr. Rochelle Walensky, director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) said in an interview on national television, “The overwhelming number of [COVID-19] deaths, over 75 percent, occurred in people who had at least four comorbidities, so really these are people who were unwell to begin with and, yes, really encouraging news in the context of Omicron. We’re really encouraged by these results.”
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Dr. Rochelle Walensky
This, for obvious reasons, really riled up a lot of disability activists. Walensky was resoundingly blasted for implying that the deaths of disabled people were insignificant and even encouraging. And a Twitter campaign broke out, with the hashtag #MyDisabledLifeIsWorthy.
Walensky felt the need to defend herself by saying her remarks were edited and presented out of context. She said she was referring to the results of a study on the effectiveness of vaccines in protecting against severe infection from the Omicron variant.
Nevertheless, more than 100 organizations representing disabled folks sent her a letter that said: “Describing the deaths of people with four or more comorbidities as ‘encouraging’ because they were ‘unwell to begin with’ encapsulates the exact problem that we, people with disabilities and our family members and allies, have faced the entire pandemic: The public health response to COVID-19 has treated people with disabilities as disposable. . . . The CDC is not the only agency that has failed to address the needs of people with disabilities during the pandemic, but your comments highlighted a trend of long-standing policy failures that have slowly eroded the trust of the people with disabilities in the pandemic response.”
On January 14, the CDC put out a brief statement saying that Walensky met with leaders of some disability groups and apologized for her “hurtful, yet unintentional” comments.
That’s the happy part. It’s good to know that disability leaders were powerful enough to not just extract an apology but to draw attention to how the public policy response to the pandemic has often left behind people with disabilities.
But an apology isn’t the end of it. Whether Walensky’s words were misinterpreted or not, she expressed an ugly sentiment at the heart of the sharpest political conflicts over public health policy during the pandemic. It’s what fuels the fiercest anti-mask and anti-vaxxers and the most arrogant libertarians who want to pretend like nothing is going on. It’s a dismissal of those who are put most at risk by easing pandemic restrictions as expendable collateral damage.
The advocates’ letter said that the best thing Walensky can do is routinely engage with the disability community to ensure that CDC policy doesn’t succumb to these forces.
That’s the way to keep the happy ending happy.