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.)
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.”