Fantastic text from Beatrice Adler-Bolton of the Death Panel. I wish they had some presence here in the Fediverse.
"In July 2020, five months into the pandemic, my co-host on Death Panel, Phil Rocco, texted our group a chilling picture of his local paper, the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel, which framed the pandemic as “pulling deaths from the future.” It said that scientists were studying whether the lives lost to Covid were simply those of people “already close to death”—suggesting these deaths were insignificant. This ableist and dehumanizing framework quickly became mainstream and has continued to shape public perception, even as the pandemic worsened.
...
We’ve become accustomed to measuring the toll of Covid through economic lenses, where the sacrifice of certain populations—disabled and chronically ill people, the incarcerated, the working class, and the poor—is seen as acceptable collateral damage in the broader pursuit of “normalcy” and “health” for the state. This logic has persisted and even escalated over time. In the years since 2020, the normalization of unequal distribution of death, illness, and economic risk has gone from being crass but necessary to becoming standard operating procedure.
What we see today is a deeply ingrained form of denialism. The U.S. response to Covid cannot be understood merely as public health failures, vaccine hesitancy, or pandemic fatigue. These issues are all tied to broader systems of power. The death and suffering we’ve witnessed were not just unfortunate byproducts of a novel virus—they were produced by a system that views death as an acceptable outcome in the preservation of capital.
We’ve bought into the logic that these deaths are just part of the cost of doing business. But this narrative hides a critical truth: that vulnerability, especially in the context of a pandemic, is socially determined. Which means it is not out of our control. Not a fact of nature, like the law of gravity.
In this context, I get why people feel overwhelmed, exhausted, and ready to give up. But if you are still politically engaged, it is crucial to resist the pull toward nihilism. The idea that the pandemic is over, that there’s nothing more to be done, is a dangerous illusion. Covid has become a business opportunity as much as it has become a health burden, and the pandemic has long been a testing ground for new forms of biopolitical control.
This is not just negligence—it’s intentional. The state wants us to believe that nothing can change, that Covid is both gone and here to stay, and that the deaths of over 7 million people worldwide are simply meaningless, “pulled from the future.” But this is a lie. These deaths are politically determined. Every policy decision, every rollback of protections, every mask ban, and every act of pandemic denial is a choice made in the service of the perpetuation of the very same systems of control and subjection that are responsible for the ongoing violence and abandonment of the pandemic."
https://blindarchive.substack.com/p/structural-violence-and-the-pandemic
#DeathPanel #BeatriceAdlerBolton #HealthCommunism #CovidIsNotOver #Covid19 #YallMasking
Dubious Blur
Anti. 🐘
Iker
Elmi
Ika Makimaki
Kirt
Brian Krohne
Vulnerable By Design
