CDC: Sick & Disabled Lives Don’t Matter
From the early days of the COVID-19 pandemic, disability justice advocates have warned that the US government’s response smacked of eugenics.
On January 7, 2022, CDC Director Rochelle Walensky made the US government’s embrace of eugenicist logic shockingly clear.
“The overwhelming number of deaths, over 75%, occurred in people who had at least 4 comorbidities,” Walensky said in a media briefing. “So really these are people who were unwell to begin with and yes, really encouraging news in the context of Omicron.”
In other words, Walensky says no need to worry: most of the people who are dying are those who are already ill. This is supposedly “encouraging.”
For those who don’t know the jargon, “comorbidities” refers to the simultaneous presence of two or more disease or medical conditions in a patient. This includes a wide range of diseases and conditions, including diabetes, heart disease, high blood pressure (hypertension), psychiatric disorders, asthma, etc.
Let’s be clear: it has been estimated that up to 60 percent of people in the U.S. have an underlying condition that increases COVID-19 risk. Walensky’s comments encompass a huge number of people whose deaths she has framed as unimportant.
Before we continue, let’s quickly define eugenics. Eugenics refers to a (now widely discredited) “scientific” field that sought to increase heritable characteristics regarded as desirable and to eradicate those considered undesirable.
Eugenics was embraced by a wide range of wealthy, White ruling elites. “Anti-miscegenation” laws, which prohibited interracial marriage in nearly every US state are often cited as an example of eugenics-informed policies in the United States. But eugenics was perhaps made most famous by the Nazi regime, which used it to justify policies such as the mass murder of Jewish people, disabled people, Roma people, queer people, and various other groups.
Although the Nazi’s use of eugenics made the field more famous, it also made it taboo. Outright advocacy of eugenics fell out of fashion. But CDC Director Walensky’s comments this week are a stark reminder that the logic of eugenics is alive and well in the United States.
The CDC claims that it “saves lives and protects people from health threats.” That is its supposed purpose. Walensky’s recent comments make that mission questionable, if not laughable.
As I’ve written before, the COVID-19 pandemic has made one thing clear: the CDC, as with the rest of the US state, does not exist to protect and serve all of us. It exists to protect and serve the interests of the wealthy. It exists to protect and serve capitalism.
Walensky’s claims should alarm all of us, even those (like me) who do not have “comorbidities.” We should be alarmed — and angered — that the state sees certain lives as expendable for the sake of capitalism.
Previous public health emergencies have made the US government’s indifference to whether many of us live or die painfully clear.
Walensky’s comments echo, for example, how the US government initially handled the AIDS epidemic. The CDC and then-president Ronald Reagan downplayed the horrors of AIDS because it was a “gay plague” that only killed those who they deemed unworthy of life in the first place. Those deaths were deemed unimportant by the US government.
Nazi policies offer an even more frightening historical comparison. The Nazi regime used the phrase “life unworthy of life” (German: Lebensunwertes Leben) as a designation for those they deemed as having no right to live.
We cannot give the CDC and the Biden administration a pass on this simply because they use language that is less outrageously offensive than the Trump regime.
Being sick or disabled doesn’t mean your life is expendable.
There are historical precedents for this language and these actions. We ignore them at our collective peril.
Canton Winer is a sociology Ph.D. candidate at the University of California, Irvine. His research focuses on the relationship between gender, race, and sexuality, with particular focus on the experiences and perspectives of asexual people. You can find him on Twitter at @CantonWiner or sign up for his free Substack here.