Writing for Truthout, Jesse Hagopian, a longtime educator with long Covid, details how Robert F. Kennedy Jr. has harmed Americans with long Covid by shutting down the Office of Long Covid Research and Practice, gutting funding, and derailing trials and studies. Hagopian did extensive research to “situate this moment of disability caused by Covid, contextualized by the broader, longer struggles… and the way the U.S. has abandoned and oppressed people with disabilities.”
JESSE HAGOPIAN; [email protected]
Hagopian is a Seattle educator, the director of the Zinn Education Project’s Teaching for Black Lives Campaign, an editor for Rethinking Schools, and the author of Teach Truth: The Struggle for Antiracist Education.
Hagopian, who helped launch the Black Lives Matter at School movement in 2016, said that the long Covid movement intersects with the work he has done for many years in racial justice and education. “But the more I learned and spoke with people,” Hagopian told the Institute for Public Accuracy, “the more I understood how important it was to use the disability justice framework.”
Hagopian added: “The journey I have been on personally with long Covid was the primary impetus for writing this piece. Grappling with my identity and health and coming to terms with the fact that I have a disability now has been a process. I’ve had to learn so much more about what it means [to have a disability] and what a disability justice lens means for my own life. This is the first piece I’ve written about this from a personal perspective, coming out and speaking on this issue that impacts me and millions of people around the country.
“People can’t tell you have long Covid when they look at you. They don’t know you have this disability or what it means for your life. That makes it more invisible, especially when it’s not being taken seriously by the government. I had to leave my lifelong profession of being a classroom teacher because it was too hard to be in the classroom every day… Long Covid is putting stress on our whole society.” Hagopian writes: “Even if you never develop long [Covid], you will feel its impact when hospitals lose nurses, classrooms lose teachers, families lose caregivers, and bus routes lose drivers. Long [Covid] weakens the infrastructure we all depend on.”
“The whole idea of Make America Healthy Again,” Hagopian added, “is such a farce when you look at the history of violence and colonialism that has ensured that our communities won’t be healthy. America has never been healthy. The idea that we’re going to Make America Healthy Again disregards that history… We see the rhetoric of eugenics continue with Donald Trump’s assault on disabled people. The way [Trump and other Republican leaders] talk about autism is so dehumanizing. Trump is openly ableist.”