#healthsupremacism

Per Maarten Steenhagen, in his 2022 essay against health supremacism, "Health is one of the most contingent facts about us human beings. Every one of us is always one infection or accident away from acquiring an illness or disability." Health supremacism, importantly, includes the tendency to dismiss certain managed or "mild" conditions as not being "any of the risk factors" for subsequent health conditions, so to maintain ideation of the (even if "flawed") healthy abled body: disability is other people. This a formulation that ought be front of mind when offering commentary on health conditions of other people we happen, however justifiably, to not like or respect. Careful, lest vulnerable people (to wit, all of us) catch strays. "It's, like, ironic..." Yes, indeed. Irony is the term we use for the mismatch between the actual and the apparent. It's not just coincidence. Not "just bad luck". 6/6 #HealthSupremacism #ableism

You know what else is linked with latter onset autoimmune disease? Is among "any of the risk factors"? That's right, prior covid infection. Some of us still remember CDC Director Dr. Rochelle Walensky's confident proclamation that it was "very encouraging news" that only folk suffering adverse health effects from covid were "people who had at least four comorbidities, so really these are people who were unwell to begin with". (He was "sick this whole time", you say?) Where comorbidities included things like an immunocompromised condition (e.g. Hashimoto's), autism, ADHD, learning disabilities, sleep disorders, even a history of childhood abuse, and interestingly (though perhaps not relevant here, for reasons of chronology), according to the CDC's updated list, blood stem cell transplant. Health impacts interrelate. Preceding health conditions ramp up predisposition to subsequent adverse health outcomes. We've known this since the 1918 flu and the subsequent rise in disability, which rise fed a certain politics in the era that followed. 3/6 #LongCovid #HealthSupremacism #PublicHealth