This commentary is by Kate Larose, pandemic equity coordinator with the Vermont Center for Independent Living.
Last month, the Biden administration announced its plans to end the Covid public health emergency (and with it, no-cost access to vaccines, testing and treatment). But despite the prevailing narrative that the pandemic is over, we continue to witness the unfolding of a mass disabling event. This declaration will almost certainly move us from emergency back to disaster.
We are repeatedly told by national and state leaders that this is progress. That we are back to normal.
In reality, we have done nothing more than to rebrand “staggering levels of illness and death” as something that is both expected and welcomed — the human sacrifice that must be paid for society to participate in our collective ruse.
The painting of this sanguine picture will continue to come at the highest cost to Vermonters who are older, disabled, BIPOC, or low income. Despite ongoing espoused commitments to addressing health equity and preventable disparities at the national and statewide levels, current policy response provides nothing more than vapid platitudes in the face of harm.
We’ve pivoted from the response stage of benign neglect, to embracing choices that openly drive and increase health disparities, belied by our tacit agreement to force people into seclusion, accept high levels of death for all — and especially for some — and mete out harms to adults and children alike. The weight of loneliness at this stage is crushing, even while needed self-protective behaviors are pathologized by broader society.
Though we’ve been told ad nauseam that we have all the tools we need to keep ourselves safe, the proclamations are a farce for those at high risk of injury. Vaccines, preventatives, testing, and treatment have dissipated with the rise of hyper-transmissible variants, indoor air quality goes ignored, and mask protections have been removed even from congregate care settings.
And we are consistently being told by health officials and media alike that our risk of catching or transmitting Covid is low, even while community transmission levels continue to be at all-time highs.
According to the Vermont Department of Health website, “health equity exists when all people have a fair and just opportunity to be healthy, especially those who have experienced socioeconomic disadvantage, historical injustice, and other avoidable systemic inequalities.”
Instead of a decrease in death and disability, we’ve arrived at a perverse plateau in which the burden has merely been shifted to those who are most vulnerable.
As protections and mitigation strategies are ripped away from Vermonters, we are begging our leaders for support and just opportunities for health.
What will it take for these cries to be acknowledged and heeded?
What will it take for Vermont and Vermonters to care about health equity during an ongoing public health crisis?
Public health is particularly skillful at the retrospective — pointing out what didn’t work in the past and pledging to do better in the future. But as we continue to journey through the eye of the pandemic storm, those who are most at risk don’t have this luxury of time and pontification.
Health equity can no longer be something that is solely examined in the rearview. Instead, it must be something we actively and planfully drive toward in the here and now. Together.
