Where’s the Vaccine for Ableism?

^{Photo by 张 学欢 on Unsplash}

I am online with eight members of the family of my client, a nursing home resident dying of Covid-19. The camera is inches from her mouth as she takes her last labored breaths. Her daughter speaks in a voice as flat and exhausted as her eyes: “I knew this would happen.” The family tells me about the countless repressions they survived in the former Soviet Union and how it prepared them for living through a pandemic in an American nursing home. There is no rage, only resignation: This abandonment by the United States government is just the latest in a long line of state-sanctioned betrayals.

I share their frustrations. As a disabled rabbi serving hospitals and nursing homes during the pandemic, I expected the worst from American public health policy. But it has still been shocking to see all the potential for prevention and harm reduction slip through our fingers.

Now the vaccines have arrived, but the rollout is flowing through the familiar tributaries of ableism, ageism, sizeism and racism that have been feeding...