Pandemics Are Chronic

 

A Statement of Commitment to Long COVID Justice

We must end practices and policies that ignore, marginalize and deprioritize
chronically-ill and disabled people.

Pandemics are chronic. After the first years of the COVID-19 pandemic, our world is significantly more disabled and chronically-ill. As we saw with HIV/AIDS, disease outbreaks expose the need for large-scale change in healthcare, public health, and other unjust structures.

Yet even as the pandemic continues to claim lives, we are pressured to return to a “business as normal” that has never centered the needs of disabled and chronically ill people.

>>> Commit to Long COVID justice: sign the pledge >>>

We must end practices and policies that ignore, and further marginalize, disabled and chronically-ill people. The Network for Long COVID Justice, a project of Strategies for High Impact, asks you to join us in a pledge:

  • To include Long COVID in the narrative of the COVID-19 pandemic; we cannot tell the story of COVID without discussing Long COVID.

  • To center, platform, and resource those with Long COVID, complex chronic illnesses, and other disabilities at the forefront of policy, advocacy, and action related to these issues.

  • To work to end the marginalization of disabled and chronically-ill people, which is a constant and widespread harm, existing outside of and across all aspects of pandemics.

  • To recognize that the COVID-19 pandemic and Long COVID have disproportionately impacted already marginalized communities, including Black, Brown, and Indigenous communities.

We are experiencing a mass disabling event.
Disabled people and those with long COVID and associated conditions must be at the forefront of addressing this unprecedented moment.

(Read the full version of the pledge, with initiating endorsers, here)