Northerner
Admin (Retired)
- Relationship to Diabetes
- Type 1
From the very beginning of the pandemic, disabled people have been treated as an add-on. See, for example, how deaf people were ignored in Downing Street’s vital public health messaging, with no British Sign Language interpreter used in daily briefings. Those with intellectual and development disabilities were initially not on the priority list for vaccines, despite being five times more at risk of hospitalisation and eight times more likely to die from Covid.
I am a survivor of polio, a crippling disease that is preventable by a vaccine – which was one reason that my Covid jab felt like an early Christmas present. As a Paralympian and a campaigner for access and inclusion, it has been incredibly frustrating to see a clinically vulnerable group being treated as an afterthought, or even as apparently undeserving of medical treatment.
In early 2021, the charity Mencap warned that some disabled people were receiving letters saying they would not be resuscitated if they became ill with Covid-19, after “do not resuscitate” orders were illegally placed on some disabled patients during the first wave. This horrified me. In this and so many other ways, the Covid-19 pandemic has widened and deepened the exclusion of people with disabilities, and given the world a taste of how quickly a marginalised group can fall off a country’s agenda and become almost invisible.
www.theguardian.com
I am a survivor of polio, a crippling disease that is preventable by a vaccine – which was one reason that my Covid jab felt like an early Christmas present. As a Paralympian and a campaigner for access and inclusion, it has been incredibly frustrating to see a clinically vulnerable group being treated as an afterthought, or even as apparently undeserving of medical treatment.
In early 2021, the charity Mencap warned that some disabled people were receiving letters saying they would not be resuscitated if they became ill with Covid-19, after “do not resuscitate” orders were illegally placed on some disabled patients during the first wave. This horrified me. In this and so many other ways, the Covid-19 pandemic has widened and deepened the exclusion of people with disabilities, and given the world a taste of how quickly a marginalised group can fall off a country’s agenda and become almost invisible.
The government's hasty lifting of Covid restrictions is a betrayal of disabled people | Anne Wafula Strike
A caring society would have made this group a priority. However, a cavalier prime minister thought differently, says Paralympian Anne Wafula Strike
www.theguardian.com
