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As the prickly discourse of shame and the novel coronavirus breaches new heights, I’d like us to explore what accountability looks like in a police state and what we’ve learned from existing HIV/AIDS and Hep C criminalization bills.
(although Twitter is not the platform for nuance, here’s one last go I swear really)
From viral tweets to a now massive Instagram platform surpassing 80,000 followers called “gaysovercovid”, we are seeing LGBTQIA+ community members pass footage of people—predominately white gay men that defy COVID-19 safety guidelines to gather and party en masse.
As we now cross 350,000 deaths in the U.S. and a whopping 20.6 million cases nationally, we ask ourselves in fury and despair; Why aren’t people taking this pandemic seriously? What is propelling them to continue as if they didn’t have the knowledge to mitigate transmissions?
Although answers are unclear and messages are mixed, I’ll share with you lessons we’ve learned from the HIV/AIDS epidemic—a continuing crisis that still ravages similar communities that have fallen victim of COVID-19.
Using shame as a public health tool does not change behavior as much as we wish it did. The only evidence we do have is that it hides or privatizes actions. Doing this only sources invisible transmissions aka transmissions we do not see nor hear about.
Shame can often hinder disclosure of transmission out of fear via societal or social stigma, then resulting in new transmissions and making contract tracing of new cases that much more difficult to track.
Shame also fuels disease stigma because we can now attach certain behaviors to virus transmission. As we know with HIV/AIDS, stigma can evolve even with advancements in science (i.e. “U=U” and PrEP) and can be difficult and at times near impossible to eradicate.
Stigma in turn has often been a pathway to policing disease or behavior attached to disease transmission and can mature to actual criminalization laws (see S08261; making “intentional COVID-19 transmission” a felony in New York State—codified in law in August of last year).
We know by referencing HIV/AIDS (34 states in the U.S. have HIV/AIDS criminalization laws almost all in their original form) that “communicable diseases are public health issues, not criminal issues” cc @HIVJusticeNet statement on COVID-19 criminalization: https://www.hivjusticeworldwide.org/en/covid-19/
A little background on HIV/AIDS criminalization: Most laws were created early in the epidemic to blame communities for transmission. The Ryan White CARE Act, which continues to be a driving force in HIV/AIDS care, required states to show that they made efforts to criminalize.
But even with the advancements of science, HIV/AIDS criminalization continues to stay active and prey on communities that are victims of abusive and racist policing.
Studies have shown that as a result of these existing laws, communities fear getting tested and neglect to seek treatment out of concern of persecution. Therefore resulting in increases in HIV/AIDS rates of infection.
Alike to “super spreader” events, jails continue to be the epicenter of both COVID-19 and HIV/AIDS transmissions, and the act of policing (enforcing behavior and gatherings) will cause COVID-19 transmissions to travel esp. when cops defy COVID-19 safety precautions themselves.
So what are the answers? New viruses are always new terrain, but what we can do is push for effective and meaningful education that include harm reduction. Creative ways to reduce risk and find mediums to make life livable during a pandemic that consider pandemic fatigue.
Demand change, from local electeds to federal legislators, on their inaction and neglect on relief, cuts to healthcare, delay on protections of people experiencing homelessness and in jails, and the utter inefficiency to address a public health crisis.
The only way we are going to survive this pandemic is with care and solidarity, so let’s get to it.
