Pandemic shaming is far from a new problem
We have an impulse to blame people for getting sick, writes Ainsley Hawthorn
It was mid-March, and Canadians had not quite realized how serious a problem COVID-19 was about to become for our country and for the world at large.
In Shaphia Taplin's life, any rumblings about the novel coronavirus were eclipsed by the devastating loss of her friend Shannon Fleming to diabetes at the age of just 36.
When Fleming was waked at Caul's Funeral Home in St. John's on March 15, it had been only 10 days since the first local transmission of COVID-19 in Canada, and that had occurred on the other side of the country, in Vancouver.
There were not yet any public health guidelines in place for the prevention of COVID-19 in Newfoundland and Labrador, bars and restaurants were open, and weddings and funerals were going ahead as planned.
Someone who came to pay their respects to Fleming or to Ed Tobin, who was being waked next door, had just returned from out of province and, unbeknownst to themselves, was carrying the virus. That weekend became a major transmission event, one of the first in the country, with 167 cases of COVID traced back to it.
When news of the cluster broke, the finger pointing began. Taplin and other mourners were accused of being reckless, of acting irresponsibly, although they'd broken no regulations or guidelines.
Despite the fact that Taplin self-isolated for 14 days and ultimately tested negative for COVID, she became the target of abuse. Twice, Taplin's neighbours called the police on her because they spotted her outside her home, performing tasks on her own property like cleaning out her car.
We have an impulse to blame people for getting sick.
In ancient Mesopotamia, the region of modern-day Iraq, illness was taken as a sign of having angered a god. It wasn't because Mesopotamians were ignorant of medicine — Mesopotamian doctors prescribed pharmaceuticals, stitched wounds, set bones and performed basic surgeries. Since Mesopotamians believed the world was part of the divine order, though, every natural event reflected the will of the gods.
In medieval Europe, disease was seen as a product of humanity's sinfulness. If not a punishment for individual wrongdoing, it was at least a cosmic penalty for having eaten the forbidden fruit and fallen from grace. Some Europeans believed the Black Death itself was a blight sent from God to annihilate the wicked.
We might like to think our society has moved past these ideas since the advent of germ theory, but we still moralize disease.
Revisiting the AIDS crisis
The modern world's epitome of a stigmatized illness is AIDS.
HIV, the virus that causes AIDS, probably crossed over from chimpanzees to humans in the 1920s, but it didn't gain much public attention until 1981. That year, the CDC identified five gay men in Los Angeles who had contracted a rare lung infection. At the same time, some gay men in New York and California were being diagnosed with an unusual form of aggressive skin cancer.
WATCH | See the 1992 CBC documentary The Death of Ray Condon, about a Labrador man who spent his final months tackling stigma about AIDS:
Neither disease normally affected people with robust immune systems, which led researchers to the theory that the men were suffering from some condition that was weakening their immune response.
At first, health officials referred to this new disease as gay-related immune deficiency — or GRID. As we've seen in our pandemic, with politicians like Trump insisting on calling COVID-19 the "China virus," naming an illness after an ethnicity or an oppressed minority only serves to reinforce bigotry.
It implies that a certain group of people is responsible for a disease or that only certain people can transmit a disease.
HIV made gay men more visible
Dangerously, naming an illness this way can also give the impression that only certain people are vulnerable to a disease. That was surely the case with HIV, which remained a "gay plague" in the public consciousness for years, even though the CDC had discovered by 1983 that it was a blood-borne virus that could be passed to anyone through the sharing of body fluids.
For many straight people, HIV and AIDS bolstered their pre-existing prejudices and became another reason to avoid and disdain people who were LGBTQ. HIV was interpreted as proof that gay sex was riskier than straight sex or even that gay relationships were cursed by God.
All the while, members of the gay community were suffering and dying from a devastating illness.
This widespread public condemnation, though, became the crucible in which the modern gay rights movement was forged. HIV made gay men more publicly visible; they could no longer be ignored.
The stigma that surrounded HIV in the 1980s — and persists to a lesser extent to this day — shows us that our culture still hangs on to the idea that a sick person must have done something "wrong."
Instead of chalking up disease to a punishment from the gods, we believe that someone who's been infected with an illness must have engaged in risky behaviour, be it having gay sex or failing to physically distance.
LISTEN | Andrew and Ainsley Hawthorn host the latest instalment of their Apocalypse Then feature on The St. John's Morning Show:
It's not always possible, however, to comply with the absolute safest health practices, either because officials are still learning about a disease, we're hampered by structural factors like racism and disability, or doing so would excessively lower our quality of life.
It's unreasonable to expect an adult, for instance, to permanently abstain from sex, though that's the only foolproof way to avoid catching sexually transmitted infections.
It's also possible to do everything right — to the best of your ability — and still catch a disease. In the end, laying blame for an illness on its victim only disincentivizes people who are sick from getting diagnosed or seeking help when they need it.
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