Kes: One of the big lessons I have learned over the past year is that one of the government's favorite ways to avoid being held accountable is to just not collect statistics, and not collecting statistics regarding people with disabilities has been used a lot as an excuse during the pandemic. As a tool for forcing transparency and accountability, I'm coming to feel about dashboards the same way Agatha felt about those little bots she makes in the Phil Folio comics.
This women-made tool could help get more disabled people vaccinated
States aren’t prioritizing the disabled community, advocates say
https://www.thelily.com/this-women-made-tool-could-help-get-more-disabled-people-vaccinated/Excerpt
Feb. 25, 2021
In early January, while she was helping her grandfather register for a coronavirus vaccine, 21-year-old Sabrina Epstein realized that she was also eligible to be vaccinated in Texas, where her grandfather lived. But in Maryland, where she is a senior studying public health at Johns Hopkins University, she wasn’t eligible. As she started looking more closely at policies, Epstein realized that states across the country had prioritized people with chronic health conditions and disabilities, like hers, either in varied phases or not at all — and according to vastly different definitions and standards.
On Twitter, she began connecting with other people with disabilities, and she discovered that many of them were similarly frustrated, confused or discouraged by their states’ vaccine rollouts. So, Epstein approached her mentor at Johns Hopkins’s
Disability Health Research Center,
https://disabilityhealth.jhu.edu/Director Bonnielin Swenor, about creating a resource for people with disabilities to find their state guidelines. Disability activists could also reference it as they advocated for more equitable vaccine distribution, Epstein hoped.
Swenor said she thought it was a great idea and consulted with her friend, Megan Collins, who had worked on a dashboard
tracking the vaccine rollout for educators.
https://bioethics.jhu.edu/news-events/news/how-are-teachers-prioritized-for-covid-19-vaccination-by-the-us-states/With a plan in mind, Epstein reached out to Kara Ayers at
the Center for Dignity in Healthcare for People with Disabilities
https://www.ucucedd.org/center-for-dignity-in-healthcare-for-people-with-disabilities/ to see if her team could provide additional support. The group of seven women, most with disabilities themselves, began compiling state guidelines. On Feb. 8, they launched
the COVID-19 Vaccine Prioritization Dashboard.
https://disabilityhealth.jhu.edu/vaccine/![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
