Center for Health Ethics, Arts, and Humanities

Leslie Francis and Michael Stein contributed to the Petrie-Flom Center at Harvard’s symposium on long COVID

This contribution argued that courts have been imposing physical reductionism on determinations of disability, leaving plaintiffs without remedies when there are no definitive biological markers of their conditions. Long COVID seems likely to be joining a list of other conditions with unsettled diagnostic criteria, such as chronic fatigue syndrome or fibromyalgia, for which plaintiffs have difficulty establishing claims to rights such as workplace accommodations. And long COVID presents plaintiffs claiming disability discrimination with a further challenge: no one knows how long it will last. Under the Americans with Disabilities Act, conditions that are transitory and minor, like a bout of the flu, are not disabilities. Court decisions are appearing that deny protections to COVID patients with lingering symptoms, when their timeframes of recovery are as yet undetermined. These legal trends, it's argue, are misguided in many ways, not least because of their failure to understand that disability is not merely a matter of abnormal physical findings that persist over time.... Read More