Learning from the ‘COVID War’
Preventing pandemic destruction is not just a question of “how to.” It is a question of organizing power from below.

Preventing pandemic destruction is not just a question of “how to.” It is a question of organizing power from below.
During the pandemic, disability rights have been negotiable and vulnerable to sacrifice in service of the needs of able-bodied, neurotypical people.
Our research shows that social movement activism is an integral part of service delivery for sexual and reproductive health and gender-based violence.
When people cannot obtain abortion care, they incur social, financial, and physical costs that are difficult to bear.
Our ability to breathe is shaped by the laws and politics that govern the use of technologies, and that validate racialized assumptions about people.
Further on-the-ground innovations, outside the courtroom and across state borders, will be needed to meet future challenges to abortion access.
Where a health state is intertwined with carceral logics, enforcement becomes coercive.
Social movements’ impact need not be salutatory, as is evident by the success that the anti-vax movement has had during the COVID-19 pandemic.
Activists in the access-to-medicines movement have mobilized to combat the threat of vaccine/therapeutic apartheid during the COVID-19 pandemic.
The pandemic showed that community-based supports can foster safety and accountability without requiring state intervention.