Senator Tammy Baldwin's Chief to Long COVID Patients: Stop Annoying Me or Else

Under Biden, the entire nation was encouraged to go ahead and get COVID. The people who were disabled by this strategy are a little inconvenient.

Tomorrow is an important day for the Long COVID community: the Senate HELP Committee will finally be holding a hearing to discuss Long COVID. All eyes are on the Senate, and advocacy groups from around the country are organizing to pressure HELP Committee members to attend.

The worsening Long COVID crisis is simply an outgrowth of Biden’s barely-there pandemic policy, the continual, unending reinfection strategy that has already left tens of millions of Americans with long-term symptoms and even disability. For years, victims of this strategy and their allies have been warning that the “let it rip” approach to COVID is unsustainable; for years we’ve warned about the widespread anger that waits on the other side of allowing this mass disabling event to continue. “Get COVID over and over again and you’ll be fine!” is not a lie that looks good in the rearview mirror to the millions of people who followed this advice and lost their independence, health, careers, relationships, and freedom.

Now, Long COVID patients are a significant demographic who are tired of being told to stay home and/or die. While thousands of studies show long-term damage to people’s bodies after COVID-19, treatments are still alarmingly far off for a rapidly growing population of disabled and severely ill Americans.

This week, thousands of calls and e-mails flooded into HELP Committee members’ offices. Among them were messages from a group called Long COVID Action Project, which has been demanding that Long COVID be declared a national emergency, and that billions be allocated to Long COVID treatment research. Not everyone was happy to hear from them.

Senator Tammy Baldwin, one of the two remaining HELP Commitee members who have not yet committed to attending the hearing, expressed via her staff that the millions of patients desperate for treatment are quite the annoyance to her and her team.

“I’m trying to be helpful,” Chief of Staff Ken Reidy says with badly concealed irritation, going on to condescendingly explain to journalist and activist Joshua Pribanic, “I have about 600 emails in my inbox from your organization, from people from Scotland, from California, from Maryland. Um. Senator Baldwin represents Wisconsin. If I had every organization that just blasted my email inbox where I do my professional work, I would not be able to do my job.”

Let’s unpack these comments. First, let’s start with the implication that Long COVID activists are too stupid to understand that Senator Tammy Baldwin represents Wisconsin. Long COVID patients are targeting the members of the HELP Commitee because the members are federally elected officials who have significant impact on national health policy. People around the country- and indeed around the world- will be heavily impacted by how the HELP Committee hearing discusses COVID, and what actions are taken as a result of this hearing. This need certain Hill staffers have to be endlessly patronizing to activists is hardly confined to this topic, but it is perhaps more jarring to observe when the activists in question are disabled and, in some cases, dying individuals desperate for treatment.

Second, there’s the unintended, cruel irony of saying he “won’t be able to do his job” if he continues to receive this volume of emails from people who were, again, grievously harmed and disabled by policies his boss supported and continues to support. As Joshua correctly points out, many Long COVID patients can no longer do their jobs. Not because they have “600 emails in their professional inbox” (the horror), but because they have heart, organ and brain damage, and cannot get out of bed.

“Part of the action is to drive that point home- with your office and with every office,” offers Joshua calmly, “that we can’t go on living. And therefore, we need you to pay attention to us right now.”

“We have forms on our website and ways for folks to contact us,” Ken explains, instructing these patients to submit their complaints about being slowly murdered by the state less disruptively. Preferably, he should not have to see or hear from Long COVID patients at all; better they confine themselves to inboxes checked by interns and content themselves with form-letter responses.

He also repeats, irrelevantly and again with great condescension, that Senator Baldwin “doesn’t represent the entire United States,” a bizarre perspective that seems to imply that the great people of Wisconsin, alone, are exempt from the impacts of Long COVID. “We live in a representative democracy,” he kindly explains to the activist trying to get his democracy to represent him.

Worst of all is the nasty tone Ken uses as he “educates” activists about how best not to bother him. As he repeatedly states, “this is the worst way to go about things.” What he is communicating here is that, if he personally is annoyed by activists, he personally will, spitefully and out of personal malice, try to block any aid or help to the tens of millions of people suffering from long-term health effects after COVID. Most of whom, of course, had nothing to do with this capital crime of “flooding his professional inbox” with work-related email correspondence.

“How are you dealing with these demands, I guess would be the question,” counters Joshua, stating that if Ken can give him any concrete actions being taken by Senator Baldwin’s office, he can certainly communicate that to LCAP’s volunteers.

“If this is the way you guys want to do your advocacy,” Ken snipes back, “you’re totally entitled to do that. I was trying to do this in a way to be helpful to you all.” Rather than answering Joshua’s very straightforward question- what, exactly, does Senator Tammy Baldwin plan to do about the millions of Americans living with Long COVID? Ken pivots back to his previous threat: keep annoying me and we’ll just see how much research funding you get. This is not the way legislative decisions or priorities should be made, yet Ken repeatedly implies that if he personally is too inconvenienced by patients living with a debilitating illness, he will try to prevent the allocation of resources to the crisis.

Let’s really think about what a horrific statement that is: his party and his boss have advanced a status quo whereby the public was repeatedly informed that it was safe to catch COVID, and that all protections should be abandoned. His boss and party have removed free, accessible testing and vaccines, stigmatized mask wearing, and publicly bragged that “COVID is over” although we are currently in the second-highest wave of the entire pandemic. As a result of these anti-science policies, tens of millions of people may never recover their former health. And as these newly ill and disabled people flood the lines of the people who did this to them, they are told to shut up or expect to be punished.

Thanks to the advocacy of dozens of groups and thousands of activists, only two members of the HELP Committee have not yet committed to attending the hearing tomorrow, Senator Mitt Romney and Senator Tammy Baldwin. You can reach their offices at (202) 224-5251 and (202) 224-5653 respectively.

Long COVID- and COVID- are not going away, and as millions of Americans are infected and reinfected amidst an ongoing, uncontrolled pandemic this week, tens of thousands will join the ranks of those left behind by the “let it rip” non-response. Ignoring this problem will not make it go away; it will make it worse. Anger over emails will not make them stop, but action could. For the record, Ken Reidy, we do live in a representative democracy. How about some representation?