"Perhaps it's because, while cancer is scary in its own way, society doesn't have the same collective fear and denial of its existence."
And that is because Cancer is NOT airborne and everywhere all the time.
And there are treatments for Cancer, there are none for Long Covid.
I never understood the term "homophobia". Anti-gay bigotry and discrimination is indisputable, but "phobia"? It just didn't seem like the right word. And then I began to see the reactions to Long COVID and it finally clicked for me.
Media coverage of Long COVID is steeped in the language of fear. Specific words and phrases get repeated over and over, almost like a mantra of collective denial.
Take this short blog published in Science yesterday. To the untrained reader, this might appear to be an article sympathetic to people who suffer from Long COVID, and while it is, it's also obvious that the writer is deathly terrified of the subject.
You can see it from the headline itself "The Causes of Long Covid". There's only one cause of Long COVID, and everyone knows exactly what it is: getting infected with COVID. What the writer actually meant was "the causes of Long COVID symptoms" which is more ambiguous and contested. By shortening the headline, he's subtly reinforcing the idea that Long COVID and COVID itself are unrelated; casting doubt on the possibility that a simple COVID infection can be the reason so many otherwise young and healthy people are now disabled. Making it just a little less frightening.
Then the first paragraph. "Most people recover quite well - I’ve had the damn virus more than once myself and haven’t noticed any particular long-term effects" Before he even starts discussing Long COVID, he has to set the stage - COVID isn't so bad, most people are fine! Look at me! - Even if this were true (and it's not clear that it is true) why does this sentence need to be included? Do articles written about cancer include a sentence in the beginning acknowledging that the writer doesn't have cancer? I've never seen one written like that. Perhaps it's because, while cancer is scary in its own way, society doesn't have the same collective fear and denial of its existence.
Then we get to the conflation, another common trope. Long COVID is just like other post viral conditions, he writes. Maybe it's just like Lyme. Don't be frightened, you see, it's nothing new or novel. Nothing humans haven't dealt with for decades, maybe longer. At one point he declares explictly that Long COVID could be a "variety" of Fibromyalgia. You know, that thing your aunt had? No one really liked her. She always seemed kind of weird at Christmas.
The article could have had all of these things removed, and it wouldn't have impacted the content one bit. Yet, they're there. Included as emotional dampening. We can't scare the children, after all.