9/22/25 - Rehabilitation, AI biases, and COVID vaccine access

Good afternoon!

And welcome to Autumn. It's my favorite season, weather-wise, here in Northeastern New York State. The leaves aren't anywhere near full color yet. When they are, I may share a photo or two here, to provide a bit of tranquility in these intense and unsettling times for people with disabilities pretty much everywhere.

Here are your three links for this Monday ...

Get set for independence

Rachel Litchman, Disability Debrief - September 17, 2025

"I hated being gaslit. And I hated my clinicians’ insistence that desperation and a positive attitude would change rigid rules and housing regulations. Their unrealistic optimism echoed the ableist sentiment that disabled people can obtain special privileges—work around the system—merely because they are pitied."

This is an exceptionally well-written account of rehabilitation gone wrong. Or, is it really rehab as designed that is inherently, fundamentally wrong? That's the question that keeps coming up for me every time I read horror stories of any kind of institutional care or program – like the Oklahoma nursing facility story linked in last Thursday's newsletter. In this Disability Debrief story, I can see evidence of both built-in, systemic ableism and more or less individual stupidity. I also see way too much reliance on a single orientation or attitude towards rehabilitation. There seems to be no recognition that different injuries and disabilities call for different goals and approaches. And different personalities call for different attitudes and philosophies, too. Some people respond well to written goals and rah-rah positivity. They really do! But some people just aren't wired that way. They, (or rather we), need a little more gallows humor, more gentle empathy, and maybe more limited goals, at least in the short term. Rehabilitation can still serve a genuinely useful purpose for disabled people. But it seems like all too often it's run by people who are woefully under-prepared, and with too many other priorities that have little or nothing to do with what disabled people actually need.

AI medical tools downplay symptoms in women and ethnic minorities

Melissa Heikkilä, Financial Times - September 19, 2025

"The findings by researchers at leading US and UK universities suggest that medical AI tools powered by LLMs have a tendency to not reflect the severity of symptoms among female patients, while also displaying less 'empathy' towards Black and Asian ones."

This seems entirely unsurprising. But it also seems like something that we should be able to correct in AI, maybe even easier than it is to correct in human beings. At he very least, it's an issue to be raised in every conversation about AI use that could affect disabled people, especially those who tend to be discriminated against from other angles, like race, gender, sexual orientation, and class. It's easy to see how AI bias in health care and disability services can escalate quickly from a troubling theoretical problem to real horror.

COVID shot: The access rules in your state

Carly Mallenbaum, Axios - September 17, 2025

"COVID vaccine eligibility could depend on where you live."

This map in this piece is dated September 17, 2025. So there may be changes following the CDC's meetings about vaccine recommendations a couple of days later. I will do my best to post updates as they occur.

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