Are you in the right headspace to receive information that could almost certainly hurt you?

Because Jameela Jamil is currently being taunted by more than a dozen Twitter users who are joking about her getting coronavirus. It started on 5 March, when New York comedian Michelle Collins joked that Jamil would be the first celebrity to contract COVID-19, and has escalated since then. Stop the world, we want to get off. 

Jamil isn’t going to take it, though. The star of The Good Place has been shutting down those who want to make light of her own struggles with chronic illness by joking about her potentially getting infected by the pandemic. The actor was born with congenital hearing loss and was later diagnosed with Ehlers-Danlos syndrome, and is never afraid to speak up for those suffering like she has.

“If you’re gonna make a joke about how I am going to be the first actress with coronavirus, ya late and ya basic,” she wrote on Twitter, sharing screenshots of each of the trolls’ posts. “Joking about my mental and physical health doesn’t hurt me as much as other more vulnerable people with chronic illness/invisible disability/actual munchausens.” 

Jamil also responded to Collins’ original tweet, suggesting that the comedian should go straight “to the bad place”.

“May you never suffer from chronic illness,” she wrote, addressing Collins. “May you never wake up in pain and swollen every fucking day of your life. May you never struggle with an invisible disability. May you never be laughed at over it by people who have never met you.”

Those cruelly poking fun at Jamil are displaying an alarming lack of empathy about the thousands of people around the world who have already died of coronavirus, and the hundreds of thousands more who have been infected by the disease. Jamil isn’t the first celebrity to point out the danger in making jokes about the pandemic. Today, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez also shut down a male politician who wanted to make light of his own interactions with a person diagnosed with coronavirus.

But the trolls targeting Jamil are also dredging up the social media controversy from last month in which the actor was accused of lying about her medical history and secretly having Munchausen syndrome.

Jamil dealt with what she called this “out of control smear campaign” in her typical, no-bullshit fashion.

“I am not going fucking anywhere,” she wrote on Twitter in February. “They drag me and shame me, not really to hurt me, but to scare you out of also sticking your neck out. To use me as an example of how you will be dragged through the mud if you speak out and push back. Don’t be dissuaded. We are strong together.”

Images: Getty