140. Needles

Needles

 

Tonight, and last night and every night on the TV news there are video recordings of people being vaccinated: now the very young and the old, the Black and Brown, people in nursing homes, on Indian reservations and in neighborhood pharmacies. In every case, we are treated to the shot of the needle going into the arm. 

 

Most of the time we get a face, sometimes a wincing face or one turned away from the vaccinator, eyes closed, the sight of the needle entering one’s own flesh apparently causing mild—or severe—anxiety. Oftentimes the video clips are accompanied by experts touting the need for and effectiveness of vaccines, background music to the main story, a needle going into an arm.

 

Why, when we now know that some significant percentage of people—16-25% in a recent British study—have an inordinate fear of needles, are we given this same program night after night after night? 

 

Two close friends who don’t like needles don’t like to watch other people getting needled. They overcame their fears to get vaccinated, but it wasn’t easy, and our continuing use of the looped video doesn’t make them feel any better.

 

If those of us who believe that vaccinating as many people as possible is what we all need, why don’t we stop this nonsense right now? What good does it do? 

 

And what harm? What if some significant number of the vaccine resistant, and even a few of those espousing personal freedom over everything, are needle phobic? What if we publicly offered sedatives and more private places for them, if we helped rather than taunted?

 

Let’s start by asking our news shows to stop showing video of pained and scared, anxious and bold humans with needles in their arms. 

139. What Do We Want?

What do we—the vaccinated and mostly healthy people—want for the next weeks and months? What can we do to meet our wants?

 

We want health and safety for ourselves, our family and friends, and for our communities. So, we of the believing and vaccinated crowd want the broadest possible acceptance of vaccinations. We cheer now as the boosters and the vaccinations for children are approved. We watched the spike and hope it’s over. We want the numbers and percentages of the vaccinated to go up. How can we help?

 

Zeynep Tufekci’s NYT column, “The Unvaccinated May Not Be Who You Think,” is a starting point. First, we understand that not all of the unvaccinated are raving libertarians, Trumpsters, or anti-vaccine followers of Robert Kennedy. Then we find them and find out why they are not stepping up to get vaccinated.

 

It turns out, according to Dr. Tufekci, that the strongest correlation for being vaccinated is having health insurance and primary care providers. Yes, vaccinations are free, but remember people being charged for tests? And remember that without insurance people are always reluctant to go for medical care. Let’s continue to make schools, drop-in downtown centers, and pharmacies—shouting “free”—widely available. 

 

Next, let’s get clear on people with asthma and other health conditions, and with pregnant women. There are so many study results floating around that link problems with vaccines for some people in some rare instances. Let’s be honest. Yes, there is a chance that you will be one of the rare ones who has a serious side effect. We need clarity on your concerns, and need to  convince most of you to take the chance on behalf of your friends and family members. 

 

And yes, some breakthrough cases, especially among older people and those like Colin Powell with overwhelming health problems, get serious and even lead to death. But it is a small number and a small chance. People need trusted medical workers to talk with. Maybe we need “free clinics” like we had in the time of AIDS. 

 

Lastly, we need to understand that as many as 25 % of us have needle anxieties or phobias. After reading Tufekci, I quickly found that two close friends have in that group. And they hate it when TV newscasts feature shots in the arm. And they don’t like big public places—where they might faint—for vaccinations. And they can understand why some people might want an anxiety pill before getting the shot. 

 

If 20 or 30  % of those now unvaccinated can be convinced to be vaccinated with understanding and compassionate accommodation, it’s a better place for our tribe’s energy to focus.

 

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134. Resilience

Resilience

 

I used to be a night person, but that’s all changed in the last dozen years. Now I go to bed about 9, fall asleep easily and sleep until 12 or 1:00 am. Then back to sleep, maybe with help from the radio or a podcast on my phone; but this sleep is more troubled, often interrupted by dreams. Not horrible dreams, though two nights ago there was a volcano pouring out of Bonneville Mountain at the head of Wallowa Lake, and I went to higher ground on the school hill. 

 

On good mornings I wake lazily sometime after 4, and turn on the BBC, which takes me sleepily into Morning Edition on PBS. This morning the BBC had “mixed” quests, young men and women whose parents came to England from China, Guinea, the West Indies and East, and then married White Britishers or one another. This crowd, this morning, exulted in their mixed heritages, and I came awake slowly with a good feeling about the world.

 

Volcanoes—and the Covid—rage on in the world. Vaccine deniers trouble my mind, but the world is so much bigger, has seen horrible pandemics in the past, and those of us on the earth now are descendants of survivors of all of the earth’s past horrors.

 

There is an odd comfort in this, in knowing that there have always been volcanoes and always been deniers of pandemics—and that there have always been survivors. 

 

All of this fits right into the book I just finished reading, Surviving Genocide: Native Nations and the United States from the American Revolution to Bleeding Kansas, by University of Oregon historian Jeffrey Ostler. Ostler follows the inexorable westward movement of the Euro-settlers, and the displacement of the original Americans, by threat and force, treaty and missionizing, and incessant European diseases. 

 

Ostler’s story is the miracle of survival, explained by the ways in which tribes fought, adopted and adapted to the relentless pressures of colonialism. One of the tricks they often performed was to adopt members of other tribes or adopt themselves into other, stronger tribes, reestablishing diminished populations time and again. 

 

Which brings me to the mixing that is going on in England—and in our own country. Yes, it’s an old story, held at times quietly, erupting at other times dramatically and violently. But it seems as inexorable as the volcanoes, and it goes to explain the diversity we show today, and foretells greater diversity we can expect tomorrow. 

 

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127. The Great Divide Widens

With this wave of the covid—is it the third or fourth? —the divisions between those who believe that Masking, Distancing, and Vaccinations are effective deterrents against it, and those who label one or more of M, D, and V as “hoax,” “fake,” “untested,” and/or some sinister plot to take away personal freedom, have widened. 

Most doctors and scientists—and politicians and media leaders—implore us to get vaccinated, put our masks back on, and practice some measure of social distancing. A few with medical credentials, more politicians, and some who preach one form or another of religion, wellness, or politics, tell those of us in the MDV believer camp that we are deceived. That something nefarious is afoot. 

While sources I believe reliable count the number of covid cases, hospitalizations, and deaths as primarily occurring among the unvaccinated, the dying—who sometimes call for their children and grandchildren to please, please, get vaccinated—often assert their rights to personal choice to the very end. Personal choice at its extreme. 

A thousand gathered in Seattle yesterday in the name of personal freedom. The courthouse here in Enterprise had its own crowd of anti’s. 

Common sense and courtesy are diminishing as the divide widens. Yesterday I heard two new stories: Bill Gates has inserted something in the vaccine that will, given time, kill those of us who get vaccinated, thus promoting Gates’ primary goal of reducing world population in the cause of fighting climate change. The second new story I heard was that wearing masks might result in Black Lung disease—this far away from any coal mine. I admit that these stories probably come from the fringe; most anti’s are people who have sincere religious beliefs and health concerns. But it demonstrates the depth of the chasm, as do callers from “my side” who advocate not insuring or admitting the unvaccinated to hospitals, wishing severe illness or even death on them.

Humbly, I wear my mask at work at the Josephy Center, where we ask everyone who works and visits to do so. I’ve stopped going into stores that don’t. These things I can control. 

What worries me most—the health of our health care systems—I have no control over. And our hospital and clinics, like most across the state, are operating at full, at the edge of triaging patients. And here too the health care workers are divided, with some small minority insisting that they will not be vaccinated. 

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108. One minute--on the Pandemic

We’re tired. There are other things in the news: police killings, mass shootings, and gun legislation grab the headlines. President Biden’s big speech before a limited congressional audience made a big nod toward the successful vaccination surge and declining rates of infection the United States—and then moved on to education, jobs, infrastructure, and health and child care in general. Covid might have been the opener on his laundry list, but it was not the closer.

On the other hand, second page and sub-headline news says that infection rates remain high or are going up in Michigan and Oregon, and spiking up in India. And in the stories we read that the world—including the US—is trying to help in India with oxygen, ventilators, some vaccine and the wherewithal to produce more vaccine in country. Those second pages also tell us that Covid variants are proliferating where contagion is spreading—they get named after countries like Brazil. We also learn that we really don’t know yet about the effectiveness of existing vaccines against all variants, and, importantly, we do not know about a need for boosters this fall or next year.

Still—at the bottom of the New York Times opinion page this morning is an article by English historian David Motedel. He writes that “Opposition to vaccination is as old as vaccination itself. And despite consistent and often widespread hostility, vaccination campaigns have always, eventually, succeeded.”

Campaigns against polio vaccination, measles, mumps and rubella vaccinations, and smallpox vaccinations were all vigorous. MMR vaccine avoidance is credited with bringing measles back in many places, including Oregon. Polio vaccine has been blamed for causing sterility and being linked to AIDs, and polio, while gone almost world-wide, reared up recently in Pakistan. The smallpox vaccine has weathered it all, and at this point the disease is officially gone. 

Motedel’s words are comforting, although the struggles to get to a point where any infectious disease has trouble finding enough unvaccinated to move significantly have never been over in a day. The Covid story—and the journey—continues.

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98. Vaccinated

Yes, I received my second Covid shot on Tuesday, and there is some feeling of relief. But there are other strong emotions that kick in with my vaccination victory.

 

Worry—about the two grandsons, 20 and 23, living with me now. They have not been vaccinated, and the 20-year-old had the coronavirus and is still experiencing after-effects. We don’t know when the vaccines will reach them, but he knows that his having had it once offers no sure immunity in the future. 

 

I worry about my granddaughter living in Portland; she’s trying to go to school while working as a flagger. Essential worker, I’d say, as she worked a couple of 90-hour weeks when PGE crashed and was in the turmoil of repairing electric lines. But she has not been vaccinated. 

 

Concern—for the families I know who have been affected directly. For my grandson, and for Representative Pramila Jayapal and her husband, Steve. Steve and Pramila are good friends as well as public servants. Their contact might have been on that awful January 6 when Pramila huddled with other elected Representatives and staffers in a Capitol basement where some deniers refused to wear masks. Maddening.

 

Outrage—Yesterday I could not contain myself with a good friend, a woman who is a strong liberal—and a strong anti-vaxxer. I have other friends who remain vaccine skeptics, and when I’ve asked for evidence of the deaths and diseases caused by the vaccines, I get silence. Or notions that evidence is suppressed in this country. Yesterday, almost yelling at my friend, I said that thousands of people are still dying each day; if the vaccines were killing people on anywhere near that scale, who could suppress that news and how would they do it? I brought up polio and George Washington inoculating his troops at Valley Forge with live smallpox virus; I said that if a few people did die, it might make life safer for the living. I vented.

 

Hope—I’m hopeful with the new administration and with Biden’s Pandemic Relief Bill. Vaccination rates are rising and new cases and deaths are falling. This bill—with all of its liberal flowers not directly related to Covid, is revolutionary, because it targets the lower 85 percent of Americans. It might lead to the biggest expansion of the middle class in America since the post-WW-2 G.I. Bill. Only this time African Americans and American Indians and Asians and Latinos will not be omitted by fancy rhetoric and official indifference. Hope.

 

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96. March: the In-Between time

Yesterday marked the one-year anniversary of the first Covid-19 case in Oregon. There are now three vaccines, and herculean efforts at production, distribution, and administration of vaccine shots into arms of the vulnerable—in the U.S., more than 75,000 have received at least one shot—might make it seem like some corner has been turned.

But in “in-between times” corners aren’t trustworthy and the future is always uncertain. And March is a tricky month. We’ve made it through this much winter and have enough wood to make heat for 2 or 3 or maybe even 4 months. But we don’t know how wet or cold these months will be. We don’t know how hot or fiery—or damp—the summer will be. We have averages and we have projections—but who predicted the 300,000 Oregonians left without electricity in February, the storms and cold and loss of water in Texas? 

I got my first Covid shot on February 9, and am due for number 2 on March 19. So, I am in-betweener—as are many of the 75,000. Between me and that vaccination stand production and distribution hurdles, government policy, and March weather. The days are longer—but not yet long. Some days are sunnier and warm, but not all days. There’s a foot of snow on the ground, which sunshine and 40 degrees today turned sticky and then slushy in places. “Slush” is the in-between state of water and snow; the sound of the word is the sound of in-between.

The tantalizing prospect of declining infections and, eventually, immunity, is almost too much for many. Mask wearing at the local Safeway is slipping. A teacher in one of our open schools tested positive and some students are quarantined. Bend high school students, excited to get back to school, had a party and passed the Covid around; school opening delayed. It reminds me of taking off my jacket and overshoes and stuffing them under a porch on my way to fourth grade school in northern Minnesota—mothers insisted and we insisted not. It reminds me of another fourth grade no-no—skating on soft ice.

But at least we skated together and hid our coats and shoes together. Today, in-between students and parents and seniors are on small patches of soft ice, each alone, or in small “pods” (we had to adapt a word) that will melt or freeze again until March makes up its mind. 

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90. The Race(s)

Yesterday’s news of anti-vaccine protesters at Dodger Stadium in Los Angeles follows on the Capitol siege and a year of sporadic resistance to safeguards against C0vid-19—and denials from partial to total about the virus itself. The California story is notable, because California is a Blue state with Democrats in control of most reins of government—and because California will soon eclipse New York as the state with the most Covid deaths. 

I wait my turn—my appointment is for Tuesday, February 9—to get my own vaccination, and watch the daily numbers of Covid positives among the 7,000 of us here in Wallowa County, Oregon. We’ve been a poster community, our schools up and running, our hospital and health care system on top of testing and tracking, and the rush of summer tourists apparently unable to bring us the virus. We’ve not been affected by the church outbreak in nearby La Grande, or by the relentless numbers of positives in Umatilla County to the west. But recently, in the last week, daily numbers of positives in Wallowa County moved from 0 to 1 with the very occasional 2, to daily positives with a high of 5. 

 

It feels like I am—we are—in a race to get our vaccinations as the virus finally makes its way through the long windy road from La Grande, or up and down Rattlesnake Grade from Lewiston, Idaho (a state with recent jumps in cases and deaths amid protests at masking and distancing). There are only two roads in and out in the winter, with one more open just a few months each year. We wait—and watch the Idaho license plates on Main Street and the daily numbers from the Oregon Health Authority (1 on Friday; 3 yesterday) against the days we get vaccinated and the weeks before efficacy. 

 

The country too is in a race, on one side the protestors, naysayers and deniers, who are wary of coronavirus vaccines, or don’t believe in vaccines at all, or who believe that the virus itself is a concocted story promulgated by Democrats or aliens. On the other side are the hundreds of thousands of health care workers who continue to risk their own lives to stop this thing; the survivors mourning lost relatives; the children and grandchildren who have parents and grandparents like me, 78 years old and in good health but nevertheless deemed “at risk”; and the new Biden administration and its efforts to get a grip on the pandemic and move on to the economy and climate change. 

 

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83. Waiting in line

Waiting in line

 

A few days ago Governor Brown opened the Oregon vaccination program up to all seniors over 65. On Wednesday at noon I heard that I should call the local health providers to get an appointment. I didn’t get to it until an email at 3:30 reminded me. I called and was told that I am on a wait list, with more drugs on the way. Last night we learned on TV news that Health Secretary Azar’s promise to release all vaccine reserves was a hollow pledge; the reserves had already been shipped. Today’s noon program on OPB says the state’s plan must retrench. Seniors get back in line.

 

Word of the local situation spread by email and word of mouth. The governor’s remarks also run out the public and private communications lines to health care providers, drugstores, and other pandemic response teams in a kind of gossip game fury, with teams A, B, and C wondering what it means for their hospitals, pharmacies, nursing homes, counties. 

 

This kind of disjointed set of messages and actions has been part of the vaccine rollout from day one. It’s easy to blame the Trump administration for the glitches that sabotaged the promised “20 million injections before the New Year,” and that have followed with every step of the Covid Crisis. But….

 

Fifty-five years ago I was a Peace Corps Volunteer in a small Turkish village. We had an impetigo outbreak and went to Turkish doctors to ask what we should do.

They loaded us up with purple medicine and sent us back to the village. Another time, my neighbor’s small son was kicked in the head by a donkey. Mom and I carried him to the main road and flagged a tractor pulling a wagonload of passengers. I held the boy as we bounced the 20 kilometers into the city, Diyarbakir, and then caught a horse drawn cab to the government hospital. The wound was swabbed with iodine, dusted with sulfa, and sewn with a staple. 

 

At some point in our dealings with local health authorities, a young doctor doing his military service lectured us on the differences between American health care and what he was doing. “I am responsible for the health of this city and state. We have to patch the wounds and prevent the spread of diseases as best we can with the whole community in mind,” he said. We don’t have the luxury of individualizing every outbreak and every procedure.”

 

There are times when individualism and competition are not the most efficient ways of getting a big job done.

 

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