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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104. It ain’t over...

I was checking out at the Safeway and casually mentioned that I was all vaccinated and had my post-vaccination two weeks in. The checker immediately told me that she was going to have nothing to do with the vaccine

 

She is white, and pollsters say that the highest percentages of vaccine resisters are among  young white Republicans and white evangelicals. I also know that there is an anti-vaccine group on the pollical left, anchored by a Kennedy. I don’t know if our Safeway friend belongs to any of above—but chances are….

 

I think back to getting my shots at Cloverleaf, the local fair hall. It was a super-efficient affair from check-in to shot to the required 15-minute post-vaccination wait.  I didn’t know everyone in the room, but I recognized several and talked to some. We were all in the 70+ category, and there were Republicans and church-goers among us.

 

All this went through my mind at the Safeway checkout. And it immediately occurred to me that those of us over 70—of all political and religious persuasions—have been exposed to polio stories if not the virus itself. As it turned out, one of my fellow vaccinees told me her own polio story during our 15-minute wait. Together we remembered the “dog days” of August, and, in my case, an end to the Minnesota swimming season. 

 

And we remembered chickenpox and measles—how our moms took us to a neighbor’s house to be exposed and infected so that we got chickenpox young, when it was less severe. I’m not sure on measles before it got its vaccine; I know I had it and was kept in a dark room for a week, my parents worried about the impact of measles on the eyes. 

 

We in the 70 + crowd have personal memories and experiences of diseases, and of vaccinations that work: measles, chickenpox, polio, smallpox—we got the vaccination; it’s no longer necessary as smallpox is eradicated! Most of us automatically okayed the new vaccines for our children. Now it appears that some 30-40 percent of those children are no longer believers. Enough of them to give our coronavirus the time and space it needs to keep mutating and moving among us, like the “1918 Flu” did a hundred years ago, when it went on for three or four years. 

 

It ain’t over till it’s over, as Yogi Berra said.

 

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95. Polio

On this day, February 23, in 1954, in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, Dr. Jonas Salk inoculated 137 schoolchildren in the first major trial of his polio vaccine. It was a success, and children across the country were vaccinated. The dark days of 1952—the worst year for polio in the U.S., with 58,000 cases and 3000 deaths—were over. We—the children of the 1950s—could swim again in the “dog days” of August, and Life Magazine would not add more pictures of “iron lungs” that breathed for the afflicted and gave others nightmares.

 

The world is not quite done with polio; there are still a few new cases each year in war-torn countries. And some survivors of childhood polio, now in their 70s and 80s, are experiencing post-polio syndrome—muscle loss and joint pain and fatigue. But Bill and Melinda Gates and Rotary International, with thousands of volunteer and paid health care workers wading into the remaining hot spots, might soon make it another smallpox. A scourge that traveled the world, left its mark in history, and is retired to a laboratory.  

 

There might be more public knowledge and memory of polio than there is of the influenza epidemic of 1918, SARS, or swine flu. Maybe because of the pictures some of us still carry in our heads of iron lungs, of memories of seeing and knowing people with shriveled muscles, and memories and stories about President Roosevelt. FDR was stricken at 39 and stood to speak with braces and much difficulty, but he launched the “March of Dimes,” which would eventually fund Salk’s research and polio’s cure. 

 

I think there are bigger lessons here. America has always been a capitalist country, but strong social movements and, eventually, government programs have brought universal education, workplace safety, Social Security, and some semblance of universal health care into being. In the 1950s, the years of Salk and my own education, Republican and Democratic administrations agreed on a “mixed economy”—differing only on the mix. 

 

But since the 1980s, when deregulation became gospel and supply side economics was a hit song, for-profit solutions to public problems has been the go-to. Now, as we battle the current pandemic globally, we might think about the March of Dimes and listen to Dr. Salk. When asked whether he had applied for a patent for the vaccine, he replied, "There is no patent. Could you patent the sun?" 

 

I’m encouraged by the free vaccines in our country, and by halting but persistent efforts to make sure that vaccines reach poor neighborhoods and poor countries across the globe. If governments and “Big Pharma” can get a dose of Salk’s altruism, Covid-19 will have changed the world. 

 

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41. What money can’t buy

This morning, on the day after only one of three policemen involved in the affair that resulted in the death of Breonna Taylor, was charged, and not charged with her death but with endangering other apartment dwellers, people in Louisville and cities across the nation stepped up protests against police brutality. Breonna Taylor’s mother had already been awarded $12 million and the city had agreed to some police reforms. That money did not buy justice—or peace on the streets of Louisville or Portland.

Although the government has dished out billions of dollars to drug companies in hopes of getting a quick vaccine against Covid-19, it will take much more than money to make even a good vaccine effective in the world. The problems of manufacture and distribution will climb on the bigger problems of anti-vaxxers to make any kind of “herd immunity” a near-term impossibility. Looking back to the successful campaigns against smallpox and polio, it is broad public confidence and cooperation of national and international partners that made—and are still making in the case of polio—effective. It is also very important to note that Jonas Salk did not patent his polio vaccine. Edward R. Morrow interviewed its Salk and asked who owned the patent. “Well, the people, I would say,” said Salk in light of the millions of charitable donations raised by the March of Dimes that funded the vaccine’s research and field testing. “There is no patent. Could you patent the sun?”

Billions of dollars are being spent to repair damages from today’s fires and hurricanes, but billions of dollars spent now cannot make up for years of mismanagement and neglect. The wrong-headed policy of stopping all fires has led to a huge buildup of forest fuels; the growth of housing in what is now called a wild and urban interface has put homes and people in fires’ natural paths. And the billions of dollars spent and still being spent in the global promotion of growth built on the use of fossil fuels over decades has helped alter the globe’s natural cycles with extraordinary temperatures, droughts, floods, and rising seas. 

Money cannot buy humility, respect for the world’s creatures, waters, trees, and savannahs, or the justice and fair treatment we owe each other as human beings in an interconnected world.

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