130. Service

“Surgeries to remove brain tumors have been postponed. Patients are backed up in the emergency room. Nurses are working brutal shifts. But at Providence Sacred Heart Medical Center in Spokane, Wash., the calls keep coming: Can Idaho send another patient across the border?” (NYT 9/14) There are 29 patients from sparsely vaccinated Idaho (40%) in Sacred Heart rooms (Washington is at 61%). 

Idaho Governor Brad Little, meanwhile, is contemplating his next moves against federal vaccination mandates. He’s not alone; California police—or at least big globs of them—are suing over mandates, some in Los Angeles “alleging that the department has created a ‘hostile work environment’ for the unvaccinated and that the mandate violates employees’ privacy and civil rights.” (The Guardian 9/14)

I wonder if any of these people tuned in CBS’s “60 Minutes” on Sunday night. The entire program was devoted to 9/11 and the New York firemen who fought to save people in the towers. They saved thousands, and over 300 from the NYFD lost their lives in the battle. More impressively, over 60 current firemen and women in the department are sons and daughters of those who died.

One dramatic portrayal—and I am sorry I do not remember the name—is of a leading officer who cleared a path for hundreds in the South Tower and made it out himself before it collapsed, and ran right into the North Tower to help extricate more before it too collapsed. Surviving firemen agreed that he knew he was going to his own death.

The examples are extreme, but the idea that someone who enters into public service as a police officer or a governor would fight against personal vaccination on the basis of “privacy and civil rights” is absurd. 

All of us, I believe, owe to our friends, family members, and neighbors. And although we cannot all become biblical good Samaritans, we generally do not consciously endanger the health and well-being of the stranger along the road. But those who choose public service as a career, whether it be as a medical, police, or fire worker or a governor, are, I believe, obligated to put the health and safety of their constituents at least at the level of their own health and safety. 

The selfishness of the time is astounding. And if this ego-centrism cannot be broken by common sense, let the screams of the dying unvaccinated wake the resisters. 

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126. True Believers

In San Angelo, Texas, anti-mask movement leader Caleb Wallace became infected with the coronavirus and has been in intensive care for the past three weeks, according to his wife, Jessica. They’ve done all they could, and he’s being moved into hospice. Jessica, pregnant with their fourth child, has been masking, and plans to get vaccinated after the birth. She still agrees with her husband about the right of the individual to decide on masking and vaccination. 

 

Caleb’s father, Russell Wallace, also came down with the virus and was in the hospital with his son for 13 days. He’s improved enough to go home. But, according to the New York Times, “Despite his own illness and his son’s dire condition, Mr. Wallace said he still firmly believes that masks are ineffective and that the government should not mandate masks or vaccinations. He himself, however, has decided to ‘look into’ getting the shots.”

 

At Embers restaurant in Joseph last night, I sat talking with friends, and mentioned that I had just come from the Joseph Market, where no one was wearing a mask. My tablemates all had stories of being in local stores and seeing the same thing—although it seemed like masks are making a comeback in our biggest store, Safeway. 

 

The family at the next table got up to leave, and the man of the family paused to say that we probably didn’t know that the whole coronavirus thing was politics, promoted by “you know which party.” Any attempts to engage in conversation were trumped by politics and comparisons to abortion, where he imagined our table respected the rights of women to make that decision. The fact that the one issue—Covid 19, was about the health of neighbors, family members, and friends, while the abortion issue centers on the health of two, mother and fetus, was raised but not accepted. 

 

The man said that he would have to get vaccinated for his job. 

 

I struggle for the lessons here. Some people believe that personal choice is an absolute right that trumps all others (in which case one could argue for the right of the mother to end a pregnancy—but that’s another road). The impacts on family members and others, the fact that health care systems are being overwhelmed, and that medical needs of non-covid patients are threatened—people might in fact die—does not phase true believers. 

 

On the other hand, mandates—by employers, insurance companies, schools, states, and stores—might work, and save some of the rest of us.

 

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125. “Freedom"

You—the unvaccinated—are free from the fear of smallpox, because I and millions of others around the world were vaccinated against it.  It is now gone—after centuries; after killing millions of American Natives when the first Europeans arrived with it; after George Washington gave his troops at Valley Forge a crude form of vaccination against it; after milkmaids in England showed milder cases of it and the first modern vaccines were developed; after the World Health Organization made it a priority to vaccinate the world, and enough were vaccinated so that the last major outbreak in the US was in 1949, and the world was declared free of smallpox in 1980.

You—the unvaccinated—are free of the fear of polio, because polio vaccines and massive polio vaccination programs were mounted in the 1950s and 1960s, and because the Gates Foundation and Rotary International have conducted major vaccination programs around the world—through wars, droughts, and objections by some that the vaccinations caused sterility and all manner of side effects. Polio hangs on in our midst, believe it or not, with many, including people in our own community, who survived the disease as children and now live with “post-polio syndrome,” a consequence of polio-weakened muscles that become debilitating with age. 

You probably don’t worry about measles, as I and my parents did when I was five or six and was put in a darkened room for a week lest eyes be damaged, an outcome that sometimes accompanied the disease. You were likely vaccinated against measles and other childhood diseases as children, even though you will not pass that gift on to your own children. 

If you are under 40, you probably didn't get or need vaccinations against smallpox and polio, and if you got measles, mumps, etc, or not, enough of your neighbors did to keep those diseases at bay.

The lesson is that your—and my—freedom often rests on the good work of others, and it always goes back to some common consensus among a broader community that we are all in this world together, and it is our obligation to consider the well-being of our fellow humans as we consider our own. 

In fact, it can be argued that if we look out for our fellow human-beings we will in the long run be looking out for ourselves. Vaccinating myself and my family members gives the Covid less room to run in our community—and in the world. Less opportunity to mutate and become deadlier (it’s already happened once, with delta now raging). Less likely to come back to me.

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118. The Spike

Although we in Oregon are comfortably near the lowest of the states in terms of percentages of incidence and death by Covid, we have joined the country in the current spike. We’ve trolled along at about 300 new cases each day—until this week, when we flirted with 600 cases per day, and passed that on Friday.

And Wallowa County, where our vaccination rate hovers somewhere between 50 and 60 percent, we’ve had days and days of 0 new cases—until this week. It was 3, then another, and then 5 cases on Thursday. There is news of another local death too, a woman in her late 50s. 

Small numbers, but we are a small place, 7000 of us plus the travelers from New York, Wisconsin, California, Washington, Idaho, and North Dakota. Can we assume that most travelers are vaccinated? I haven’t seen stats on that, but imagine they are split like the rest of us. Even with Fox News now, at least at times, advocating vaccinations.

Why is it so hard! The illogic of it is startling. The White House and some Republican governors are reeling.

I think it is our radical individualism and the belief in total personal control. Yes, air travel is safer than car travel by the statistics, but I am in control in my car—until another car crosses the center line. And yes, vaccinations might have worked with polio and measles, but I know or know by hearsay about someone who got the Covid vaccination and died. I’ll take my own chances.

Or, more combatively, “don’t mess with my freedom to live and do as I want,” and I don’t like shots, or don’t like doctors or anyone else telling me how to live, what to eat, how to take care of my heart or my overweight or smoking or drinking or couch-addicted self.  Just leave me alone!

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