Take Your Medicine!

I should have posted this several days ago, but I don't think it's outdated yet.

As everyone probably knows, Pfizer's vaccine for COVID-19 has been approved for emergency use by the FDA, and the inoculations have begun.  (The Moderna vaccine seems poised for approval within a day or two.)  Not without some glitches, of course, especially as our rulers and betters have tried (often successfully) to jump in line ahead of unimportant, disposable people such as frontline healthcare workers.  And there have been some mixups in shipping sufficient numbers of doses, at both the Federal and state levels.  But it's okay, everything will work out eventually, we have to trust the experts and other authorities, especially now that Joe Biden has been elected and Science will save the day.

Once again, NPR's Morning Edition gave me food for thought, with indigestion, three stories in one day.  This one, for example, though it began by giving me a laugh when the host, Rachel Martin, said that most of the patients served by her interviewee are "first and second-generation Latinos."  Yes, I know what she meant, and it isn't entirely her fault since American discourse on ethnicity stinks to high heaven, but still.  She's using "Latino" as a racial category opposed to "whites," which is problematic for many reasons.  Imagine if she'd said "first or second-generation whites."  Really, Rachel, "first or second-generation Americans" would have done the job admirably, and it's what you meant anyhow.

Anyway, the physician Martin interviewed, Eva Galvez, gave this example of inadequate information among her patients.

It was a family who came in to get care for their children. And so the visit really was not a visit for Mom and Dad. But Mom asked me if the vaccine was safe, and she had heard some information on a social media platform that the vaccine had long-term side effects and that the vaccine was actually risky. And then she asked me, how can you ensure that this vaccine is safe? And then what I told her was that we had done very many studies, and it had gone through a rigorous process and that, based on my reading, that it was safe. And what I conveyed to her was that all vaccines have side effects, but that the risks of the side effects generally are less than the benefits of getting the vaccine. And that was how we ended up leaving the conversation. So she didn't tell me that she was going to get the vaccine, but she certainly seemed open to the vaccine. And so it's really fighting two battles here. One is trying to convince people that the vaccine is safe and that it is important, but at the same time is also trying to rectify all of those messages that they have been getting from other sources. So these conversations really do take time.

This is good, because instead of telling the woman she was stupid and anti-science, she took her questions seriously and tried to answer them.  But look at the bit about hearing on a social media platform that the vaccine had long-term deleterious effects.  That's not unreasonable or alarmist, though it's unavoidable given the rush to produce and certify the vaccine.  It should be remembered and stressed that the approval is for an emergency situation.  (It occurs to me also that flu vaccines, which must be revised each year, also don't get long-term studies before they're approved.)  The discussion I've found always focuses on immediate effects, such as pain at the injection site for a day of two afterward.  That, if I recall correctly, is also a possible effect of the flu shot and other vaccinations I've gotten in the past several years, though I've never experienced it.

So I appreciate Dr. Galvez' candor with her patients.  I'm not so happy with the next doctor Martin interviewed, Anthony Fauci.  Martin began with a typically dumb reporter's question, if the first inoculations "feel like the beginning of the end to you?"  Fauci responded with some vacuous platitudes.  Martin then asked wouldn't it be terrible if people refused to get the vaccine, and what should we do?

It isn't only African Americans. It's Latinx and many white people feel the same way. We've got to get the message across and explain to them what their hesitancy is and what their reluctance is and try and reason as to why they're understandable, but they're really not based on facts. If you look at what goes on historically with vaccines, overwhelmingly they are the safest and most effective interventions in medicine when it comes to infectious diseases. We've got to keep trying to get that message out because it's to the benefit of the individual, but to the benefit of the entire society.

I haven't been impressed by Fauci as a spokesman for Science.  There's no reason why he should be any good at it, I guess, but communication is part of a physician's job, and on top of that he has been anointed by the media as the Anti-Trump of the pandemic.  So it's not good that he says here that "we" should "explain to people what their hesitancy is and what their reluctance is and try and reason as to why they're understandable."  This is authoritarianism, understandable in a physician of Fauci's generation but unacceptable.  First you have to listen, to let them tell you what their hesitancy is.  Even if their hesitancy is irrational, as it often is; sometimes it isn't, though.  

After all, Fauci has been saying that Santa Claus "is exempt from this because Santa, of all the good qualities, has a lot of good innate immunity," a line that sounds as if it were composed by Pete Buttigieg's platitude AI.  USA Today explained, "But with millions of Americans already sick with COVID-19, children have been worried about Santa, especially this Christmas Eve when he visits millions of homes. And there's no denying that Santa, because he is older and overweight, would at first glance appear to be at higher risk of developing severe disease from COVID-19."  Speaking of "not based on facts," this is the trouble with impressing children with the reality of a mythical being: when something goes wrong, you have to come up with crap like Fauci's reassurance. But grandfatherly Dr. Fauci knows what's best for you.  

And today he told the nation that he'd given Santa the vaccine; even that he "measured [Santa's] immunity," which is how you say, not a thing.  I know he's a grandfather in private life, but Fauci comes across as the kind of patronizing adult who neither understands or likes children very much.

The fictional Santa is safe from COVID, it's true, but unfortunately he's not the only Santa.  On that same morning, Rachel Hubbard reported on Morning Edition that her parents play Santa and Mrs. Claus every year.

My dad is not a mall Santa. He and my mom live in Cordell, a small town about 100 miles west of Oklahoma City. Working in rural Oklahoma, my parents spend their time visiting with people at community events, in nursing homes and at schools. Most years on Christmas Eve, dad is visiting people in their homes. People just expect to see him around town.

"They've always seen Santa, and he's always been around when they need him, and he can just come by their house," my dad said. "It's just not the same this year." 

NPR is not usually kind to religious people and others who don't want to give up their traditions because of the pandemic, but apparently Santa cosplayers have special status.  However, as Hubbard acknowledged, Fauci's claim that Santa is immune isn't true.  I wonder if it even occurred to him that there are real people out there who have to cope with children's beliefs about them.  But Doctor knows best.

Stephen Arnold is president and CEO of the International Brotherhood of Real Bearded Santas (IBRBS). He says at least three of the organization's 2,200 members have already died from the coronavirus. (One in Florida and two in Texas.)

"That has created consternation amongst ourselves. Whether we cancel the season altogether, whether we ignore the warnings or whether we find a compromise," Arnold said.

Many of these men rely on the Christmas season to supplement their income, so it isn't just a matter of self-regarding ego. 

According to an informal survey IBRBS did of its membership, about one quarter has decided to proceed with Christmas appearances without masks or social distance. Another quarter has canceled their seasons altogether, and the rest have landed somewhere in the middle.

Hubbard and her siblings are properly concerned about her parents' health.  Santas around the country have been creative in coming up with creative alternatives, and even Hubbard's parents have had to bend to reality.  If they are valuable to their community, and they clearly are, they need to be around next year too.

In a recent digital event, children were able to ask Santa questions. While there were questions about what kind of cookies Santa likes (sugar cookies with lots of sprinkles) and whether Rudolph always leads the sleigh (yes, his nose lights the way), kids also expressed anxiety about what was happening.

My dad told them this: "I know some of you are having to do school at home, and your parents might not be working right now. I just want to let you know that Christmas is going to be OK. Everyone is going to make it; we're going to make it through this."

I don't say this because I don't care about kids, but because I do.  It is a pity that Fred Rogers isn't with us anymore: he could have helped find ways to explain the pandemic to children without condescending or lying to them.  He's dead, though, so the rest of us must grow up and be helpers ourselves. Where children are concerned, Fauci isn't helping.

Resistance, even antagonism, to authority has its upside and its downside.  I think we've made a lot of progress in the past half-century when it comes to holding authorities accountable, requiring them to explain and justify themselves.  They still don't like it, and NPR is on their side, along with most corporate media.  We have to be responsible about it, not just yelling "No" like two-year-olds; we have to exercise critical thinking, as difficult and unpopular as that is with authoritarians.  There's no easy way to do it.  

I myself intend to be vaccinated when it becomes available to me, which will probably be in a few months.  But I'm glad for the interval, so I can wait and see how it goes in the meantime.

Born Free, Free as the Wind Blows

We went through this four decades ago, and I suppose we'll have to go through it again.

Yesterday I saw a Facebook ad from a struggling local business which said they were open and ready to serve, and "coronavirus free." I do sympathize with them, but I asked if they'd actually been tested. They answered that they didn't have any symptoms.

Sorry, everybody, but "symptom-free" is not "coronavirus-free." In this case they were probably right, I hope that they don't have the virus, and I don't believe they meant to be deceptive. They just really didn't, and don't, understand the difference.  We really need to understand the difference, though. You can go from apparently fine to very sick in a few hours.  So please, don't get this confused, and speak up when other people confuse it.

Fumigation Nation

We critics are often accused, rightly, of accentuating the negative and refusing to offer positive alternatives to the states of affairs we criticize.  I did that in the last post, and this morning I realized that if I didn't like crossing my heart, signaling namaste, and other salutations that others had offered to get us through the coronavirus crisis, I should come with something better.  Here it is:

There, doesn't that say it all?

This morning in a local group on Facebook, someone asked if anyone had seen "that" (no further detail) at 10:05 p.m.  When asked what "that" was, she posted a murky cellphone picture.  Someone else posted that she'd seen several helicopters in the air over my town last night.  No one knew anything, and all I could say was that I'd seen helicopters on their way to land at the local airport from my window.  Someone posted that he'd gotten this:

A couple of people asked where it came from; he eventually explained that someone he knew had sent it to him in Messenger, but he didn't post it right away because it had no source; but when he saw the question about lights in the air, "it made sense."

Except that it didn't.  If the first poster had seen a helicopter spraying a fumigant -- an hour and a half early, when people wouldn't have been inside even if they'd known about it! -- she would have heard it.  If such a procedure really had been planned, would it have been announced through private messages on Facebook?  Perhaps President Trump, Blessed Be He, only wanted to save his Elect, but if that were so, a lot of them had no idea what was coming.  Someone else pointed out that livestock and other animals would have been affected too.

Also, spraying disinfectant from helicopters probably would do very little to eliminate coronavirus, because it would miss all the people huddled indoors.  Whoever came up with this fantasy was probably thinking of spraying DDT to stop malaria, etc. That had some effect because it could kill mosquitoes and flies that carried disease. But insects are not the the main carriers of coronavirus; people are.

In other goodies, a video clip has been circulating on Facebook, shared by an old friend of mine among others, which shows an elderly Mexican woman showing how to make a face mask by accordion-folding a paper towel.  My friend thought it sounded cool, so pleased that she didn't mind it wasn't in English.  It's the kind of Hints-from-Heloise kind of "hack" that appeals to many, but it's not protective gear: if it were, hospitals would be doing it.  Someone shared it to a Facebook group for Bloomington, where I used to live, but added the warning "***This is not a protective measure against Coronavirus Covid-19!!! It will help you to not touch your face, which is an important safety precaution!!!***"  That's about it.  But that tiny positive is balanced by the certainty that many people will believe that the mask will protect them and others, and they'll be careless.  It's not as bad as telling the credulous and desperate that chloroquine will cure COVID-19, because these masks aren't poisonous, but that's small comfort.

Simeon Simian

WARNING: This post takes a somewhat raunchy turn a few paragraphs in.

I saw this tweet this weekend, and replied to it:

It's possible, I suppose, that Mr. Hussain was being sarcastic; the lighthearted tone of some other commenters on his tweet suggests that they might have taken it that way.  On the other hand, 408 likes and 80 retweets suggest that many people took it literally, and no one mocked me for having missed the joke, so I'll presume it was meant seriously.

We're already seeing the necessity of avoiding physical contact in this pandemic, and people have been exploring alternative greetings online and probably elsewhere.  Someone under Mr. Hussain's tweet posted a GIF of a black woman making the "Wakanda forever" salutation from the movie Black Panther.  The trouble with this one is that many African-Americans were dismayed when white fans began making the gesture, seeing it as cultural appropriation, though the fuss died down after awhile as people moved on to the next big Phenomenon.  But that raises the question of whether non-Muslims should put our hands over our hearts in a dignified manner and slightly bow, or non-Hindus make the Namaste sign, or any other salutation borrowed -- appropriated! -- from other cultures.  No matter in the long run, as far as I'm concerned; people will sort out what they're going to do.

The obnoxious thing about Mr. Hussain's tweet was his petty glee at the prospect of people being forced by the pandemic to give up a gesture that is meaningful to them, just to suit his personal hangup.  If shaking hands is unsanitary, so is copulation, so is a non-copulatory embrace, so are mothers using spit to clean their children's faces, so is human society generally.  Keeping six feet apart may be a necessary strategy in a pandemic, but it's not something human beings can live with forever.  Even now we have to find situations and people we can get closer to than that.

This reply was mildly funny, though:

I suppose English isn't this person's first language.  By "foreign" I suppose he meant "non-Muslim." When I pointed out that Islam isn't a nationality, he replied "Islam for us extends beyond national boundaries and nation states. We are first Muslims and then citizens of different lands."  That's true, and different lands have different customs about greetings.  Embracing, holding hands, and kisses, though "simian," are not unknown in Muslim lands, as in many others.

I also couldn't help thinking of what the historian Richard Trexler wrote in his Sex and Conquest (Polity Press, 1995, p. 109: 

Various cultures have used sexual signs and gestures of subordination to express reverence toward their gods and lords. Indeed, only those ready to avoid the topic will be surprised that some corporal expressions of religious reverence, such as kneeling, bowing and prostration, remain formally close to certain sexual postures.

When I see Muslim men prostrated for prayer, I always think of this passage, and I'm not even an ass man.  Those postures are part of our simian heritage, along with kissing and holding hands.

A day or so later, someone posted this tweet, with a more obviously lighthearted tone.

 
Many of the comments were also playful, but they made clear how little people had thought through what COVID-19 is going to mean.  One person wrote:

Nope.  More like arranged marriages.  Courting involves prolonged physical proximity, and that leaves aside where you meet your love interest (church, dancin' parties, school - all unsafe; and what are you going to do when church, dancing venues, and schools are closed?).  Other people wrote about the erotic excitement of brushing elbows, holding hands, and the like, all of which are verboten under the six-feet-apart rule.  There was romanticization of the days when "ankles were sexy," forgetting how repressive those days were; I think we can guess that they'd been watching too many period films, and forget that people nevertheless broke the rules, with considerable human cost.  (Unwanted pregnancies, social ostracization, sexual harassment and rape, among others.... I forgot to add what used to be euphemistically called "social diseases.")  Also they're forgetting the terrible sanitation of those days, with resultant outbreaks of disease.

Probably this is mostly whistling in the shadow of a catastrophe.  Nobody knows how long we're going to have to stay apart from one another, so of course people joke nervously.  I'm probably taking these comments too seriously, but I don't know.  In the early days of the AIDS epidemic, brave people held hands, hugged, cuddled anyway, even before it was known that such behavior was safe, because they knew and felt how important physical comfort is to human beings.  Besides, from what I know of human nature, most of the people gloating over the end of unsanctified sexual practices are certainly eating ass right now.

One other thing: what bothers me most is the suspicion that I'm seeing the germs of a new erotic prohibitionism being spread.  I don't think it comes from religion, I think it goes into and motivates religion.  I doubt that Rachel Sennett, for example, is a Christian fundamentalist, nor are the people who commented on her tweet, but she's ready to fall back to a sex-negative stance far too easily.  Someone tweeted elsewhere that he already flinches when he sees characters in pre-COVID-19 films or TV casually leaning in for a kiss.  That can be a useful habit to form, but it won't just go away when the virus is no longer a threat.

Damn - this took way too long to write.

P.S. The World Health Organization currently recommends keeping at least a three-foot distance from others, which is certainly easier than six.