We’ll get vaccinated. At least that’s our hope. We also hope that the vaccine will be effective against coronaviruses and a bunch of other pathogens. One of the side effects of the COVID-19 pandemic has been an increased number of consultations with Dr. Google about the Zika, dengue, yellow fever, West Nile and Spondweni viruses.
You may never have heard of the Spondweni virus. It sounds terrible. Dr. Google will tell you that it can cause hematuria, hematospermia, and epistaxis. These are words for blood showing up in places it shouldn’t, which can be scary but most often isn’t fatal. Epistaxis, for example, translates from medicalese as a common nosebleed.
Spondweni virus itself is considered a mild pathogen. You get over it in two or three days in most cases, without lasting effects. It probably doesn’t belong in the same paragraph as the others, even if Dr. Google put it there and caused all this anxiety in the first place.
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Julie and I will get vaccinated next month, for the flu. Flu vaccine is not effective for much longer than six months, so we try not to get it too early in flu season. We also ignore rumors that it contains nanotechnology in the form of Bill Gates-supplied injectable mind-control chips, chips that will cause an overwhelming impulse to buy the newest version of Microsoft Office the minute it’s available. Judging from the age of our version of Office, nanotechnology has a way to go before it can control consumer behavior, at least our consumer behavior, which usually only responds to Costco sale flyers.
Also, we don’t worry about thimerosal in our flu vaccine, because when it is used, each dose contains less mercury than a tuna melt, and the mercury it contains is ethylmercury, not the far more destructive and long-lasting methylmercury.
If you want to worry about mercury, an ahi steak marinated in honey and lime juice and put on a hot grill for a minute on a side and then devoured with wasabi is the sort of thing you should consider. Make that your dinner every evening for a month, and you will bioaccumulate enough methylmercury to cause enough brain damage that you’ll happily donate to Steve Bannon’s Build the Wall charity.
We do worry that the flu vaccine will miss its targets this year. Flu shots are readied well ahead of time, before anybody knows exactly which strains will be circulating. Last year the vaccine missed its target, mostly, and we caught something flu-like in December. Then we caught something else flu-like twice more, in January and February. We may have had a small relapse in March, or it may have been Spondweni Fever, picked up on that abnormally warm day when the mosquitos came out. It was a bad winter that way.
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When and if a coronavirus vaccine becomes available, it will come with head-splitting ethical questions, not the least of which are—
Do you wait until you have enough vaccine for everybody, so you don’t have to prioritize one group of people over another?
If your vaccine isn’t properly tested, do you give it to military personnel under the guise of national defense? This isn’t an idle speculative question. China has already gone ahead with such a plan, giving a theory-designed vaccine to real soldiers and hoping that theory has some relationship to reality. In our own country, we remember the Gulf War vaccinations, given to American soldiers on the assumption that as an invading force, they would be exposed to Saddam’s chemical and biological weapons. Check out what Dr. Google has to say about Gulf War Syndrome if you want something to talk about in your Medical Ethics class in the coming semester.
Do you give the vaccine first to high-risk groups? If so, do you define them by blood type, living arrangements, income, age, race, or political party?
Do you force people to get vaccinated when they don’t want to? Do you refuse to let unvaccinated children play sports or even go to school? Fines? Jail terms for child neglect? Squeeze chutes?
You’re the head of a family-owned pharmaceutical company, one that has just come up with a cheap, safe, and effective COVID-19 vaccine, arrived at with the help of extensive government-funded research. Do you: a) charge what the traffic will bear; b) make it available to everyone for free; or c) resign before you’re fired for suggesting b)?
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It would be nice to have a universal vaccine, one that would prevent any and all diseases for life. That sounds impossibly utopian until you consider that for a huge majority of children these days, the default position is health. Kids used to get sick all the time, and enough of them died that everybody knew what the term replacement kid meant.
Over the years, at least until COVID-19 came along, medical science developed enough vaccines for enough diseases that we had a de facto universal vaccine. People could finally worry about side effects. It’s hard to overstate the improvement that represented over worrying about replacement kids.
Shortly after I was born in 1950, I had mumps, measles, and chicken pox, all of which I was lucky enough to survive without life-altering complications. Early on, I was vaccinated for smallpox and whooping cough, and received both the Salk and the Sabin vaccines for polio.
The Sabin vaccine contained domesticated live virus, but nobody worried about that as much as they worried about getting wild polio. Other vaccines had unpleasant side effects, but they were nothing as bad as what they prevented. I went to school with classmates who had been paralyzed, or who had heart conditions, or who couldn’t hear because of infectious disease. My mother, a nurse, had dealt with the victims of these infections. I didn’t like needles—besides the pain, I saw them as a monstrous violation of the boundary between my inside and my outside—but there was no chance of remaining unvaccinated in our household.
Tetanus was the one I remember, because it hurt, and the first inoculation wasn’t the last. I got a booster shot whenever I stepped on a nail, which was about once a summer during my grade-school years.
In spite of the pain, as an adult I made sure I received a new vaccine whenever it was approved. When pneumonia vaccine was available, I got it. When meningitis vaccine came along, I got it. When I took a trip to Thailand in 1983, I received what appeared to be the entire 20th century’s worth of vaccine research in one giant shot, courtesy of the Idaho South Central Health Department. It cost me ten dollars and left me with pain in my joints and muscles for a week. But I didn’t get sick in Thailand.
Last winter I received, with some relief, my second Shingrix shot. I felt lousy for days, but not as lousy as I would have felt if I’d had a bout of shingles.
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We are discovering that people can get COVID-19 more than once. It’s not surprising, given that immune system responses to the virus are all over the map, and worldwide cases have surpassed twenty-five million. That’s a lot of anecdotal evidence. If you have enough anecdotal evidence, you can prove anything you want.
It may be that for some people, getting the virus is a one-time thing. It may be that, within six months, everybody else loses the immunity acquired by vaccine or by having the disease. It’s certain that as people who have survived the disease get older, lots of deaths will be blamed on a recurrence, or a mutated strain, or on a vaccine. It will be hard to design the study that will establish immunological certainty.
In spite of that, Julie and I will get a COVID-19 vaccine. We’ll be worried about side effects, because the vaccine we get will have been rushed through FDA safety protocols. But there will be enough data to make a common-sense decision, one not dependent on anecdote or rumor, to be injected with one of the many vaccines that will be available by this time next year.
There’s science out there if you take the time and trouble to look for it. Once you find it, you have to have faith in it. Then you have to bet your life on that faith, which is the hard part. It’s still easier than betting your life on the benign intentions of a virus.
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There are fears within the scientific community that a COVID-19 vaccine won’t produce herd immunity because too many people will refuse vaccination. The politicization of the pandemic has produced people who won’t wear masks because they’ve been told that masks cause or intensify disease or interfere with their freedom. It’s doubtful that the same folks will line up to be vaccinated.
Another factor in vaccine refusal is the eternal psychological problem of what’s inside and what’s outside. Judging from the amount of time people spend on it, it’s not easy to figure out where they end and where the world begins. Getting injected with anything is a violation of an uncomfortably permeable boundary. Because there are so many other, more nebulous violations of that boundary by powerful people and institutions who confuse their needs with your own, it’s tempting to refuse whatever violations you can.
The conspiracy theories that the anti-vaxxers have about Bill Gates or Big Pharma or population control stand in for what is really happening to them. That is, most people in this country really are being herded into a kind of squeeze chute, but what they’re being injected with, as the chute holds them immobile, are social media memes, foods and medicines designed to be addictive, lifetime mortgages, unpayable college loans, and hours-long commutes to jobs that have no meaning.
There’s more, but that’s enough to see that refusing to wear a mask and refusing to be vaccinated is a metaphoric response to the unrefusable assaults of day-to-day life. You maintain what boundaries you can, where you can, but they’re never enough. Your small refusals, you hope, will compensate for all the big refusals you’d like to make but can’t, the ones that remind you that you’re being treated as a farm animal by the corporations and politicians of this country.
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Julie and I had planned on going to Yellowstone and Chico Hot Springs for a week in October for my seventieth birthday. Chico has a wonderful restaurant, nice rooms, and hot pools that you can soak in until you get too warm. Then you can climb out, lie back on a chaise longue, and read murder mysteries until it’s time to dress for dinner. There are worse birthday presents.
But it’s not going to happen this year. We’re not going anywhere without a vaccine, and even then we’re going to be cautious travelers. I doubt if we’ll ever feel as safe as we did back in the days when there was a vaccine for everything and we hadn’t even heard of Spondweni.
If things go as we hope, this time next year we’ll be planning a seventy-first birthday party. Even if it doesn’t have the cachet associated with a seventieth birthday, it will be a celebration of being alive. Even if we won’t be heading for Chico next year, we will be thankful of our survival in the face of unknown odds, and of our ability to hunker down and wait out this plague.
If this plague is over. If it hasn’t touched us with grief. If Dr. Google will let us out of the house.