Don't Tread On Me

By mid-January of 2021, one in every three residents in the numerous counties of the Los Angeles Basin had been infected with Covid-19.

L.A. County proper, officially become the first county in the nation to record one million coronavirus cases.

At the time, one person was dying every six minutes in Los Angeles from Covid-19.

According to the South Coast Air Quality Management District, pollution control limitations and environmental protections on the number of daily cremations were temporarily suspended to deal with the backlog of bodies at hospitals and funeral homes. Plans were underway to open five large scale vaccination sites that week at the Forum in Inglewood, Six Flags Magic Mountain in Valencia, Cal State Northridge, the Pomona Fairplex, and the Downey Education Center, with hopes they’d be able to inoculate 20,000 people daily.  

According to an analysis from the American Public Media Research Lab, regarding death stats by the end of 2020:

One in every 1,925 Asian Americans died from Covid-19.

One in every 1,325 white Americans died from Covid-19.

One in every 1,150 Latinos died from Covid-19.

One in every 1,100 Pacific Islanders died from Covid-19.

One in every 800 Black Americans died from Covid-19.

One in every 750 Indigenous Americans died from Covid-19.

Follow the descending ladder thereabouts?

As was the case for the last six hundred years, Blacks and Native Americans were disproportionately relegated to the bottom tier of the class war, in virtually all sociological arenas, including that of managed health care.

The Asian American ratio probably ran higher than the whiteboy ratio because Asian Americans often approach the closest levels of proximity to ruling class privilege in the Western world, and not unlike their Eastern brethren, they tend to be more disciplined than white Americans on the whole, and thus suffered fewer losses within their ranks.            

Thousands of vaccine doses across the country were tossed in the trash rather than given to willing people. They had a very short shelf life once they were thawed out for use. Decentralized federal and state mandates on proper dissemination and backup contingencies for administering extra dosages were mucking up the predicted estimates of vaccine rollout. Unexpected amounts of people in frontline essential service ranks refused to get the vaccine, and there wasn’t an adequate backup plan in place, which often forced health care staff to find willing recipients in the halls of their facilities, whether they were cutting in the mandated tier line or not.

Doses initially assigned for that first tier were going bad before the next tier was officially approved by the state. Pharmacy and hospital workers let doses spoil before giving them to folks who weren’t scheduled to receive them yet. The WHO estimated up to 50% of global vaccine doses were discarded instead of administered because of shortcomings in the coordination of supply chain and distribution channels. The United States was little different from a third world country in that regard.

Perhaps we were even more susceptible to such issues because of the trickle-down nature of our federal government umbrella, under which 50 different states have differing policies and paradigms. Deeper still, there are varied county regulations, city to city and region to region, all of which often differentiate about the how, the why, and the what of virtually anything within their borders including public health emergency responses. It was a real time example of how our decentralized health care system-for-profit was falling short of the necessary speed and efficiency to save more lives.

The Center for Disease Control and Prevention vaccination tracker reported a total of 30.6 million doses of vaccine were distributed to hubs of access, yet only 11.1 million people were given their first shots. According to Johns Hopkins University, the United States stood at 23 million confirmed coronavirus cases and 387,000 deaths from coronavirus complications.

At that point, whoever wanted the vaccine should’ve been allowed to at least sign up and register on a waiting list, no matter how old they were or what scheduled tier they fell in, simply to ensure no doses were wasted and more people were vaccinated sooner than later, even if that meant young folks were vaccinated before older ones, even if non-essential workers were vaccinated before essential ones.

Rather than throwing out doses, we should’ve ensured that each and every one was used by someone, somewhere. For every scheduled vaccine shot, there ought to have been an alternate recipient willing to come in at a moment’s notice to take it, should the first option elect out. This all should’ve been considered and implemented before the vaccines shipped. The tiered system was a fair idea in theory, prioritizing those who were most at risk, but it didn’t account for the time-sensitive nature of un-thawed vaccines, or the surprising amount of vaccine hesitancy.

Sure. There was cause for caution, of that there was no question. It was not a completely foolproof science. There are few arenas of science that are one hundred percent foolproof. We’re not terribly evolved creatures just yet. There was always going to be a proportion of adverse reactions to a new medicine in a population of 320 million. You may recall my girl’s reaction to her vaccine. Indeed, it seemed California may have gotten an errant batch of the Moderna vaccine that month, as state officials officially recalled hundreds of thousands of doses after a cluster of allergic reactions occurred at a single clinic in San Diego with a Moderna lot, designated 041L20A. Less than ten people went into anaphylactic shock. They were all successfully treated, but that was enough to freeze the lot and initiate an investigation. I didn’t know if my girl got a wonky Moderna dose or not, or if it was just her sensitive system. Her lot dose number was 025L20A. Our local public health spokesperson told the public we’d received about 500 doses directly from the potentially dangerous lot in question, and they paused the use of that lot until the CDC finished their investigation. 

Vaccine hesitancy is a weird thing. Seriously, though, in the Americana of our country, wildly unaccustomed to widespread pestilence, who was going to turn down protection from a deadly pandemic when it finally arrived?

Turns out, a lot.

I had my own reservations initially, as I’ve said. I eventually determined through careful consideration and observation and research, as more information came to light or more necessary alterations to former perceptions became required, the dangers of a late in life vaccine didn’t outweigh the dangers of Covid-19. That’s called learning. It was second nature for all of us, back in grade school. Turning 18 years old doesn’t give us an exemption to this process. It’s an ongoing, lifelong dealio. Well. It’s supposed to be.  

Many American physicians expressed their frustrations regarding vaccine hesitancy and Covid-19 deniers by citing a seminal work of Albert Camus called The Plague, which bore a more than striking resemblance to circumstances at that time.

One of the central tenets in that work is Camus’ definition of abstraction, the quality of dealing with ideas rather than events. There’s a trio of protagonists in The Plague that more or less represent a familiar division on how our society was handling the Covid-19 pandemic. There’s a guy named Rieux who wants to serve the greater good over individual interests. There’s a guy named Rambert who wants to escape the situation at all costs no matter what. And there’s a guy named Cottard who sees the plague as a potential financial opportunity. All three dudes experience the same thing, yet rely on their individual perceptions to make sense of it. One guy wants to do the right thing and think of others. One guy sees it as fortuitous and wants to capitalize on it. And one guy wants to save his own ass.

Camus showed people trying to order a happening inherently difficult to order, which fortified his position of life being totally absurd, that there are no universal meanings of life, no absolute truths, that life is simply a random circus of insignificance.

I do not share the infamous French adulterer’s views in that regard. But his idea of abstraction was all too pertinent to our situation then, whether it was the downplaying of Covid-19’s severity or vaccine hesitancy. The dangers of the pandemic, with its daily numbers and statistics and news coverage, were muted to most human beings until the virus hit them directly, via infection of themselves, or a personal loss in their immediate spheres.

Not until it’s in my backyard.

I’d say this ought to have become the official rallying cry for the conservative side of the American experiment, but they already have one of those.

You’ve seen it somewhere around your ‘burg in virtually every corner of this country, its instantly recognizable rattlesnake motto emblazoned on yellow Gadsden flags. Several were hoisted and carried at the United States’ first insurrection just a week or so before. It’s been around since the American Revolution, when the Continental Marines adopted it as a slogan, and it’s been used ever since by right-leaning components of our society, most often in reference to anti-government notions and gun ownership rights.

Don’t tread on me.

It’d be nice to presume this mantra has held up all these years as an honorarium to British religious persecution. That was indeed its original intent, a statement of rebellion against an imposing state of governance that unfairly marginalized certain classes of people. If only whiteboy colonists hadn’t carried on the very same traditions they presumably renounced. In this modern era of ours, it’s not so much about government control – though many Americans have convinced themselves as such – as it is about not having limits set upon them of any kind.

A good majority of those supposedly apparent moralities are often called into question, if they’re not blatant transgressions like murder, rape, or property destruction. There’s much room to interpret within agenda filters, when it comes to the zero to sixty range of incorporated whiteboyism.

However, recommendations to take scientifically tested vaccines to dial down a raging epidemic weren’t attempts to tread on the downtrodden or the persecuted or the disadvantaged. They were actual safety measures designed to save as many of us as possible. There was a lot of talk about coronavirus absolutism, some experts decrying stringent public perceptions of outdoor transmission and the prohibition of open space activities. While it was an evolving understanding of how much and to what degrees Covid proliferated through human activity, getting the vaccine didn’t fall under those considerations. If getting the shot meant saving my life as well as protecting the lives of my neighbors, the temporary imposition on my accustomed way of doing things wasn’t only warranted, it was welcomed.

And yes, there was all too many of my sisters and brothers that proclaimed in adopting that creed, I was a boot-licking, brainwashed lemming who was too willing to give away my personal freedoms.

Nah. I was just trying to save my own skin. And my girl’s, and my boys.

And your sorry, stubborn ass, too.

*Compiled from January 16, 2021