The Gauntlet
The United States hit 22 million cases in the second week of January, reporting yet another new record of 269,420 new cases in one day.
There were over 369,000 American deaths.
The new mutated Covid strain was proliferating.
The CDC vowed to expand genetic sequencing efforts, a key component in discovering and adjusting vaccine treatment of new strains. Hospitals straddled a line between max capacity and collapse. Los Angeles County approached a total of one million coronavirus cases. 1 out of 10 Angelenos were infected over the course of the epidemic.
Governor Newsom opened several ‘super’ vaccination sites that week to move along the vaccine process in California, including Disneyland’s parking lots in Anaheim, Dodger Stadium in Los Angeles, Petco Park in San Diego, and Sacramento’s Cal Expo. The National Guard provided logistical support at each site. Front line workers and nursing home residents and care staff were finishing up first round doses. The next group to be slated were teachers, education staff, and folks 75 or older. Dodger Stadium was estimated to administer 12,000 vaccines a day when fully operational. It would’ve been more, but that pesky post-vaxx waiting period slowed down the factory line. Each vaccinated person had to be monitored for 15 minutes to ensure they weren’t going to have an allergic reaction.
My gal went and got her first dose of vaccine.
She was a front liner, being a nurse.
Locally, essential workers were being offered the Moderna vaccine. So, she went in, got the jab, sat in a side area for the required 15 minutes of observation for allergic reactions. Around the 14th minute, she broke out in hives. They took her blood pressure and it was off the charts. Yep, I freaked the fuck out. They gave her an antihistamine and continued to monitor her, taking her blood pressure every five minutes. With her diabetes and family background of strokes, they were afraid she might have one, so they sent her over to Urgent Care to see a physician, who took her history and monitored her for another two hours.
Meanwhile, I was losing my shit outside the clinic. Of course I couldn’t be inside with her due to Covid protocols, so I was on the phone with her the whole time. Her heart rate was normal. She wasn’t short of breath. All seemed copacetic enough. But of course, I was still working myself up, thinking of rare instances of severe vaccine side effects. Then I mentally self-flagellating for forgetting some of the initial UK research findings at Oxford, which suggested folks with histories of allergies might not be recommended to receive the first doses of vaccine.
The thing was, my girl hadn’t ever been diagnosed with specific allergies. She broke into hives sometimes if she ate carb-heavy foods, or drank alcohol, or ate high amounts of sugar. She was diabetic, was on the keto diet for a couple years and running, her biochemical system was no longer acclimated to heavy carb invasions, but we perhaps erroneously figured she wasn’t so much allergic as she was sensitive to certain kinds of food.
But the likelihood was, she probably was genuinely allergic to specific types of sustenance all of her life, and simply soldiered through minor incidences which didn’t provoke telltale symptoms like hives. She was probably spiking her blood pressure and blood sugar all along, which possibly led to her diabetes outright.
Anyway, she ended up fine, her blood pressure went down before she left the clinic, she was sent home with scrips for Benadryl and Claritin, she rested comfortably, but her arm was pretty sore. I was certain the delivery gunk mixed in with the mRNA was the stuff that spiked her blood pressure.
(Here’s all the ingredients in the Moderna vaccine, according to the CDC: messenger ribonucleic acid, lipids (these include SM-102, polyethylene glycol [PEG] 2000 dimyristoyl glycerol [DMG], cholesterol, distearoyl-sn-glycero-3-phosphocholine, tromethamine, tromethamine hydrochloride, acetic acid, sodium acetate, and sucrose).
Better living through chemistry.
I’d have wagered a pink sawbuck it was the cholesterol and sucrose that set off her allergic reaction, with her diabetes-compromised system unready for a rapid transfusion of sugar water. Generally speaking, in rare severe allergic reactions with the new vaccine, epidemiologists looked for offending ingredients in the mix and there were only three major suspects: the RNA, the nano-fabricated bags of fat, or the stabilizing molecules. Allergies to RNA are improbable, given that RNA is in every cell of our bodies. Those microscopic bags of fat are indeed just bags of fat, and seen by human bodies as friendly, so they were also not a likely allergic trigger.
That left whatever was used for the stabilizing molecules in the vaccine. For both Pfizer and Moderna, that was the polyethylene glycol (PEG).
That mix wasn’t used in any former common vaccines, which tended to use polysorbate. Some scientists posited allergic reactions to polysorbate might also manifest with polyethylene glycol. Considering her history and her reactions to carbs and sugars, we still thought it was the sucrose, but sure, maybe she topped off her reaction with the lipid mix, though she never had reactions to old vaccines mixed with polysorbate.
Yeah, I knew what anti-vaxxers would’ve been thinking. I’ve been sympathetic to some their points over the course of my years. As I’ve said, I’m no fan of late in life vaccinations, but it was obvious the risks of Covid outweighed the risks of vaccines. We stood by that. We still do. But…the docs were not going to let my girl get the second dose of the Moderna vaccine because of her blood pressure spike reaction. She was only going to get about 52% protection from Covid instead of the standard 95% we’d hoped she’d have after her second dose. (She ended up, over the course of the next two years, two J&J boosters, and another Moderna bivalent booster).
But some protection was better than none. She assured me she still probably would’ve taken the risk, even if we’d known her sensitivities were in fact allergies. I’m unsure I would’ve been at peace with that, admittedly. At the time we thought when enough appropriate time passed, she might get the pending Johnson and Johnson vaccine, which required only one dose and was an adenovirus-based, recombinant preventative, using a weakened live pathogen as the delivery vector much like old school vaccines.
There are inherent risks to taking any new medicinal interventions.
In that era, those dangers were infinitesimal compared to the risks of Covid.
I was a way out for my own vaccine. I fell in the next to last tier. Early fifties, no significant preexisting conditions, and I didn’t work in the medical field. I still had to soldier through at least a couple more months unprotected.
The point was, anyone who’d bothered with researching the epidemiological science ought to have taken the vaccine as soon as it was offered. If you were an allergic type, then the option was to chill for a while until the science caught up, continue appropriate quarantining, social distancing, and masking protocols. We kinda learned the hard way, though it could’ve been much worse. That was on us for not explicitly factoring in her personal biochemical titers beforehand. To be fair, so few of us humans are that proactive, unless we’ve had a near death allergic reaction of unknown origin and ran standard labs for allergy testing accordingly.
Nonetheless, I quietly bashed myself all that night, as she wrapped herself in blankets on the couch, because once upon a time, I lost a beloved dog for an oversight of appropriate titer testing before administering a late-in-life booster vaccination. It resulted in catastrophic liver failure. That’s why I’m wary about late in life vaccines. She was my bestie, a border collie-aussie mix that I had for just over ten years before I began assembling my aussie pack. Her passing wrecked me. On occasion, I still chastise myself for not crossing all my t’s and dotting all my i’s before cavalierly treating my older dog with what I presumed was a routine sort of thing. It’s a permanent grief.
Have I mentioned how close I am to dogs?
Oh, I have?
The same goddamned thing could’ve happened again that day, with my girl and the Moderna vax.
My girl is a light of my life.
I wouldn’t have survived the horseshit of that year without her.
Have I mentioned how precious everyone is, whom I’ve ever held dear?
Oh yeah, you too?
See?
We all have some few toes dipped in the same pool.
*Compiled from January 9, 2021