The Jab

By hook and crook, dumb luck, or surfing the waves of universal mojo, your author received his first vaccination dose earlier than expected, and the second dose two weeks later. I managed to wrangle the Pfizer editions. It was a happenstance sort of deal. I’d signed up for one of those apps which alerted users to potential, soon-to-be-wasted, end of day doses at varied vaxx drive-thru-and-jab outlets. Out of the blue, I received a text asking if I could be at a certain vaxx location within 15 minutes. Of course I capitulated and off I went. Not that I wanted to cut in line. As we determined a while back, between the options of shots getting tossed in the bio-garbage or putting them in the nearest available arms, it’s an easy choice.

Next thing you know, I was in my vehicle, speaking with a number of efficient and polite and masked vaxx center folks, set up in a factory line sort of vetting and checking in process, filling out consent forms and answering queries on my potential allergies to polyethylene glycol and polysorbate. A professional young man rolled up my left sleeve outside my driver side window and administered my long, long, awaited jab. To put it succinctly after all that quarantined time…it was a fucking relief.

As I sat there in the car for 15 minutes after my first shot, as they had me wait to ensure I wasn’t going to go into anaphylactic shock (I didn’t), I thought of how fortunate I’d been, how me and mine managed to either elude the virus, survive it, or had a relatively asymptomatic version of it, how my girl and I had enough resources between us to endure extended quarantines, and how state and federal agencies were finally stepping up and making that countermeasure actualize at last.

That second dose, though…yeah, it took all the piss out of you. Others had worse side effects than me, but geez, I dunno if I’ve ever been more exhausted in my life. I was wiped…like fall down can’t even make it to the couch kind of wiped. I knew that meant my immune system was working like it was supposed to, but holy cow, what a drain.

As might have been predicted, Florida took a commanding lead in premature Covid acting out. Spring break in Miami that year became an idiot fest of monumental proportions, with virtually the entire world descending upon the drooping dick of the United States, largely because of Governor Desantis and his decision to open up the state and damn the viral consequences. Collegiate students and quarantine-weary tourists alike swarmed over the beaches of Florida. The state was running the highest positivity rate in the country and was the leading regional carrier for the more contagious U.K. variant. Miami Beach declared an official state of emergency, imposed an 8 PM curfew for its entertainment district, and closed several roads leading into the city. In several crowd control altercations, police used pepper balls to disperse unruly folks who were refusing to abide by Florida’s limited coronavirus precautions. Miami Beach’s Ocean Drive looked like a Rolling Stones concert, with many thousands of drunken kiddos, largely unmasked, packed shoulder to shoulder, carrying on like Covid was over.  

Yet Covid was definitely not over. Americans just couldn’t wait a few more months until we achieved a measure of herd immunity via continued vaccinations. Like clockwork, Florida continued to mark itself as the epicenter for American un-exceptionalism.  It’s more or less become the national hub where whiteboys can go to be the whitest they can be.

The doom-blur carried on. We Gen X’ers seemed to be of three camps regarding the potential end of our era. Some believed they were powerless to prevent it. Some were taking up their lances Quixote style to tilt at windmills much taller than could realistically be jousted without a massive, communal effort. And unfortunately, a distressing, if not surprising, amount of folks resigned themselves to the sect who were unwilling to look at pending calamity clearly enough to believe its pending actuality.

The big, splashy, back-to-school reveal was, of course, the secondhand pandemic, Covid 2.0, brought to us courtesy of the Delta variant and the unvaccinated masses.

While most experts predicted a backlog of holdouts and refusals, none dared estimate the later-in-year levels of Covid activity, filling up ICUs and morgues in largely red states, some Covid deniers going all the way to their deathbeds touting conspiracy and anti-vaxx rhetoric. Gotta give ‘em credit, you gotta have mad huevos, to head on into oblivion or the great beyond that resolute about anti-scientific stances and government oversight.

I sometime wonder about corrective interventions or reconditioning classes in the afterlife. Wouldn’t it be a daisy, if those re-education camps our fringe is so concerned about actually exist in other dimensions? Some sort of reconditioning almost has to exist, doesn’t it? Or perhaps our uber-souls revert to their more evolved forms upon leaving this plane. Either way, if you think about it, there must be a trillion-strong gaggle of humans who’ve looked back on their time on planet earth and realized holy cow, was I off base. Guys like Hitler, Mussolini, Genghis Khan, they must be pulling centuries of double shifts in the karma wards of eternity.

We were averaging about 156,000 new cases a week in the U.S. in August of 2021, a 123% increase in transmission rates since the same time the prior year. We were at about 1,000 Covid deaths a day and we hadn’t hit Labor Day weekend yet. Here in California, rural northern and central valley citizens eschewing vaccination and continuing to embrace paranoid propaganda were struggling with higher rates of deaths and hospitalizations than their blue coastal cousins. Red counties the country over were having to ration healthcare once again. Pediatric ICUs were packed. Some kids were dying from Covid.

As expected, those folks who chose to disregard vaccination for themselves and their children had no problem rushing to the hospital when they were in Covid distress. Politics don’t mean a damned thing when you can’t catch your breath. Even in my hometown, there was a measure of home fried resistance, wherein a number of small rallies and protests were held decrying vaccination mandates.

What is ‘medical tyranny,’ exactly, and when did we get so fervent about knowing what we put in our bodies? Nobody cared about that prior to the pandemic, outside of hardcore, wellness extremists. Folks had no problem popping a Tylenol full of big pharma chemicals, or doing a chemotherapy regimen upon oncologist recommendation, or eating whatever-the-fuck came out of a less than sterile slaughterhouse after being shipped to the fast-food drive-through du jour…but all of a sudden, we were on a mass toxic cleanse to promote ‘medical freedom?’

No. Just continued American distrust of the unknown, fueled by social media disinformation.

Those anti-vaxx folks were dragging us all down with them, and they groped and groveled for any random forces or happenings that might bolster their creaky soap boxes. Cases in point? Continued anti-intellectualism by the likes of Eric Clapton or D list SNL comedians Jim Breuer and Rob Schneider, going so far as to cancel their touring appearances at any venues which required proof of vaccination. Or Nicky Minaj’s embarrassing revelations about her vaxx hesitancy because of a sister’s friend’s boyfriend’s supposed case of swollen testicles. Random celebs found themselves becoming poster children for the movement, and folks who formerly couldn’t cite a single Minaj track or recall Breuer’s impact on pop culture outside of Goat Boy were suddenly embracing those famous folks as messengers of freedom.

Can you guess which two states led the charge in anti-vaxx consequences, their death rates in the last two weeks of that August exceeding the military death rates in Afghanistan the prior twenty years? That’s right, kids. The cock n’ bunghole of the U.S.A., the gator and the longhorn, the swamp and the panhandle, good old Florida and Texas, where folks like all the amenities of the blue states and none of those pesky, freedom-denyin,’ blue responsibilities. Mayhap I sound a little petulant?  Apologies. I was pretty sick and tired of the whole fucking thing by that time. I admit it.

I presumed it would eventually end, yes, but I was torqued that we’d chosen the road where it ravaged through all of us before it left. Vaccinated people came to accept eventual exposure was almost certainly inevitable. While vaccination ensured we likely wouldn’t be admitted to the hospital or perish, the reality was, we were all going to get infected at some point. The paranoid half of this country made sure of that.

A Kaiser Family Foundation Vaccine Monitor survey conducted in July of 2021 identified two separate groups of unvaccinated Americans: those who were open to getting the vaccine eventually after a subjective ‘wait and see’ time period, and those who claimed they were never getting vaccinated. The first group was less educated, included a higher fraction of minorities, and exhibited high levels of skepticism about efficacy and consistency of communication from government and medical agencies. The second group was mostly white male Republicans hotly opposed to vaccine mandates, who made it clear it was less about the vaccines and more about the mandates. Again, whiteboys don’t want to be told what to do even if it saves their asses.

Some turned to ivermectin, a horse de-wormer (you can’t make this shit up) as an alternative treatment. As Professor Bill Schneider at George Mason University noted in an article at The Hill, conservatives tended to view health issues as wholly individual responsibilities, and that ‘public health’ sounds too much like collectivism (that’s the practice of giving a group priority over the individuals within it). Generously, they believed that sounded like a variant on socialism. It’s the same old whiteboy hash, competition over cooperation, the rights of a few superseding the rights of the many.

It was a bummer. Especially for the 700,000 dead by then.

It’s now about a million Americans dead from Covid.

It didn’t have to be that way.

*Compiled from March 78^th, April 46^th, Octoberish, Novembery, 2021