My father had another saying.
He had many sayings, actually.
Oh, your father too?
Yeah, dads are good for that sort of thing.
Here’s one of his golden oldies.
It’s not the end of the world until it’s the end of the world.
I love that saying.
It implies so much, with so little.
I’m a wordsmith. I appreciate stuff like that.
On that light, that first Monday in mid-November after the most anxiety-ridden election of my life, the gods evidently decided to levy another hopeful boon in the Biden-elect era. Big pharma giant Pfizer announced their analysis of its coronavirus vaccine trial, completed by an outside panel of medical field experts, and they found the vaccine was more than 90% effective in preventing Covid among nearly 44,000 trial volunteers who’d had no prior evidence of infection before the administering of the vaccine.
They were the first company to announce verifiable, successful results from any late-stage vaccine trial to date. They said it was a milestone. The vaccine’s effectiveness involved injecting part of the virus’s genetic code to train the body’s immune system to fire up antibodies and activate T-cells. The vaccine required two doses three weeks apart. Trials held in the United States, Germany, Brazil, Argentina, South Africa, and Turkey showed that 90% protection was reached seven days after the second dose. Initial data was scrutinized carefully, as they were still unsure whether the vaccine stopped people from spreading the virus, stopped the development of symptoms, or if it worked as well with high-risk populations.
The $20,000 question, how long immunity would last, might’ve taken months, maybe years, to answer accurately. Then there were the issues of manufacturing, distribution, and logistics to consider. Immunizing several billion humans was no small task. Pfizer’s vaccine had to be stored in cold storage at 80 degrees below Celsius. An interesting paradox, in that a potential world saving vaccine for all humanity had to be cold-stored in a warming world that humans were overheating with their fossil-fueled follies.
Health care professionals, first responders, and those populations at the highest risk would get the first opportunities to take the vaccine. John Bell, Regius Professor of Medicine at Oxford University, tentatively suggested that life could be return to normal by spring of 2021. That was, as we now know, overly optimistic, not because of the science, but because of our American proclivities.
President-elect Biden’s transition team announced his public health experts that would comprise Biden’s promised Covid-19 advisory board. The task force included a number of prestigious professionals, people like former Surgeon General Vivek Murthy, Food and Drug Administration commissioner David Kessler, Dr. Julie Morita of the Chicago Public Health Department, Dr. Marcella Nunez-Smith of Yale University, Dr. Luciana Borio at the Council on Foreign Relations, Dr. Zeke Emanuel, even whistleblower Rick Bright from That Guy’s administration, dismissed early on in the pandemic for refusing to prioritize public relations over the saving of lives.
It was nice to see Biden immediately delivering good on his vow to rally experts and prioritize getting the virus beat over all else. It was a welcome reassurance that folks who actually knew their asses from their elbows were going to oversee the means to the end of the epidemic, rather than a bunch of sycophants more worried about their whiteboy status than the lives of American citizens.
Right on cue, the alt-right pundits exploded across social media, who naturally found it incredulous the timing of Pfizer’s vaccine announcement happened after the election was called. Pfizer maintained for months the earliest results of their trials would come no sooner than mid-November. The alt-right seemed to be more concerned with carrying on conspiracy theories than their own well-being, so much so that the petulant soon-to-be ex-president wasn’t granting the usual access to the new President-elect in normal transitions of power, things like daily intelligence briefings and immediate release of bookmarked funds historically allocated to President-elects in gathering their forces and working up planned regime constructs over the last two months of the outgoing president’s term. Biden plowed ahead nonetheless. He wasn’t going to run short on funds needed to start firing up his machine with the support he garnered. His team’s expediency surely saved tens of thousands of lives.
Conversely, That Guy’s bruised ego likely cost many more American lives over the Christmas season. His people blabbered endlessly about recounts and lawsuits. He roped in Attorney General Barr to send word to federal attorneys across the country to start filing suits in what they thought were contested vote counts in right-leaning counties.
There are a lot of ways to cheat the system in this country. That Guy was all too aware of that, having indulged in countless shortcuts and end-runs throughout his career. What he and his team discovered was, it’s somewhat difficult to cheat the American vote pool, and as he’s finding out now in June of 2024, it’s often tough to jerk around the court system.** People vote by mail or in person, ballots are counted meticulously and overseen by bipartisan and neutral supervision. They tried their best shot with muddling the delivery of the votes via the postal system, but that failed. He was also pissed off so much of the Black vote showed up to the polls in far greater droves than ever before, driven by activists like Abrams.
At this point in the narrative, I stated outright I was looking forward to never, ever writing about That Guy again. Ha. Foolish little Bard. Hindsight stings sometimes. I really hoped he’d fade like the other one-term executives. On the plus side, I like the fact I have a bit of naiveté left inside my soul. It means I still have a lot to learn, and I’m not so jaded I’m unwilling to do so. It means the little kid in me hasn’t been completely washed away by the toxic, cultural tsunami of the 21st century.
But a vaccine at long last was in the offing, a potential godsend. I didn’t use that last word lightly. I’m no fan of big pharma, nor am I am an advocate for late-in-life vaccines or unnecessary boosters, but there was a reason we were all mostly free of smallpox and polio. If you were one of those conspiracy people losing your shit over the idea of forced vaccinations, you should’ve chilled out and looked at the science at the university levels, not the FOX op-eds and Q forums on Reddit.
Nobody was gonna force you to do anything. Sure, you might have had to skip certain sanctioned group activities if you couldn’t prove you were vaccinated. That might’ve chapped your hide, having to provide a vaccination card at the entryway to a business or a proceeding. It may have made you feel squeezed under Big Brother’s thumb, though you had no problem doing the exact same thing with your driver’s license every day when asked for proof of ID at any number of institutions. If you wanted to die, that was your business. But it was not your business making that decision for anyone else.
I started daydreaming about summer of 2021, and what life might feel like free of Covid, all the things I wanted to do that we weren’t able to do that year.
First and foremost, I wanted to see my boys, maybe take that long overdue trip to Tahoe we promised them for years. Wave-running on the lake, hike the upper basin trails, hit the poker rooms at South Shore, but mostly family face time, laughing, probably some crying after all that 2020 horseshit. In person, face to face concourse, the way humans were designed to interact.
Then I wanted live music, and lots of it. Ideally a rescheduled Stones tour, maybe some G Love at the Belly Up in Solana Beach, maybe Green Day, Robert Plant, or Sting, Alicia Keys or Gary Clark Junior or Jack Johnson. I honestly didn’t care who toured, I was thinking I’d go see anyone, maybe everyone. I just wanted to dance again. I never got into the live streams from home so many artists offered as an interim source. I appreciated their efforts, but it wasn’t the same. The live concert experience is visceral and difficult to replicate outside of itself.
Having a nice date night with my girl sounded like an epic time after nine months of relative isolation, one where we didn’t have to wear masks, where there wasn’t a constant threat of pestilence, where people enjoyed good food and drink and music and talk, that taken-for-granted, weekly American pastime. My girl and I were talking about where we’d most like to go first: the Lone Eagle Grill in Incline Village, Musso and Frank in Hollywood, any number of mom n’ pop taquerias across SoCal, seafood in Malibu or Monterey, a piping hot bowl of chowder with fresh baked sourdough bread, and an ice-cold Sierra Nevada brew.
Hope. It felt good. Better than good. Fan-fucking-tastic.
*Compiled from November 9, 2020