I got my first vaccine shot yesterday, as you oldsters probably already had before me. It was done in what is called "The Salt Palace'', which is in downtown Salt Lake City. It is a convention center of gigantic proportions that was built in 1995 and seems to have taken its inspiration from an airport terminal. It had very long hallways with properly spaced chairs between so that all the people waiting for their appointments to start at ten a.m. business could sit while they were waiting, quite considerate of the fact that many elderly people can’t wait standing for a long time. Everything was well organized. I was ushered into the Grand Ballroom where one person promptly went over the paperwork and then shifted to a table where I got my shot and then went to another place to wait for fifteen minutes to see if I had a reaction. All of the people at work, from those at the start to guide you where to go, or at the end to tell you to go home, were all perky and friendly, something I much appreciated, anxious that something in the process might go wrong because of the paperwork or the injection. Nothing did.
The procedures in the Salt Palace seemed eminently practical. It made sense for those who were to be vaccinated to have their temperatures taken or identified by a piece of paper as attesting to be the one who made the appointment. It made sense to use seventy years as the cutoff for vaccination. Sure, it could be sixty-five or seventy-five, but there had to be a cutoff somewhere. It made sense for people to sit around so as to be very cautious that there would not be immediate adverse side effects. The measure of the arrangements were that they were comprehensive in taking account of all possibilities rather than in having high judgment calls about how to organize the operation. This was administration rather than policy. I didn’t ask the political party of the woman who gave me a shot as if that might make a difference. We were all humans together.
In spite of the elaborate and ritually correct movement of people through this process, I did not have the sense that I was transformed by my inoculation. I did not feel bathed by the blood of the lamb or, as my son put it, acquired reverse Kryptonite, so that I was free, free at last, and so I could leap buildings in a single bound. I noticed that the idea that I can be less anxious about getting sick is only slowly coming about. Perhaps eventually I will move from being a potential victim of coronavirus to being safe from coronavirus, but I am curious about why that gradual transition is taking place. After all, my shot does give me a new lease on life. Now, I am eighty years old and so I don't expect to last forever, but I am unconstrained in that I do not know how long I have in that it will last as long as it will and what is the particularity that will overtake me is unknown rather than see doom close in with the flu like symptoms that are the onset of coronavirus. Ignorance of the future is a kind of bliss I should immediately have recovered after my shot
Perhaps it is because the aura surrounding coronavirus has lasted long enough that all of us remain under its pall. We have all been so long in danger that it is not easy to relinquish it even if the duration of the time under danger was about a year. We had not recognized how accustomed we were at being in danger and so it had become normal, just part of the risks along with getting cancer or run over by a truck. So we see the vaccination as practical rather than transforming and it will gradually wear off until we will just have all the other of our load of potentially fatal eventualities, people not liberated until we cure cancer, which also seems to be having a gradual impact in lessening death rates so that cancer will become a manageable chronic illness, as has happened in other diseases and coronavirus will just be one of those other infectious diseases that are required to get booster shots every year. In that case, the mature person doesn't worry all that much about coronavirus because all of us are subject to the onslaught of chronic and fatal diseases and so everyone is just lucky to have an extended time one day longer than the life one already had.
Jane Austen in "Persuasion" suggests that life is very fragile, children getting sick and parents hopeful that those children will not die as also happens, in that book, to a healthy person who dies from an accident. But people go on with their lives as if death will not be used to change the way we live, as if it were that we tarry no rosebuds while tomorrow we may die. To the contrary, Anne Elliot is inside her life in that she is concerned with the customs and feelings of her society, which means there is a slow reawakening of feeling towards her one time suitor rather than a rush to cling to her. Otherwise, we would all be living under the weight of doom and angling to take some fast solution so as to have a moment of pleasure before it so quickly ended. Normal life continues even in a pandemic, whatever precautions there are to be taken, for suggesting the alternative of always being in an emergency is so unpalatable. People walked around in their furs while people died of starvation in the streets during the Warsaw Ghetto. So too during a pandemic. We know about the alarmists in the media about how awful the pandemic is for most of us is just inconvenient rather than traumatic, no more than missing restaurants, even if the situation is very dishabilitating for the restaurateurs themselves.
Another and perhaps the most crucial reason that many people and not just myself are not elated at having become free of coronavirus is because the pandemic has been politicized. Conservatives say coronavirus is no big deal. It may be true that half a million people have died in the United States, but the death rate of those contracting the disease is about two percent, and if it weren't for the pandemic having been so highly publicized by the media, Trump would have been reelected. Liberals, for their point, see the failure to be aggressive by Trump about the disease, his flaunting of mask and distancing requirements, as just showing how failed he was as a President, and so deserving of his rejection by the American electorate, whatever other were his shortcomings as President. Biden certainly focussed in his campaign and in his first month on dealing with the coronavirus and its impacts as his first responsibility. He provided a definition of what it is to be presidential by making coronavirus his priority.
Something has lost heart by making coronavirus political, even as some political things such as the Civil Rights Movement are emotionally elevated by making the ongoing status arrangements between blacks and whites to be now political, which means subject to change. Here it is debilitating to see an existential issue as just political. We are diminished to being rhetorical and competitive rather than joined together in our humanity against a common scourge. We are dignified and sustained by the fact that people die or are dying rather than subject to a rhetorical sleight of hand that makes us foolish or not of significance when dealing with the inevitable.
People like to think that they cooperate with one another when there is adversity. People will share food and water and shelter after the devastation of a flood or a hurricane. People who are strangers will risk their lives to free a passenger from a car that is about to be flooded. We are all Dorothy in the tornado cellar in Kansas. But the truth, sorry to be said, is that people carry on with retaining their usual cleavages. The poor do worse off than the rich; there are discrepancies in race and income as to who gets services. Senator Cruz went off to Cancun rather than working in a food bank during the Texas electricity blackout. Ex-Governor Rick Perry said the electrical blackout was worth it so that Texas was free of federal regulation even if, as he did not say, people were freezing to death in their homes and in their cars.
The whole spectre that hovers over the coronavirus epidemic is that it was tainted by politics in a very perverse and non practical way: Republicans refused to wear masks or keep their distance so as to please the President even though it led to a cluster of their own becoming infected. Politics trumped practicality when we wanted practicality to put aside politics, much less than that the politicians would move towards doing the practical. It was a sorry epidemic that made many previous epidemics, such as the Seventeenth Century plague in London or the Yellow Fever epidemic in Philadelphia in the Eighteenth Century seem enlightened, less mean spirited, than was the case previously, however mistakes were made because the doctors did not know what to do in that they did not have a germ theory of disease. We are all better off with finding these tasteless times behind us, and so I do not feel the need to commemorate the event of having emerged out the other end of this process of disease and recovery.
Remember that when the Sabine vaccine against polio came around in 1962, there were no politics about it. Nobody I knew about thought it was political. The Kennedy Administration had people show up in high schools to get their doses and, as I remember, there were no objections by Republicans nor either disputes about whether the availability of the doses had been properly administered. It was just something a federal administration would do, whatever the one in charge by the party. That made it all feel like progress for humanity rather than something to fight about. There certainly were political fights at the time about heart wrenching existential threats, as happened in the Cuban Missile Crisis, but not having to do with a vaccine, even as the inequities of medical care persisted, in that it was only afterwards that Medicare and Medicaid were passed in 1965. Health services are political but the fact of health and illness are not. It is a good question how long it will be, given the experience of the coronavirus pandemic, when we can recover the idea of this separation or whether we are to remain in a new understanding, a new dispensation, whereby health as well as health care are political.