Reflections on the Coronavirus on the Occasion of My Stepfather’s First Posthumous Birthday
I don’t need to tell you that the world has changed because of the coronavirus pandemic. We’ve all experienced the global disruptions to our daily lives, societal fabrics, economies, and also all have been witnesses to a tremendous period of loss.
And now, again, the virus is on the rise nearly everywhere — fueled by a variant that has made itself more transmissible (itself a show of the evolutionary threat that a still-uncontrolled spread poses).
Today the still-unvaccinated face a threat that is many degrees less evitable (i.e. an ability to be evaded or to escape) as public health measures loosen. We are still waiting on more information to confirm that the delta variant is marginally more dangerous. But, we know for sure that it is no lesser threat than that time not long ago when the entire world slowed itself down and shut itself inside for months.
It was an unprecedented moment of coordination to protect many millions of people who did get a chance to survive disease and death. I only wish my stepfather could count among those of us who either faced the virus and beat it or evaded it until they were to get the protection of safe, efficacious (effective) covid vaccination.
If you have read this far and count yourself among the unvaccinated, I want to tell you a bit about my stepfather. He was a gregarious example of fathering (e.g. ‘fathering’ because his expression of fatherhood lived as a verb — of action and of constant, albeit, if also sometimes, unwitting guidance). For over two decades, he was that figure not just to me but more wholeheartedly and for a longer period to his daughters and sons. He left behind a mother whose love for her only son can feel to this very day, a host of siblings, and a darling grandson, as well as the potential of many more years of fathering, which I think we all feel deeply.
Though the most peculiar thing occurred when we lost him in January — I couldn’t come up with the words to honor him. And as a writer (or aspiring writer at least), this felt beyond uncharacteristic. But, I felt nothing but the weight and shock of his turbulent sickness, quick decline, and untimely loss that I couldn’t adequately put together the words to give meaning to chaos.
Now, on the occasion of his first posthumous birthday, over six months later, I know the best way to honor him is to work to bring this pandemic to a close. And, the best way to accomplish that work is to continue to meet the institutionally-hesitant, expertise-dissuaded with both compassion and ardent directness.
It is to mount a charge against the fraudulent claims of the danger of the vaccines we could have only hoped to have to save so many of those who died from the pandemic in its first year.
The truth is the scientific data, across many different national contexts (for those hesitant to consider the medical field in this country given its racial history of exploitation and plunder), has given us relative certainty of its safety. Over the past six months, that certainty has deepened as millions received not only newly immunized freedom, but withstood mostly only minor side effects. And without minimizing those who have been affected by vaccination because of interactions between their bodies and the vaccine, I want to explain why physicians and scientists still believe the risk of the virus is greater today than not taking the vaccine.
See, in this pandemic, we met the threat of an extern pathogen to which people were not evolutionarily apt to confront without also costing many millions of lives (or, in most historical cases, already did cost many millions of lives) with ingenuity. Scientists many decades ago demonstrated that vaccination could provide a route to adaptation (immunity). And the oft-maligned coronavirus vaccines seek the same objective — to introduce to your immune system (in a safe as opposed to a precarious way by exposure) to a marker of the threat. In the MRNA technologies of the Moderna and Pfizer vaccines, it is a protein that coats the virus, which is introduced to your body by intermuscular injection (the shot). And, then, miraculously, over a month-long period, your body builds immunity to the coronavirus without ever having needed to get sick by the virus.
The vaccines bring the risk of hospitalization to the individual to a near-to-zero number.
At minimum it protects most from death, and at maximum it keeps some people from ever becoming infectious.
And quite simply, I would have done anything to have kept my stepfather’s dying at bay by a simple shot.
His decline, however, led physicians to try several life-sustaining interventions, which too quickly were overwhelmed by the disease’s weight on his life force.
Only vaccines would have prevented that cascading collapse of organ functions and would have given us a chance at many more years with my stepfather. The existing treatments for covid disease at the point of hospitalization can only do so much when the body is in an overwhelming fight with itself to combat the virus.
I’ve since taken part in restored rituals — weddings and reunions — that resumed after vaccines became more readily available and ensured that gathering would also not bring the threat of a cluster of cases.
And, I have seen how the truth of his deadly encounter affected others like my once also vaccine-hesitant parents to get their vaccinations. I’ve seen how safely vaccines can be administered in how well both of my grandparents, 91 and 89 (and recipients of his and her Moderna and Pfizer shots), are doing all these months later.
Today, I wish only that your hesitance does not overwhelm the short time you may have to place your health in safer bounds by going through a month-long immunization period. I wish you might take advantage of the advances in vaccines, which only seek to make your immune system adept at identifying and eliminating the virus without mounting a crashing, all-systems-alarm for your immune system — like the one that my stepfather’s immune system prompted.
So in honor of my late stepfather, and in the name of all those who don’t deserve more losses in this pandemic, I’m asking those of you who are still unvaccinated to sympathize with all of those left in the wake of all those we’ve lost. Please reconsider the advice of fraudsters, peddlers, and spinsters by instead looking directly at the stories of my family and get the protection you need urgently.
